August 15, 2019 • 41 mins
In this bonus episode, Dani Shapiro talks with best-selling author, speaker and therapist Lori Gottlieb about the emotional toll of secrets.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. Today you'll be hearing a conversation between myself
and Lori Gottlieb, therapist, speaker, and New York Times best
(00:24):
selling author of the recent book Maybe you Should talk
to someone. I had the chance to talk with Lorie
about the emotional toll of secrets. I hope you'll enjoy
this bonus episode. In the meantime, mark your calendars for
the season two launch of Family Secrets on Monday, August nine.
(00:48):
I just want to have a conversation with you about
everything you understand about secrets and sort of what you
experience in your office in that way, and you know,
just what you've learned about humanity the way that, um,
how do we hold secrets as we walk through life?
And what does these secrets due to us? Right right?
(01:09):
That's such a that's such a great question. I think
so complicated, because we all have secrets. I think even
those of us who believe that it's best to not
keep these kinds of secrets, I think we still have
them anyway. And I think that the reason that we
keep secrets is because partly it's you know, it's Carl
(01:29):
June called secret psychic poison because they're so corrosive, and
also they're they're often all about shame, but I think
they're also about this question of, you know, will I
do more harm by weathers to myself or to others
by revealing the secret? Do we just let sleeping dogs lie?
Is that? Is that a better? You know, that's one
(01:50):
of the questions I get all the time these days,
is um, just would it have been better to not know?
Or you know, are there some secret it's that are
good to keep? A great example of that is, UM,
something I see not infrequently in therapy, which is someone
(02:10):
comes in and they say, Um, you know, I had
this affair, but I realized by having this affair that
I really wanted to be married to my to my partner.
And if I reveal that I had this fair he
or she will leave me, or or that here she
will never look at me the same way or never
(02:31):
trust me in the same way, or it will it
will paint our marriage. Um. And you know there's that
question of if this person never finds out, if my
partner never finds out, Um, wouldn't it be so much better?
Why should I put my spouse through this trauma um
(02:55):
and all of this, you know, sort of like the
harrowing uh, you know, a most a roller coaster that's
going to follow if I revealed this thing that meant
nothing to me and that and that actually made me
realize how much I want to be married to this person?
And where do you come out on that or does
it depend on the person? I think it depends on
(03:17):
the person. But I also feel really strongly that the
truth comes out. I feel like we think we can
keep secrets, but in this day and age, you can't.
I mean, even before this day and age, it was
hard to keep those kinds of secret. Things surface, But
now you know your pernan will find a text and
(03:38):
be like, what was that from ten years? You know,
and then the affair is right there and why didn't?
Why did you? You've been holding the secret for years
and you never told me. It's even worse because then
there's a betrayal layered on top of the betrayal, right,
and and I think there's also aside from the practical
(03:58):
issue of that, they're really it's very difficult in this
day and age to keep a secret. Do you think
that there's something subtler and more invisible than that that
secrets do? I mean? I know in my story and
you know, growing up being a secret and hearing so
(04:20):
many stories of other people who have grown up not
knowing the truth of their identity, not knowing the truth
of their paternity or their maternity. There was those were
secrets that were kept with everyone keeping them really believing
that it was iron clad impossible for those secrets to
come out, and at the time it was iron clad impossible,
(04:43):
and yet there was a residue or a kind of
leakage that those secrets would leave on you know, the
child or you know this sense that so many people
I've talked to have said versions of I always knew there.
Something wasn't right, something didn't add up. So even with
(05:04):
a lack of absolute knowledge of what that secret is,
it was impacting everyone around it. That's such an important
point because we have an intuitive sense when something feels off,
and the person keeping the secret also is impacted by
that secret. So in the case of the affair, that
(05:26):
person still holds that experience and they're going to be
different and changed because of it. It's not like things
can just go back to normal. You can't just pretend
it didn't happen. And so even if you think you can,
and so your partner is going to pick up on that.
And even with little kids, I think intuitively we are
(05:48):
hardwired to kind of be able to suss out what
is real and what is not real. That's why they
always say, like parents things that they can kind of
pretend certain things around their kids. Their kids know and way,
whether it's something like what happened with you, um, you know,
or I was just talking to um someone in therapy
the other day and um, somebody and her family had
(06:12):
mental illness and they were saying, no, no, no, it's
this person's you know, it's a medical it's like this.
They don't want to say specifically what she was told
because it's just specific, but you know she was told
it was something else, and even as a four year old,
you know, she was like, no, that doesn't seem right
and and and and that was the worst part, was it.
(06:32):
It was that enough, this is happening around her, but
the secret made it worse. The secret made her feel crazy.
It made her feel like, well, wait, I trust these adults,
but at the same time something it feels like the barometer,
something is like telling me that this isn't right, And
then you have that internal thing about am I crazy?
Can I trust myself? Um? It really it really affects
(06:57):
the way that you navigate yourself through the world and
think about you know, what is real and what is
not real exactly. I mean there's almost an element of
gaslighting to it, like just a sense of this doesn't
make sense to me, or I'm feeling these feelings that
I don't know why. And I think, particularly in children,
(07:17):
but maybe in adults too, there's a way in which
when we can't really make things add up for ourselves
what we know something's not quite right, we tend to
turn those feelings against ourselves because we don't know what
else to do with them, that's right. We either say, well,
something's wrong with me, right, Um, this feeling of uneasiness
(07:39):
have to do with me, as opposed to it has
to do with something out there that is really making
me uneasy. But we but when you were saying, no,
that's not what's making me uneasy. There's nothing to see here.
I don't know what you're talking about. The other night,
during a Q and a. At a reading of mine. UM,
someone in the audience asked me whether I think, of course,
(08:03):
by having become this sort of accidental expert on secrets, UM,
whether I think that there's ever a good reason to
keep a secret. How would you answer that question? On
the surface, I would say no, because I think that
the truth is liberating for everybody, even if the truth
is painful, even if the truth is hard. I think
(08:26):
that again, we have a sense that something's off and
we don't know the truth. UM, there's always a sense
of weight, just something feels wrong. UM. Somebody wrote into
my Your Therapist column the other day and wrote that
this person was, I think, found there biological mother, and
(08:51):
then found the biological father, and then had a really
beautiful relationship with the biological father, and then found out,
after I think a couple of decades of having this
beautiful relationship with him, that she took a DNA test
and found out that he's not actually her biological father,
that the mother had given misinformation about who her biological
father was. And and potentially because her guess is that
(09:15):
maybe it was because maybe the biological father, maybe it
was a rape, maybe it was you know who knows.
She doesn't know. The mother is dead now, so she
doesn't know, UM. And so this person is now eighty
the father, and she was wondering, you know, do I
do I tell him that he's not my biological father?
And then if I do, do I what about the
(09:38):
rest of the family and will they I feel like
they spent all this emotional energy and welcomed me into
the family and did all these things, but I'm not
actually this person's a biological daughter. Um. And you know,
in those cases, a lot of times, when people are
you know, old, and they might die soon, people re
(10:00):
really wonder about whether the secret would be more disruptive
to the person, whether it would kind of disrupt their peace.
