Tears, Fears, and Pathological Liars: The Path to Dishonesty is Paved with Emotion
In a recent podcast episode clip, NY Times bestselling author and therapist Lori Gottlieb talks about an unhelpful dynamic that she sees in couples – where one person’s tears and emotions are used to manipulate and silence the other person.
Indeed, she illustrates here an important notion in emotion science: emotions are not merely expressions of our inner world. They are social tools. When someone expresses sadness or distress to us, they are essentially saying “Help me, be nice to me, be gentle with me”. Psychopaths aside, at the first sight of these emotions, most of us go into caring and nurturing mode. We see a child in distress, and we instantly go up to help them. We see a colleague crying and we immediately feel the need to check in with them and comfort them. In my own research, I discovered that even extremely brief microexpressions of distress in a person can cause activating psychophysiological changes and a more compassionate attitude in the observer, even though these expressions were so brief as to not be consciously recognizable by the observer. This is a feature of human social wiring, not a bug, and it underpins our most fundamental capacities for empathy and care.
At the same time, we see that sometimes this feature can consciously or unconsciously be abused. In Gottlieb’s example, one partner uses crying to shut down discussion of the other’s partner’s legitimate concerns and needs in the relationship, avoid accountability, and the real need for change. However, you won’t just see this dynamic in couples counseling. In my interviews with leaders, a big barrier to their ability to be honest with followers was a fear of their emotional reactions – leaders who feel trapped in that space when someone starts crying or expressing distress, and therefore walk back the truth, or avoid it altogether. When an individual starts using this tactic consciously, as Gottlieb points out, it can now become a manipulative tactic where victimhood is used to gain power in a situation or a relationship.
So what can be done about it? A lot of the conversation around leadership development has focused on developing the capacity for empathy and building emotional intelligence in leaders. Yes, ofcourse it is important to know how others are feeling and be able to experience and express empathy in those moments. You must know how that tough feedback is going to land. However, developing the capacity for honesty means understanding the boundaries between your own emotions and another person’s. It means taking a breath and understanding that another person’s distress is not always a call for you to fix it or make it go away.
Indeed, we think of liars as individuals who disregard the welfare of others. But the truth is that for many individuals who struggle with honesty, it is not a lack of caring that causes it, but an extreme sensitivity to the emotions of others. In their work on pathological lying, Drew Curtis, PhD, and Christian L. Hart, PhD examine how lying often becomes a compulsion to avoid uncomfortable situations. In essence, it becomes a tool to deal with the extreme anxiety around telling someone the truth and the crippling fear of their reaction. The problem is, when lying is used as a quick fix to deal with anxiety, it can start to become overused. In Curtis and Hart’s work, we see pathological liars are deeply distressed people, who experience shame and regret, and suffer significant personal and professional consequences.
If you are a leader looking to develop your honesty, personal emotion work is going to be the number one place to start. It involves understanding when emotional caretaking is called for, and what it should look like in different situations. Most of all, it involves understanding where your emotions end and where others’ begin.