Secrets

Secrets are complicated. I don’t mean keeping someone’s surprise birthday party a secret – not that kind. I mean those secrets wrapped up with deceit and shame. These are secrets we keep to protect ourselves, not others. They’re complicated because many of them begin with deceiving ourselves.

We deceive ourselves often through ignorance, meaning there’s something we aren’t ready to face, to see into the truth of, so remain unconscious of it. We could say this is non-intentional self-deception.

Sometimes we deceive ourselves intentionally; we know there’s something we ought to look into more closely, but we choose to look away, maybe pretend we aren’t deceiving ourselves at all, or that whatever we’re up to isn’t all that bad.

I think secrets are borne out of both of these – non-intentional and intentional – self-deception. Either way, self-deception leads to deceiving others, lying, and burying the truth. We bear a heavy burden of isolation when we keep secrets.

In relationships, deception and secret-keeping can be corrosive. Whether on the receiving or giving end of a relationship with lies and secrets, both people are hurt. Maybe you have experienced this in your life.

Keeping this kind of a secret hurts because of the shame it’s laced with. Shame – the feeling that YOU are bad – is so very harmful. Lying leads to shame, and shame leads to more lying. It’s a terrible cycle of snowballing damage.

The way out has to begin with telling ourselves the truth, and then finding the courage to speak that truth to others. It’s not easy. But it is doable. We have the resources within to do it, and external resources are also available.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way. My formative years fostered secret-keeping, and I learned to do both non-intentional and intentional deception well. And this caused suffering to myself and those around me.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Light in Bandaged Places: Healing in the Wake of Young Betrayal. I’m reflecting on a new relationship:

“But I was still, like a defective appliance, not functioning quite properly. My heart was behind a wall, and I didn’t know it. On the outside, I was an open, loving soul, ready to embrace her life [and this new relationship], but on the inside, I was a befuddled, defended person. My life was ruled by the tyranny of the wiring inside me that made me unable to fully participate in a relationship of openness, love, and honesty. I knew only how to live inside a secret or isolated world and engage in deceit and denial. To me, that’s what being in a relationship meant; these elements had the comfort of familiarity. Without them, I was rudderless. I should have seen the trouble that could come from a beginning like this. But I did not.”

This is the story, in part, of how I overcame years of being far too comfortable with participating in deceit, keeping secrets, not facing the truth, and feeling the shame of it all.

The book will be out this summer. It’s been a long journey to get to this point of readiness to put it into the world, but I do so with the hope that my story might help others who struggle as I struggled.

What was the culture you grew up in regarding secrets and truth-telling?

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