And I used to think differently about that. I used
to think maybe it would, But now I think, o't
bet that this person would welcome the truth and that
he would still love her just as much. I don't
think that it would be like, you know, a hallmark moment,
(10:22):
because I think I'm sure it would be very discombobulating. Well,
it takes it takes time, right like it. I think
that that's one of the thoughts I'm having about someone
who's elderly and that's I've heard similar stories. Um, as
I've been hearing so many people's stories. I've heard very similar,
a very similar story of a woman who discovered that
(10:45):
her dad who raised her was not her biological father,
and uh, you know, he's in his eighties and she
said it would break him. And so she now, because
of the decision that she's made to hold this secret,
has put herself in the position of being a secret keeper, right,
And and it's a painful thing to be a secret
(11:05):
keeper when you I think it's probably a painful thing
to be a secret keeper full stop, but it certainly
is if you sort of inherit a story or find
something out and then feel that you have to keep
the secret in order not to hurt other people. Yeah.
The thing about revealing secrets, especially later on after a
(11:26):
lot has happened, is that you kind of have to
rewrite the past in a different way. All of a sudden,
the memories that you have look different knowing that there
was this other thing going on at the same time.
An example of that is like somebody finds out that
their partner was having an affair and they were and
(11:47):
their memory was we were on this beautiful trip to Rome,
and you know, it was really romantic and at the
same time you were having this affair with this other person.
And now my memories of you know, that year or
that trip or that experience is so different because this
whole other thing was going on, and now you've robbed
(12:08):
me of that memory that's I've heard like that. So
there is this Any time there's the decision made to
UM to reveal a secret, there is a reckoning that happens,
and that is unavoidable and unavoidably painful. So I imagine
(12:31):
that you probably encounter a lot of people who have
resistance to going through whatever that unknown dark tunnel to
the other side is going to be. You know, it's
it's fine to intellectually know on the other side there's
liberation UM, which I certainly believe and know and know
in my own case to very much be true. But
(12:54):
there's the there's the going through what it's going to
take to get there, the both hurting another person or
thinking that you're going to hurt another person and wounding
a relationship that's important, whether it's a father child relationship
or its partners, and having somehow the faith that and
the belief that on the other side of that that
(13:15):
is actually going to be better, that everyone is going
to be better for it. I think there generally is
relief when you get through that tunnel that on the
other side, what's waiting for you with some kind of relief.
If you're the secret keeper, I think there are people
to whom you'll reveal the secret who won't um, who
won't acknowledge the secret. Um. And for those people, they
(13:38):
might not even get in the tunnel. They don't want
to go there. So it's it's more that for the
secret keeper there's relief. UM. So if say somebody was
abused as a child, right and like say someone was
abused by their mother's boyfriend and they tell their mother,
you know, years later like this happened, and the mother
(14:02):
does not believe it, does not want to believe it. UM,
there's relief for the person who tells the secret, even
though it's frustrating. UM. But I think that for the
person who still I think that in those cases, people know.
I think those mothers do know, you know, in that
particular instance that they generally have a sense, but they
(14:23):
don't want to they don't want to go there. It
would it would be too disruptive UM. And so it's
not that they willingly say, oh, I know this and
I'm going to pretend they don't know it. It's it's
a very unconscious process. They're not even aware that that's
what's happening. Yeah, could you talk a little about that,
because that's UM. I mean, I read a lot about
(14:46):
that while I was researching inheritance and the you know,
the period of time in which my parents, you know,
we're having fertility issues and conceived me, you know, via
a owner. And the people that I found and that
I continue to that continue to reach out to me,
(15:09):
often in their eighties seventies, eighties, who they were told
to forget that it ever happened. Right. An entire industry
was kind of in service of, we're going to help you.
If you would like to explode this secret into bits
and particles so that you will never actually remember it
(15:30):
and possibly even believe that it didn't happen, you can
do that. We're gonna We're here to help you. And
so one of the things that I've encountered again and
again are people who discovered that they were UM donor
conceived and they discover this, usually through a DNA test
that they take kind of recreationally, and then when their
(15:54):
mothers are living, they go to their mothers with proof,
you know, in their hands, you know, genetic DNA proof
and and and say, mom, I don't understand. I mean,
what happened I was doing or conceived? Tell me about this.
And most of the women of a certain generation, um,
(16:17):
I would say, the women in their late seventies and
eighties that I've heard about, they actually have the response
of that didn't happen, that didn't happen. And and they're
not they're not lying. It's something much deeper than lying.
And it feels deeper than what we think of when
we you know, we use the word denial. We throw
(16:38):
the word denial around a lot, but it would seem
to me that to be in denial about something you
actually have to hold it as an evident truth and
then deny it. This seems like something beyond that. It's
it's very much you know, we can call it denial,
we can call it something else, but it's it's very
much not in their awareness. Um so, you know, it's
(17:00):
it's something that they truly believe did not happen. In
no matter you can you can show them the Dno,
the DNA test must be wrong, oh you need you
need to do a different one, or that that technology
has all kinds of you know, problems with it. Um.
You know that's there. That's what they believe. They're not
saying that because they feel like you're stupid. You know,
(17:23):
there's emmett em it um. You know, they're saying that because, um,
they truly believe that there has been a mistake. They
could pass a lie detector tests right, like they could
actually pass the polygraph. That is their beliefs. And so
and especially in you know, in your case, Um, you
(17:44):
know when you talk about how they mixed the sperm,
that was why they did that. When they knew that
the man was infertile, and you know, there was that
wasn't going to be the one that worked, but they
mixed it so that there's like that point o one
percent chance and boom, you guys, this miracle happened. Um.
And that's what they're told. Look, it were and and
(18:05):
and it was your own um. And so that's what
they believe. Even though you looked nothing like that, you know,
even I mean it was even you look nothing like
your father. Um, that that's what they believed, and and
I think that, you know, there are times when there's
a crack in the surface where you know that they
might have thought, given all the comments that people make
(18:26):
and all of that, um, and sometimes they might think
for a millisecond like oh, I wonder but oh no, no, no,
the doctor told us, so we know that she's are
right right, We're going to pause for a moment. So
this self convincing or like, how much of this has
(18:47):
to do with I mean, I guess the way I
think of it in in so many of the secrets
on this podcast, and so many of the secrets that
I hear, is that there's this potent come a nation
of there's shame, there's often trauma in some way or another,
and there's desire in my parents case and in many
(19:10):
parents cases, I think, just the desire to just believe
that the child is biologically both of theirs and then
just get on with it, you know, And what difference
does it make? No one will ever know. In the
case of different kinds of secrets, it feels like there's like,
why would a secret be kept to begin with? There's
(19:34):
something underneath that secret that um you said it a
few minutes ago that seems to carry some sort of
whiff of shame or you know, and then everything that
goes along with shame, isolation, aloneness. No one has ever
been in this position before. I guess the difference in
you were talking about, you know, the idea of of
(19:55):
partners where where one has had an affair. I guess
that's a little bit of a difference. It's I don't
know that there's necessarily shame involved there, although there could
be more like like self preservation, preservation of the relationship.
I just want to fix this. How can I fix this?
What's the fastest and most painless way to fix this?
