Bliss Broyard was 23 when her mother told her, as her father was dying in the hospital from prostate cancer, what her father, Anatole Broyard, had been unable to tell her on his deathbed. Raised in a tight-knit family in the affluent white community of Fairfield, Connecticut, Bliss grew up wondering why she never knew her father’s side of the family or knew much about them, even though her father’s two sisters lived in Brooklyn.
“Your father is part black,” her mother told her. After he died, Bliss spent the next seven years getting to know the mixed-race side of her family that her father had kept secret while he passed as white. She wrote about the effects of the revelation of this family secret in One Drop (2007).
Rosemarie Fritzl was married to Josef Fritzl for 50 years before she discovered that their daughter Elisabeth, who had disappeared 24 years earlier, presumably into a cult, had in fact been living in the basement of their apartment building in Vienna, imprisoned in a bunker built by her husband, while he kept up appearances of being a mild-mannered electrician and building manager.
Have you ever wondered who your spouse or your parent really is? What secrets are hiding in the people we think we know well? Sometimes our family or friends surprise us. The psychology of secrets is a universal and fascinating aspect of human nature, yet remarkably little research has focused on how secrets are created, how they develop over time, and what makes us reveal them.
We all have secrets, and most are healthy and harmless, but think for a minute about whether you keep a formative secret—some information that you conceal from others and which shapes your key relationships, your work, or some important aspect of your life. The secret may be creative or damaging, innocent or malicious. Here are a few questions that may help you understand the life of your secret, from dilemma to disclosure and beyond.
What was the dilemma that led to the creation of this secret? It may have been your dilemma or one that belonged to someone else who passed it along to you. Bliss Broyard’s grandparents passed as white when they moved to New York from New Orleans in order to get jobs. Their son chose to do the same, but not their two dark-skinned daughters, so Bliss inherited a family secret without knowing it.
What was the aim of the secret? For some it is protection from expected danger, such as poverty, shame, or assault. For others the secret may be essential to keeping a bond or securing power or creating an advantage over a rival.
What is the content of the secret? Often this is not as clear as we assume. Try writing the key piece of information that you’re concealing to see how easy or hard it is to put it into words. Then shred it, if you want to. Or share it carefully.
Who’s in on the secret? And who is deliberately denied the secret? Can you list them? Some people may know part of the secret but not the whole. And often, we don’t know who actually knows our secret and who does not.
What do you expect to be the consequences of disclosing the secret? We often assume dire consequences without asking how realistic those assumptions are. Is the dilemma that created the secret still a dilemma that requires this secret? And do the others who are in on the secret share those assumptions about the risks of revealing? The need to be known sometimes drives the intentional or accidental reveal.
Secrets have an economy that shifts over time. How do the current costs or risks of keeping the secret stack up against the gains? When is that balance likely to change, and what will change it?
If you have already disclosed a secret, what has been the aftermath? Have the consequences been as dire as you had expected? Or the benefits as much as you hoped? Have you been surprised by the effects of revealing this part of your life to those involved?
Secrets play an essential role in the ways we form both bonds and boundaries. They can serve as weapons and rewards. In fact, we can’t live well without them. Most dramas rely on secrets to give us both conflict and intimacy. As you think about your own experience, what do you know about the life of your formative secret?
If you or someone you know would like to participate in my project titled “The Lives of Secrets,” read about the project here and then send me an email.