Deception, Conflict, and Authenticity: Navigating Relationships with Dr. Jason Whiting (Episode #24)

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There's something about you that I can't help but smile when you smile and laugh when you laugh, something surround.

Welcome to the Human intimacy podcast. I'm Dr. Kevin Skinner. Today my special guest is Dr. Jason Whiting. He's a licensed marriage and family therapist. He's a professor at Brigham Young University and their marriage and family therapy program. He researches healthy and unhealthy marriage and is the author of a recent book called Love Me Overcoming the Surprising Ways We Deceive in Relationships, as well as other books and articles on control, respect and communication. Want to welcome you, Dr. Whiting. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. It's good to be here. Kevin. Thanks for, thanks for inviting me.

You know, I'm excited to have you on. We actually met about 30 years ago.

Maybe something like that. Yeah, we were students in, in the same program. I was a master's student, you were a doctoral student. So unbelievable ways back.

Unbelievable. 30 years. And then we're just talking and we both grew up in Idaho Falls, which is really cool.

Yes, yes. Again, also a long time ago.

Long time ago. All right, so Love Me True Overcoming the Surprising Ways we Deceive in Relationships. I. I know our listenership. A lot of them have dealt with a lot of deception in relationships. This topic, I think, will ring true to what here. Tell me about the book. Let's get started and let's learn more.

Sure. I think the reason I ended up gravitating towards that topic was as I started working with couples and just people in general, there are these big questions, like, why are we drawn to each other? Why do we fall in love with each other? And then why does it go so wrong? Like, what's what's going on in human relationships. They're kind of complicated and crazy, but. But we're all about relationships. We know you turn on the radio, you hear songs about relationships, but it's about heartbreak, but it's also about love and joy and meaning. So, anyway, as I got into the field and as I became, you know, more involved as a therapist and then as a researcher, it seemed to me that most every time something goes wrong in a relationship, there's some element of deception going on, whether that's somebody being blaming or exaggerating or minimizing or not taking responsibility or, you know, there's the obvious examples of, you know, an affair or some sort of bigger betrayal, but there's a lot of other examples that are smaller, more subtle. And. And I just think if we can get that figured out and become a little more authentic, a little more responsible, we'll do better. It just. It just kind of cuts across all. All of the ways we interact as humans.

So have you been gathering research on this topic? And. And is it something that you have information related to research? Yes.

Early in my career, I started things like abuse and neglect, starting with, like, children. But then I gravitated to more adult relationships, and I became really curious that, you know, these issues of rationalization and blame were very pronounced in the most unhealthy relationships. Just as an example, you think about domestic violence and somebody who is at a point where they're hurting each other in a relationship, they're also doing things like making serious excuses and accusations that are pretty far out there. They'll say something like, and I. And I. I did interviews with. With both people who had perpetrated as well as people who had experienced and survived domestic violence. And I asked him about this. I said, were there times when you maybe said something to excuse your behavior, but it wasn't really accurate? And it was startling how. Well, people could own that when they're in a place of kind of calm reflection. They would say things like, yeah, I hit her, but I would say, I hit you because you weren't shutting up when I told you to shut up. But I realized that was just sort of an excuse. And. And that's just a classic example.

Or.

Or, you know, I would. I would call in something terrible and say, well, I only did that because you did this. When I realized I didn't. You know, that's not really an excuse for my behavior. So. So it's just very pronounced. And. And yeah, I've done hundreds of interviews since that time and continue to Ask and explore the ways that couples rationalize, excuse, minimize blame, and on the reverse are taking accountability and apologizing and making things better. So it's just a really interesting topic for me.

So real quick, in some of your research, if you've been interviewing hundreds of couples or individuals, you're seeing a lot of self awareness when they're not in the middle of the battle.

Right?

Right. And so the key takeaway, some of your key things, like with that awareness. Now what?

