Are you a liar?

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0:05Kimberley Wilson:The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods Market, no antibiotics ever, burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill. Fire up a juicy ribeye, grab creamy potato salad and savoury flatbreads from the prepared foods department and round it all out with 365 brand condiments, chips and dips at everyday low prices. Whole Foods Market. Make your summer sizzle. Out here, if you're doing nothing, you're doing everything right. Though on a cruise with Norwegian, even if you're doing nothing, you're still basking in the warm sun, enjoying the peaceful ocean waves.

0:43Kimberley Wilson:You're breathing. Don't forget about breathing. Definitely need to be breathing. So you get to do nothing or everything, but you still need to be breathing. It's, like, really important. Experience the difference with cruises to Alaska, the Caribbean, and Europe. Norwegian Cruise Line. It's different out here. Visit ncl.com, call your travel advisor at 1-888-NCL-Cruise. Norwegian Cruise Line Ships Registry, the Bahamas and USA. Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberley Wilson, I'm a psychologist and this is Complex. As we all know, there is a lot of information and misinformation out there about our mental health.

1:22Kimberley Wilson:I want Complex to help you make sense of it all so that you can feel reassured and hopefully live a calmer and healthier life. In this episode, I'm exploring lying. Lying is such a good topic because, well, so many of us do it. You probably drop a little white lie every other day, like, no, I can't meet you tonight because I've got a terrible cold. But even if you tell this kind of lie, you wouldn't actually consider yourself to be a liar. Liars are bad people, aren't they? Well, it might surprise you to know that learning to lie is a natural step in our cognitive development. Studies show that we begin lying at a very young age.

2:13So if we can all lie, why does lying have such a bad rap?

2:22Kimberley Wilson:The answer, my friends, is because it causes us harm. So if you lie a little or even a lot, have you ever stopped to think about why you do it? We'll be hearing from a listener about a lie she told, and as in every episode, I'll be inviting an expert guest to join me. So let me be your guide through the tangled vines of misinformation to the sweet wine of understanding.

2:55Kimberley Wilson:okay let's crack on I've invited psychotherapist Dr Charlotte Cooper to look at lying with me why do we do it how we do it and what it does to us hello Charlotte hi thank you so much for joining me could you tell us a little bit about yourself and also about your work well I'm a psychotherapist. I work with all kinds of people and I've been doing this for some time now. My scholarship is around sociology. I'm always interested in the social context that people bring to the work that we do together. My research, the work that I do is around queer theory, disability actually, and also fat activism.

3:37That's the sort of thing that people most know me for. Gorgeous. Thank you. And can I just ask you, do you lie, Charlotte?

3:46Kimberley Wilson:Have you told any lies yet today? Oh no, I'm not the lying type. I mean, of course I do. And I was thinking on the way here about the first lie that I can remember telling. Yeah. No, mum, I didn't give the cat a haircut. Didn't do that. I think this is going to be a very good episode.

4:12Kimberley Wilson:Now, for everyone listening, before we start, it's worth taking a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror and asking, do I lie? No, really, do I lie? Because lying is something we mostly pretend we don't do. It could be as simple as telling your housemate or your partner that you didn't have time to clean the bathroom when in fact you couldn't be bothered to do it. Or it could be a larger lie, saying that you were out with your best friend or working late when actually you were being unfaithful. Now this is a judgment-free zone and what I'll say is that in this episode we're going to focus on what lying does to us when we are the ones who are lying.

5:01Kimberley Wilson:and we'll explore what happens when we are lied to in a later episode. I have a listener story here that absolutely gets to the nub of lying. Charlotte, I'll read her story out and I'd like to know what you think. And for the sake of her privacy, I'm going to call her Alex. Alex says, I'm a mum with small kids and a very stressful job. I was invited to New York recently for a conference and I realised I could stay on for a few extra days by myself. So I jumped at the chance and booked a week-long trip because I just needed a break. But I didn't dare tell my partner. I told her that I was going to York for a couple of days and gradually let it be understood that it was going to take a bit longer than that.

5:52Kimberley Wilson:She didn't realise I was in New York until I was in my hotel. She was really angry and accused me of lying and now I feel really bad. Charlotte, you look very uncomfortable. Poor Alex. Uh-oh. Tell me. Well, what I'm hearing in that story is the difficulty in being honest. she's under a lot of pressure the job the travel the kids the you know all of that you know I feel for her what would it be like to say I'm not coping I need some respite this is not a shameful thing I'm wondering what's going on in that setup the relationship the family um where things can't be said yes yeah yeah I feel for her but also the partner as well I mean, all of them.

