Richard, I looked up awkward in a thesaurus, and these seem to fit best: dangerous, disagreeable, discommodious, hazardous, incommodious, inconvenient, perilous, risky, troublesome, uncomfortable, unhandy, unmanageable.

My best recommendation is to pair one of these with a word such as "situation" or "lifestyle", etc. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is a word that indicates being forced to lie--without some specification for why, that is. Other than that, all I can think of is some statement along the lines of, "Joe grew up knowing that telling the truth was dangerous".

Edit--I do realize this is not what you're asking for: sorry. Maybe one of the real word whizzes will offer something good.

Last edited by Jackie; 11/15/08 02:44 AM.