The Psychology of Secrets
(I wrote this entry back in 2022 on another site)
George Orwell said “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.”
How do you do that? You rationalize WHY keeping the secret is the right thing to do. If you told the secret, you’d hurt the person that was affected. You would bring on shame by exposing the secret. So you just pile on thoughts, keep so busy that you can’t think about the secret, you lie even more when anyone gets too close to finding out the truth. I think eventually it gets difficult to keep the lies straight. Finally, all the secrets just become too destructive to relationships and ironically, the thing you were trying to protect is destroyed.
In my instance, my grandmother was trying to keep a secret to hold the family together, to shield my mother from shame, but in the end our relationships were permanently shattered due to the secret, and ultimately, the lies.
I’ve been listening to the Family Secrets podcast by Dani Shapiro again today. I just finished the episode with Lori Gottlieb on the emotional toll of secrets and it was fascinating. I’ve added “Maybe You Should Talk To Someone” to my reading list and some concepts from the episode to my “google this” notepad on my phone.
Most interesting to me was the idea that secrets can live in DNA and travel through generations. I think Gottlieb’s example was having a fascination with reading books about suicide despite not knowing her father’s brother had committed suicide. Could her father have been so impacted that, even though it was never something that was discussed, that Gottlieb somehow intuited that she needed to research suicide? Shapiro said that she always chose to read books that involved a secret in the family, even before she knew her own family was keeping a secret from her. They also briefly discussed epigenetics, or the idea that childhood trauma can play a role in increased likelihood of physical and mental health issues.* They touched on the possibility that the expression of trauma on DNA could be passed on to children. (I apologize if I’ve misunderstood this part of the conversation.)
Another topic of discussion that got me thinking was how the secrets and lies in my family have led to me never feeling comfortable in my own skin. I think being the one the secret was kept from has made me feel like I should also hold onto the secret, or that it’s not my story to tell. Like, I didn’t do xyz so I shouldn’t share it. But continuing to keep their secret for this long makes me feel constrained, or trapped.
As I was listening (and knitting), I did the mental math on how old I am now versus how old my mother was when the secret, or one of the many secrets, came out. I’m four years older now than she was then. She, and the rest of the family, had kept the secret for 19 years. Going back to the Orwell quote, I don’t think they would have ever told me had I not found out on my own. They hid it from themselves, as best they could. I think there are still more secrets, probably even bigger secrets that they’ve kept for over 40 years now. There was another episode of Family Secrets discussing how after people die, secrets tend to emerge because it’s finally safe.
I think eventually the truth, or at least telling what truths I know, will set me free.