And we can just move on and pretend it never happened. Yeah,
(20:18):
I think I think that, you know, when you talked
about desire, that really resonated because I think sometimes the
desire is so strong for something to be the way
that it's not that people will go to great lengths
to deceive themselves and pretend again they don't know they're pretending,
they're deceiving themselves to really believing that something is as
it's not. So you you know, this is um, you
(20:43):
know the biological child um. This you know this didn't happen,
This abuse didn't happen. Um, you know, whatever, the desire
is so strong for the thing to be true that
they cling to that. And it's interesting because you know,
in the psychological literature, um, you know, we have diagnoses
(21:03):
for things like you know, delusions and you know what
we call psychosis, even right when you believe things that
are clearly not true. Um. But these people are not
people who more psychotic. It's that there is such emotional
valence attached to these outcomes that for their emotional preservation,
(21:25):
they they you know, concoct a reality that isn't there.
And what's it like for you sitting in the seat
that you're sitting in as a therapist when you see
this playing out in your office? How do you help patients,
(21:46):
I guess, break through that sense of let's just call
it denial or sort of being dissociated about something or
you know, just willing it, like willing it into not
being when you're seeing it play out, you know in
the patient therapist arena. Well, first of all, so often
people come in with secrets that I don't know about,
(22:09):
and so remember I'm only hearing one perspective unless I'm
seeing a couple of family, um, in which case the
secrets are much more easy to detect. So if someone
comes in and they say, here's my version of the story. Often,
you know, say they come in with like a lot
of anxiety or depression. Often there's something that they haven't
(22:29):
dealt with. And sometimes it's a secret that they haven't
admitted to themselves. So they can't tell me about the
secret because they don't even know that it's a secret.
But eventually it does come out because they can't remember
these self selected group because they came for therapy. They
didn't come to talk about a secret that they weren't
(22:50):
even where they were keeping. But they came because something
was you know, secrets really affect every area of our lives.
They play out and behaviorally and emotionally. Um. You know,
if they can't get air, they're going to find a
way to manifest. And so it could be manifest in
like insomnia, depression, anxiety, short temperateness, inability to get close
(23:13):
to me, all kinds of things. So they're coming in
for some kind of problem like that. And often what
we find through the work as that there was some
kind of secret. Either they were the secret keeper or
they were the person from whom the secret was cut
and that they had a sense of it right right,
and so the pain that drove them to pick up
(23:35):
the phone or send an email and contact the therapist
like that, you know, I need help, you know, like
when no one no one does that easily. I don't
don't think very many people, except like in Woody Allen movies,
um seek there seek therapy because it's like recreational or
fun or you know, this is just you know, something
(23:58):
cool and interesting to do. It's work and it's and
it's coming. You know, the desire to be in therapy
or the need to be in therapy originates in some
kind of pain. So when someone comes in and you know,
presents as anxious or fear fearful or short tempered, is
there part of a sense that you have that well,
(24:22):
I feel like this is almost an obvious question, but
like that there's more going on there that there's It's
not these symptoms are not free floating. Here's here's how
it might play out. Someone comes in and they say, um,
you know, when I was a child, my dad died
in a voting accident, and I was really close to
my dad and it was horrible. And I feel like
(24:43):
I've never been able to have relationships with men um
where I really trust them. I always kind of like,
you know, I'm always like messing it up. Um. You know,
I always think that they're like not telling me the truth.
Things like that. Won't be that direct, but there are
ways that they're sort of sabotaging relationships because they're always
(25:07):
kind of looking for what's what's going to go wrong,
And then they it's like, you know, you can't fire me,
I quit um, you know the wave before um the
person can break up with them because of this behavior
that they're doing, and don't they're really having trouble and
relationships and here's my family history and whatever, and they
don't connect it to a all um. But then as
you sort of talk to them more, you find out
(25:29):
and it's just little little kind of things that they
float out there that make you think, like, wait, did
he die in a boating accident? Does this person believe
that is true? And and and the person really believes
firmly that he died in a boating accident. But as
you work with them more, you start to see that, oh,
there's this little thing that they grow into the conversation
(25:49):
about you know, maybe you know he was depressed, but no,
I don't really know. I mean, you know, those kinds
of things. And then and then factually it comes out
that this person has suspected for quite a while, even
though it wasn't in her awareness that her father might
have committed suicide. And then sep searching and find out indeed,
there are a lot of there's a lot of evidence,
(26:13):
even though some people aren't really talking about it that
way and some people refused about it that way, that
that he did commit suicide, and no one will ever know,
you know, in this particular case, we'll ever know. But
all sort of investigation leads to that conclusion. And when
she was able to kind of pay that, oh that
makes so much more sense. It was such a most
(26:34):
horrible but it was the relief to her. It made her.
It was such a relief that oh, so many things
that didn't add up now add up in this way
that even though it's so sad and so horrible, it's
better than the other stories. Yeah. I think so much
(26:55):
of what family Secrets mean this podcast is about, episode
after episode, is the liberation and relief that ultimately, you know,
if they can stand there in the gale, you know,
and let the let the wave crash over them and
(27:19):
go through everything that is involved in the revelation, whatever
the revelation is, um that sense ultimately of oh this
makes so much sense. I mean, that's not necessarily comfortable.
It can feel actually like you know when you get
a new pair of glasses and it's a really intense
(27:41):
prescription and for a little while, they're your eyes hurt
because everything is too sharp and too clear. Like that,
to me is what that feeling is. It's like, oh,
you know, I see, I see God, It's really hard
to see, but I see, and I'm glad I'm seeing.
And and I feel like just about everybody that I
(28:02):
talked to reports that. And yet there's also a world
of people like I. I did this event last week
at a country club in New Jersey, and after I spoke,
the audience had um index cards that were gathered with
their questions, so they weren't actually getting up and asking questions,
(28:25):
which I think allowed them to be a little more
pointed and bolder in their questions because they weren't on
the spot. I was just getting the index cards and
reading them, and I was leafing through them as I
was standing there, and there was this one index card
and it read what good is it to know? And
(28:45):
I didn't have to take that question. It felt a
little bit almost hostile in its kind of intent, but
I couldn't resist. I was like, Okay, what good is
it to know? Where can I begin to answer this question?
And I think I probably went on like a five minute,
(29:06):
impassioned speech about all the reasons why it's so good
to know. And that doesn't mean that it's comfortable, but
that that's I mean. In every episode, I ask my
guest towards the end, do you wish you hadn't known?
And I still don't have a guest who said, yeah,
I wish I hadn't known. And you know, even even
(29:27):
ones that are in their story and are in a
lot of pain about their story have the sense that
you know what because it's true, because it's real, because
it's my story, and because ultimately, you know, the the
old trope of you know, the truth will set us free.
Actually there's really something to it. Yeah, And it's not
just it's not just the truth to some kind of
(29:50):
isolated thing out there. It's the truth of who you are.
So if you don't know the truth of who you are,
you can never be truly comfortable in your own skin.
And it doesn't even have to be something that directly
happened to you. Like in my column a few weeks ago,
UM I answered a letter where somebody wrote in and said, Um,
(30:12):
I am now married to this man who I knew
the mother when she was alive, and the mother had
had another kid that she put up for adoption before
she was with this man, and then they got married
and they had this son. Now this son is an
adult and he nobody ever told him that he had
this half sibling out there who knew about them, And
(30:35):
I'm a church knew about them, but who had this
half sibling out there and this other family? And um,
you know, should we tell him? And she said, you know,
I'm worried that like one day, we're we're the only
people who have this secret. We nobody else knows this
as far as they knew, and we are worried that
he will find out after we die. But we're also
worried that if we tell him will really upset him
(30:57):
that he never knew we had a half brother out there.
