Common clinical lies: Clinical progress and feelings about one’s therapist

Clients lie about a great many things, including issues relating to their suicidal thoughts, experiences of abuse, trauma, addictions, and of course, sex and family matters. This chapter focuses on the inability of clients to reveal honestly their thoughts and feelings about therapy itself, including the state of their relationship with their therapist and their sense of their progress. Therapy clients are often fearful of upsetting the balance in their relationship with their therapist by addressing their concerns. Clients' lies or concealment of any salient information may pose threats to the integrity and mutative potential of the client–therapist relationship. The chapter provides more information about therapy-related lies, including the primary motives associated with each lie and clinical examples of each lie, the latter drawn from the set of open-ended text-entry questions to which respondents could provide a short narrative explaining their dishonesty in their own words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)