6:48Kimberley Wilson:This is it, isn't it? That I think it really gets to the complexity of lying because Alex says, this is what I want, takes it, finds a way of getting it for herself, but then ends up feeling really bad. So, first things first, I love to start with the definition. Everybody gets on the same page. Charlotte, can you outline what lying is, please? Well, what I understand it to be is telling a story with the intention to deceive somebody. So knowingly telling a story to try and obfuscate what's actually going on. So there is a reality or a truth that we know, but we tell a story that creates a different reality.

7:31Yes, and in that sense, lying is so powerful because it warps reality. It makes it something different.

7:38Kimberley Wilson:Yes, and I think that's one of the reasons, I think in my own personal life, I tend towards a lying absolutism. Like I really try to avoid all kinds of lying because I really think about those power dynamics. And I guess that touches on what lying does for us. When we are lying, we are controlling reality. Yeah, shaping things, maybe making it better for ourselves. It does feel very powerful to be able to change what is known. But what's also interesting is that sometimes it is about the opposite. So there was a study looking at 100 ,000 lies found that approximately 20 % of them were about managing social engagements, getting out of our commitments.

8:27That doesn't surprise me at all. And I think lying is about managing people, often managing relationships. I'm thinking about situations where people have to be polite, where there's some social smoothing that needs to happen, where face saving is important.

8:45Kimberley Wilson:And I guess, I mean, maybe either my friends are particularly hardy or they just tolerate me. But if I can't go somewhere, I will try to kindly and gently be honest about that. And so maybe there's something about how comfortable or skilled we are in doing something that we think might disappoint someone. Yes, I think what's allowed? What's allowed here? What's allowed in this relationship? Can I actually say, I don't really like that person very much. I don't want to go around to their house for dinner tonight. Or I'm really tired and actually I just want to put my feet up and watch the traitors.

9:24Do you know what I mean? There's something about safety, I think, there. What's safe to say and what isn't.

9:29Kimberley Wilson:Yeah. So lying does seem to have what we might call some pro-social or at least useful functions in our social relationships. But I think if we all lied all of the time, then society would collapse. We would fail to function as a society. Yes. Lying establishes how important truth is. You know, we need truth, but truth makes such demands of us. We need courage. We need moral courage as well. We need to feel safe, to feel empowered to speak the truth. and that yeah that's asking a lot of us to think but we do need it that's gorgeous

10:14Kimberley Wilson:so what we're going to think about now is what happens to us when we lie what are the downstream consequences even of those little white lies it isolates you it involves so much labor to maintain a lie. I mean, Alex, not in York. I'm in New York, you know, and the consequences of it as well. How is it going to land with the other person? I don't know about you, but I don't really like being lied to, even if it's a nice lie. So it's a risky tactic. You know, you have to manage it. You're probably going to be found out if you're close to the person that you're lying to. Or if you're not found out, and this is what I think about in terms of like big secrets and families, you have to keep everything at a very superficial level because any depth really risks exposing the lie.

11:09Kimberley Wilson:If I let you into how was the trip? Oh, it was fine because I can't tell you about the amazing pretzel that I had from the stand on the corner of the street. I can't tell you about any of the details of it because that would expose me. So yes, this is that distance that gets lonely. It's lonely. Lying is really lonely. And it's a thing that you carry. When you talk about creating a reality, actually, you are creating a solo reality. You're no longer engaged in the reality that the rest of us are participating in. You're out on a little planet by yourself, the planet Liar. That's not a good place to be.

11:47But it's also understandable that sometimes you might need to be in that place. For example, I was thinking about the lies that the closet demands of people or the lies that masking demands of neurodivergent people. So there are situations that are isolating, but are also beyond your control as well when you're lying.

12:10Kimberley Wilson:And so when you say closet, you mean sexuality? Yes, yes. Okay, so there are those lies that keep us safe. They might keep us safe psychologically, emotionally, physically in some circumstances. Those are necessary and understandable and beneficial and protective, but you're saying that there's still a cost. The cost is high, I think, of lying. Not just the social cost, but also the cost to yourself and the cost of people around you. And I don't think we think about those costs, do we? We think this lie is going to get us out of this tricky situation, this little sticky conversation. We think about surviving that immediate moment and what we're not thinking about is what happens after this?

12:53Kimberley Wilson:Do I end up having to avoid this person because I've told a lie? Do I have to try to remember who I told what story to? And that, as you say, exactly this kind of cognitive burden, this load that I'm now, you know, putting these additional rocks into my raksack and carrying around with me psychologically. Yes, it's a lot to carry. But it can also develop or there can be an aspect of it where people blame the other person for making them lie too. Yes. There's a projection that happens. That kind of, I feel really bad. I can't bear how bad I feel. I don't like it. And so I'm going to blame you for making me feel bad.

