Can I Be Honest?

A moment I had been dreading rapidly approached.

My client had been isolating herself for years but her daughter had convinced her to come to treatment. After the sudden death of two family members in an accident she rarely left the house, talked infrequently and slept most of the day. It’d taken months to have our conversations flow freely. Before this she’d often sat with her hands pressed between he knees, head down and whispered one-word answers. To say that I was happy to have her talk freely about anything at all would be an understatement.?

I’d noticed that as she felt freer to talk, she’d begun to ask for my opinion more often. It would usually come out like this:

Does that make sense to you?

Does that sound weird?

What do you believe about that?

I don’t do the annoying therapist trick of turning questions back on clients. Or at least I’m happy to give my honest thoughts AND encourage reflection from the client too. But we had started venturing into territory where I dreaded these questions.?

Over the last few sessions, she’d begun to talk about spirituality, a pillar of her culture which she’d retreated from in response to her grief. As she opened up, she found great comfort in connecting with these beliefs again. And recently one of the things that had helped her was her belief in the afterlife. She’d told me that deceased family members communicated with her through signs to let her know they were ok and she could be too. The signs involved animals appearing in places and at times that seemed out of the ordinary.?

I’d been dreading this topic because of my relationship with the supernatural. I’d grown up in a fundamentalist Christian church but left in my mid-twenties due to its regressive stances on social issues and a dwindling belief in God. I’d also examined my beliefs on the supernatural generally and found I no longer believed in that either.

Figuring the day might come when she asked me for my opinion on the afterlife and wanting to be honest, I took this to supervision. I realized I wasn’t worried about being honest, I was worried about seeming callous or uncaring. In my twenties when I told people I no longer believed in God, some reacted like I had set out to offend or hurt them. They became argumentative and defensive. I feared a negative reaction like this and a rupture in the therapeutic relationship we’d worked so hard for. Reflecting helped and though I still felt nervous, I was prepared to stick to my values and tell the truth.?

The dreaded moment came a few sessions later. While explaining a recent sighting of migrating birds and its connection to her loved ones, she asked me what I thought about it. Did I believe that people could communicate with the living after death like this?

I took a deep breath and told the truth. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, but I respected people's beliefs and hoped that didn't offend her. I braced for a negative response that never came. She was just genuinely asking and told me that she felt that there was room for everyone's beliefs. She even went as far as thanking me for being honest and we had a good discussion about different cultural approaches to death and hope.?

It made me think about how honest we should be with our clients. Right now many psychologists hold political, religious or simply personal views that seem at odds with their client's beliefs. And this might seem like a minefield for the therapeutic relationship. But so what? The therapeutic relationship is not made stronger by deceitfully telling clients what we think they want to hear. It isn't improved by hiding ourselves so that the client only sees the things we think they want to see. It requires honesty, trust, empathy and a genuine regard for one another. And if being honest causes a rupture in therapy, then let's remember that we have the skill set to deal with that. Our work as psychologists requires us to handle difficult conversations so frequently that we can easily forget how good we are at doing this. If my client had reacted negatively, I would have worked to make sure she left the session knowing that we could still work together. I've had to do that before and I'm sure you have to.

To my mind, we should always be tactful AND as honest as we can be with our clients. If we don't, we avoid difficult moments, only to create the wrong conditions for ethical and effective practice. Instead, we can embrace the difficulty of having two unique people working together to effect change. And in doing so, make room for both honesty and differences in therapy.