November 3, 2022 • 37 mins
From our earliest days as little human beings we love secrets. There’s something that makes kids a little giddy about knowing something special. In fact, psychology researcher and author of The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships and Who We Are Michael Slepian says kids know intuitively that sharing a secret is a way to create intimacy. He tells Ali that if you ask a child what a secret is, they might say it’s something you share with your best friend. Oh, but we do grow up. When do secrets become dangerous? Slepian uses his unique research to explain what our most common secrets tend to be, why we keep them, why we sometimes need to share them, and how that can be good for our mental health.
If you have questions or guest suggestions, Ali would love to hear from you. Call or text her at (323) 364-6356. Or email go-ask-ali-podcast-at-gmail.com. (No dashes)
**Go Ask Ali has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Interview/Talk Show Episode! Please vote for her and the whole team at https://bit.ly/415e8uN by April 20, 2023!
Links of Interest:
Book: The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships and Who We Are
Articles with Slepian’s Research:
“The Secrets You Keep Are Hurting You - Here’s How”, Psychology Today (01/22/19)
“Why We Keep So Many Secrets”, Psychology Today (07/05/22)
Listener Questions Notes:
(Peri)Menopause-Supporting Beauty Brands
CREDITS:
Executive Producers: Sandie Bailey, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang & Gabrielle Collins
Producer & Editor: Brooke Peterson-Bell
Associate Producer: Akiya McKnight
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Go, Ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I think like
eriginas have a lot to say. I think we should
let them speak out of it and they'll just talk. Yes,
one of the hardest things to absorb for those who
are new to these kinds of fights. Again, if we
want all of them, we wouldn't be here. If you
(00:20):
see a monster, don't try to run away, step right
up to it and say, what do you have to
teach me? Why are you? In my mind, I want
to be the person who has cancer and doesn't run
a marathon, Like, do I have to work that hard? No,
it's the best excuse not to run a marathon. Welcome
(00:41):
to go, Ask Allie. I'm Alli Wentworth and I have
a secret. Did I get your attention? That's right, because
secrets are enticing. But the question is are they good
for us? Are they bad for us? We all keep secrets,
We've all told secrets. Do you feel bad about a secret?
(01:01):
Are there any secrets you take to your grave? There's
just so many secrets, So what is the science behind secrets? Well,
my guest can tell us all these things and probably
divulge a few secrets of his own. Michael Slappian is
an Associate professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University.
As a leading expert on the psychology of secrets, he
(01:24):
is a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the
Association for Psychological Science. Slappian has authored more than fifty
articles on secrecy, truth and deception. His research has been
covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker,
The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, NPR, and more. Hi, Hey,
(01:46):
Michael Slappian, how are you the secret? Life of Secrets? So?
First of all, it's the most compelling title in the world,
because you know, secrets are enticing, terrifying, being somewhat delicious,
depending on what it is. Tell me, what is so
compelling to you about secrets? Why write a book about them?
(02:09):
We all keep secrets, and for most of those secrets,
we really don't talk about them, and so we really
don't have a good understanding of our own secrets. We
certainly don't have a good understanding of how secrets affect us.
There's also a lot of misconceptions, including in the academic
set of things, about what secrecy even is, and so
(02:30):
it doesn't have to be shrouded in mystery. We can
learn about how our secrets affect us because it will
help us better cope with them and help us better
decide what to do with these secrets. So I think
we should just jump in with the basics, which we
kind of need for context. What is a secret? I
define secrecy as an intention to withhold information from one
(02:53):
or more people, and the information is the secret. And
so there's plenty of things that about you that other
people don't know that or not secret. What makes one
of those things a secret is you intend to withhold
that information from at least one person. So tell me
a little bit about the difference besides the obvious, between
a big secret and a small secret. Yeah, So I
(03:15):
think when a secret seems small, it feels like the
detail is not very significant. Whether that's not significant to
us or not significant to the other person. Um that
there's no huge problem with keeping that kind of thing
a secret when we start thinking about big secrets, if
it feels big to you, then to me it indicates
perhaps is something you need help with or something that
(03:37):
you're not sure about, or it seems like a major
event and it's creating some kind of problem for you
that you're trying to work through. Um. For a secret
to be big, it has to feel like there's something
to do or there's something to figure out, you know.
