How honest are you with your therapist?

Painfully honest actually. She'd see right through me if I tried to be anything but and besides it would be a waste of money for me to lie to her - and I pay out of pocket so it ain't cheap!

Painfully honest..

I started out very manipulative, but even back then I don't think I told any actual lies.

There are different sides to this.
* I have lied to T about things, although not very many times. Once or twice I've felt threatened by something he has asked, and defended myself by resorting to a lie ("no, I have never done x"). Then I have felt guilty, and told him the truth the next time. That's no big deal, it's not as if I consciously decide to lie beforehand, I have rectified my error as soon as I could, and the resulting discussions have been good. Then there was one rather important event that I told him about at the start of my therapy, where I gave him the same untruthful version I had given everybody else back when the thing happened, over 10 years ago. Fairly recently, he asked about that time in my life again - it was a tumultuous time, and also the first period of my life when I saw a therapist - and I realised that if I told him the untrue version I would lose something important in the narrative, and I'd miss my chance of getting his input on what had actually happened. So I told him, and that was extremely hard. But ultimately rewarding. We had a good discussion about it (not why I'd lied to him, because again that's pretty irrelevant, but why I had fabricated things at the time.)
* I sometimes omit things that are too difficult for me to talk about. I am getting much better at letting T know when I do, though. And he is usually quite good at helping me not to avoid topics.
* For me, usually, it's not a matter of honest or dishonest, but of not knowing that something is relevant enough to bring up. My default thinking is that what I have to say is not interesting, so I minimise the amount of detail I include, which can lead to misunderstandings because I have not included sufficient information (always had trouble applying those Gricean maxims...)

Pretty honest. It really depends on what she asks me. Some issues I am afraid to bring up unless she does.

I'm 100% honest with my T. She is 100% honest with me. I even tell her when I feel like lying to her...

But we're not 100% open with each other...

Last session I told her I started smoking cigarettes again. She wanted to know how many a day I was smoking and I told her I didn't want to tell her. So she started guessing: "1, 5, 10, a pack, 3-4... She's was like: "yep, 3-4". She told me my reaction changed when she said 3-4. LOL I told her that wasn't fair.

My T knows when I'm not completely open...she also know when I only give her partial truths. But she says it's okay, I'm just not ready to talk about it yet.

When we first start session, she asks how I'm doing. I always say okay or fine. She say: "B.S." So I don't consider it a lie if she knows the truth anyways.

Scott Adams calls this The Way Of the Weasel.

I like this. I know I can google it, but who is Scott Adams?

He writes the Dilbert comic strip.

Haven't been in a while but not 100%....depends on the day.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk