What do we know about the life of a secret? What does psychology tells us about how secrets are born? Have you ever traced a secret from its birth through its growth? How do we protect them, change them, multiply them into several secrets, widening the circle of confidence? And what moves us to part with them, let them fade or cease by leaking or by sudden forced disclosure? It’s hard to trace the life of a secret, even one of your own. Why? Because we keep our secret ways hidden.
How does a secret begin? How does a secret shape a life? What drives the stages of disclosure until it’s no longer a secret? Though we all harbor our own secrets, we don’t often get a window into the secrets of others long enough to trace them from start to finish. I’ve just read a fascinating and short book that gives us that long window: Mimi Alford’s Once Upon a Secret .
My fascination with secrets played a part in my attraction to medicine and later to psychiatry, with its privileged access to the inner worlds of others. I like to think that psychotherapy works in part by helping people learn to speak the unspeakable, to understand their fragmented narrative well enough to retell it in a way that serves them better.
Secrets fascinate us through the mysterious ways they bind us and divide us. In spite of the universality of secrets (Who does not keep them? And what popular drama does not hinge on the keeping and the revealing of secrets?) surprisingly little has been written about the psychology of secrets. Yet the contours of our character are drawn by the secrets we keep. We tend to our boundaries every day by choosing who knows what about us.