I think to me, indicates there's there's some work to do,
whereas a small secret, you know, I don't really need
(04:00):
help with it. But this is just this little thing
I keep to myself. And nothing is harder than living
with the secret that can't be spoken. UM. And I
love how you talk about Tony Soprano in the book,
because I mean, he's such an iconic figure and you
know the idea of him having so many secrets that
(04:20):
caused him anxiety and depression, which leads him to therapy,
which is also a secret. And I'm I'm sort of
always fascinated by trauma and anxiety and depression, and I
think that secrets have many, many roots to all three
of those. And I you know, so many novels and
(04:41):
films have been written and made about the person that
find finds out they're not who they thought they were.
And that is a secret that when it's revealed, have
huge consequences. The kind of secrets that completely implode your life.
I'll draw on my personal experience here. Um. I and
(05:04):
I started the book Revealing this secret as well. UM
almost ten years ago. Now, I was just starting at
my secrecy research and I was actually on the job
interview this day and I was presenting this new research
on secrecy. And as the day was winding down, I
got a call from my dad which I didn't pick up.
(05:24):
And then I got another call from my dad and
I said, oh, no, something bad has happened. And he
then goes on to tell me when I eventually got
him on the phone later that night, where it's like
after midnight at this point, he says, Michael, I have
something to tell you. I'm not biologically able to have children.
I am not your biological father, is what he was saying.
And for me, of course, I mean for anyone, that's
(05:48):
going to be shocking to learn just you know, you
have these assumptions and to have them up ended can
be a lot. But I think for me in particular,
what was really shocking about that wasn't the new information.
As shocking as that was, I kind of readily accepted that.
I thought, well, you know, the relationships that matter most
to me, a lot of them are not based in genetics,
and so what does that matter whether I share jeans
(06:10):
with a parent or not. But it was the secret
keeping that really shook me, or that really shifted the
ground under my feet, because you know, this is a
secret my parents have been keeping for me my whole life.
I was in my twenties at that point, for for
more than two decades, and you know they planned on
never telling me about and our entire family knew except
(06:31):
for me and my younger brother. And so I think
when you get that, when you learn that kind of thing,
I could totally shake up everything my my younger brother was.
You know, it made it less shut about a lot
of things, whereas for me, it kind of made me
more sure about certain things. And so I think those
kinds of big secrets certainly cause you pause and start
(06:52):
asking questions that you might not have asked before. But
it's interesting that you say it wasn't so much the
concrete fact, but the secrecy of it. And I'm from
a family of a lot of secrets, and I when
I read your book, I really paused because I thought,
(07:13):
I think that's absolutely true. It's what is so painful
is not the fact, and Look, we can put it
into infidelity, because there was a lot of infidelity in
my upbringing. And it wasn't so much the fact that
you know, you did leave mom for this woman, but
the fact that you were with this woman for two
years and you know it was a secret, and it
(07:36):
was it was something you were withholding from your children.
And so to me, it's the repercussions of the secret.
So you know, and I think you say in your
book that one can be weighted down by secrets, then
I think that there are families that are so steeped
in secrets that everybody is weighted down, which brings me
(07:59):
back to it leads to anxiety and depression and alcoholism
and addiction. Um. Talk about the three dimensions of secrets.
So in in my research, one of the very first
things to do was to figure out what are the
secrets people commonly keep? How many secrets do people commonly keep?
When I started this research, you know, about ten years ago. Now,
(08:22):
that was a question no person had ever asked before,
which is crazy, um. And the reason why psychologists had
yet to ask that question was simply because when psychologists
before me studied secrecy, they have a very specific situation
in mind, one person interacting with another person and that
person asking you questions related to your secret, and that's
(08:45):
what they saw secrecy as. And the reason why that's
problematic is that that's just one moment of a secret,
and in fact, we don't often have to hide our secrets,
and our secrets exist before those moments, and they exist
afterwards too. And so because prior researchers were creating these
secrecy situations in the lab, they weren't looking at people's
(09:06):
real secrets. And so the first question was, now, if
we're gonna look at people's real secrets, which is what
we're trying to understand, what what are the secrets people keep?