Well, you bring up a really interesting point, which is the awareness comes when they're not in the middle of the battle. And the thing I think about is when you're in the middle of the battle, your body is in a different state. You get reactive, you get defensive. I have a student that actually just yesterday defended a thesis where he looked at a bunch of this data, asking people about being defensive. And sure enough, people talk about really getting ramped up, Right. Their bodies get, their heart rates escalate, their galvanic skin response goes up. And so, you know, other researchers like John Gottman have found the couples who are not doing very well are the ones who get fired up. They have what he calls diffuse physiological arousal. And what that means is they get so activated and reactive that they say and do things in this kind of survival attack mode that's not helpful and that's oftentimes damaging. So to your question, if you can help people get to a more calm, reflective place, both individually and together, that's a big part of finding, you know, more truthful, more constructive conversations.

So Dr. Gottman, in the book the Science of Trust, he talks about this idea of being flooded. Heart rate over 100 beats per minute to general basic baseline basically says doing marital therapy when couples heart rates over 100 beats per minute. Usually ineffective. Yeah, because you can't think right. You're, you're talking about fight or flight. But you're adding a fascinating dimension here, maybe even more deceptive, self deceptive. When I'm overwhelmed or flooded, maybe I'm blaming you, accusing you of. Because I'm overwhelmed emotionally.

Right, right. Yeah. And Gottman says this interesting thing about flooding and getting people to timeouts. He says when we have couples take a timeout, it's almost like they've had a brain transplant because their humor returns, their good nature returns. And, and we, we, I say myself and some colleagues at Texas Tech, when I was down there, we did a similar project. We had couples who were high escalation, conflictual, had some, some level of violence. And these weren't like your typical, I don't know, stereotypical violent couples. These were average generic couples coming in for therapy, about half of which qualified for this study. And that means a couple things. One is a lot of people struggle with getting escalated and getting fired up. But the point is, we taught them this strategy of negotiated timeout. It's something developed by Dr. Sandra Stith and her colleagues at Kansas State, where they just when things start to escalate, they. They take a time out and they take some time and then they come back later and check in and say, do we want to talk further or do we want to not talk about it? Do we want to talk later? But it's negotiated. The point is, I was surprised, maybe even shocked, how many of those couples in our little study said that was the most helpful thing we got out of therapy was that little tool of negotiated timeout. And we still use it. We use it with our kids. So anyway, for me, the point is you're not yourself when you are in fight or flight mode. You don't think the same way. The person in front of you now instead of a partner, is a threat or an enemy instead of your loving companion, and you don't act the same way and you can do some damage.

And what's interesting there is I found that in my career, physiologically, when they're aroused to that emotional state, not only are they not thinking clearly, but their tone of voice, their pitch, their body language, every aspect of how we are with each other shuts the other person down or it fires them up and they fight back.

It's really hard to not get the other, you know, start activating each other. Because when I get activated, my spouse is going to get activated. If I get aggressive, she's going to get defensive. If she gets aggressive back, I'm going to get defensive. And. And again, probably nothing good is going to happen during those kind of exchanges.

So this negotiated timeout, let's dig into it for a second because I think our listeners could probably really benefit from what it is. What does this negotiated timeout actually look like?

