My legs dangled from the wooden pew, periodically kicking the kneeler just to keep myself from melting into the hot boredom. It had been at least three hours, or so my itchy seven-year-old brain told me. In reality, it had probably been about 20 minutes.
My younger brother sat a few pews away, his head resting in the hands he had propped on his knees. He looked equally miserable. The only other person in the church on this Saturday afternoon was my mom, who sat several rows behind both of us. I was sure I could feel her glare through the base of my skull, though I was not about to verify.
She had brought us here in a stroke of insight – or more likely, I imagine now as a mom myself – a stroke of desperation.
Someone had gotten the bucket of white paint out of the garage and painted the back door without permission. Besides the crooked strokes of paint now dried on the door, big splotches of white covered the concrete in front of it. Neither of her older two children were copping to the paint job, and so she had no choice, she told us, but to bring us to church. Maybe the Holy Spirit would inspire the culprit to fess up.
As the evening light poured through the stained glass, casting pink and yellow shadows around the room, I weighed my options. I could admit that I’d been inspired by an article in her Redbook magazine about refreshing your entry and taken it upon myself to to do a little home improvement. Or I could stick to my story that my brother was to blame.
Glancing back at my mom, I saw tears in her eyes. It was worse than I thought. I hadn’t seen her this mad in a while, and her next move upon hearing the truth was anyone’s guess. I stood up and walked back to her pew.
My eyes were downcast as she looked upon me expectantly. “Mom, I have something to tell you.”
“Yes?” she asked sharply.
“This is hard to say…” I started. “But, well… really what happened is that Zach paid me to tell you that it was me. But it wasn’t! He’s just really scared that you are going to be mad.”
Her eyes narrowed, easily detecting the lie. Her face twisted and I couldn’t distinguish if the look reflected more anger or sadness. It was only then I realized she’d known it was me all along. She was just waiting for me to tell the truth.
“Get your coat,” she hissed in the echoing church. “We’re going home.”
–
I hear myself instinctually repeating one of my mom’s refrains to my own kids these days. “Tell me the truth,” I warn. “You’ll always get in more trouble if you lie.” In my head I can hear how she would often follow it: “I hate liars. I can forgive anything, but not lying.”
As the first part comes out of my own mouth, I instantly recognize the limits of this sentiment. You’ll get in more trouble if you lie, sure, it stands to reason… but, of course, only if you get caught. I can see my own kids doing the same calculations I did in that church at seven years old. What are my odds here? Is the potential punishment bad enough that I should take my chances? Do I put all my chips on the table?
Without a more sophisticated moral reasoning system, the risk-reward calculation is the primary tool children have at their disposal when deciding whether to lie. It’s a clunky tool, at best, given that kids – with their still developing theory of mind – will vastly overestimate their own ability to be sneaky. Picture the preschooler adamantly shaking his head when asked if he ate the cookies while smears of chocolate cover his hands and face.
When I work in therapy with parents , one of the things that surprises them – it surprised me – was how early ‘lying’ actually begins. Research published in 2026 in the journal Cognitive Development confirms that babies start engaging in deception before their first birthday. These very early forms of deception are of course simple – and fairly forgivable: they pretend to not hear an instruction from a parent or they hide a toy so as to avoid it being taken.
But quickly, the forms and frequency of deception pick up. The same study, which came out of the University of Bristol, found that by three years old children are becoming more sophisticated in their manipulation. They withhold information, as in sharing the part of the story where their brother stole their toy, but not the part where they took it from him first. They also begin to offer what we would consider more outright lies. (“Did you take the juice out of the kitchen?” “No! That must have been my sister.”) And just like me in the church with my helpless little brother, they are savvy enough to point the blame on whoever might be more defenseless.
All of this probably shouldn’t surprise as much as it does, given that we see deception in many other animal species, from chimpanzees to birds (no joke, there are African birds that will mimic ‘false alarms’ so that they can steal others’ food). Lying doesn’t require as sophisticated language skills as we once thought. It also doesn’t require a cold heart or bankrupted morality.
And yet, it tends to startle us when we are confronted by our children’s mistruths. I see it rattle even the most grounded of parents, ones that manage to handle tantrums and messes with aplomb. This being lied is unnerving, and when it happens, many of us are struck with equal parts anger (How dare they!) and fear (Who am I raising? How have I messed up?). Those feelings then twist upon and amplify each other.
We of course want to raise humans who are morally grounded and trustworthy. It’s important for the society that most of us want to inhabit. But given how developmentally normal this all is, why does it shake us? I have to wonder if lying serves as a shadow for us.
When someone engages in a behavior or possesses a trait that we can’t stand to look at in ourselves, we react strongly, sometimes irrationally. (For more on shadows and how finding our own can help us grow, read my essay here.) Could it be that lying tends to trigger us because it makes us deeply uncomfortable that we are lying so often ourselves?