And from asking a couple thousand people, we arrived at
these thirty eight common categories of secrets and includes all
the things you think would be on that list, issues
around sex, drugs, relationships, ambitions, and fidelity involving school work, abortion,
(09:32):
um self harm, harming another person, telling a lie, violating
another's trust, and so all use that in my research
to essentially look at a person's whole set of secrets,
because when you look at only one secret at a time,
you can ask, is this secret bad? Or good for you.
But you can't get at the question of which of
your secrets hurt you and why until you start looking
(09:53):
at a person's whole set of secrets. And so that's
what I do in my research. Now, if you were
wanted to ask me of these thirty eight categories, which
secrets are more harmful than others, these dimensions come into play,
and what we can see is that people naturally think
about their secrets as varying along three dimensions. The first
(10:13):
dimension is how immoral the secret is, and so the
more immoral you think your secret is the behavior in question,
the more you feel ashamed of that secret. Um. Infidelity,
of course, is for an example of the secret people
see us immoral um. The next dimension is how much
does the secret involved with other people? Some secrets very
much involved other people, any secret about romance or sex,
(10:36):
for example, very highly relational. Some secrets involved no other
people and just involve yourself only. And so a secret
that seems only where related to yourself feels very individual,
feels very personal um and also as secrets that we
find most isolating. And then the third dimension is how
much the secret involves your goals? Right, you know your aspirations,
(10:56):
and so that often involves, for example, the workplace, career
goals and so on. So secrets about work, secrets about
money are really high on this dimension, where secrets really
low on this dimension aren't oriented towards specific goals at all,
but are more sort of based in feeling. Um, what's
useful about knowing that these are three dimensions that people
primarily experience their secrets by is it means there's three
(11:19):
ways in which a secret can hurt you. And what's
so useful about knowing that If there's three ways in
which a secret can hurt you, there's also three ways
in which a secret doesn't have to hurt you. And
the good news is that in all situations, and what
we see in the research is that there is one
of the dimensions of those three you say is not
(11:41):
hurting you. And what I do is help people figure
out what dimension that is because it points you to
your path forward to better coping knowing how your secret
isn't hurting you, right, And I believe you in your
book you said that being weighted down by secrets. You
use the example of Pablo ascar Bar hiding all his
(12:01):
money in all the cracks and the walls, which I
sort of love that as a visual because when you
are bogged down by a lot of secrets, you are
tucking them into your consciousness everywhere. There's a lot more
to come after the short break and we're back. So
(12:28):
let me ask you this. When somebody says to you, Hey, Michael,
can you keep a secret? How do you answer that? Yeah?
I mean, if someone is saying that to me, it
indicates that they have something really interesting that they want
to talk about. That's one reason for gossip, if we
want to call it that. But also they might be
asking for help. And so if someone ever says that
to me, and I'm like, well, yes I can, um,
(12:50):
I can help if that's what you want. And I
can listen to hear what you have to say if
that's that's all you want too. So is it curious
that when people say, hey, Ali, can you keep a secret?
I always answer it depends because I have found and
you you talk about this in your book that sometimes
(13:11):
I have been blessed or cursed with someone else's secret
and I don't want that secret. I don't want to
hold it, I don't want to think about it. I
don't even want to know it, and my mother used
to always say to me, if you don't want anybody
to know your secrets, don't tell anybody. You've heard all
(13:32):
the children's lyrics about secret secrets are no fun unless
you share them with everyone. But there is an impulse
in human beings to tell secrets. Why do you think
that is? What is the psychology of needing to tell somebody? Yeah? So,
so there's a class of situations where it's like you
(13:52):
need help, and it's really hard to work on something
that you're struggling with if you're entirely alone with that thing.
And I one reason why people want to reveal their
secrets as they want to hear how people respond to them,
whether it's validating your experience or giving you advice on
what to do differently. But on an even more fundamental level,
(14:13):
I think the reason we so often want to talk
about our secrets with others, reveal our secrets to others,
is we just don't want to be alone with them.
