Revealing Secrets

I could tell you, but then I'd have to live with you knowing

A boy huddling alone in a dark cave. Generated by DALL-E2.

I am privy to a lot more secrets than the average person because I’m a therapist. Being a receiver of people’s weird, dark, scary secrets is right at the top of my job description. People have told me their secrets my whole life, long before I took up this profession; I hear that’s not uncommon for future therapists. It’s hard to tell which way the causality runs there.

Anyway, because I’m often the very first person to hear a secret, I often get a front-row seat while the secret-haver hems and haws about whether to tell anyone else and what might happen if they do. And then, often, I get to witness how it works out.

I wish I got to do real science with this. I would start with the same initial conditions and play it out a thousand different ways. And if I got to do science fiction in addition to science, my client and I could sift through the results and pick the outcome most to their liking. I don’t have that – but I do have a pretty large pool of anecdata about the pros and cons of revealing secrets; I’m not just reasoning about it in a vacuum.

Here are my claims:

• Whether to reveal a secret or keep it private is a tradeoff in every case

• Many people overlook important factors in that tradeoff

• Especially when it comes to their intimate relationships

Point: Act Like the Other Monkeys

What people tend to believe about their secrets:

• if people knew, they would shun me

• if people knew, they would direct disgust at me

• if people knew, they would try to stop me

• if people knew, they would harm me

• if I tell one person, I will lose control of the information

• if people know true-thing-X about me, they will assume false-thing-Y about me

• my secret is very unusual

Here’s the thing: everything on that list is often straightforwardly true, except maybe the last one. (A lot of secrets are waaay more common than people think, because everyone is so busy keeping them secret that nobody realizes that lots of other people have the same secret.) 

Your estimates of the risk – how likely these outcomes are, and how bad it will be – may be off in your particular case, but that list by-and-large describes how humans treat each other about being different.¹

And let’s also acknowledge that we’re wired to care a lot about even the mildest consequences on this list. Social rejection is a powerful force in shaping human behavior – it’s not something you can easily decide doesn’t matter to you.²

Counterpoint: Let Your Freak Flag Fly

Given all of these risks, why in the world do people ever admit to any variation at all? what’s the other side of the tradeoff?

There are at least three major benefits: relief, reducing shame, and increasing intimacy.

The Relief of Authenticity

Keeping a part of yourself hidden can be a lot of work. The more core to your identity that secret, the more you have to deviate from what the-real-you-would-say-or-do and maintain what the-fake-you-says-or-does-instead, the more you have to remain vigilant to keep the truth from leaking. It’s exhausting.

So the first, obvious benefit of revealing a secret is that you get to stop doing all that pretending. Ideally, you get lucky and the people you tell don’t shun you, but either way, at least you get to be yourself.

This alone is surprisingly powerful. I have personally worked with clients who came in with a variety of conditions from depression to anxiety to what looked like bipolar disorder or personality disorders, all of which resolved to undiagnosable levels once they, for example, came out as transgender. It was so much work pretending to be the wrong gender that they were grinding themselves down into dust.

When I ask people how it felt to tell me a secret, they say they were terrified right up until the moment the secret came out, and then they mainly felt relief, a great unburdening.

Shame Grows in the Dark

Shame is the idea that there is something inherently wrong with you, something bad that makes you unworthy or unlovable. It’s not just that you did something wrong, it’s that you are something wrong.

A lot of secrets are all bound up with shame. It works like this:

Let’s say you’re gay, and you were taught that being gay is bad and wrong and evil. So by being gay, you are bad and wrong and evil. So naturally you don’t tell anyone, because if people knew, they would not love you, they would shun you. Some people seem to love you, but those people don’t know you’re gay, and you believe that if they did know, they would not love you after all.

You can never feel truly loved if you do not first feel truly known; those people who seem to love you really just love the mask you’re showing them. It feels hollow and fake, and that’s at least partly true.

And so your gayness stays a secret, you stay ashamed of it, and it remains the actual truth that no one actually loves you.

One remedy to all of this is to bring the allegedly shameful fact about yourself out into the light, let a few other people see it, and then (if all goes well) they actually do love you even when they really know you. When it works out this way, opening up can blast the shame away extremely effectively.

A more difficult but more comprehensive remedy is to think as clearly and deeply about yourself as you can, and arrive at your own principles about what is actually good or bad, and then judge yourself accordingly. By this method, you could theoretically defeat shame about gayness even in a world entirely populated with homophobes.

But this is much harder to do, because, see above, evolutionary biology and human wiring with respect to social exclusion. And you run the risk that you’re not seeing yourself clearly somehow, that you’re making some systematic error in your thinking and either entrenching harmful, culturally imposed self-judgment, or rationalizing away real flaws that the best version of you would not endorse.

So in my opinion, some combination of the two remedies is the best approach: establish your own moral framework, but also get a few other trusted minds to have a look at you from the outside.

