Author: Alex Thompson

What Happens When You Keep Secrets?

If you’re burdened by a secret infidelity, it’s best to work out your feelings and the relationship dynamics with a trusted counselor or confidant before revealing it to your partner. On the one hand, if your motive for revealing the secret is to relieve yourself of the burden of guilt, you are being selfish. On the other hand, if you sincerely want to improve the relationship, revealing the secret, despite the harm your partner will experience in the short run, may be worthwhile. In terms of the trade-offs, it’s hard for me to imagine a more weighty one, right? But the price of keeping that secret might be psychologically catastrophic as well. An honest confrontation, in which each of you expresses your thoughts and feelings, can help both of you understand the motivations for your behaviors and the value you place on the relationship.

And then he tells me that he’s not biologically able to have children. He’s telling me that he’s not my biological father. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 1-33.

Michael Slepian

It turned out that everyone in my family, apart from my younger brother and myself, knew this secret the whole time. Your book opens with you recounting how a 10-megaton secret was dropped into your lap that sort of exploded your life. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The human mind is designed to predict, but uncertainty helps us thrive.

What keeping secrets does to you

Revealing a secret is a way to cope with the stress that maintaining the secret causes. Not only do you feel the presence of social support in helping you cope with the content of the secret, you also reap the benefits of less mind-wandering over to the secret. Of all of those, the one that seems to be the most harmful is shame.

Keeping Secrets to Prevent Harm to Ourselves

The harm from keeping a secret about sexual infidelity is threefold. First, the perpetrator will experience the burden of guilt as they keep the infidelity secret from their partner. Second, their partner will feel the pain of betrayal if the infidelity is revealed.

Keeping Secrets to Prevent Harm to Others

  1. But at the same time, we may be protecting others from harm by keeping these secrets hidden.
  2. And what’s more, even if your partner doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, they’ll get a sense that something is wrong.
  3. For instance, there’s been some discussion recently in social media about a phenomenon known as “stealth shopping.” One partner makes a major purchase and then tries to hide it from their significant other.

The guilt you feel at keeping this secret will reveal itself in other ways and taint the relationship you’re trying to preserve. In this case, it’s far better to be open and honest with your partner about what you’ve done. There may very well be a heated confrontation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it allows partners to be forthright with each other. When we keep secrets, we may be burdened by feelings of guilt for what we are hiding. But at the same time, we may be protecting others from harm by keeping these secrets hidden. When deciding whether to keep or reveal a secret, you may need the help of a trusted confidant or counselor to decide on the right course of action.

The Top Ten Secrets People Don’t Share with Anyone

If this is a one-time issue and it’s not going to come up again, there are folks who would advise you to say, yeah, don’t reveal it because this is not some larger problem. You have some interesting charts in the book about this, but I want the audience to have a sense of what you discovered here. A lot of academics who study whatever it is that they study, it can feel very abstract. And then suddenly, boom, you’re hit with this secret that is kind of at the core of your identity and your life. At Vox, our mission is to explain the world, so we can all help shape it. While some publications focus on their own interests, we’re focused on what matters to you.

A Hard Secret to Keep

Here at Vox, we believe in helping everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help to shape it. Our mission is to create clear, accessible journalism to empower understanding and action. I did take some comfort in the fact that you found that secrets tend to impact all of us in very similar ways, right? No matter where we’re from, whether the South or the North or America or somewhere else. And that shifts the negative evaluation from your whole self to something you did in the past.

Most of us would agree that stealth shopping is a kind of infidelity, in that you have done something behind your partner’s back that you know they won’t be happy about. However, it’s still not as egregious as sexual infidelity. In this case, the question of harm in secret keeping becomes especially complex. If keeping a secret is keeping you down, should you reveal this secret to someone else? In a recent study, Slepian and Moulton-Tetlock (2019) found that sometimes confiding your secrets to another person can actually help you feel better.

And what’s more, even if your partner doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, they’ll get a sense that something is wrong. What was so relevant to what I was understanding about secrecy, the science of it, was, I asked my parents, “What was it like to keep the secret? ” And they told me it wasn’t something that was difficult to hold back in conversations because it’s really easy to not let that long, complicated story just spill out of your mouth.