You know, it's hard to have something in your head
and to not talk about it with any people. That
feels lonely or it feels isolating, and we don't want
to be alone with our thoughts. I think that's what,
at the end of the day, makes partly why secrecy
(14:35):
is are difficult. So why would people, for example, uh,
tell secrets about infidelity? That's one of the ones on
your list. Yeah, I've never been unfaithful to my husband,
but if I was, there is no way I would
tell anybody for risk of it coming out or him
finding out. But I have found that people seem to
(14:58):
tell their infidel all these two friends a lot. And
I don't know if it's what you just said before
that they need validation of it. But you know, I
can't help. But sometimes think do they want to be caught?
I mean, why are you telling me this secret? And
how do I now sit across from your spouse at
a dinner party? But but my first thing is why
(15:21):
are you telling me this? I really think it's even
in that example, is this this thing that did happen?
It did happen. You do have to find a way forward,
even if just by yourself, if if the decision is
to never reveal this to your partner, Um, it feels
good to just admit to someone that had happened. I
think again, it's just it's hard to be entirely alone
(15:43):
with something. You talk about confessing and confiding, and you know,
there's a whole structure built around, particularly the Catholic Church,
which is all about confessing and confiding and the idea
of relief seeing a secret that way in a safe place,
which I would also say therapy can be too. Um.
(16:07):
Is there a psychological release when you're able to confide,
when you're able to confess. Yeah. So the way I
distinguished confession and confiding is, Um, if you reveal a
secret to the person you're keeping it from, I call
that confession. If you reveal a secret to someone else,
I call that confiding. And so in terms of confessing,
(16:31):
sometimes that can be very complicated whether that's the right decision,
and fidelity is are you know we've already been talking
about is a great example, Um, confessing this to this
destroy your relationship. And so especially if you're trying to
decide whether it confess something, I think a good strategy
is often to talk to someone else about it to
be sure that you've made the right decision here. And
(16:52):
that's what I call confiding, talking to someone that you're
not specifically intending to hold that information from. And the
average experience people have with confiding is very helpful one. UM.
People feel like they get a lot out of those
conversations that it's And so what's helpful about confiding is
not just saying it out loud. UM, is not just
releasing your secret out into the world. It's that the
(17:14):
person responds and their research shows our research shows that
people respond in helpful ways. Maybe they give you advice,
maybe they give you emotional support, and maybe it's just
sympathy and they're like, that sucks, I'm so sorry that
you're dealing with that. Even that is really helpful to
just make you feel that you're not aline with this,
that you that that this is a tough situation, and
(17:36):
and that there is paths forward. UM. Maybe one reason
why people get so much out of confiding as they
choose the right people to confide in. UM. But even
a lukewarm response people find helpful. Only very negative responses
lead people to feel like confiding backfires and they're really rare. Again,
maybe because people choose the right people. UM. The other day,
(17:58):
a friend of mine said to do you think that
you will die holding onto any secrets? And I said,
I think there's probably two secrets I will die with
And I was thinking about afterwards, why why, And I
think that they're they're just embarrassing or shameful, like there's
no good or bad that would come out of telling them.
(18:21):
And I think that's got to be the sort of
bottom line of most of those secrets. You know that
it's shame on some level. Yeah, when it's something that
you feel ashamed with, if it's something that makes you
feel bad about yourself, it's very natural to imagine that
if you don't reveal it to people, that's better because
(18:44):
once people learn these things, then they're permanently out there
and you don't have control over them, and people might
draw the wrong conclusions. But I think talking about it
with some person, any person could be a therapist, could
be a bartender it you know, it could be like
a taxi driver ry right. Um, When we choose to
be entirely alone with something, we often don't develop healthy
(19:06):
ways of thinking about that thing. It's actually all too
easy to find unhealthy ways of thinking about that thing,
and that's hard to temper. That's hard to mitigate those
harms on your own because you're really locked into your
own perspective. It's really hard to find a way out
of that alone. You can try you can try journaling,
and that can help if you do it in a
(19:28):
way that challenges counterproductive ways of thinking. But that's really
easy to achieve in a conversation with anyone, um, someone
who you think could just be a sounding board or
someone who actually might respond with helpful advice, and you know,
maybe they have to be far removed from everything. That's
what it takes. I know, with like anxiety, holding in
(19:50):
anxiety can can cause all kinds of physical problems. Has
there been any studies about you know, holding secrets causing
cancer or any kind of internal damage because it's the
act of suppression or secrecy, yes, um, but it's often
not because of the suppression. UM. There's a famous study
(20:12):
that was conducted in the nineties on HIV positive men
who concealed their sexual orientation, and essentially, the more they
concealed their sexual orientation, the more rapid progression of disease, UM,
the more health problems than they even hide sooner. But
more recent research suggests that what's so harmful about that
(20:32):
situation is not feeling supportive enough to be yourself to
reveal yourself in the first place. It's not the hiding,
it's it's not feeling able to reveal. It is the problem.
