Some Thoughts on Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy as a catalyst for frustration is a concept that has come up in my work often and for as many years as I’ve been doing it.  There is probably an important question to ask about how the current set of cultural conditions makes so many clients sensitive to that kind of pretense and causes it to consistently yield such a palpable sense of frustration.  However, before even attempting to answer that, I’d rather raise some thoughts about what the source of that frustration might be, via my usual lens of object-relations and existential thought. 

In examining this through the object-relations prism, I think there’s a set of primary considerations and a secondary consideration worth examining.  The primary consideration exists at the level of affect.  The reported emotional state of clients detailing the perceived hypocrisy of another is almost always anger.  Though, when sufficiently probed, this anger is often more genuinely observed to either be accompanied by a sense of fear or sadness which the anger is in someways attempting (it would seem) to cover over.  To my thinking, the sadness would appear the “healthier” position, in as much as it lends itself more readily to some kind of adaptability.  This is a kind of sadness separate from, say, depression, which as a form is a kind of sadness that has not yet worked through the anger, but merely turned it inward.  The kind of sadness I’m talking about presupposes a kind of mourning I’ve talked about in previous posts, where the sadness is a precursor to confronting our powerlessness before the inconsistent activities of the other and reconciling that, so as to be able to carry that powerlessness forward without necessarily becoming dysregulated by it.

Anger as a reactionary position to fear has no such benefit.  This position is more akin to the relationship to hypocrisy I would frequently bear witness to while working in corrections.  This form of the response tended towards a position where the inconsistency of the other is seen as a threat against one’s own security and wellbeing, therefore resulting in things such as paranoia, aggression, and violence.  Even for those not dispositionally or developmentally predisposed to violent reactions, my sense would be that the paranoid position as a response to perceived hypocrisy still stands as a relevant factor in the hypervigilance one sees in those who have experienced considerable trauma, but projected in ways that don’t necessarily lead to physical violence enacted upon another (which is more of a projective identification of sorts than mere projection).

Of course, all of this is intentionally reductive.  Experientially, the likelier condition is that some version of each of these responses is happening to a larger or lesser degree.  The outline is meant to serve, not as a way of examining what might be happening in any exclusive sense, but to offer some speculation as to 1.) what might be happening for any particular client in having assessed which of the emotional states, fear or sadness, seems to be predominating; or 2.) helping the client to discern possible underlying emotional forces at play based on the set of behaviors they are enacting in response to hypocritical conditions in their lives.  The hope is that, through either of these, given a supportive and sufficiently safe holding environment, we can help move the client from angry-fearful to angry-saddened, allowing them to grieve the necessary limitations on their own safety and find ways of responding to hypocrisy that doesn’t further endanger or inhibit the healthy growth and development of themselves or others.

The secondary level works off the primary level and is perhaps already signaled by what I shared above, but extends into the way the experience of hypocrisy, and more importantly the threat of hypocrisy, compromises one’s sense of safety in a way that elicits an intrapsychic experiencing of the internalized bad object.  In addition to what has already been stated, I suspect there is a more complicated process going on which has something to do with early attachments and the vicissitudes experienced at the hands of early care givers.  This perspective seems helpful in distinguishing the degree of “pathological response” one might extend in trying to resolve the dysregulation brought on by the hypocritical other.

Hypocrisy, as a means of describing common place contradiction and dishonesty, is a more or less common occurrence most of us have to bear over the course of normal living.   Those operating at what would traditionally be called a more neurotic level of response, might react to these experiences with a certain level of irritation, though would be expected to quickly return to some sort of stasis or baseline.  Consider what I offered above, but operating within a generally accepting window of tolerance for the individual, where evaluation and reflection is still helpful, but otherwise the hypocrisy does not bring the person experiencing it into a state of crisis.  At the more vulnerable level, the kinds of responses outlined above related to paranoia, fear, potentially even rage, the idea of the bad object becomes fairly useful.  The notion in this instance being that traumatic early attachments serve as the foundation for an intense affective and embodied response to the lack of safety felt when in the presence of an inconsistent and unpredictable reality or, worse yet, someone who appears to be deliberately manipulating reality for their own gain.  For those operating at a more fundamentally split good/bad object level, this kind of experience could quickly elicit an identification with an internalized bad object, with a consequent response filled by intense experiences of shame, loneliness, dependency, and toxic guilt, that is far more difficult to resolve.  Further, I think all of this can be additionally impacted by the degree of proximity to the consequences of the hypocritical position, bearing a significant amount of influence on the level of the intensity of the response.

What does this all look like phenomenologically?  The most obvious answer is that, at some point in the therapeutic encounter, the client will discern some amount of hypocrisy in the clinician, no matter how careful and attendant the clinician might be (not just because of the fact that interpersonal tendencies may cause the client to see hypocrisy where it is not, but also because, given a sufficiently long and authentic therapeutic process, no clinician can ever really be that careful).  How and where this conversation goes will depend a lot on where the therapy is and the personal history of the client that is being worked with.  In general, though, my initial impression is that the most helpful response might very likely be some version of “I’m sorry.  I’ve clearly hurt you.  Do you think we can talk about what just happened?”  (This may seem obvious to some, but I am pretty much of the impression that there are many clinicians out there who are either unaware of this potential response or believe it to be the right response, but for any of a number of factors would fail to respond this way in the moment.)

The reasons for this are two-fold.  One, is that it allows for and invites an examination of this client’s inner experience and response to hypocrisy.  It becomes a space for exploring the harmful impact on a healthy sense of dignity and self-worth; the negative impact on the ongoing negotiation of warm and genuine interpersonal contact; the clients perceived sense of safety in the therapeutic encounter; the impediment to desired growth and development of the client out of such interpersonally injurious experiences; and (most importantly) the way all of the above and more signals to and elicits from the client something about the ways in which all of these are wrapped up in and reaffirm some structural and relational knowledge about how they understand their existence at the very core of their being.

The second reason has to do with therapeutic technique.  Certain other types of therapy might encourage deflecting such accusations and turning them back on the client for examination or interpretation.  It might be considered an opportunity to examine various “cognitive distortions” the client is engaging in, an opportunity to make the moment about practicing emotional regulation, or held at some kind of psychological arm’s length to make it first and foremost about a reflection on the internal psychodynamics of the client.

All of these might genuinely be of some value to the client later in the treatment.  But at the moment of therapeutic contact, the most important response is the one that acknowledges the felt state of the client and allows them the opportunity in that moment to experience a new kind of relationship to a threatening, hypocritical other.  One that honors and supports their feeling into and making meaning of what that experience holds.  This can be incredibly uncomfortable for some clinicians.  It relates, in part, to an idea in Winnicott developed within the framework of object usage.  If we can create a sufficiently safe holding environment for the client’s needs, which likely means internally being able to hold ourselves in the interaction as well, the opportunity for authentic contact in the context of a genuinely painful interpersonal encounter unfolds, bringing the relationship into a place that allows for some new experience for the client of their own being-in-the-presence-of a hypocritical other.  This is the healing impact of the intersubjective nature of the therapeutic relationship itself.