And maybe you know, who knows where this person is
and maybe he would want that. And and now what
I said in my response was that this is part
of his story. It's not just the mother's story and
what she did and giving up the sun for adoption.
It's his story. He has a half brother out there,
and it gives him information about himself and is placed
(31:18):
in the world, and who he is related to, and
also who his mother wasn't And maybe what you know,
the mother was always depressed in her life, the letter said,
and maybe there was some connection, because you know, there
was some She had a lot of feelings about having
given up that child for adoption, and he might have
personalized those feelings. And now it might make more sense
(31:40):
to him why his mother struggled so much. It just
flashes out his story and there will always be answers
that he won't have, but at least he will know this,
and then he can make a choice about what he
wants to do with that information. That in the intuitive way,
I think that people know, you know, he knew something
(32:01):
was wrong with his mother, but then we make up
stories to kind of make the stories make sense. But
if we just had the information, it would be so
much better. It's like that woman who discovered that her
father probably committed suicide. She used to buy suicide books,
you know, books like memoirs of people who there were
there have been suicide in the family, and her boyfriend
at one point remarked, like you read a lot about
(32:23):
suicide before been able to acknowledge that maybe this would
happened to her father. She didn't make the connection at all,
but she would was always fascinated by suicide after her
father's even though she never made the connection that maybe
he had commit suicide. Right. It's like it's almost the
difference between going through life and missing a couple of
(32:50):
colors like from the palette, right or um, or just
with this sense about oneself, like that there's something, there's
something that doesn't add up. There's a subtle disconnect in
some way. UM. And you know, we can go through
life that way and even have possibly somewhat contented um
(33:13):
and successful lives that way, but there's always something like
this woman buying these books about suicide or you know,
in my case, all of my books thematically, all my
novels were about family secrets. Why you know, like I
if you had said said to me, why um, I
(33:36):
would have said, I don't know, it's just those are
my themes. That's what I write about. My parents had secrets,
and I would create, I had created narratives about what
those secrets were. They were just not the big Cahuna secret.
They were different versions of this. Here's my story about
why my dad was depressed. Here's my story about why
my mother was angry. Here's my story about why they,
(33:58):
um we were, you know, unhappy with each other. All
those stories were in fact true, they just weren't the
whole truth. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. The other thing, too, is
that secrets travel through the generations. So um, you know
(34:20):
when you say you know the theme in your books
was all about family secrets. Um, if you hadn't unearthed
the secret, that might have passed along somehow to your
son in some ways that we can't know. In my family, UM,
my father discovered when he was very young, he was
(34:42):
in the i think the attic of his parents house,
and he discovered this box with all this, you know,
like children's things that were not his or his older sisters.
And one of them said Jack, and he said, just
Barrens who's act and they didn't tell him that that
(35:05):
was the brother who had died. Um. And he still
doesn't know of what or he thinks that you know,
with some like a flu or pneumonia or something like that.
UM that he doesn't know where he's buried. He doesn't
know where, he doesn't know anything. But he eventually like
a neighbor at one point he remembers, like me to comment,
you know that, um something that that the mother then
(35:26):
sort of like changed the subject and he would There
would be different things throughout my father's life where he
kind of put two and two together and thought, we
I think there was another person here and that boy
in the picture was my brother. When he later found
out that was in that the case. UM. And interestingly,
when I was a kid, and I didn't know this.
(35:47):
When I was a very little kid, one of the
things I was fascinated by when I would write little
stories myself was about like a dead child in the family.
I don't know whether it didn't happen, you know, it
didn't happen to me and my brother, but it was
just something there. I don't know whether that's a coincidence
or not, or whether that secret was kind of like
living in our d na um in the way that
(36:10):
secret do travel through the generations. And when I found
out about this story, when my father told it to me,
I never wrote about that anymore. It was like there
was something I was working out that I didn't even
know I was working out. Right, Well, you know, writing,
I think, or any kind of art making is one
(36:31):
of the ways that we, you know, kind of work
out our unconscious stuff and and we don't know that
that's what we're doing. So then there it is. There's
there's this body of work that you did as a child,
and you were done with it because that thing that
you were digging for in some way without knowing it
(36:53):
was answered. And I mean, to me, that's so fascinating
in terms of just the power of the conscious to
do that. So is what you're describing there in terms
of like secrets being carried through the DNA, which is
such an amazing idea. Is that is that what epigenetics are,
is that the that is that the study of epigenetics.
(37:15):
Epigenetics is fascinating and we don't know a lot about
it yet, but we talked about it sometimes in terms
of like a surrogate tearing a baby UM whose DNA
is different from that of the curroguit, right um, and
will the or were in the other direction, Say a
(37:36):
mother who used an egg donor and she's carrying the baby,
but it's not her egg, right UM that you to
make the umbryo. So they're saying that there's some way
that the d NA UM, somehow, UM can I don't.
I'm going to say this wrong. So, but there's some
(37:59):
way that the d NA UM can be part of
this child even though this wasn't her egg, right that
the DNA because she's carrying the baby. UM. I don't
know how it all works, but I do think that
there's like UM. You know, Carl, you talked about sort
of like the collective unconscious, right, and you think that
there's like a collective unconscious of a family, which I
(38:20):
don't think he talked about, UM. But in terms of secrets,
I think there is this like the way we carry
the UM like the programming from our family. And if
the programming is a programming of secrecy, we carry that
through the generations. Sometimes we reenact it with our own kits,
you know. We keep secrets in ways that our parents
(38:41):
did um. But sometimes like a secret that loves over
a family gets carried on um in ways because people
know that something's off, but they just don't know what
it is, and everybody in the family feels a little
bit like uneasy and they don't know why. That's so interesting.
So in that case, again, it's such an argument for
(39:02):
secrets coming out because then presumably if if a secret
is revealed in the light of day, it can't do
that particular kind of haunting in a collective, unconscious way
of a family because we see it because we know it,
right and so and so that's why when people say,
(39:24):
which is what you asked initially? Which is you know?
Is there a reason to keep secrets? And I should
say first that there's a difference between secrecy and privacy.
Right We all places that need to be private for ourselves, right,
We don't. We don't say every single thing that crosses
our mind to another person. We don't share every piece
(39:46):
of ourselves with another person. We need to keep some
private spaces for ourselves. That's healthy. But the secret is different.
The secret is something that is toxic um and it's faster,
and that's different private. See, it's really healthy and feel good.
Secrets you feel bad. So are there reasons that we
should keep secrets? We can come up with a million
(40:08):
reasons that we should keep a secret that all make
very rational, intellectual sense, but it doesn't make emotional sense
because in the end, that secret is going to affect people,
even the people you're trying to protect, whether you like
it or not, by virtue of being secret. And if
you reveal the secret, people will have feelings about it.
(40:32):
It might be hard for people, but ultimately, every single
person who has ever heard a secret, even if it
was something that really didn't want to be true, ultimately
that I've heard um, they they say they wanted to
know that it was better to know that it freed
them up in all kinds of ways, in all areas
(40:52):
of their life, in a way that the secret was
limiting them and keeping them constrained or trapped. And you
get the line. Family Secrets is an i Heart Media production.