And so having a secret is not harmful in itself,
but having a habit of secret keeping is because the
(20:53):
person who habitually keeps secrets as a way to deal
with problems is the person who's not working on those problems.
So let me ask you about responsibility of being the
recipient of confiding or confessing um because in therapy there's
doctor confidentiality. But if we were friends, even if we weren't,
(21:17):
even if I just sat next to you on a
train and I said, you know, I once killed a man.
When somebody reveals one of your quote unquote big secrets,
what is your responsibility of the recipient. If the secret
is about somebody who's being harmed, or if the secret
(21:39):
is hiding some kind of harm that's ongoing, that's a
problematic situation, especially if you think about like children or teenagers.
If someone asks you to keep a secret on their behalf,
if it's about something harmful, that's going to be a problem.
And so I think those are the kind of secrets
that you do have some kind of response ability to
(22:01):
address in some manner, Whether or not that's telling someone
else about it or talking with the person who revealed
this to you. If it's about somebody who's being harmed
by this information being contained, you should do something about him. Um,
you're right that people can feel burdened by others confessions
or being confided and can be a source of burden
(22:22):
if now you have to carry the secret on their behalf,
or now you have to think about this thing over
and over and so especially when you're unloading something heavy
on another person, They're going to help you, but recognize
your you might be placing a burden on them too.
And then there are the secrets that you've told somebody
that are revealed. There's a tremendous fear of telling somebody
(22:47):
a secret and having it exposed, which is why I
think so many people are tormented and keep so much
inside because the risk is too high and in most cases,
and it's time for a short break, welcome back to
(23:11):
go ask Alli. I have kids, right, and I think
secrets are probably the hardest thing for them because every
time I've said to either of my daughters, okay, promised
to keep a secret, I know that they're either going
to tell each other or tell my husband. So I
actually set them up to divulge information because I know
(23:33):
if they can't do it. So when you think about
the brain itself and cognitive thought and in the maturation
of the brain, can children keep secrets? Yeah, they can,
and they get better at it of course the older
they get. But even by age three, children will sometimes
try to keep secrets not very well. Um, and so
(23:54):
they're on their eight track as far as competent secret
keeping goods, and their youngest years they might just try
to keep a seat by denying it, saying I didn't
eat any cookies except for having cookie crumbs on their lips.
But as they get older, not only do they have
a better sense of what is the information that only
they know about that other people were not witnessed to something,
but they also have a better sense of how to
(24:15):
keep that information secret. So for example, if they broke
a vase, they might say in their younger years and
a ghost did it, whereas in their older years they
might say the cat did it, which is more believable.
So they have a better sense of what to say
or what not to say to keep a secret. All right,
So in in context of that, and as an example.
One of the things I was thinking about when I
was reading your book is what is the difference between
(24:38):
a secret and a lie? So secrecy and lying is
interesting because they can cross over in two different ways. Um.
The most important thing is they're different things. And so
there are plenty of times and there are plenty of
secrets that you can keep without telling a lie. UM.
So one can ask a question, you could say I
don't want to answer that, or you can say I
can't tell you that's secret. Um, or you could just
(24:59):
say something subtly different as a way answering a question
without revealing a secret. So lying is a way to
keep a secret, It's not a way I would typically recommend.
There's much better ways to keep a secret besides telling
something totally untrue. Also, you can keep a lie of secret.
So you said something, You've had some significant moment of
saying something that was not true, and you do not
(25:21):
want people to learn that you are not being truthful
in that moment, you might specifically intend to hold that
lie back the truth back. So yes, with children, the
secrets are pretty much all small secrets. But then when
they get older, in the teenage years and young adult years,
secrets become more dangerous, So talk to me about that.