13:33Kimberley Wilson:I can't hold this for myself. Yeah, you have it. And that deepens the disconnect. It can spiral, as somebody I used to know would say, it grows legs and walks out the room. It can overwhelm you. You get lost in it. It's really harder to resolve the initial conflict, perhaps, that led to the lie in the first place. And now you've eroded a little bit of the trust in that relationship. Yes. And that's another unspoken cost. It just gets worse and worse. It just gets worse and worse.

14:08Kimberley Wilson:let's think about why we start doing it in the first place for this we need to start thinking about developmental psychology so in order to be able to lie you need to be able to be at the stage of life or cognitive development where I know that you and I have different perspectives on things and so that doesn't really happen till about the age of two or three because before then children tend to think that we're all one really we all share the same worldview we all have the same mind and so if I see something happen I'm going to assume that you have seen something happen but then I start to realize huh I can see something happen that you haven't seen happen and then if you ask me about it now I have the opportunity to tell you or not and so that's not a kind of conscious decision it's a kind of a developmental stage that emerges but it's at that point that a child can begin has the capacity to lie i wonder if there's a sweet spot where it's about developing an imagination for other possibilities about seeing yourself as separate to the other person about commanding your power as well as a tiny tot um but yeah the morality of it comes later or maybe you get punished yes for life um so it's not necessarily that they know lying is bad, but they want to avoid punishment.

15:33Kimberley Wilson:And I suppose maybe this is where we start to get that sense of the self-protective lie, that I can avoid something aversive, I can avoid something difficult, I can avoid something painful by distorting reality and telling an untruth. So it starts off as this developmental capacity, I'm going to call it, and then somewhere along the line, and it might be different for different people, it becomes a conscious choice. And I wonder whether it's at the point that it's a conscious choice that we start thinking about things like morality, goodness and badness and that kind of thing. But sometimes that choice doesn't feel like a choice.

16:14We might be curious about what's going on when those choices are made. if you're going to tell a big stonking lie you might have a choice about that but the smaller ones the ones that we're talking about the habitual lies the lies of safety the lies of convenience sometimes they come out automatically they come out too quickly to think about them i know when i've lied in this way that often comes out of panic a panic response so i think this idea of choice we might question that the choice of lying and the morality of it as well and the judgment that comes with that too.

16:48Kimberley Wilson:So maybe now is a good time to attempt to put lying on a scale from the mild to the moderate and then to the more kind of severe and concerning. And what's useful about a scale is that it helps us in that task of self-awareness. It helps us to work out where we might sit on it. And of course, as all therapists know, that self-awareness is the start of change. It's the start of everything. So Charlotte, mild lying. Mild lies might be things like lies of omission, not filling in the detail, not telling the whole story. They might be lies of that they're about safety that are about your own um as we said earlier about about the closet or about masking i always think about you know when you're stopped in the street by a fundraiser and you say oh i don't i don't have any change on me or i don't have my card with me or i already give and it's it's yeah it's not true is it you could stop you could give them all your money but you don't want to and that's not allowed you're not allowed to say that because you're a good person who wants to support their charity yeah but I think that's at the mild end I also I think we see lies in the therapy room you know when someone wants they want you to like them they want you to think well of them they want to be your favorite client or patient and so they It might just elide the parts of them that they are not proud of because they assume they're going to be judged.

18:31Yes, whereas it's the shameful parts that I'm interested in.

18:35Kimberley Wilson:Exactly. Bring your shame, bring your embarrassment, settle down. Yes, that's where the growth is. You know, if you can face the shame down and enter it, well, that is electrifying. That is beautiful stuff. We know. We can tell that something is up. Something, and it will come out over time. Yeah, so that might be, yeah, that's fairly mild as well. Midpoint lies, well, possibly. Is Alex's lie a midpoint lie? I mean, I understand that she felt that she had to lie. It would have been preferable not to. She's in a sticky situation. But I don't feel that it's the worst thing in the world. And, you know, with a bit of support and kindness and generosity, they might be able to work it out, her and her partner.

