In my last post, I talked about researching the codependency, addictions, and dysfunction in our family trees. I also warned that sometimes our older relatives will not want to share information with us.
Every family has its secrets, its skeletons in the closet. People even just a generation or two back were much more secretive and private than today. An unmarried mother was a disgrace to her family. An alcoholic wasn’t talked about. Morals were different in those days. People hid more often behind shame and fear rather than trying to understand dysfunction and work through it.
While we might choose to think people did a better job of behaving themselves back then, more likely, they were just better at keeping secrets, and those secrets often broke up homes, led to unwanted children being given away to protect the family, led to more domestic and child abuse because no one would talk about it, and if people knew, they wouldn’t rat on their neighbors.
Today, we still keep secrets. Sometimes we have our own secrets, things we are too ashamed to tell other people. It is okay to keep secrets so we can protect ourselves, but it also helps to find someone we can trust to talk to. Secrets often destroy us inside. We make them out to be worse than they are until we find ourselves living our lives in fear, denying who we are from fear someone will find out about the one awful thing we did, or perhaps simply something about us that isn’t even that awful, but we are afraid people will disapprove of it and we will be rejected. Finding a counselor, an anonymous group where secrecy is respected, or a trusted friend is a good place to start to let go of the shame, to refuse to let a secret control our life.
Often we are raised in families with secrets. We may have a parent who continually tells us, “Don’t tell anyone…about your father’s drinking problem, about your brother’s cocaine addiction, that your mother has been cheating on me.” If we are children, it is inappropriate for parents to expect us to keep their secrets, but we may be burdened with them anyway, allowing them to make us grow up in fear. If we are adults, we can do better. We can be open and honest rather than creating families where secrets are allowed to prolong and feed shame. We can also help loved ones find a path to a better life beyond the shadows and closed doors where secrets force us to hide. While we can’t make anyone else do anything, we can let loved ones know that we still love them despite their secrets, that we accept them for who they are, and if appropriate, we can direct them to counseling, to a Twelve-Step group, or to literature to help them come to terms with whatever secrets they are keeping.
Secrets eventually can become our friends. Once we let go of the shame, we can step into the light and when light is cast on a secret, we often find that what we feared about the secret being known did not happen, that revealing the secret was not as scary as we expected. The secret led to our growth, to our opening the locked door and stepping forward into fresh air and a new day.
Irene Watson, MA, is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.
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