There's no question that family secrets are destructive. But it matters mightily when and how you reveal them. Resist the temptation to handle them at transition times such as weddings, graduations, and new beginnings.
As a family therapist, I'm a professional secret-keeper. I'm often ~the very first person with whom someone risks telling a longheld secret. Several decades of guiding people struggling with secrets have taught me that they have an awesome if paradoxical power to unite people--and to divide them.
From government conspiracies to couples having affairs, secrets permeate every level of society. Secrets have existed throughout time, but the nature of secrets has recently changed in our society. Today's families face special dilemmas about secrecy, privacy, silence, and openness.
We live in a culture whose messages about secrecy are truly confounding. If cultural norms once made shameful secrets out of too many events in human life, we are now struggling with the reverse: the assumption that telling secrets--no matter how, when, or to whom--is morally superior to keeping them and that it is automatically healing. My own experience, however, has shown me that telling secrets in the wrong way or at the wrong time can be remarkably painful--and destructive.
The questions we need to concern ourselves with are: When should I keep a secret? How do I tell a secret without hurting anyone? How do I know the time is right? I've learned the answers as I've witnessed--sometimes with terror, more often with joy, and always with deep respect--families making the courageous journey from secrecy to openness.
Secrets are kept or opened for many complex motives, from self-serving abuses of power to altruistic protection of others. Understanding the best ways and situations in which to reveal a family secret can help you decide when and how to do so.
HOW SECRETS SABOTAGE
Although we encounter secrets in every area of life, they are perhaps most destructive when kept in the home. Families are support systems; our identity and ability to form close relationships with others depend upon the trust and communication we feel with loved ones. If family members keep secrets from each other--or from the outside world--the emotional fallout can last a lifetime.
There are four main ways that family secrets shape and scar us:
o they can divide family members, permanently estranging them;
o they can discourage individuals from sharing information with anyone outside the family, inhibiting formation of intimate relationships;
o they can freeze development at crucial points in life, preventing the growth of self and identity;
o they can lead to painful miscommunication within a family, causing unnecessary guilt and doubt.
A person who seeks to undo the damage caused by family secrets must accept that revealing a secret is not a betrayal but a necessity Luckily, as you'll see, it's never too late to do so.
SHATTERING THE TRIANGLE
Not all secrets are destructive. Many are essential to establishing bonds between two people. When siblings keep secrets from their parents, for example, they attain a sense of independence and a feeling of closeness. But the creation of any secret between two people in a family actually forms a triangle: it always excludes--and therefore involves--another.
When family members suspect that important information is being withheld from them, they may pursue the content of the secret in ways that violate privacy. A mother reads her daughter's diary. A husband rifles through his wife's purse. Relationships corrode with suspicion. Conversely, family members may respond to a secret with silence and distance, which affect areas of life that have nothing to do with the secret.
Either way, the secret wedges a boulder between those who know it and those who don't. To remove this obstacle, families must break the triangle formation.
Molly Bradley first called me during what should have been a joyous time. She had recently given birth. Her happiness, however, was bittersweet. Molly felt a deep need to surround herself with family but hadn't spoken to her brother, Calvin, in six years. The reason, I discovered, reached back 30 years to a secret made by Molly's mother.
When Molly, Calvin, and their youngest sister, Annie, were teenagers, their grandmother committed suicide. Molly and Annie were told she died from a heart attack. Only Calvin, the eldest, knew the truth. His mother made him promise not to tell. His sisters sensed a mystery, but if they asked about their grandmother, their mother switched topics.
Making secrets soon became the family's modus vivendi. Their aunt committed suicide two years after their grandmother's death. Calvin fathered a child out of wedlock. Each secret was kept from Molly and Annie, amplifying the family pattern of secrecy Calvin grew distant from his sisters, their relationship weakened by mistrust. Eventually, Molly guessed the truth of her grandmother's death but, in her family's style, told only Annie. Secrets between Calvin and his mother were matched by those between Molly and Annie, tightening family alliances.
From the outside, the family looked like two close pairs--Calvin and his mother, Molly and Annie. But the pairs were actually triangles; Calvin and his mother distanced themselves from the girls with their secret, forming one triangle, while Molly and Annie, keeping their own secrets from the rest of the family, formed another.
'DON'T TELL ANYONE OUR BUSINESS'
Tags:
abuses of power,
assumption,
confidentiality,
courageous journey,
cultural norms,
family secrets,
family therapist,
first person,
government conspiracies,
graduations,
honesty,
motives,
new beginnings,
privacy,
secret keeper,
secrets,
shameful secrets,
telling secrets,
transition times,
trust,
wrong time,
wrong way