Working with shame may be the best use of the professional secret keeper (aka a therapist). Therapists have training in hearing and keeping secrets and not intensifying shame. Typically, the therapeutic relationship is the only point of contact you have with your therapist, which lowers the risk of disclosure in a helpful way. If you tell your spouse a secret and your spouse hates that secret, your marriage may be over, but there’s somewhat less to lose with your therapist.

Real Intimacy

Most of the time when you go to a coffee shop, you play the role of Drink Buyer and you interact with someone playing the role of Barista. In your role, you can say and do things like:

• Ordering a drink

• Quipping about the weather

• Asking where the stir sticks are

• Proferring your credit card

And the Barista can do things like

• Greeting you

• Making your drink

• Taking your payment

• Thanking you for your business

And that’s about it. That’s most of the interface between a Drink Buyer and a Barista.

With occasional exceptions, the relationship does not get more intimate than that. It’s not so much that you’re keeping secrets from the barista, as that you’re just not engaging very much of your selfhood in the encounter.

Some people set up their closest relationships the same way. They play the role of Partner or Spouse, with an artificially limited set of possible actions, such as:

• Asking the other person about their day

• Sharing meals

• Appearing at social functions together

• Watching TV together

• Having sex³

And indeed, many of these actions might not be much of a stretch. Even in an authentic relationship with no masks, most people still share meals and ask each other about their day. The question is, how much of your selfhood are you bringing to the relationship? What’s the surface area of the interface? Does the other person have access to all of you, or just to a curated subset of you?

When your relationships are curated, there’s a cap on how much intimacy you can really share.

If you have an important secret you don’t share with your partner, you don’t know for sure how they would respond if they knew. You might have a very educated guess, and you might even be correct, but you can never be sure until you let your real-life partner interact with that information. So you don’t really know them as well as you could.

And obviously they don’t know the real you, either, because they don’t know your important secret.

You and your partner are not having an intimate relationship with each other - your masks are having a relationship, while you peek out from behind the mask, disconnected.

Two people wearing masks and talking to each other. Generated by DALL-E2.

Even worse, let’s pretend that your partner would hate your secret if they knew, maybe so much that they would leave you. There is a certain sense in which keeping that information from them is exploitive. You are there under false pretenses, deciding on behalf of your partner what they get to know and what they don’t. And if that information would be salient to them, that puts you in a position of power over them to which they did not consent.

Many people live out their lives in a role play of a relationship rather than in an authentic relationship. Historically, I think most marriages were configured roughly like this, with one person playing the role of Husband and one playing the role of Wife, each trying to discharge the responsibilities of their roles and not particularly expecting deeper intimacy in their marriage. I believe that’s a valid choice, especially if you live in a time and place where that is the standard way of doing things, both people are expecting it, and no one is under any illusions that the relationship has greater depth than that.

But if you are longing for more, if you want to be truly seen, known, and loved for who you are, then a roleplay of a relationship is never going to be satisfying for you.

Mistakes People Make

After watching so many people agonize about their secrets, I believe these are the most common mistakes people make:

• Overestimating how unusual and/or “bad” their secret is

• Giving too much credence to what other people think, whether those people have earned the right to an opinion or not

• Not devoting enough attention to developing their own inner compass about what is okay and what is not

• When thinking about revealing the secret, thinking only of the “relief” part, and being unaware of the isolating effects of shame and the limits to intimacy

• Overlooking their exploitation of others

I don’t want you to come away with the idea that I’m saying it’s a great idea to spill all of your secrets to lots of people. It’s not. You’re right to worry about what the other monkeys will say and do with your private information. I am not in a position to judge what you should share, with whom. You know your own circumstances best.

What I do want you to know, though, is that some of the best parts of life are unlocked when you are truly known by at least a few people. Please don’t discount that.

Some people I know think of telling secrets in terms of betting at a casino. Telling a secret is a gamble: once you’ve told the secret, it’s out, you can’t untell it, and you can’t know in advance how that’s going to work out. So you need to be prepared for the worst even while hoping for the best. You can ask yourself: can you afford it if you gamble and lose? Can you afford to cover your losses?

It’s okay not to be sure, but make sure you’re factoring in all the potential benefits when you do your calculus.

Play it safe, but not too safe. Be discerning about who you open up to. Time it as best you can: don’t share with people who haven’t been around long enough to earn your trust, but don’t wait until you’re so hopelessly entangled in a multi-decade roleplay of a relationship that you have a lot to lose if you finally reveal your secret now. (Though even then, it may be better late than never.)

If you can swing it, if you can cover your losses, tell your secrets to the people you most want to be close to. Let yourself live a real life in real contact with real people. I think you’ll be glad you did.

1. Why? Evolutionary biology. That is the answer to most psychological or behavioral “why?” questions.

2. citation

3. Though in this scenario, they may be acting out the type of sex they believe a Partner is supposed to want, rather than the kind of sex they most prefer.