(41:21):
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro and this is a special bonus episode of
Family Secrets. Today you'll be hearing a conversation between myself
and Lori Gottlieb, therapist, speaker, and New York Times best
(00:24):
selling author of the recent book Maybe you Should talk
to someone. I had the chance to talk with Lorie
about the emotional toll of secrets. I hope you'll enjoy
this bonus episode. In the meantime, mark your calendars for
the season two launch of Family Secrets on Monday, August nine.
(00:48):
I just want to have a conversation with you about
everything you understand about secrets and sort of what you
experience in your office in that way, and you know,
just what you've learned about humanity the way that, um,
how do we hold secrets as we walk through life?
And what does these secrets due to us? Right right?
(01:09):
That's such a that's such a great question. I think
so complicated, because we all have secrets. I think even
those of us who believe that it's best to not
keep these kinds of secrets, I think we still have
them anyway. And I think that the reason that we
keep secrets is because partly it's you know, it's Carl
(01:29):
June called secret psychic poison because they're so corrosive, and
also they're they're often all about shame, but I think
they're also about this question of, you know, will I
do more harm by weathers to myself or to others
by revealing the secret? Do we just let sleeping dogs lie?
Is that? Is that a better? You know, that's one
(01:50):
of the questions I get all the time these days,
is um, just would it have been better to not know?
Or you know, are there some secret it's that are
good to keep? A great example of that is, UM,
something I see not infrequently in therapy, which is someone
(02:10):
comes in and they say, Um, you know, I had
this affair, but I realized by having this affair that
I really wanted to be married to my to my partner.
And if I reveal that I had this fair he
or she will leave me, or or that here she
will never look at me the same way or never
(02:31):
trust me in the same way, or it will it
will paint our marriage. Um. And you know there's that
question of if this person never finds out, if my
partner never finds out, Um, wouldn't it be so much better?
Why should I put my spouse through this trauma um
(02:55):
and all of this, you know, sort of like the
harrowing uh, you know, a most a roller coaster that's
going to follow if I revealed this thing that meant
nothing to me and that and that actually made me
realize how much I want to be married to this person?
And where do you come out on that or does
it depend on the person? I think it depends on
(03:17):
the person. But I also feel really strongly that the
truth comes out. I feel like we think we can
keep secrets, but in this day and age, you can't.
I mean, even before this day and age, it was
hard to keep those kinds of secret. Things surface, But
now you know your pernan will find a text and
(03:38):
be like, what was that from ten years? You know,
and then the affair is right there and why didn't?
Why did you? You've been holding the secret for years
and you never told me. It's even worse because then
there's a betrayal layered on top of the betrayal, right,
and and I think there's also aside from the practical
(03:58):
issue of that, they're really it's very difficult in this
day and age to keep a secret. Do you think
that there's something subtler and more invisible than that that
secrets do? I mean? I know in my story and
you know, growing up being a secret and hearing so
(04:20):
many stories of other people who have grown up not
knowing the truth of their identity, not knowing the truth
of their paternity or their maternity. There was those were
secrets that were kept with everyone keeping them really believing
that it was iron clad impossible for those secrets to
come out, and at the time it was iron clad impossible,
(04:43):
and yet there was a residue or a kind of
leakage that those secrets would leave on you know, the
child or you know this sense that so many people
I've talked to have said versions of I always knew there.
Something wasn't right, something didn't add up. So even with
(05:04):
a lack of absolute knowledge of what that secret is,
it was impacting everyone around it. That's such an important
point because we have an intuitive sense when something feels off,
and the person keeping the secret also is impacted by
that secret. So in the case of the affair, that
(05:26):
person still holds that experience and they're going to be
different and changed because of it. It's not like things
can just go back to normal. You can't just pretend
it didn't happen. And so even if you think you can,
and so your partner is going to pick up on that.
And even with little kids, I think intuitively we are
(05:48):
hardwired to kind of be able to suss out what
is real and what is not real. That's why they
always say, like parents things that they can kind of
pretend certain things around their kids. Their kids know and way,
whether it's something like what happened with you, um, you know,
or I was just talking to um someone in therapy
the other day and um, somebody and her family had
(06:12):
mental illness and they were saying, no, no, no, it's
this person's you know, it's a medical it's like this.
They don't want to say specifically what she was told
because it's just specific, but you know she was told
it was something else, and even as a four year old,
you know, she was like, no, that doesn't seem right
and and and and that was the worst part, was it.
(06:32):
It was that enough, this is happening around her, but
the secret made it worse. The secret made her feel crazy.
It made her feel like, well, wait, I trust these adults,
but at the same time something it feels like the barometer,
something is like telling me that this isn't right, And
then you have that internal thing about am I crazy?
Can I trust myself? Um? It really it really affects
(06:57):
the way that you navigate yourself through the world and
think about you know, what is real and what is
not real exactly. I mean there's almost an element of
gaslighting to it, like just a sense of this doesn't
make sense to me, or I'm feeling these feelings that
I don't know why. And I think, particularly in children,
(07:17):
but maybe in adults too, there's a way in which
when we can't really make things add up for ourselves
what we know something's not quite right, we tend to
turn those feelings against ourselves because we don't know what
else to do with them, that's right. We either say, well,
something's wrong with me, right, Um, this feeling of uneasiness
(07:39):
have to do with me, as opposed to it has
to do with something out there that is really making
me uneasy. But we but when you were saying, no,
that's not what's making me uneasy. There's nothing to see here.
I don't know what you're talking about. The other night,
during a Q and a. At a reading of mine. UM,
someone in the audience asked me whether I think, of course,
(08:03):
by having become this sort of accidental expert on secrets, UM,
whether I think that there's ever a good reason to
keep a secret. How would you answer that question? On
the surface, I would say no, because I think that
the truth is liberating for everybody, even if the truth
is painful, even if the truth is hard. I think
(08:26):
that again, we have a sense that something's off and
we don't know the truth. UM, there's always a sense
of weight, just something feels wrong. UM. Somebody wrote into
my Your Therapist column the other day and wrote that
this person was, I think, found there biological mother, and
(08:51):
then found the biological father, and then had a really
beautiful relationship with the biological father, and then found out,
after I think a couple of decades of having this
beautiful relationship with him, that she took a DNA test
and found out that he's not actually her biological father,
that the mother had given misinformation about who her biological
father was. And and potentially because her guess is that
(09:15):
maybe it was because maybe the biological father, maybe it
was a rape, maybe it was you know who knows.
She doesn't know. The mother is dead now, so she
doesn't know, UM. And so this person is now eighty
the father, and she was wondering, you know, do I
do I tell him that he's not my biological father?
And then if I do, do I what about the
(09:38):
rest of the family and will they I feel like
they spent all this emotional energy and welcomed me into
the family and did all these things, but I'm not
actually this person's a biological daughter. Um. And you know,
in those cases, a lot of times, when people are
you know, old, and they might die soon, people re
(10:00):
really wonder about whether the secret would be more disruptive
to the person, whether it would kind of disrupt their peace.
