In the winter of 1976 Mark Twain came to Cincinnati’s Music Hall in the form of Hal Holbrooke’s one-man show. My then-girlfriend and medical school classmate, who knew my fascination with Twain also as my refuge from my insecurities about surviving medical school, arranged for us to usher that evening. Luck left us with two empty seats in the 10th row, close enough to see his whiskers twitch and the smoke of his pipe curl.
I have to admit I don’t know much about my voice, or voices in general. I’ve never taken voice training or read any books about it, and I can’t even tell you whether I sing tenor, bass, or baritone. In my mid-sixties I’m still surprised by the sound of my own voice when I hear it on my voice mail or in a home video. Do we ever hear our own voices the way others hear us?
If you’re not aware that there’s a revolution going on, you’re in good company. Nobody I’ve talked to since Christmas Eve is aware of it either. Yet we all know what large companies have done to shift power from the corporate board room to the solo entrepreneur and to cooperative networks. You may not find this power shifting threatening, but think of the corporate dynasties that have taken big hits in the last two decades. Think of most newspapers, record companies, advertising giants, book publishers, postal services all around the world, taxi companies, hotel chains, and the giant retail stores that anchor our big malls and now are selling off their real estate while Amazon hires a larger workforce.
Our shifting national demographics over the past generation have foretold the end of the dominant role of the white male in US politics. We’re losing our grip, and we’re scared. Some readers of the tea leaves say that the surprise showing of rural white males at the polls on election day this year in a few key rustbelt states shows how desperate we white males are to hold on to that grip, reckless as The Donald may be.
Since July 1, 1970—just one of many lucky days in my life—when I learned that the draft lottery for military service in the Vietnam war had assigned boys born on my birthday a safe 163rd out of 365, I have wondered how I would have handled the traumas of combat. Now that I treat my age mates at the VA who were less lucky than I, I can’t forget about the question. Would I have been among the one in six exposed to combat trauma who would later develop post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD)?
Listening is easy when you want hear what the other person wants to say. Listening is not so easy if you’re Jodi trying to talk with Stutz about some tough news. Jodi has known Stutz for three wild and thrilling months, during which they discovered they’re both rebels and soulmates, with new tattoos to prove it: a chain around the right ankle, wings over each ankle bone. This morning she went to the Health Department clinic and came back with the news that she’s pregnant and tested positive for syphilis.
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.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
-Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
When I first read these lines in my high school English class on the romantic poets, I wondered what might be wrong with me that I could not find such ecstasy over the beauty in that “still unravish’d bride of quietness” on the Grecian urn. Now I wonder what might have been wrong with young Keats, but these lines have earned him much ink and hard thought by many people smarter than me. Is beauty really the only truth we need to know?
How do you define “negotiation?” Consider the possibility that a negotiation is any communication between at least two people that attempts to meet at least some of the needs of each person. I was surprised to find that using that definition on my relatively conflict-free day, about half of my encounters qualified as low complexity and nearly a third were high complexity negotiations.
So how could such a clever, attractive, feisty woman have burned her bridges with every one of nine siblings and the rest of the extended family to end up homeless and jobless at 60? Of the many paths to homelessness the one that intrigues me is the inability to negotiate, even when the stakes are high.
When my mother kissed my father goodbye on that Navy pier in Los Angeles the morning of August 5, 1945, they both assumed he was headed for the invasion of Japan, possibly the Pacific equivalent to D-Day in 1944. He was a 24 year old lieutenant (junior grade) fresh out of his war-accelerated medical school and internship. She was 23 with a couple of years of college and no kids after three years of marriage. Were they facing months, years, or that dreaded final separation? Did they dare try for contact of any kind?
In many ways Sub-Saharan Africa is booming. During our trip to Kenya in September this year, we saw new schools, roads, cell phones, motorbikes, and skyscrapers in places that looked economically stagnant just six years ago. And economic reports generally support this impression of a new chance against poverty. I love this progress and promise, but for many rural Kenyans these new opportunities pull them away from their roots in their ancestral villages. The family pays a price.
I love the uncertainty of travel. If where you sleep, who you see, what you eat and when all depend on factors you might or might not navigate well, the stakes for daily life rise and the opportunities for missing your targets multiply. Separations loom, and common contact is no longer a given. The farther you stray from home and your comfort zone, the greater the risks. It’s a wonder we bother. It’s even more wonderful that we sometimes call this travel fun.
The limbic symphony for my 94 year old father’s death began Sunday night July 20th at 10:15 with whispers around his bedside. Then my choked calls to siblings and children raised sound of his death. Just one hard thing to say for now, and say it many times. Pass it on, the drumbeat that stops the other music.
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 .
We want our control over what others know about us, but we also want others, at least those closest to us, to know who we are, eventually. The older we grow, the more important this may be to us. This need to be known becomes so great that we take risks we did not dare to imagine when we created the secret. Our need to be known overrides the shame that created the 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.
