Working With Client Lies and Concealment, DVD

With Barry A. Farber, PhD

Closed Captioned]
Running Time: more than 100 minutes
Copyright: 2019

ORDER CODE: APA-4310003

Resistance to treatment can often manifest as clients keeping secrets, minimizing their disclosures around significant clinical issues, and even occasionally lying. Clients' secrets and lies inevitably affect the process of psychotherapy and, unfortunately, therapists tend not to detect them as they occur.

In this video, Dr. Farber discusses the phenomenon of secrets and lies in therapy and demonstrate how he handles such resistance.

Using illustrative clips from the demonstration session, Dr. Farber discusses ways therapists can recognize and monitor client avoidance and dishonesty, understand the factors that inhibit or facilitate honest disclosure, determine when to accept and when to challenge clients' efforts to stay hidden, and learn to work with the clinical consequences of these behaviors when they occur.

This video features clients portrayed by actors based on actual case materials.

Approach
Often the best clinical approach to seemingly-avoided material is to simply ask. Therapists who don't introduce challenging topics can communicate to the client that these areas are off limits.

Whereas client honesty will never be totally unbounded, clinicians who address issues of emotional safety, trust, confidentiality, and disclosure in the earliest stages of therapy — and how these may be impacted by racial, ethnic, gender or sexual orientation differences — and who revisit these issues periodically throughout treatment, are likely to encounter more open and engaged clients. Greater client honesty should be both a focus and goal of clinical work.

Though sometimes such behavior is clinically justifiable in terms of "tact," at other times such behavior is more obvious to clients than therapists believe and can lead to significant alliance ruptures and termination from treatment.

About the Therapist
Barry A. Farber received his PhD from Yale University in 1978, and the next year became a member of the clinical psychology faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he's been ever since. He served as Director of Clinical Training there for 24 years, and also served two stints as Dependent Chair.

He has varied interests within the area of psychotherapy research, including the ways in which patients and therapists construct and use representations of the other to further the work of therapy, the nature and consequences of therapists' provision of positive regard, and the extent to which patients, therapists, supervisors and supervisees do and don't disclose to each other and sometimes even lie to each other.

His book, coauthored by Matt Blanchard and Melanie Love, Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, will be published by APA Press in the Spring 2019. He is also the author of Self-disclosure in Psychotherapy (Guilford Press), The Psychotherapy of Carl Rogers (with co-authors Patricia Raskin and Debra Brink; Guilford Press), and Rock 'n Roll Wisdom: What Psychologically Astute Lyrics Can Teach about Life and Love (Praeger).

In addition to his research, writing, and teaching, he maintains a small private practice of psychotherapy and is editor of Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session.