And I used to think differently about that. I used
to think maybe it would, But now I think, o't
bet that this person would welcome the truth and that
he would still love her just as much. I don't
think that it would be like, you know, a hallmark moment,
(10:22):
because I think I'm sure it would be very discombobulating. Well,
it takes it takes time, right like it. I think
that that's one of the thoughts I'm having about someone
who's elderly and that's I've heard similar stories. Um, as
I've been hearing so many people's stories. I've heard very similar,
a very similar story of a woman who discovered that
(10:45):
her dad who raised her was not her biological father,
and uh, you know, he's in his eighties and she
said it would break him. And so she now, because
of the decision that she's made to hold this secret,
has put herself in the position of being a secret keeper, right,
And and it's a painful thing to be a secret
(11:05):
keeper when you I think it's probably a painful thing
to be a secret keeper full stop, but it certainly
is if you sort of inherit a story or find
something out and then feel that you have to keep
the secret in order not to hurt other people. Yeah.
The thing about revealing secrets, especially later on after a
(11:26):
lot has happened, is that you kind of have to
rewrite the past in a different way. All of a sudden,
the memories that you have look different knowing that there
was this other thing going on at the same time.
An example of that is like somebody finds out that
their partner was having an affair and they were and
(11:47):
their memory was we were on this beautiful trip to Rome,
and you know, it was really romantic and at the
same time you were having this affair with this other person.
And now my memories of you know, that year or
that trip or that experience is so different because this
whole other thing was going on, and now you've robbed
(12:08):
me of that memory that's I've heard like that. So
there is this Any time there's the decision made to
UM to reveal a secret, there is a reckoning that happens,
and that is unavoidable and unavoidably painful. So I imagine
(12:31):
that you probably encounter a lot of people who have
resistance to going through whatever that unknown dark tunnel to
the other side is going to be. You know, it's
it's fine to intellectually know on the other side there's
liberation UM, which I certainly believe and know and know
in my own case to very much be true. But
(12:54):
there's the there's the going through what it's going to
take to get there, the both hurting another person or
thinking that you're going to hurt another person and wounding
a relationship that's important, whether it's a father child relationship
or its partners, and having somehow the faith that and
the belief that on the other side of that that
(13:15):
is actually going to be better, that everyone is going
to be better for it. I think there generally is
relief when you get through that tunnel that on the
other side, what's waiting for you with some kind of relief.
If you're the secret keeper, I think there are people
to whom you'll reveal the secret who won't um, who
won't acknowledge the secret. Um. And for those people, they
(13:38):
might not even get in the tunnel. They don't want
to go there. So it's it's more that for the
secret keeper there's relief. UM. So if say somebody was
abused as a child, right and like say someone was
abused by their mother's boyfriend and they tell their mother,
you know, years later like this happened, and the mother
(14:02):
does not believe it, does not want to believe it. UM,
there's relief for the person who tells the secret, even
though it's frustrating. UM. But I think that for the
person who still I think that in those cases, people know.
I think those mothers do know, you know, in that
particular instance that they generally have a sense, but they
(14:23):
don't want to they don't want to go there. It
would it would be too disruptive UM. And so it's
not that they willingly say, oh, I know this and
I'm going to pretend they don't know it. It's it's
a very unconscious process. They're not even aware that that's
what's happening. Yeah, could you talk a little about that,
because that's UM. I mean, I read a lot about
(14:46):
that while I was researching inheritance and the you know,
the period of time in which my parents, you know,
we're having fertility issues and conceived me, you know, via
a owner. And the people that I found and that
I continue to that continue to reach out to me,
(15:09):
often in their eighties seventies, eighties, who they were told
to forget that it ever happened. Right. An entire industry
was kind of in service of, we're going to help you.
If you would like to explode this secret into bits
and particles so that you will never actually remember it
(15:30):
and possibly even believe that it didn't happen, you can
do that. We're gonna We're here to help you. And
so one of the things that I've encountered again and
again are people who discovered that they were UM donor
conceived and they discover this, usually through a DNA test
that they take kind of recreationally, and then when their
(15:54):
mothers are living, they go to their mothers with proof,
you know, in their hands, you know, genetic DNA proof
and and and say, mom, I don't understand. I mean,
what happened I was doing or conceived? Tell me about this.
And most of the women of a certain generation, um,
(16:17):
I would say, the women in their late seventies and
eighties that I've heard about, they actually have the response
of that didn't happen, that didn't happen. And and they're
not they're not lying. It's something much deeper than lying.
And it feels deeper than what we think of when
we you know, we use the word denial. We throw
(16:38):
the word denial around a lot, but it would seem
to me that to be in denial about something you
actually have to hold it as an evident truth and
then deny it. This seems like something beyond that. It's
it's very much you know, we can call it denial,
we can call it something else, but it's it's very
much not in their awareness. Um so, you know, it's
(17:00):
it's something that they truly believe did not happen. In
no matter you can you can show them the Dno,
the DNA test must be wrong, oh you need you
need to do a different one, or that that technology
has all kinds of you know, problems with it. Um.
You know that's there. That's what they believe. They're not
saying that because they feel like you're stupid. You know,
(17:23):
there's emmett em it um. You know, they're saying that because, um,
they truly believe that there has been a mistake. They
could pass a lie detector tests right, like they could
actually pass the polygraph. That is their beliefs. And so
and especially in you know, in your case, Um, you
(17:44):
know when you talk about how they mixed the sperm,
that was why they did that. When they knew that
the man was infertile, and you know, there was that
wasn't going to be the one that worked, but they
mixed it so that there's like that point o one
percent chance and boom, you guys, this miracle happened. Um.
And that's what they're told. Look, it were and and
(18:05):
and it was your own um. And so that's what
they believe. Even though you looked nothing like that, you know,
even I mean it was even you look nothing like
your father. Um, that that's what they believed, and and
I think that, you know, there are times when there's
a crack in the surface where you know that they
might have thought, given all the comments that people make
(18:26):
and all of that, um, and sometimes they might think
for a millisecond like oh, I wonder but oh no, no, no,
the doctor told us, so we know that she's are
right right, We're going to pause for a moment. So
this self convincing or like, how much of this has
(18:47):
to do with I mean, I guess the way I
think of it in in so many of the secrets
on this podcast, and so many of the secrets that
I hear, is that there's this potent come a nation
of there's shame, there's often trauma in some way or another,
and there's desire in my parents case and in many
(19:10):
parents cases, I think, just the desire to just believe
that the child is biologically both of theirs and then
just get on with it, you know, And what difference
does it make? No one will ever know. In the
case of different kinds of secrets, it feels like there's like,
why would a secret be kept to begin with? There's
(19:34):
something underneath that secret that um you said it a
few minutes ago that seems to carry some sort of
whiff of shame or you know, and then everything that
goes along with shame, isolation, aloneness. No one has ever
been in this position before. I guess the difference in
you were talking about, you know, the idea of of
(19:55):
partners where where one has had an affair. I guess
that's a little bit of a difference. It's I don't
know that there's necessarily shame involved there, although there could
be more like like self preservation, preservation of the relationship.
I just want to fix this. How can I fix this?
What's the fastest and most painless way to fix this?