–
Most of us consider ourselves to be fairly moral individuals. It seems to be an important part of protecting our own delicate egos, so much so that even if we are in the habit of lying regularly, our minds can justify this behavior as part of being moral (I didn’t want to hurt her feelings!) or at least relegate it to those shadows while we carry on our otherwise moral lives.
What this means is that if you ask people about how much or how often they lie, you may be hard-pressed to get a factually accurate depiction. Nonetheless, researchers who study lying seem to rely most heavily on asking people to report directly how often they lie. (Those studies suggest about once per day is the average). They assume that under the protection of anonymity, most people will report honestly. I’m not so sure.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that we are often barely conscious of many of the lies we tell. Or we are conscious in the moment, but the mind is, again, whipsmart at ‘forgetting,’ minimizing, or rationalizing. We pretend to be paying attention to something our partner just said. We give a half-truth excuse as to why we didn’t get deliverable in on time. We embellish our enthusiasm for our sister’s news. We tell our kids the park is closed today (okay, maybe that one’s just me).
Do we call these lies? It might depend on the standards of honesty to which we ascribe. Some of us wouldn’t call an omission a lie, while others would. Some of us consider incorporating a heaping of truth with a little dash of lie less morally ungrounded. Lying is much more relative than we were taught to believe. (Hello, the last decade of politics.)
But regardless of how we define it, the body knows when we are lying – whether that’s to others or ourselves. Martha Beck, a well-known coach and a personal favorite of Oprah, claims to demonstrate this directly. She asks people to hold their arm out straight while she pushes down on it. When they tell the truth, their resistance remains strong. When they tell a lie. the arm succumbs easily to the pressure of her push.
This is hardly a controlled scientific study, but it actually makes sense with what we have proven about lying. Lying activates the amygdala and creates a stress response, which can pull resources away from other body functions. Beck explains that the body itself never lies – it is designed to live in the gritty reality of the present. So when our minds lie – a verbal function, there is an incongruence created. That incongruence wears on us.
Beck was so intrigued by this that she set out to not lie for an entire year. She documents her experience as part of her book, The Way of Integrity, and she is the first to acknowledge how grueling this can be. Telling someone you can’t make it to their party because you are tired, not otherwise occupied? Responding that you’re fine when you’re really not? It can feel exhausting to share the truth. But she reminds us that it can also feel liberating, and perhaps more importantly – allow us to be more fully known.
–
A place we imagine wanting to be fully known is in our therapist’s office, and yet this is even a place where we find ourselves lying – massaging the reason for cancelling an appointment to subtly leaving out some context for our story to make us look a bit more sympathetic.
Because it’s a relational playground, therapy can also be an excellent forum for exploring when, how, and why we lie. I’d suggest that most of our lies occur in the context of preserving relationships. We smooth over the edges, make things just a bit more palatable. We have the opportunity in therapy to observe what happens when we try a different way.
A few weeks ago, I had a therapy appointment on the day I was returning from a trip. I’d be back in time, but anticipated the scramble of trying to get to the appointment in the midst of unpacking and resettling. I almost instinctively told my therapist that I was returning too late from the trip to make it. If pressed, I might have had plausible deniability. But as soon I realized I was about to lie, I stopped in my tracks. Why was I inclined to not just tell her the truth (“It feels like too much to make it.”)? I told my therapist about my urge to contort the truth, which led to a deep and meaningful dialogue about where a fear of disappointing others or seeming ungrateful for their time shows up. (She also, of course, was more than happy to reschedule our appointment, which helped create a prediction error that updated my expectation of someone being irritated with me when I need an accommodation. (More on how this works here.)
Recognizing that lying almost always arises for women in the pursuit of safety, approval, and connection can help us destigmatize our understandable urges toward it. When we sense – accurately or not – that our truth will create disruption or disconnection, our first instinct will often to be to contort the truth. That’s not a sign of badness or pathology. It’s a survival instinct that may have outgrown its usefulness.
–
If we’re seriously interested in becoming more truthful and living in greater integrity, we can start practicing dropping our lies. But there’s an important principle to practice first.
If we wanted to build more honesty in our kids, we would have to ensure that they knew that it was safe to not only tell the truth, but also to acknowledge that they lied or had the urge to. Ironically, my mom telling me that lying was the worst thing I could do actually backfired spectacularly. Suddenly it became more important to hide the lie than to hide the original mistake in order to preserve her positive feelings toward me. I don’t blame my mom for this – so many of us have said these things.
Teaching ourselves to practice consistent honesty requires the same things: understanding of the urge to protect ourselves and a heaping dose of compassion. When our inner selves can trust that they will be met with compassion, they will start to notice our inclinations to withhold or lie. Once they do, we can start to experiment with saying the hard thing in the moment – the thing that as a child may have threatened resources or connection – and see that we can have a different outcome.
Somewhere between that church pew and this moment, I’m still learning the same thing: that truth is less about confession and more about the courage to be seen as our imperfect selves.