19:15and the the extreme lies i mean well i'm i'm veering towards politics at the moment um i'll rein that in a bit but you know the really big lies that cause enormous harm fraud and corruption yes yes yeah affairs yeah yeah hurt things that that really hurt people i think about big lies that people have told me you know it hurts decades later it causes a lot of harm. So ones that really, really warp reality for a lot of people, I think they're at the extreme

19:51Kimberley Wilson:end of don't go there. Absolutely. It's that thing where you allowed me to live a completely different reality for a long time. That's the wound, isn't it? Yeah. I also want to reassure people that most people you encounter aren't telling lies all the time. We think from the research that about 5 % of the population are telling about 50 % of the lies, whereas we think that most people are telling one or two small social lies per day. And so if this is you, and you're listening, and you want to make a more honest person of yourself, Charlotte, what advice do you have? Well, it's a universal advice, really.

20:33Always go gently. know that it's not always possible to be completely open and honest with everybody

20:40Kimberley Wilson:and if that happens forgive yourself try again and know that it might be demanding of a lot of yourself to to speak the truth about who you are and what you actually think and if there isn't a safe place for that to land well make some decisions about how you're going to manage that if we're not talking about lies of safety, if we're talking about the lies that are automatic, but really you don't need to be lying. So for example, with a charity worker in the street, instead of lying, maybe people might practice saying something like, I'm sorry, it's not for me today. Nice. It's not a lie. You're not getting into anything, but you're being honest about why you're not stopping today.

21:28Kimberley Wilson:That's right. So maybe find the truth in what you want to say and think about what you want to convey there. And again, it does require some kind of consideration, not an automatic response. If you're feeling panicked or hepped up, you know, it might be harder to access that gentle voice of truth inside you. But that's something to aim for and you can practice it. And it gets easier over time. And also you make a really good point there because I think when people think about the opposite of lying, they think about a brutal truth they think that the truth has to be hard and aggressive and that's not the case at all the truth can be kind and it can be gently conveyed that's right i i don't want to come out to your party whatever thing tonight um but let's get together another time and have a coffee that would be nice yeah so more gentle truths i think so always the way what I love about a conversation like this is how it opens my mind because I do have a personal position on lying and it's always worth being reminded of that little bit of introspection that invitation to look at the things that we might either be doing automatically or might just casually be saying to ourselves aren't a problem you know it's no big deal nobody's going to find out but it's not necessarily about being found out or the impact on the other person as mental health professionals we're thinking about the impact on the self as well because it accumulates it's corrosive over time it's about your own integrity like when i go to bed at night and i think about the kind of person i am the kind of person i hope to be these little things do accumulate i think integrity is a beautiful way of putting it and I think maybe the first and perhaps biggest hurdle is separating lying from morality in yourself because we all want to protect our sense of being a nice or good person but in order to look at this unflinchingly we do have to say actually I do lie sometimes and if I can do that compassionately and non-judgmentally with myself then I give myself the opportunity to think why am I doing that?

23:48Kimberley Wilson:What is the function of this thing that I do so casually? Yes it's a humbling process but also a human process, a kind process. And then ultimately an empowering one because now I can take possession. These things that happen automatically and without thinking now I make more deliberate conscious decisions about how I want to be and who I want to be in the world. Yes, to be your own solid self, to own yourself and to own your truth. I think that's essential.

24:19Kimberley Wilson:Thank you, Charlotte, for joining me today to talk all about lying. Well, thanks for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. And thank you to everyone listening. I hope you found this episode honestly useful. As you can hear, I am on a mission to clear up the mental health space, to clarify and create more considered help and advice. I want Complex to be your trusted space. And I just want you to understand yourself more and take care of yourself better. And you are definitely part of the show. What would you like me to talk about and why? You can email us your questions to complex at bbc.co.uk.

25:02Kimberley Wilson:We might use what you tell us, but we'll make sure that we do it anonymously. Please also note that I can't answer you personally. If you have a concern about a mental or medical health issue, then I'd strongly urge you to seek expert help. And if you want details or further support with some of the issues raised in this podcast, you can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line. And the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds. Next episode, we're looking at depression. Most of us think we know what depression is, but do we really? What's the difference between feeling sad and being clinically depressed?

25:42Kimberley Wilson:I'm going to offer some clarity on this together with my guest in the next episode, and I hope you can join us. And don't forget to subscribe to Complex on BBC Sounds and make sure your push notifications are turned on so you don't miss out on a single episode. and that's it my thanks again to dr charlotte cooper and also to alex whose story we looked at today and now for the credits thank you to the lovely loftus media team producer kirsten lass assistant producer katie chander-clark researcher grace revel technical producer reuben huxtable digital editor richard berry science editor rami zabar sound engineer ruth rainey and at bbc sounds Assistant Commissioner Izzy Lee Poulton and Commissioning Editor Rhian Roberts.