Yeah, Dr. Stith and her group, they're working with folks who qualify with, with like some domestic violence. And, and there's two types of domestic violence. There's the kind of classic controlling, monitoring, jealous type. And we see that in the movies, but there's this other type that's more frequent. We just don't see it as much. It's just two people have a hard time controlling their temper, their emotions, and we call it situational Violence, usually where somebody just loses their cool, they slam a door, maybe they push someone or worse. I mean, it can get dangerous. So what they did Sandy stiff in the group, they said, let's take. They tried timeouts, and they taught people, hey, you need to take a timeout. But then they found out that people were misusing it. They would say, well, I don't want to talk to you. I'm taking a timeout. Or you're being annoying. You need to go to timeout. You know, they put each other in timeout. So she said, let's come up with a better way to do this. Let's call it negotiated timeout. And so what that means is they work together. You know, I always pull out a little piece of paper, a little worksheet, and I do this with my clients and I teach my students. And basically, you start by saying, what are the signals? What are the signs that we are getting to that point of no return? What's good? Yeah, what are we. You know, when do we know? And people will say, well, I start seeing red, or I. The tone gets really negative, or we start, you know, just talking loud. Okay, so what's going to be our signal? And a lot of people use a little referee, timeout signal or whatever. And then where are we going to go? And again, you're just writing all this out. People make a little plan. It's not that hard to do, but like I said, surprisingly effective. Okay, I'm going to go chill out in my den. I'm going to take a walk, and that's better than I'm going to go drive my truck and drink a beer. Or, you know, you're not supposed to go stew on it and fume. You need to genuinely do something that is. Is a distraction. And then how long do you need? Maybe it's a half an hour, maybe it's an hour. And then you come back, and then here are the options. And this is what makes it kind of negotiated. We check in and we say, do we want to. One, continue the conversation. Two, abandon the conversation, just let it go. Three, come back to it later, at another time, or just take another time out. So, and that's. It's about as simple as that, but it's pretty helpful. A lot of people just don't have those kinds of skills in their toolbox, and maybe they didn't grow up in a family where there's, you know, healthy communication. So it just gives them this little tool to slow down and work it out in a. In a more Effective way.

I love it. One of the things that I actually do with couples, I actually add a part to that, and that is while you're away, I'd like you to think about what's really inside of you. What's the core issue inside of you? And, and then take it a step further. Once you've identified your core issue, try to understand your partners.

What.

What are they really trying to say? And when I have couples do that, it's. It's amazing to me if they can get outside of self and into the other person's thoughts, they come back so much more prepared because they've got like, I don't know what they're thinking. I, or, or are you thinking this? And so that curiosity can lead to a much more effective communication once they get back together.

Yeah, I love that. Because that's the thing that doesn't come intuitively when you're in an escalated state. You, you're all about self and preservation and defense. But if you can pull yourself out and what's going on with my partner, that helps you shift into a different mode of thinking. And it reminds me of another study. There was a guy named Eli Finkel. He asked couples what was your most significant disagreement over the last year. And they talked about it. But then he had one group, he said, write about that disagreement, but write about it from a third party perspective. Who, who wants the best for you guys? So think of a friend and just write out what happened. And by doing that, it made those folks kind of rethink what had happened and say, if I were a neutral friend, I would say, well, they said this, but this person said this. But each of them were trying. This point is the people that did that softened and actually let that go and felt better about the relationship in general and not just the issue.

Right. So if we can pull ourselves away from. I love this idea of this. Self deception is more likely to occur there. But also this, My emotions are aroused. I now pull back. I've got a negotiated timeout. I'm actually thinking. And now, based upon the study, you just said, wow, what would happen if we could actually get arguments to the point where we're reflecting what is their perception, what's actually happening here? When couples do that, I found we get much better and much more effective outcomes.

Yeah. And in. And hopefully that's what therapy can do. You know, when you get in a safe space and you say, let's, let's hear where you're at. Let's hear where you're at. People can slow down and kind of appreciate, oh, you were scared. You know, you were. You were in this funny place. You weren't just being mean and, you know, but a good conversation can do that as well, you know, just kind of slowing down, seeing the other person as a person rather than a threat.

All right, so let's transition maybe to some solutions. All right. If I find that I am a person who has maybe been deceptive and now we're talking to maybe transition into authenticity, shifting out of that, into becoming an authentic self. Tell us a little bit more about that concept. I think that's probably. Probably part of your book.

