Why is my client lying?

A colleague and I carried out an evening street shift tonight, walking the streets looking for drinkers and beggars, descending upon them and immersing ourselves in their problems. We talked about the process of working in a field full of obfuscations, defences and at times out and out lies. One particular client communicated always through a filter of half-truths - everything they said existed only to create a particular effect in the listener. The effect is deeply odd. We mused on how workers should navigate this kind of communication.


For myself, I talk about what I call the 'neutral space' - the place in my head I put information I cannot fit into any valid emotional or cognitive category. To me it becomes neither true or not true. Instead I find myself thinking in terms of actionable and unactionable - can I do something with this information or not? Yet this is not the full truth because I can't just stand there passively when what the client is telling me is emotive - but nor can I respond with a fully congruent level of emotional confirmation when nothing quite seems to be true. There is a very real sense that my responses, even when accurate, are detached from the reality of my thinking. So what we have is a client telling a collection of half-truths and sometimes pure lies, and me responding with a certain fake (but accurately empathetic) sentiment. Our level of outer congruence is great but our sense of inner distrust (for both of us) is equally great - we are reaching out to eachother but our positions mean we must be guarded.


One might be inclined to demand the truth, pull out discrepancies and reflect them back but the half-truths are emotional camouflage and I am in no position to denude someone of their defences at 9 o clock at night on a street corner. That is not to say I would not challenge, but that I must tread carefully and can't challenge everything said. In this the outreach worker is less safe than a counsellor.


More usefully, I remember a lecture I listened to talking about 'core component communication', this is a development on Eric Berne's 'games people play'. In core component communication we are asked to look at the meta-message (as Alan and Barbara Pease would have us term it) behind each statement. Yes, they are lies, but why tell them? To achieve what?

No one is wholly truthful all the time because the described truth rarely captures the emotional content we feel. Often we exaggerate or underexaggerate towards the truth. The example I give in training is of waiting for someone on a street corner in the rain when they are five minutes late. It is the most awful five minutes ever and you count every single second of it painfully. When they finally arrive the actual truth of the situation doesn't fit your level of emotional content and so rather than say: 'I've waited five minutes for you!' You say: 'I've been here twenty minutes in this rain!' And even though it is a lie, it is more congruent with the emotion you wish to communicate and more cathartic (it feels better). This is an important point. So often I have met clients that have a £20 a day drug habit but are in crisis. £20 a day doesn't seem a lot so in trying to communicate their level of crisis, they say: 'I''m using £100 a day!' Or alternatively, someone is working really hard to keep their use down and maybe they've only used 4 times this week, yet telling me this doesn't quite seem to fit the emotional context so I'm told: 'I haven't used all week!' And so in the end whilst I can't really have a clue how much someone is or isn't using, based solely on self-disclosure, I can at least say that my client wants me to know they are doing quite well or doing very badly and it is that that becomes actionable not the actual facts.


As an example of this we recently had a rough sleeping client who would tell stories of being in the army, that were probably not true, and in times of distress would say things like: 'As a sniper i killed 97 people.' Now this is blatantly ridiculous, but a worker would have to find a way of making an emotionally congruent response. Why tell such a lie? Because esteem and the flow of power dynamic demanded it - he had nothing and was utterly disempowered but desired a degree of parity with the workers he 's talking to. So the best thing to to reflect was not the actual fact of the statement ('Good god! You've killed that many!') but to pick out the core component and reflect this instead: 'You're a man to be taken seriously.' This seemed to work and it forms a good general rule: don't get sucked into a lie, and don't just reject it - instead put it into your neutral space and try to work out what it represents and use that as your reflection, and your guide for how to take the engagement forward.

The beginning of the blog, bear with me.

Welcome to the Thinking Outreach blog.

This blog is a counterpart to the Assertive Engagement Resource, a website resource dedicated to the skills employed by outreach workers, drug workers, prison workers and any other worker whose client group is often termed 'Hard to reach'.

There you can find weblinks, book reviews, listings and formal articles, here I aim talk about good practice in outreach in a much less formal sense. The idea is to use this blog to share ideas and observations well before they get honed into something that can be presented as an article, a good practice guideline or a presentation.

There are three core drivers to the aim of this blog:

1. I believe that the good practices of the workers I work alongside in a range of fields are too infrequently recorded, analysed and disseminated and yet by doing just this we can begin to build up a picture of what works and what doesn't in fields of working that sometimes are no more than only a few years old (my own field of Anti-Social Behaviour is so new expertise is very hard to come across).

2. The thoughtful application psychotherapeutic techniques, along with learning from social and cognitive psychology, can enhance our engagement with vulnerable and disenfranchised groups enormously and yet these techniques, and this learning, are often seen solely as the dominion of psychologists and counsellors who actually need work much less hard than outreach workers (and require fewer techniques) to secure meaningful outcomes. This blog (and the Assertive Engagement Resource) is an attempt to redress this balance slightly by trying to draw lessons from the ways that a client's responses to a worker's attempt at intervention can often be unpicked and understood through the same processes that more formally recognised workers use to analyse their practice.

3. A part of this blog will just be a cheeky polemic on subjects close to my heart such as homelessness and substance misuse. Mostly this will just be my opportunity to vent but more charitably you could look at these entries as being, at least in part, representative of the kinds of conversations that professionals in these fields are having, and the kinds of views we hold. I do not think that there is often a close attention paid to the views of workers who work on the front line of service provision - certainly we are under-represented in the media.

So welcome, I hope that some small part of this blog proves useful to you. And if not, at least interesting.