And we can just move on and pretend it never happened. Yeah,
(20:18):
I think I think that, you know, when you talked
about desire, that really resonated because I think sometimes the
desire is so strong for something to be the way
that it's not that people will go to great lengths
to deceive themselves and pretend again they don't know they're pretending,
they're deceiving themselves to really believing that something is as
it's not. So you you know, this is um, you
(20:43):
know the biological child um. This you know this didn't happen,
This abuse didn't happen. Um, you know, whatever, the desire
is so strong for the thing to be true that
they cling to that. And it's interesting because you know,
in the psychological literature, um, you know, we have diagnoses
(21:03):
for things like you know, delusions and you know what
we call psychosis, even right when you believe things that
are clearly not true. Um. But these people are not
people who more psychotic. It's that there is such emotional
valence attached to these outcomes that for their emotional preservation,
(21:25):
they they you know, concoct a reality that isn't there.
And what's it like for you sitting in the seat
that you're sitting in as a therapist when you see
this playing out in your office? How do you help patients,
(21:46):
I guess, break through that sense of let's just call
it denial or sort of being dissociated about something or
you know, just willing it, like willing it into not
being when you're seeing it play out, you know in
the patient therapist arena. Well, first of all, so often
people come in with secrets that I don't know about,
(22:09):
and so remember I'm only hearing one perspective unless I'm
seeing a couple of family, um, in which case the
secrets are much more easy to detect. So if someone
comes in and they say, here's my version of the story. Often,
you know, say they come in with like a lot
of anxiety or depression. Often there's something that they haven't
(22:29):
dealt with. And sometimes it's a secret that they haven't
admitted to themselves. So they can't tell me about the
secret because they don't even know that it's a secret.
But eventually it does come out because they can't remember
these self selected group because they came for therapy. They
didn't come to talk about a secret that they weren't
(22:50):
even where they were keeping. But they came because something
was you know, secrets really affect every area of our lives.
They play out and behaviorally and emotionally. Um. You know,
if they can't get air, they're going to find a
way to manifest. And so it could be manifest in
like insomnia, depression, anxiety, short temperateness, inability to get close
(23:13):
to me, all kinds of things. So they're coming in
for some kind of problem like that. And often what
we find through the work as that there was some
kind of secret. Either they were the secret keeper or
they were the person from whom the secret was cut
and that they had a sense of it right right,
and so the pain that drove them to pick up
(23:35):
the phone or send an email and contact the therapist
like that, you know, I need help, you know, like
when no one no one does that easily. I don't
don't think very many people, except like in Woody Allen movies,
um seek there seek therapy because it's like recreational or
fun or you know, this is just you know, something
(23:58):
cool and interesting to do. It's work and it's and
it's coming. You know, the desire to be in therapy
or the need to be in therapy originates in some
kind of pain. So when someone comes in and you know,
presents as anxious or fear fearful or short tempered, is
there part of a sense that you have that well,
(24:22):
I feel like this is almost an obvious question, but
like that there's more going on there that there's It's
not these symptoms are not free floating. Here's here's how
it might play out. Someone comes in and they say, um,
you know, when I was a child, my dad died
in a voting accident, and I was really close to
my dad and it was horrible. And I feel like
(24:43):
I've never been able to have relationships with men um
where I really trust them. I always kind of like,
you know, I'm always like messing it up. Um. You know,
I always think that they're like not telling me the truth.
Things like that. Won't be that direct, but there are
ways that they're sort of sabotaging relationships because they're always
(25:07):
kind of looking for what's what's going to go wrong,
And then they it's like, you know, you can't fire me,
I quit um, you know the wave before um the
person can break up with them because of this behavior
that they're doing, and don't they're really having trouble and
relationships and here's my family history and whatever, and they
don't connect it to a all um. But then as
you sort of talk to them more, you find out
(25:29):
and it's just little little kind of things that they
float out there that make you think, like, wait, did
he die in a boating accident? Does this person believe
that is true? And and and the person really believes
firmly that he died in a boating accident. But as
you work with them more, you start to see that, oh,
there's this little thing that they grow into the conversation
(25:49):
about you know, maybe you know he was depressed, but no,
I don't really know. I mean, you know, those kinds
of things. And then and then factually it comes out
that this person has suspected for quite a while, even
though it wasn't in her awareness that her father might
have committed suicide. And then sep searching and find out indeed,
there are a lot of there's a lot of evidence,
(26:13):
even though some people aren't really talking about it that
way and some people refused about it that way, that
that he did commit suicide, and no one will ever know,
you know, in this particular case, we'll ever know. But
all sort of investigation leads to that conclusion. And when
she was able to kind of pay that, oh that
makes so much more sense. It was such a most
(26:34):
horrible but it was the relief to her. It made her.
It was such a relief that oh, so many things
that didn't add up now add up in this way
that even though it's so sad and so horrible, it's
better than the other stories. Yeah. I think so much
(26:55):
of what family Secrets mean this podcast is about, episode
after episode, is the liberation and relief that ultimately, you know,
if they can stand there in the gale, you know,
and let the let the wave crash over them and
(27:19):
go through everything that is involved in the revelation, whatever
the revelation is, um that sense ultimately of oh this
makes so much sense. I mean, that's not necessarily comfortable.
It can feel actually like you know when you get
a new pair of glasses and it's a really intense
(27:41):
prescription and for a little while, they're your eyes hurt
because everything is too sharp and too clear. Like that,
to me is what that feeling is. It's like, oh,
you know, I see, I see God, It's really hard
to see, but I see, and I'm glad I'm seeing.
And and I feel like just about everybody that I
(28:02):
talked to reports that. And yet there's also a world
of people like I. I did this event last week
at a country club in New Jersey, and after I spoke,
the audience had um index cards that were gathered with
their questions, so they weren't actually getting up and asking questions,
(28:25):
which I think allowed them to be a little more
pointed and bolder in their questions because they weren't on
the spot. I was just getting the index cards and
reading them, and I was leafing through them as I
was standing there, and there was this one index card
and it read what good is it to know? And
(28:45):
I didn't have to take that question. It felt a
little bit almost hostile in its kind of intent, but
I couldn't resist. I was like, Okay, what good is
it to know? Where can I begin to answer this question?
And I think I probably went on like a five minute,
(29:06):
impassioned speech about all the reasons why it's so good
to know. And that doesn't mean that it's comfortable, but
that that's I mean. In every episode, I ask my
guest towards the end, do you wish you hadn't known?
And I still don't have a guest who said, yeah,
I wish I hadn't known. And you know, even even
(29:27):
ones that are in their story and are in a
lot of pain about their story have the sense that
you know what because it's true, because it's real, because
it's my story, and because ultimately, you know, the the
old trope of you know, the truth will set us free.
Actually there's really something to it. Yeah, And it's not
just it's not just the truth to some kind of
(29:50):
isolated thing out there. It's the truth of who you are.
So if you don't know the truth of who you are,
you can never be truly comfortable in your own skin.
And it doesn't even have to be something that directly
happened to you. Like in my column a few weeks ago,
UM I answered a letter where somebody wrote in and said, Um,
(30:12):
I am now married to this man who I knew
the mother when she was alive, and the mother had
had another kid that she put up for adoption before
she was with this man, and then they got married
and they had this son. Now this son is an
adult and he nobody ever told him that he had
this half sibling out there who knew about them, And
(30:35):
I'm a church knew about them, but who had this
half sibling out there and this other family? And um,
you know, should we tell him? And she said, you know,
I'm worried that like one day, we're we're the only
people who have this secret. We nobody else knows this
as far as they knew, and we are worried that
he will find out after we die. But we're also
worried that if we tell him will really upset him
(30:57):
that he never knew we had a half brother out there.
