Benjamin Franklin said many, many wise things, and this saying speaks to one of the simplest dangers of keeping a secret--the secret isn't safe if more than one person holds it.
"Three may keep a secret," wrote Ben, "if two of them are dead."
It was this reality that turned my client Alan's world into a minefield.
Alan [all clients' names and identifying details are changed, in any of my writings] never graduated high school. If we're to be perfectly frank, Alan hardly went to high school, but no one takes attendance in later life-it's more about that piece of paper we call the diploma. This was a cause of great shame for Alan-and his intellectual Jewish parents-at the time, but all hoped that time would heal.
When Alan met Alayna, he was blown away by her refinement and intelligence, and believed firmly that she would never be interested in Alan if she knew about that missing piece of paper. So as they fell more in love, he simply lied about it. Well, he justified, he didn't really lie about it. He told her where he went to high school, and the year he would have graduated, and if she just went ahead and assumed he had, well, ball was in her court. However, his sense of shame, as well as of being 'lesser' than his wife, pervaded not just Alan's internal landscape, but the marriage, as well. The burden he carried was great.
Alan and Alayna moved out of town to be near her parents as they aged, and Alan took a job as a carpenter, which he actually was skilled at and enjoyed, but which Alayna felt was beneath him, and found demeaning to both of them-and to their children. The marriage soon soured. Alayna found Alan uncouth and unrefined and always coming up with the wrong thing to say in social affairs, until finally she left him out of social engagements more and more and went on her own. By the time the couple, with two children, moved back to Chicago, their old stomping grounds, and I began to see Alan, he told me with wrenching honesty, "She really hates me."
Therapy had provided a realm of safety for Alan-more on the ability of therapy to create a safe haven for revealing secrets later-- and he had confessed his horrible secret to me about his lack of education. This seemed to be eating Alan so greatly, that I suggested he simply tell Alayna, even all these years later. But the response was that, even though Alayana hated him now, she would hate him even more if she knew he'd only achieved a grade school education.
But the Jewish north suburban world is a small one, and it seemed to Alan that everywhere he went with Alayna they would run into people from-of course!-his high school, and begin to play Jewish geography. Alan's life soon whittled down to one purpose-to stay away from anyone who might have known him in high school, or known someone who knew him in high school-and to keep these people from Alayna. All social events were fraught with peril-but so was a family trip to the local grocery store, or bringing their daughter to local ballet lessons or a little league practice.
The very effort to keep this secret was causing Alan to live a further and further circumscribed life-and he lived in the state of fearful of arousal of the man whose crime is always just about to be discovered.
Because one of the major issues with secrets-and with successfully keeping them-is who else knows about them, and can thus "out" you at any time.
Let's address this issue plus a few more crucial questions you should ask yourself if you're occupying your energy keeping a secret.
If we're to take an honest look at secret-keeping--and that involves our own--we need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about why we continue in our path of secrecy.
Ask yourself these--and be honest:
1. Who else knows this secret? Like in Alan's case, with never having graduated high school, do so many people know, that keeping a secret becomes an exercise in avoiding more and more people?
2. Who's harmed by this secret? Is it me? It is my children? My ex? Am I keeping this secret to try to protect somebody? And is that a noble enough reason to continue to perpetuate this secrecy? Think clearly about how your secret may be damaging to others.
3. What am I afraid of if I were to tell my secret? Go ahead--allow all of your worst, deepest, darkest fantasies to come to play themselves out. It's a time for honesty now. And most often I find, after all the analysis, no matter if the secret is a relatively minor one--"I failed high school biology"--or a relatively major one--"I'm a homosexual and I can't continue in this marriage"--that the question is almost always answered by, "I won't be loved/accepted." You must work through this issue, not just to be able to relieve yourself of your secret, but to come to feel accepted for who you are in the world.
4. Who owns this secret? Is it really mine to tell, after all? And if it isn't, how can I make my life better living with it?
Evan Imber-Black, editor of Secrets in Families and Family Therapy, is an expert in secret-keeping and its impact on the family, as well as in how therapy can heal from damaging secrets. Look to her text for further delving into the topic of secret-keeping and damage to families. I can only brush the surface of the topic here.
But first, secrets create distance between family members, circumventing closeness. Remember Alan and Alayna, already struggling in their marriage, but prevented of an opportunity to build a more solid foundation by Alan's continued secret-keeping of his lack of diploma.
Then the secret, if painful or shaming enough, can prevent family members from sharing information with those outside of the family. I saw a young woman whose father was a homosexual who contracted and died of AIDS. My client struggled mightily to share the truth about her father with her serious boyfriend, whom she wanted to marry. These secrets thus hamper the development of external intimate relationships.
And finally secret-keeping drives a cleft between hose in the family who know the secret and those who don't, and members on the two sides are driven apart by the knowledge, causing a re-alignment of power in family dynamics-almost certainly not for the better.
In one family in my practice, the father had an affair. Don't get too excited--it all turned out okay and the couple does better together now, afterwards, than they had been doing for years previously. But the mother elected to tell the oldest daughter about the father's straying. To this day I'm not sure the father is even aware that his daughter knows about his extramarital activities, but you can imagine the impact this has on family dynamics. Although secret-keeping can damage a family, still and all you must think carefully before you draw someone into your secret's orbit who really has no reason--or right--to know about it.
In fact, as carefully as you have worked to keep your secret--for years or sometimes decades-that is how precisely you need to work to reveal your secret, at the right time, to the correct people, and in the appropriate fashion.
Candida Abrahamson has been a mediator, life coach and counselor since graduating with her PhD from Northwestern University. She does family and couples therapy, grief and cancer counseling, and works on coaching clients with life management skills. In addition to hypnotherapy, she also mediates for families and businesses, as well as in cases of divorce, both in person in her native Chicago, and nation-wide, via the medium of the phone session. Read more of her ideas in-depth at http://www.candidaabrahamson.wordpress.com, and visit her website to find out more about Candida's therapeutic approaches.
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