The Honest Professional: On Truth, Training, and the Wish to Be Real

“Lies, my boy, are known in a moment. There are two kinds of lies, lies with short legs, and lies with long noses.”— Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883)

A discussion has been circulating online recently about what counts as “honest” when describing one’s NHS experience. The question seemed simple: is it misleading for a clinical psychologist to write, for example, “ten years’ NHS experience” on a professional profile if only one or two of those years were post-qualification?

It is an interesting question, but what struck me most was the word honesty. It is a morally charged word. It turns a conversation about clarity into one about virtue, as if the issue at stake is not just accuracy but integrity.

For my part, I do not think saying “ten years’ NHS experience” is dishonest. It may need clarifying, yes, but it is a reasonable description of one’s professional journey. Most of us bring a long apprenticeship of clinical work, research, and training before qualification. The discomfort, I suspect, lies not in deceit but in what the phrase evokes about hierarchy, identity, and how we position ourselves in a rapidly changing profession.

The wish to be real

When I read these debates, I cannot help but think of Pinocchio. A puppet carved from pine, animated by longing, desperate to be seen as real. He performs, he lies, he stumbles, and each time his wooden nose gives him away. It is tempting to laugh, but there is something painfully familiar in his predicament. The desire to be recognised as real before we have quite earned our flesh is one of the oldest human wishes, and one of the most enduring professional ones.

Clinical psychology, too, is a discipline animated by longing. We wish to be taken seriously, to be respected alongside medicine and psychotherapy, to sound confident and competent even when we still feel wooden. Our title carries an aura of mastery, a kind of institutional charisma that suggests depth, gravitas, and moral clarity. Yet, like Pinocchio’s strings, that charisma can also constrain. We move convincingly, yet the movement is not entirely our own.

Lies with short legs and long noses

It was from Pinocchio that I first learned the distinction between the two kinds of lies. Lies with short legs cannot carry us far before the truth catches up. Lies with long noses grow slowly and publicly; they are visible to everyone except the liar. They depend on collective denial, a quiet agreement not to notice what has become distorted.

Perhaps our profession tells its own long-nosed lies. Not malicious ones, but the sort born from insecurity and aspiration. The lie that qualification equals wisdom. The lie that scientific neutrality protects us from our own narcissism. The lie that to speak of feeling lost, green, or unready would somehow make us unprofessional. These are not deceptions of character but of culture, collective defences against the vulnerability of being seen in our unfinishedness.

Seen this way, the debate about “ten years’ experience” is not about whether an individual is lying, but about the long nose of professional identity. The inflation sits within the structure, not the person.

The evidence-based practitioner, not the psychotherapist

To name this honestly is not to diminish our discipline. It is to tell the truth about what our training does and does not provide. We are trained as evidence-based practitioners, researchers, evaluators, and reflective scientists who can integrate theory and practice. But we are not, strictly speaking, trained as psychotherapists. Therapy skills are introduced as competencies to be met, not crafts to be deepened.

Most newly qualified psychologists step from the crucible of training into Band 7 roles that are almost entirely clinical. Their capacity for reflective depth, supervision, and long-term relational process is only beginning to form. Yet the moment of qualification is treated as arrival, as if we have already become real.

In medicine, a newly qualified doctor is named a junior. Apprenticeship is assumed. In psychology, the title itself confers the status of consultant, even when the body beneath the robe is still growing into the role.

The puppet of institutional charisma

Like Pinocchio, we are animated by forces larger than ourselves: institutional expectation, public trust, and professional pride. These strings give us movement and purpose, but they also risk pulling us away from the awkward honesty of our developmental truth.

The question of experience, then, is not really about deceit. It is about how our profession itself inflates and idealises. The wish to be seen as mature, competent, and complete can eclipse the quieter truth of how learning actually happens: slowly, relationally, through error and repair.

When we overstate our experience, we are not lying so much as defending against shame, the same shame that made the little puppet boast about being a real boy. We want to belong. We want to be enough.

The Blue Fairy and the apprenticeship of truth

In Collodi’s tale, the Blue Fairy does not punish Pinocchio for lying; she helps him bear the consequences. She stays near him while his nose grows absurdly long, a living symbol of exposure. Her task is containment, not condemnation. She knows that truth is not taught through moralism but through relationship.

In that sense, she is the first group analyst, the one who holds the space where illusion and reality can meet without annihilation. She allows Pinocchio to discover that honesty is less about never lying and more about learning to survive one’s own shame.

Our profession needs its own Blue Fairies: supervisors, mentors, and peers who can help us metabolise the gap between the image and the reality of our practice without resorting to moral policing or professional shaming.

Towards a culture of humility

Honesty, then, is not a fixed moral state but an evolving practice of becoming real. It begins when we stop pretending to be fully formed and start admitting what we are still learning.

Perhaps we could speak more plainly about the limits of our training, about the parts of ourselves that remain wooden, and about the ways institutional charisma disguises our developmental needs.

If we could bear that exposure, the small humiliation of admitting that our noses have grown a little, we might discover a deeper kind of integrity. The kind that comes not from appearing perfect but from staying in relationship while we learn.

The wish fulfilled

At the end of the story, Pinocchio becomes a real boy not because he has stopped lying, but because he has learned to love and to take responsibility. He has moved from performance to participation, from fantasy to relation.

That, I think, is the task before us too: to become real professionals, not by polishing our titles or counting our years, but by growing into our work with humility, gratitude, and care.

Honesty in our field will never be a simple arithmetic of time served. It will always be the slow, human work of aligning our words, our bodies, and our hearts, until, like Pinocchio, we find ourselves at last moving freely, no strings attached.

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