Keeping Honesty In Psychology

The key to psychotherapy is honesty. Psychotherapy works when the psychotherapist and client are able to be honest with each other. Only then can effective treatment occur once the client portrays total psychological honesty with their self and the therapist.

To gain complete honesty, it is important to let go of all your fears and defense mechanisms. Complete and total honesty allows you to share you innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires. To reach the point of this honesty it is important to face your emotional grief that resulted in your defense mechanisms and fears. When you confront your feelings without hiding from them, it helps you overcome and recover from them. You can start overcoming your feelings in a safe psychotherapy environment.

When many patients begin psychotherapy, they have deep dark secrets that they have a hard time revealing. They often try to hide their secrets either consciously or unconsciously from their psychotherapist. They do not want their therapist to know how deeply troubled they really are, they want to present themselves in a better state of mind.

At the start of therapy, people do not realize that they should be talking about these deep dark secrets and emotions. They also do not share their feelings about the treatment itself. Usually in result to some event within the treatment, the feelings emerge and then everything is revealed. It is not until these feelings are revealed that the real treatment can begin. If a patient continues to run from their feelings, then everything will just continue to be bottled up and the treatment will not effectively work.

The hard part is that sometimes professionals are not honest either. There are professionals who make mistakes and will not admit to them or try to fix them, who do not keep promises, who lie to colleagues and patients, and who are even afraid of their own patients.

Many people fear complete honesty of their feelings because of the social consequences that may result. For example, if you fear that if you are honest with someone they will stop loving you, then you never really had their love.

There are four steps to psychological honesty. Second, recognize that you unconsciously use psychological defense mechanisms to run away from bad and traumatizing emotions. Third, realize that the past becomes the present when you experience similar emotions. You will unconsciously respond to the emotions use previous defense mechanisms. You can then adapt to new positive behaviors.

It is very important to understand that psychological honesty is not easy. You need to make a conscious effort to endure your emotions without being angry. You need to learn to forgive yourself and overcome your obstacles. You need to work hard through all the stages to live honestly with yourself and others. You will not be able to have honest and meaningful relationships if you default back to old habits and defenses.

Once you understand dishonesty, you can overcome it and live a happier life.

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