Secrecy: How Shame and Secrets Hold You Back
And a big way our disbelief in our own worth presents itself is around the line between being a private person and being secretive person, and not knowing whether it’s okay to keep some things private, and not even realizing when we’re being secretive or lying in an attempt to people-please, protect connection or to feel safe. We’ll focus here on secrecy and why we keep things secret.
This is a really important issue for us on so many levels.
For so many years I thought that keeping things secret was a smarter, safer way to live – cause if no one saw the real, true, vulnerable tender ravioli that is me… then no one could hurt me, right?
I know now that that thought isn’t true, but I sure believed it, and it kept me in painful shame spirals that I’m so glad to be on the other side of now.
And the more we can lovingly challenge our own habitual thinking the more freedom and true internal safety we create in our lives. This is also a really important topic for us because learning who we are when we are truthful about our lives about our past, present and future is key to living authentic, intentional lives. And getting clear on when we’re in an old habit of secret keeping or if the issue at hand is one that calls for sacred privacy is important to be clear on, so we can set boundaries and hold them as sacred.
Where does the confusion/fear come from?
Growing up, many of us were not allowed privacy, and often secrecy was the norm.
Our parents were up in our business or read our journals. Perhaps we were asked, either explicitly like “don’t tell your mother…” or implicitly as part of the family ethos to keep family secrets, so as the brilliant children we were, we came to conflate love, safety and keeping secrets.
The reason it hits so hard is in our limbic system, our inner children come to conflate vulnerability, speaking up, sharing what’s real in our family homes, and betrayal – betraying the family. I was talking to a client the other day and she said secrecy didn’t really resonate with her as part of her childhood, she was never asked or told to keep secrets, but when I asked her if she went to school and told everyone that her mother drank too much or that her parents fought every night, she said no; she kept those secrets close.
Often when we grow up protecting the family secrets, we can come to believe that it is our job as children and later as adults to keep things secret, which teaches us that being open, honest, real, vulnerable isn’t safe and we are not safe if people know our business.
As a result, we block ourselves from being in our realness. Of speaking our truth. And because we learn to block ourselves from revealing too much, we lose touch with our somatic or bodily capacity to feel into whether someone feels safe to be honest and open with or not. So of course we just decide everyone is dangerous whether they are or not. If there weren’t good boundaries at home, for many of us, there were lots of reasons to keep secrets and why sharing information felt unsafe.
We end up with a lot of confusion about what to keep private and what to keep secret to have boundaries around and what is even the difference?
Secrecy is about intentionally hiding things, and secrecy comes from a place of shame and fear and worry and a lot of catastrophizing about what will happen if your secret, or your family secret, gets out.
We feel shame because we feel bad about ourselves or our families because of what we’ve done or what they’ve done or failed to do. We feel shame about other people’s lives because we don’t feel clear about what we are responsible for – what’s ours and what’s other people’s to own and be responsible for.
We feel fear, because we’re afraid that if our secret gets out, we will lose our external validation, our sense of safety. That we will lose the love, respect, care, loyalty of our partners, friends, family of society or our religious group. We keep secrets because we’re afraid that someone will be upset if they find out, so lie to ourselves and we tell the story that we’re protecting them, when we’re really obfuscating or hiding our truth in an attempt to keep ourselves feeling safe by going along to get along.
When we’re talking about fear I do mean fear of judgment, not fear of being physically unsafe. That is: if you’re creating a plan to leave an abusive situation, that’s a smart thing to not tell your abusive partner, parent, whomever because the fear there is a different thing, but it can still be held as something private, to be shared with trusted people ONLY, and not secret when you do the thought work and somatic or body-based practices to release the shame around being in that situation, because there is nothing shameful about being in an abusive relationship.
I was in an emotionally abusive relationship for a long time, and what matters is that you get out – sharing what’s going on in your life with trusted folks can help you to get out, so keeping your experience secret only keeps you trapped. And if this is your current or past experience, know that I’m sending you so much love – feeling shame and worry about others judging you is normal and human, and it’s also something you can get to the other side of so you can take care of you.
So.
We keep secrets because we believe that other people having thoughts about us is a problem, is something that can hurt us and is something to be carefully managed because we don’t realize that we never ever have to borrow anyone else’s thoughts about us, ever.
And finally, we keep secrets because we believe that our actions create other people’s thoughts, feelings and lived experiences. We believe “if I’m honest they will feel hurt” and that is not always a fact but our inner children believe it to be. In my own life when I’ve shared something that I previously kept secret with someone I felt safe with, sharing that story lead to us feeling closer, it built love and trust, not the opposite.
We can also keep secrets from a perfectionist place, to try to control what others think about us so we can maintain the story that we are so very perfect. We keep secrets about how we really feel to try to please the people in our lives, and tell lies to try to keep them happy. We tell them the sex was great, we’re not annoyed that they’re late over and over again, that we’re happy or okay or fine even when we’re not.
Keeping secrets takes up a lot of brain space and energy as you worry about what will happen if it gets out. And it creates an almost antagonist experience in the world, like it’s me against the world. I have to protect myself and so you can’t relax into just living your life and having your authentic experience. Instead you are stuck in will they find out? Did they find out? What if they find out?
And secrecy can lead us to act outside of our values and integrity because lying is often required to keep the act, to not let the secret out, especially when we’re working on building a loving connection or a new relationship.
The lying necessitated to maintain secrets builds a further wall of distance between ourselves and the people we want to love and whose love we want to feel, and takes us further away from living with intention and authenticity, further away from living out loud as the fullest expression of our selves, which to me is the most essential human task – to live into and from our full open hearts and our authenticity.