Yeah, and there's a lot of ways to do that. You know, we talk about. We talk about mindfulness, for example, as a way to slow down, as a way to kind of not get caught up in our thoughts. That's. That's one strategy for kind of stepping back from thoughts that can be fueling behavior. We talk about cognitive behavioral techniques, which is using our own logic or our own, you know, ability to talk through an issue and kind of combat some of our flawed or distorted thoughts. And. And people can do those kind of things on their own. We can also do things like help people tap into their own moral sense. Even programs that are designed to help, like, abusers. I'm thinking of a guy named Alan Jenkins who is in Australia. He's written a book called Invitations to Responsibility where he works with abusive men. And these are like physical abuse, sexual abuse, pretty serious damaging stuff. Most of these men still have a moral sense. And he. That's why he says, inviting them to be responsible. And that means who are you as a person? What are your core values? What are you about? What kind of. What kind of husband, father, spouse, person do you want to be? And when people are in a. In a reflective place, they can tap into that. Most people who are hurtful don't enjoy being hurtful. Yeah, there are some people who kind of fit maybe a sociopathic or psychopathic profile, but most don't. So. So that's just kind of three quick things to think about. And I. I really think with couples, you can help them tap into that. You know, who are you and what are your values? And, you know, think back to when you guys first met. For example, what were the things that you admired about each other and that you were. That helped you bring out the best in each other?

So that idea of core values leading taps into this idea. I want to be a person who's kind. I want to be a person who's who's caring. I want to be responsible. I want to be a loving partner. So you're saying really tap into those core values. The authentic me is. Is really striving. This is the kind of person I long or want to be. Maybe I haven't been him or her, but I want to. And that's kind of what you're finding.

That's right. And. And people lose sight of that because they get so focused on what the other person allegedly is doing or not doing that they think they should. And that's. That's fair. I mean, they might have some legitimate complaints, but that just complaining about the other person doesn't help them be their best self. In fact, it often helps them excuse their own bad behavior. So let's focus on your behavior and stepping up to be your most authentic self. And I will say I'm currently doing this big research project on what are the attributes people value in a relationship? And honesty, of course, is one of those. You talked about Gottman's book on trust, and that's one of his findings over 50 years. People really value trust because that is the foundation of intimacy, of sharing of security. So anyway, help coming back to help people be that kind of person, that's congruent with their own value of honesty. And, you know, integrity is important.

All right, so let me pick your brain here for a second. I love this conversation. So let's just say the individual has not been honest. They've been deceptive. And they say that they want to, but they really have struggled to be that person that they long for. What would you suggest to that individual who. Maybe their hearts into it, but they've really struggled, let's say, with honesty. Now I'll give you a very specific example. I work with lots of men who've betrayed their partner. They've been deceptive in their relationship, hidden their behaviors, and now they. They say, I want to be. But maybe their spouse comes to them in anger and in hurt, and they're, you know, feel like they're being bombarded by their partner and they lie again because they went to McDonald's and hit the hamburger. And now they're afraid that their spouse is angry at them. And so they. They lie about seemingly stupid stuff.

Yeah.

But they. They want to be that person, but their spouse is coming at them with that energy of, where have you been? Why are you late?

Yeah, it's a great example. I talk about a similar example in my book where a guy, you know, buys something for 20 bucks and then his wife Finds out and she kind of blows a gasket, in his words. But the issue was that the trust had already been broken about other stuff. And so his, his responsibility now is to step up and really, really work on being honest in, in every way, not just, you know, in those specific ways. So it is a, it's a challenge. There's the, there's the kind of this dance that goes back and forth with couples. And I know you work with this all the time, but where, where one person is trying to be honest and maybe repair something, where they haven't been honest or they've been hiding something. And certainly in compulsive and addictive behaviors, this happens all the time. And then the other person who maybe has felt betrayed, they want to trust, but it is hard because they've been hurt before. But to choose to trust is also kind of an act of faith. And there's kind of this dance of, you have to earn the trust, but then I have to choose to give it. And not long ago, I was working with a young couple where there had been a betrayal. There was some pornography and some other things, and I, I, I fell for this woman, but her reaction was one where she clamped down so hard that he had a hard time not retreating. In other words, she, she wrote this list of rules for him every day as he came home from, you know, his schooling. He was supposed to answer like, five questions. Did you look at pornography today? Did you think about looking at pornography today? Did you look at any other woman? If any appropriate thoughts? Did you have any kind of inappropriate thoughts? You know, it was kind of, it kind of ramped it up to this level that was pretty tough to, to live up to, frankly. And so in my mind, like, he has to have some space to do his work while she. And I want to be really careful because I don't, I'm not trying to say that she, she wasn't betrayed. She was betrayed. She was badly hurt. And there we, we needed to work on some ways for him to build that trust back. But if couples become more, how do I say, you know, rigid or strict, that's going to be a tough, that's going to be a tough thing to live up to. Is, is the bottom line, you know.

