So, what about secrets that are easier to keep? Fifteen years later, another research team asked participants to answer questions about their ideal dating partner without revealing the gender of that person. Without giving away the truth of their eating disorder, the women had to answer questions such as ‘Sometimes people have problems with self-control is there any part of your life where you have self-control problems?’ and ‘Does anyone (eg, friends, roommates, family) ever tell you that you have unusual eating habits?’ The participants reported that they tried to push away thoughts of their eating disorder, but this was impossible to do while being asked questions like ‘Do you eat regular meals?’ The study purposefully made concealment difficult, and the researchers concluded that secrets hurt their keepers because concealment is difficult. When I asked participants to recall a secret that currently preoccupied them, they judged the hill to be steeperĪ study conducted in the late 1990s asked women who had an eating disorder to conceal it from the interviewer. Until recently, the story of secrecy was a short one: secrets hurt us because hiding is stressful. It was after those conversations that my parents would sometimes wonder: should they reveal the secret? Were they making the right decision? The longer they carried the secret, the weightier it became in their minds. They said that, even then, the secret was always easy to keep, but it did feel awkward to navigate around it, to hold back something so huge from us. In our teenage years, my brother and I would ponder which traits we had inherited from which parent, and we’d ask our parents to weigh in. My parents told me that it wasn’t until I got older that they ever had to hold back the secret in conversation. It was extremely improbable that donor conception would ever come up in conversation when we were young, and so they never had to hide the secret in those early years. The very existence of the secret caused them to worry: what if the children didn’t look like their father? What if they would need to know about their genetics one day? And, after we were born, the secret gnawed at them even more. My parents are a good example: the damage wrought by their secret started before my brother and I were born, a time when there wasn’t even anyone to conceal the secret from. And these harms can begin the very moment you decide to keep a secret. These experiences can leave us feeling helpless, at the mercy of our secrets, and unable to cope. Simply thinking about a secret outside of a social interaction is associated with feelings of shame, isolation and inauthenticity. While hiding a secret in conversation can feel uncomfortable, the hiding turns out to be the easy part. Our secrets often hurt us, but not for the reasons you might think. Keeping a secret is associated with lower life satisfaction, lower-quality relationships, and symptoms of poor psychological and physical health. And, while the revelation for me was jolting, the greater impact and harm came to my parents themselves. But I had not been the keeper of the secret for all those years. And it was even more shocking to learn that my brother was, in fact, my half-brother, conceived from a different donor. It was shocking to learn that I was not biologically related to my father nor his parents with whom I was very close. I was 26, and if you’re wondering what it’s like to learn such a major secret, I’ll tell you this: it was surprising. I know the story of Don and Judy’s secret well because I’m their first child, and I learned about this secret the same day I gave an invited talk about my research on secrecy for a job interview. This was a secret they promised to each other that they would never tell.įor the past decade, I’ve studied the psychology of secrecy. They were going to have two children, and they would never tell their children that their father was not biologically related to them. And, even before they found one, they had already decided. But, after a few attempts, they realised that they would have to adjust their plan. Don and Judy were finally ready to start a family.
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