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.