And maybe you know, who knows where this person is
and maybe he would want that. And and now what
I said in my response was that this is part
of his story. It's not just the mother's story and
what she did and giving up the sun for adoption.
It's his story. He has a half brother out there,
and it gives him information about himself and is placed
(31:18):
in the world, and who he is related to, and
also who his mother wasn't And maybe what you know,
the mother was always depressed in her life, the letter said,
and maybe there was some connection, because you know, there
was some She had a lot of feelings about having
given up that child for adoption, and he might have
personalized those feelings. And now it might make more sense
(31:40):
to him why his mother struggled so much. It just
flashes out his story and there will always be answers
that he won't have, but at least he will know this,
and then he can make a choice about what he
wants to do with that information. That in the intuitive way,
I think that people know, you know, he knew something
(32:01):
was wrong with his mother, but then we make up
stories to kind of make the stories make sense. But
if we just had the information, it would be so
much better. It's like that woman who discovered that her
father probably committed suicide. She used to buy suicide books,
you know, books like memoirs of people who there were
there have been suicide in the family, and her boyfriend
at one point remarked, like you read a lot about
(32:23):
suicide before been able to acknowledge that maybe this would
happened to her father. She didn't make the connection at all,
but she would was always fascinated by suicide after her
father's even though she never made the connection that maybe
he had commit suicide. Right. It's like it's almost the
difference between going through life and missing a couple of
(32:50):
colors like from the palette, right or um, or just
with this sense about oneself, like that there's something, there's
something that doesn't add up. There's a subtle disconnect in
some way. UM. And you know, we can go through
life that way and even have possibly somewhat contented um
(33:13):
and successful lives that way, but there's always something like
this woman buying these books about suicide or you know,
in my case, all of my books thematically, all my
novels were about family secrets. Why you know, like I
if you had said said to me, why um, I
(33:36):
would have said, I don't know, it's just those are
my themes. That's what I write about. My parents had secrets,
and I would create, I had created narratives about what
those secrets were. They were just not the big Cahuna secret.
They were different versions of this. Here's my story about
why my dad was depressed. Here's my story about why
my mother was angry. Here's my story about why they,
(33:58):
um we were, you know, unhappy with each other. All
those stories were in fact true, they just weren't the
whole truth. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. The other thing, too, is
that secrets travel through the generations. So um, you know
(34:20):
when you say you know the theme in your books
was all about family secrets. Um, if you hadn't unearthed
the secret, that might have passed along somehow to your
son in some ways that we can't know. In my family, UM,
my father discovered when he was very young, he was
(34:42):
in the i think the attic of his parents house,
and he discovered this box with all this, you know,
like children's things that were not his or his older sisters.
And one of them said Jack, and he said, just
Barrens who's act and they didn't tell him that that
(35:05):
was the brother who had died. Um. And he still
doesn't know of what or he thinks that you know,
with some like a flu or pneumonia or something like that.
UM that he doesn't know where he's buried. He doesn't
know where, he doesn't know anything. But he eventually like
a neighbor at one point he remembers, like me to comment,
you know that, um something that that the mother then
(35:26):
sort of like changed the subject and he would There
would be different things throughout my father's life where he
kind of put two and two together and thought, we
I think there was another person here and that boy
in the picture was my brother. When he later found
out that was in that the case. UM. And interestingly,
when I was a kid, and I didn't know this.
(35:47):
When I was a very little kid, one of the
things I was fascinated by when I would write little
stories myself was about like a dead child in the family.
I don't know whether it didn't happen, you know, it
didn't happen to me and my brother, but it was
just something there. I don't know whether that's a coincidence
or not, or whether that secret was kind of like
living in our d na um in the way that
(36:10):
secret do travel through the generations. And when I found
out about this story, when my father told it to me,
I never wrote about that anymore. It was like there
was something I was working out that I didn't even
know I was working out. Right, Well, you know, writing,
I think, or any kind of art making is one
(36:31):
of the ways that we, you know, kind of work
out our unconscious stuff and and we don't know that
that's what we're doing. So then there it is. There's
there's this body of work that you did as a child,
and you were done with it because that thing that
you were digging for in some way without knowing it
(36:53):
was answered. And I mean, to me, that's so fascinating
in terms of just the power of the conscious to
do that. So is what you're describing there in terms
of like secrets being carried through the DNA, which is
such an amazing idea. Is that is that what epigenetics are,
is that the that is that the study of epigenetics.
(37:15):
Epigenetics is fascinating and we don't know a lot about
it yet, but we talked about it sometimes in terms
of like a surrogate tearing a baby UM whose DNA
is different from that of the curroguit, right um, and
will the or were in the other direction, Say a
(37:36):
mother who used an egg donor and she's carrying the baby,
but it's not her egg, right UM that you to
make the umbryo. So they're saying that there's some way
that the d NA UM, somehow, UM can I don't.
I'm going to say this wrong. So, but there's some
(37:59):
way that the d NA UM can be part of
this child even though this wasn't her egg, right that
the DNA because she's carrying the baby. UM. I don't
know how it all works, but I do think that
there's like UM. You know, Carl, you talked about sort
of like the collective unconscious, right, and you think that
there's like a collective unconscious of a family, which I
(38:20):
don't think he talked about, UM. But in terms of secrets,
I think there is this like the way we carry
the UM like the programming from our family. And if
the programming is a programming of secrecy, we carry that
through the generations. Sometimes we reenact it with our own kits,
you know. We keep secrets in ways that our parents
(38:41):
did um. But sometimes like a secret that loves over
a family gets carried on um in ways because people
know that something's off, but they just don't know what
it is, and everybody in the family feels a little
bit like uneasy and they don't know why. That's so interesting.
So in that case, again, it's such an argument for
(39:02):
secrets coming out because then presumably if if a secret
is revealed in the light of day, it can't do
that particular kind of haunting in a collective, unconscious way
of a family because we see it because we know it,
right and so and so that's why when people say,
(39:24):
which is what you asked initially? Which is you know?
Is there a reason to keep secrets? And I should
say first that there's a difference between secrecy and privacy.
Right We all places that need to be private for ourselves, right,
We don't. We don't say every single thing that crosses
our mind to another person. We don't share every piece
(39:46):
of ourselves with another person. We need to keep some
private spaces for ourselves. That's healthy. But the secret is different.
The secret is something that is toxic um and it's faster,
and that's different private. See, it's really healthy and feel good.
Secrets you feel bad. So are there reasons that we
should keep secrets? We can come up with a million
(40:08):
reasons that we should keep a secret that all make
very rational, intellectual sense, but it doesn't make emotional sense
because in the end, that secret is going to affect people,
even the people you're trying to protect, whether you like
it or not, by virtue of being secret. And if
you reveal the secret, people will have feelings about it.
(40:32):
It might be hard for people, but ultimately, every single
person who has ever heard a secret, even if it
was something that really didn't want to be true, ultimately
that I've heard um, they they say they wanted to
know that it was better to know that it freed
them up in all kinds of ways, in all areas
(40:52):
of their life, in a way that the secret was
limiting them and keeping them constrained or trapped. And you
get the line. Family Secrets is an i Heart Media production.
(41:21):
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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