So let’s look at some examples of secrecy:
So secret keeping is marked by fear, shame and an attempt to not upset others, to caretake them at your own expense and an attempt to manage how others think and feel about us.
When you’re awash in shame or fear about something and that’s what is driving you to not share about it with your date, friends, partner, spouse, then it’s likely that you’re keeping that thing to yourself as a secret, and not from a healthy sense of privacy.
Let’s say that when you were a teenager you shoplifted with some friends or told some big lie, and you have a lot of shame around it, so you never share it with anyone because you don’t want them to think less of you. That’s a secret, my darling.
Let’s say you had an abortion in your 20s – if you don’t want to tell your current partner because it feels shameful and you’re worried they’ll judge you then that’s a secret.
If you’re in a relationship that your partner believes is mutually monogamous and you’re seeing someone else on the side then of course it would be a secret if you were hiding that for fear of losing or upsetting your partner.
But what if your partner was totally down with non-monogamy or held no judgement that you stole when you were 13 or told a lie when you were 16 or had an abortion when you were 27?
Would you then feel that same drive towards secrecy or would you want to share those things or want certain things to be private, just yours?
If you dropped the shame for yourself, regardless of how another person might respond to hearing about it, what would you do with those stories?
So the difference between a secret and something that’s just private is *generally* the weight we give it and what we make it mean about ourselves and our relationships.
So, are secrets bad?
I don’t love that language – let’s ask instead – Does it serve me to keep secrets?
If you’re planning an uprising, and I hope you are, then keeping your plans secret from the fuzz is vital while sharing it openly with comrades! Same goes if you’re planning a surprise party (and this leo has thrown many a surprise party, lemme tell ya what) you keep it secret from the birthday person but tell those who need to know. And like I said before, if you’re making your way out of an abusive situation, keep those plans secret from the abusive person or people, while letting those you trust in.
My clients often say things like “Oh, I’m just a private person” which is totally great when it’s the truth, but sometimes that story can be a coverup for being secretive, so asking ourselves “do I hold shame around this” is a great way to see what’s really going on and if you’re living in secrecy. Meanwhile I often hear “I don’t trust people with my details” which goes along with “They are going to throw it in my face and use it against me” both of which can be coverups for “I am scared to be vulnerable.”
And I get it!
When we showed our tenderoni side in the past and that trust was broken or disrespected, especially if we weren’t resourced in our nervous system then or were young and didn’t have the developmental skills to have our own backs, then it makes sense we would have this story in our minds and would cling to secrecy as a false protection.
But my darling. When you believe this line of thinking you’re telling yourself that other people create your feelings. And it’s just not true. I know, I know, having someone break your trust or share info that wasn’t theirs to share hurts – that’s so real! I know it first hand.
It also hurts when you tell someone something in confidence and that leads them to step out of relationship with you. Totally sucks. For example, when I was 19, I had some eating disorder behavior. I told my g/f at the time and she broke up with me. That is what people fear. They are going to be honest with someone and it will “be used against them” and I want to say this – while it may hurt, for sure may hurt, you get to decide what you’re going to make that betrayal mean for and about you.
You can decide that they used it “against” you or… you can choose to feel the pain and to then shift your thinking, to recognize that that person just told you a lot about them and nothing at all about you. Someone making a choice such as breaking up with you because they learned something true about you that you feel shame about doesn’t have to feel different than them breaking up with you because they don’t like dating people your height or people who have noses. I’m being silly but also so serious.
It doesn’t mean anything when you take the shame out of the story, when you take the secrecy out of it.
I was hurt that that woman broke up with me after I told her I had eating disorder behavior because I was holding that thinking and resultant behavior in shame-laden secrecy. I can talk about it openly now because it doesn’t carry shame anymore, which means that no one can “use it against me” cause here I am telling thousands of people but I’m not feeling shameful, I’m standing in my agency to decide how things make me feel, instead of leaving that to others to decide for me.
Where do vulnerability and intimacy fit in?
Secrecy in relationships blocks our personal and collective growth.
And when vulnerability and intimacy feel scary and we don’t have safe experiences of those things, we believe that we need to keep things secreted away in the shroud of shame and worry as a way to protect our tender underbellies. When in fact we may want to share them or choose to keep them private. This is when we can remember that we can take the same action with wildly different feelings and results.
If your thought is “this is shameful, I cannot share it because they’ll reject or abandon me,” you will create an experience of more secrecy and you’ll feel more shame when that is the driving energy in your mind and body.
The thought is “someone is going to have thoughts about me, to judge me and that’s a problem. Someone is going to question or reject me and that’s a problem.” Forgetting that their thoughts don’t mean that you are a problem – they are, in fact, the one with the problem my darling.
And so when your thought is there is nothing shameful about me, my life and my past, that’s when you can pause, attune to your breathe, remember that you can be your own best friend, your own most loving internal adult parent, you can have your own back and can own what you are experiencing now and can be present with it and yourself, and can give yourself some perspective about your past and present choices.
When we detach our experiences and choices from shame, then we can make a conscious, intentional decision about keeping it secret, private or sharing because we have freed it from that story of shame. And then you can decide to keep it private if you want to from the energy of self love and self worth, and not from believing that your past/present thoughts, feelings and actions mean anything about you and your worth intrinsically, which is the root of shame. This is a beautiful departure from that codependent story that other people’s thoughts and feelings matter more than yours do.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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