And I just take that example of what you just described. And what I find is that individuals working recovery, they need to be responsible for self. And in that kind of a list, when couples go through that day in and day out, I often say that they're looking at the cow pie every Day.

Yeah.

And ideally, having grown up in Idaho, cow pies seem to be a common theme in my conversation. But. But one of the things I find is if that person is reaching out and isn't accountable, then the spouse can actually be the spouse. And not every day am I. Am I giving you a rundown of everything that happened in my thoughts? Because that overwhelms the relationship system. Now, that kind of accountability. Hey, I had a hard day going to a sponsor, going to accountability team. Those things are very appropriate and important. But if you're. Every day your spouse is hearing about everything that you're struggle, every battle, good, bad, eventually it overwhelms the marital system.

Yeah. And for me, this comes back to this issue of reactivity and flooding that we were talking about earlier, in the sense that people have all kinds of reactions and thoughts, and I don't think they should be sharing all those with each other because they have to work at finding the truth. There's a line I put in my book, which is, people need to edit their words, not to hide the truth, but take the time to find it. So, for example, I might have a really, you know, I might be hungry, I might be cranky. I might have a negative thought towards my spouse. It's not honest for me, really, to just lash out at her and say, well, I'm only being honest. You're blanketing, like, whatever. That's not fair. Because that's my own imperfections and my own physiology and my psychology and whatever. If people said every thought they had to each other, we, you know, it'd just be kind of a disaster because people have a lot of thoughts that are judgmental or negative or inappropriate or whatever. So I think there has to be this space to say, now, give me a minute. I'm not in a very good place right now. I need to come back to this while I take some time to get to that truth, to get to, you.

Know, my proper filter. You're talking about a filter of really, what is my truth here? Because if we all went off our raw emotions, we would probably not be very good in relationships. And I think that's probably the part of the problem is we are too raw.

Yeah.

And we don't use this filter, the prefrontal cortex, to think through. What is the real thing I'm trying to communicate here? What is the real thing I'm trying to say here? Which gets me to one other topic I'd like to address, and that is this concept of honesty and kindness. That's also something that's important in your findings.

Yeah, people. People will say, well, I'm just being honest. But really what they're being is reactive. They say, I'm being brutally honest. They're just being brutal. You know, it's that raw emotion that you're talking about. Maybe they're, you know, maybe they're acting out of some sort of hurt. And, and again, I'm not trying to minimize someone's hurt, but that hurt might be related to any number of things. It might be related to their boss yelled at him, say, might be related to their dad was rough on them when they were kids. It might be related to that they were bullied. It might be related to all kinds of stuff. But it feels like this thing they have to say to their spouse. But I would say you're. You need to take some time to think through that, and if there's a real concern, yeah, you should probably talk about it. But maybe it's just you're having a bad day and somebody left the toothpaste out. That's not, you know, that's, that doesn't merit a thousand pounds of dynamite where one would have been enough. So, so there's kind of this balance between honesty and kindness. And I'm, I am all for honesty. I, I, you know, especially in my research for that book, I read studies even on things like white lies, where, where people. There's one woman who developed this scale called the Lying in Amorous Relationship Scale. So the acronym is the liars. Right. Good job. Academics come up with good acronyms. So she developed the liars. And she, she thought she would find that people who told white lies, like, this meal was so great, or you were such an attentive lover, or you look amazing, would benefit the relationship. But she didn't find that. She found that those were. They felt slightly inauthentic, those interactions. And so again, she doesn't say, like, you know, just say you don't look good or whatever. You can still. But if somebody says, do these jeans make me look fat? There's maybe a way to say, you know, I think this looks better than that, as opposed to like, oh, no, it's just your whole body that makes you look fat. Or, you know, people sometimes embrace honesty, but really they're kind of just embracing tactlessness and aggression instead of thinking through what's the right thing to say here. And, you know, where do I get to that? So it's just this balance.

