> This has made my life so much better. When I hear something someone says to me now I have an extra filter to run it through. It's no longer a choice just between the person being dishonest about the facts or being dishonest about the facts. They could mean it in a different way.
I'm with you, but to me, this is just operationalized dishonesty, assuming it's not a significant cognitive deficit relative to those who are capable of engaging with reality. The solution I landed on was to avoid assuming adult levels of cognition until someone proves they have it. It's much less common than you'd think, especially if you have a foot in many different social circles.
I will say that your gf example touches on something related but importantly different, in my experience. The women I've dated generally met the bar I'm describing as "adult level cognition" (naturally, as that feeds into our compatibility). But they universally, by their own description, react to even mild conflict by getting emotional and irrational.
I see this as a related phenomenon, but not the same. Loss of rationality in specific emotional circumstances is completely understandable, just as I can lose sensitivity to other's feelings in those moments. The solution we've landed on there is the same as yours: she can press a proverbial button that causes us to table the discussion until she calms down enough to think clearly. It takes a lot of trust on both sides to do this, but it's extremely effective.
To me, people subject to these moments of impairment are importantly different from the people who don't even seem to have a mental model of what intellectual honesty looks like. I often wonder if the latter are even capable of it, in any meaningful sense.