“All of this concerns honesty. I was in treatment with this guy for at least four years. And I don’t know these major things about his life that would have influenced decisions that I made. He kept the sexual molestation a secret. Not only that he ended up getting involved with somebody else in the A.A. program about a year after Sally was seeing me. That was a total secret that accompanied a host of lies. Later he ended up breaking up with Sally. Eventually, Sam married this other woman. It was horrible for Sally, because they were all in the same AA group. And they had the same group of AA friends. He lied and manipulated.”
At this point, Suzanne identified an important dynamic operating in Sally’s psychic window:
“Sam’s dishonesty was something everybody but Sally knew in their A.A. group.”
Like many of us, when we are in love with another person, Sally was blocking out important information entering her public quad (one) that would move to her second quad (regarding Sam). She “didn’t see” what Sam was doing. Or perhaps she did “see” but isolated this perception in her second quad. If this is the case, then Sally is being dishonest in her own window (quad two), just as Sam is being dishonest in his quad one. Dishonesty breeds dishonesty in relationships that are important and dishonest.
Suzanne offers a comment regarding Sam’s dishonesty and her ongoing relationship with Sally:
“I was glad I was her therapist, because we both felt really betrayed. I felt like he hadn’t been honest with me at all about anything happening in his life. So, I wondered, what kind of treatment was I doing with him anyways, because what I was doing with him was all based on a lot of lies. And Sally felt like their relationship was filled with lies, too. So I was very supportive of her. It was like, whoa, who is this person? Who is this person with whom we were both related. We don’t know.”
As we leave this challenging psychotherapeutic episode, there are multiple insights to be gained about honesty when introducing the dynamics of Joe Luft’s Johari Window. We find that dishonesty in quad two leads to an unwillingness to acknowledge what is occurring in the behavior of another person. We are dishonest with ourselves and as a result are vulnerable to the manipulation of this other person. They may not themselves be aware of this manipulation, being dishonest about their own motivations and behavior (quad one).
Underlying this dynamic is a self-escalating pattern: we are dishonest with another person, they are unaware of or unwilling to admit to this dishonesty, and we become increasingly dishonest. We are likely to identify this dishonesty as simply being a “convenience” or as a way not to hurt the other person’s feelings. Sam didn’t want to hurt Sally by telling her about his emotional disengagement or his relationship with the other members of their A.A. group. He “cared” about Sally by insisting that Suzanne see Sally in therapy. He also “cared” for Sally by not sharing anything important with Suzanne about his relationship with Sally—for Suzanne might have disclosed something to Sally about Sam’s shifting feelings, which, in turn, would have wounded Sally. Suzanne admits that she is also drawn into this cluster of dishonesties when reticent to confront Sam with his unwise decision to remain in relationship with Sally.
As is often the case when dishonesty is saturating a set of relationships, the initial motive may reside in a desire to “care for” one another. However, as Joe Luft proposed, it takes energy to hide, deny, or be blind to behavior. We are likely to find, eventually, that our caring behavior is transformed into manipulative behavior, founded on strong feelings of guilt, helplessness and even anger. Eventually we hate ourselves and our relationship with the other person. We turn away from other people, such as Suzanne, who can help us disengage from the dishonesty-saturated relationship. Like Sam, we look for someone else to fulfill our needs and allow us to protect our often-hidden sense of self (quads three and four).
