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As I watched a recap of the melodrama that unfolded between the Murdochs and the British parliament, I am reminded about past clients I have worked with, whose motto seemed to be "cheat and lie no matter the costs."
As the son of a retired journalist/ college professor, I have witnessed the tedious process of investigative journalism. No, I am not formally trained in journalism nor do I claim to be an expert in the field. However, I can write with a fair degree of certainty that those journalists of the now defunct "News of the World", who engaged in immoral activities to collect information, would have achieved more success if they had relied on the fundamentals of their profession. Ultimately they did not, and over a period of time arrogance and complacency had become the norm.
Whenever I come across such clients, whose habitual deceitfulness are so blatant and detrimental to their social relationships, I put integrity along with several objectives as one of the goals on the client's treatment plan. Like clockwork parents are initially very upset about this treatment goal and will usually demand that I change it immediately. When we sit down to speak about their concerns, they will usually agree that the treatment goal was accurate for their son, and will express a desire for me to address this issue with their son without putting it down on paper. When this happens, my stance is usually simple, I can't honestly address this sensitive issue with the client without telling him why I was addressing this issue, and I believe it is always important that he see it in writing and sign an agreement. If it's a conversation between the parents and I that drags on, I will eventually ask them what their biggest fear is, and then the truth comes out. Parents are usually afraid that somehow a college or prospective employer will get a hold of my records, and that their son's future would be compromised.
"That ship is already sailing away," is usually my favorite way to begin my response to this fear. After reminding parents about the terms and limits of confidentiality, I will usually point out severally incidents that the family has already shared with me, that usually indicate that their son already has a reputation amongst his peers and adults as not being trustworthy. Sometimes I will even draw out a worst case scenario of what his relationships in the future would look like if the issue isn't addressed immediately. By this time, most parents are in agreement that the goal should be written in the treatment plan.
So if low competency leads to deceitfulness, what leads to low competency? I do not know, however I have a theory and that is the fear some parents have of witnessing their children fail. When parents unknowingly become too preoccupied with what would happen to their children if they experience certain setbacks, too often I have witnessed these fears translate into an aversion for risk taking with the child or teen.
Think about it, there are degrees of risk in everything we do on a daily basis and with most human beings this dates back to when we first learned how to walk. For every cautious step we took, there was a risk of falling. In other words, true mastery is learned from one's efforts to give their best while accepting and learning from their setbacks.
With this in mind, how does deceitfulness come into the picture? Well, if there is a pressure to succeed, alongside with a poor tolerance for failure, it makes sense that anyone buying into this paradigm of thinking will resort to cheating. Interestingly enough, whenever a teen has made significant progress on any treatment goal around honesty, that teen has always ended up confronting one or both parents in regards to her beliefs that the parent or parents would not accept her if she did not meet certain achievements in life. In reality most parents love their children unconditionally, but this is how most children and teens will interpret a parent's constant fear of seeing them fail.
Ultimately, to honor one's integrity and to strive for competency requires dedication.