And what I like about this, especially this conversation, because far too often I have Found that individuals, they don't think about the most important conversations. Right. So, so if I was doing a presentation in Dr. Whiting's class, I'd probably spend hours and hours doing prep work. I, you know, I'd make sure the presentation's good, the pictures in it, the fonts. Right. I do everything to make this presentation good. And our most important relationships, this is the thing that I just absolutely drives me crazy. Our most important relationships are dialogues, are off the cuff, in the moment, in the heat of the moment and somehow we think that we're going to have an effective outcome with no preparation, with not even thinking through it and our raw emotions are not going to take over.

Yeah, it's like asking somebody to do like an ACT level exam when they've been up late and they're hungry and they're tired. Like, yeah, go give me your best cognitive work on, you know, in kind of your worst self. And we ask or we somehow couples think they can handle some heavy duty serious issue when it's 11:30 at night and they're tired and they got, you know, a lot of stuff going on. That's not the time to, to try to sort through some of this expert level stuff. You need to be at a better place. You need to be, you know, feeling good. You need to maybe take it in chunks. You need to be prepping for it like you're describing. Maybe you need to go to a professional that can help you sort through it. Those, you know, relationship conversations. You should give your best stuff to your most important relationships. And a lot of times people don't do that.

Yeah, awesome, awesome conversation. Talking with Dr. Jason Whiting, the author of Love Me True Overcoming the Surprising Ways we Deceive in Relationships. Anything else from your book you'd like to share with our listeners today?

Well, I would just again emphasize this idea that we, we feel a lot of times like we are, have an accurate take on what's going on, but really we have to be careful about these emotional filters that we always carry around. And we've talked a lot about our negative filters. But, but I would also just say this is why it's good to be positive in relationships because a positive filter has a beneficial effect. Like if you, if you're having a good time with your spouse and then they say something that's kind of annoying, you're going to be like, well, they didn't really mean it. I know their heart. Does that make sense? And, and there's, there's research that shows that too like when people are in a better mood, they just feel better about life in general. There's a, there was a funny project where in a, in a mall one day they gave passersby little trinkets as free gifts. They said, here, I'd like you to have this free gift. And then a little distance away, they had someone approach them with a survey. Can we ask you some questions about how satisfied you are with your car and your tv? Well, guess what? The people who got the trinket a couple minutes ago felt more satisfied about their car and their tv, just unrelated, just because they had this little boost in mood, this little just happy thing. So the point is we are, we are not always rational animals. We, we are, we are affected by these moods and that, and that is why it takes a little extra work to sort through and figure out, you know, what's going on. But it's also why we just have to be positive and grateful and connect and do things that give us those healthy, happy mood boosts as well.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. All right, any final thoughts? I often ask my guests this question. If you could give the world any advice on relationship success, how to achieve it, what would you give the world? If you could just tell the world one thing, what would you say? This. Healthy relationships. Finish the sentence.

It's so hard for an academic to just give one thing. But I would, I would follow up on what you just said a minute ago, which is Our, our most important relationships should get higher priority. Our prime relationship should get prime time. Right? Give them, give them more priority. Spend time, spend energy, spend good, good quality there and you'll see the results.

All right, thank you so much. Talking with Dr. Jason Whiting again. If you haven't got his book, Love Me True Overcoming the Surprising Ways we Deceive in Relationships. Research based, valid, helpful information. If you find a lot of self deception, if you don't know how to break down difficult moments, it'll be a great resource for you. Dr. Whiting, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks so much, Dr. Skinner. It's great to see you again.

All right, you take care.

Bye bye.