When They Lie (Part 2)
Jul 24, 2024- If there is anything that will crack the foundations of a relationship, it is being lied to, being deceived. That loss of trust is hard to repair, yet lying is a way to keep a secret, to maintain an intimate interior world. There is no other age group, in my experience, that requires a secret life than adolescence. The need for peers, the ongoing attachment with families, and the burgeoning need for connection with the larger world does not mitigate the teen’s overwhelming need for a private internal sanctum of the psyche that must be inviolable for the transformative processes that unfold during this developmental stage. Think of the pupae in the dark, solitary world of the cocoon.
In Part 1 of this short series on when teenagers lie, I talked about the parts of the young person that engage in the behavior we call lying. From an Internal Family Systems perspective, we can understand that teenagers lie to protect something vulnerable within. However, well-intended or not, lying can cause serious ruptures in the child’s relationships.
Understanding why teenagers lie can go a long way to helping our internal systems calm down, to not take it so personally, therefore allowing us to have more Self energy. We can be clear, compassionate, and necessary guides in this complex communication strategy. Lying is something that we all do and sometimes multiple times a day. If we think of lying and truth telling as communication strategies, they are just like other skills that teenagers must learn to use with integrity and efficacy.
Robin Henig writes in her excellent article on lying: “The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial. Lies can be verbal or nonverbal, kindhearted or self-serving, devious or baldfaced; they can be lies of omission or lies of commission; they can be lies that undermine national security or lies that make a child feel better. And each type might involve a unique neural pathway.”
Here we find the full spectrum from effective and healthy to the destructive nature of lying. These shades are important to consider. No matter how much we might hate being lied to, it is naive to think that we can get through this life without being lied to or without lying. To tell teens that they should never lie, that it is unequivocally wrong, is a disservice. They must learn how to lie with integrity. A paradox, I know, and yet it is true.
Garrison & Tanisha
My client Garrison lies by omission about his less-than-stellar grades to his mom because he knows how important his academic success is to her. He feels he is a disappointment to her. Politically and socially active Tanisha, on the other hand, lies defiantly and blatantly to her older parents who see the world very differently. Their worldviews anger Tanisha, and she hasn’t figured out how to stand in her autonomy while maintaining the relationship with her parents. Lying to her parents keeps her feelings, opinions, and activities secret; she doesn’t have to defend them if she hides them away.
In the previous blog, I outlined parts that engage in lying. We can hear some of these parts in Garrison and Tanisha. Garrison’s protector part lies so he can prevent himself from feeling the sting of his mom’s disappointment. Tanisha has parts that lie from anger, keeping herself safe from real or perceived threat from her parents, and as an attempt to have autonomy in the midst of her family system.
I want to offer two more explanations for why Garrison and Tanisha lie, and many adolescents like them who engage in deceiving their peers and their elders. Neuroscience and a mythopoetic approach to deception should also be taken into consideration.
The neuroscience of lying
Deception is a complicated cognitive business! The ability to lie is part of the natural maturation of the brain and cognition. Another proposition is that with the development of empathy and communication we must also develop the art of deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy to maneuver complicated social systems and situations.
It takes more thinking to lie; the prefrontal cortex is more active during lying than when telling the truth. Furthermore, the research shows that different neural processes are involved in lying, depending on the lie:
who is being told the lie;
what kind of lie; the intention behind the lying;
who the lie is about (self or other);
how strongly the liar feels about the lie or the truth; the severity of the consequences should they be found out;
and myriad other factors.
The person who lies is engaged in complex simultaneous processes involving memory, truth speaking, fictionalizing, and speech.
All of this helps us make sense then why adolescents lie more than other age groups. Their brains continue to undergo significant construction. The emotion center of the brain, involved with pleasure and reward, is more developed in adolescence than the prefrontal cortex which is needed to put the brakes on impulsivity. Perhaps lying is one of the behaviors that occurs with the confluence of an active and developing prefrontal cortex, learning to navigate new social situations, and continuing development of communication skills. Teens are steeped in the developmental task of moving out of the nest into the larger world, entering into complicated relationships, intimate partnerships, figuring out how to have boundaries, assuring emotional safety, and the list goes on.
So much going on! Knowing how, when, and why it’s okay to deceive is a fine and mature art. For kids like Garrison and Tanisha, our beliefs and feelings about deception need to be critically questioned and viewed if we want to scaffold them in this fine art. Equally important is for adults to come to know what parts come up in us when our kids lie.
The mythos of deception
In one of the seminars in my doctoral program, James Hillman, always a paradigm-shifter, spoke about deception, betrayal, and the trickster god Hermes. Hermes was the god of the marketplace. Where there were thievery, shady deals, sly bargains, and “getting one over” on the merchant or the customer, there was the god Hermes. It was not the one who deceived who was looked down upon by the community but the one who was deceived. To move out of childhood and into adulthood, to mature and lose one’s naiveté, Hillman said, we must all have experiences of being betrayed, of being deceived, of having our trust damaged. If you go to Google Scholar and enter the keywords trickster deception, you will find many articles that speak to the value of deception, of trickster energy.
Finally, as always, following the trail to the roots of the word is enlightening. While there are words found in most of the old languages that point to its meanings of betray and deceive, “to lie” is a word of uncertain etymology. Its roots are not found in Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. I’m not sure what this means, other than to say that it’s this thing we seem to do naturally as humans. It has its place for perhaps mysterious secretive reasons, in service to the Trickster, that clever, illusive figure.
Our teenagers, when they lie, attempt to be illusive, to hide something away. Garrison attempts to hide his failures, to get one over on his mom—to be in service to his relationship with his mom and also to protect something vulnerable within. Tanisha is fiercely protecting her burgeoning social activist and her very normal Idealist within. To lie is to attempt to grab hold of and maintain autonomy while staying in relationship with her parents. Certainly there is Trickster energy there.
So how do we enter into these spaces with our kids when we feel injured by their deception? We can use the four tools of The Shiftless Wanderer:
Engage in the validation process with your own parts and with the teenager.
Invite in Compassionate Curiosity—the curiosity needed for connection.
Situate yourself on the Love end of the Love/Fear spectrum.
Delve into learning about the Essential nature of Adolescence.
These tools can be a map to navigate all that comes up within you and between you and the adolescent who lies. Trust that their parts have innate wisdom, that much of this is normal development rather than pathology, and that Trickster has shown up in service to the teenager’s journey of becoming.
Photo by: Cultura Creative