(25:44):
The two differences between younger children keeping secrets and teenagers
keeping secrets is, first of all, teenagers can just get
into more trouble, into more complicated situations. Um, it doesn't
seem that childhood size in discretions, secrets about sort of
childhood sized accidents and so on, are are that harmful.
(26:06):
And maybe it's just because it's you know, small potatoes. Um,
But teens can get into more trouble, whether it's drug
use or you know, driving dangerously or things of that nature,
or maybe they're struggling with something at school, or struggling
with something relational, or with their friends or identity, right, identity,
(26:26):
it's as a huge one and so you know, the
struggles are bigger. But also in that shift to adolescents,
teenagers become a lot more concerned with how other people
will respond to them. And so as children become older
and start shifting into those teenage years, they become way
(26:48):
more concerned with saying the wrong thing. You know, they
become concerned with social approval. And at that point when
teenagers start becoming so concerned with saying the wrong thing
and so concerned with social approval that they'll hold something
back that they're struggling with. That's when secrecy starts to hurt.
(27:09):
And that's what secrecy looks like in adulthood, to where
our fears of being rejected eclipse our ability to place
trust in others and to obtain help and support. But
you do have a whole section on positive secrets. So
maybe I just grew up in a family of infidelity
and divorce and all I could think of is a
(27:31):
secret is a dark and it's an ominous thing. But
so tell us about positive secrets. Positive secrets, as you
might be expecting, are quite different from from the other secrets.
And it's not just because they're positive. Um. Some of
life's mss J is you know, occasions start off as
secret and marriage proposal, of pregnancy that a couple has
(27:53):
been trying to make happen, and so you know, a
surprise party or some kind of big surprise gift, and
the whole point of the secrecy is this big exciting reveal.
And so if you're carefully planning out you know, your
marriage proposal or you know, the surprise that you're pregnant, um,
(28:15):
because you're carefully planning how that information gets revealed. You
feel really in control over that secret, and feeling in
control over your life is one of the most fundamental
feelings you can have in terms of healthy living. When
people feel in control over their lives, they they more
effectively cope with life' challenges, they're healthier, they're happier, they
(28:35):
live longer, and so positive secrets can tap into this
because we feel so much in control over that. So
one thing your book I thought was interesting was the
thought that sharing secrets can actually make friends with people.
So can you talk to me about that? It's really
easy to see the sort of positive social power of
secrets and children. If you ask a young child to
(28:58):
tell you what a secret is, they might say, it's
something you would only share with your best friend. Um.
They understand that secrets don't have to be this thing
that we struggle with. It can be this special thing
that we share with other people because they're special people
in our lives. Um, you know, that's the stuff of
intimate relationships. Making yourself vulnerable revealing something. Um. You know,
(29:21):
a child might say a secret is something you can
tell your friend and they won't make fun of you,
and so you know, when we talk about secrets that
were struggling with or that we feel ashamed with, it's
really easy to lose sight of this amazing power that
these secrets have, where if you reveal it to someone,
something you wouldn't just tell anyone. It's this profound act
of intimacy that we can find with our secrets. Is
(29:45):
there anything in your research that surprised you? Yes, of
something I started doing was saying, you know, look at
this list of secrets. Tell me which secrets you're currently
keeping from this list, and then when is that secret
on your mind? And how much does that secret hurt you?
And because of my original studies looking at how just
(30:06):
thinking about a secret can devote a sense of burden,
anticipated that having to think about a secret a law
on your own time would be related to well being
harm and having to hide a secret in conversation with
people frequently would also be harmful. That we would find
these two different harms, one we could call the sort
of mental load and the other one of the sort
of stress of hiding it in conversation. It turns out
(30:28):
that the secrets that harm us the most are not
the ones we frequently conceal in conversation, it's the ones
we frequently think about outside of those conversations. Um, for
the most part, it's really actually hard to find harm
when it comes to concealing, And that kind of flies
in the face of what we used to think about SECRETSY.
It turns out that the average secret is just not
(30:48):
difficult to conceal. If you get asked a question related
to it, you answer a subtly different question, or you
redirect the conversation in another way. UM, all those secrets
we don't want people to know about us for the
most part that they don't know them. It's a while
it's technically not difficult to hide a secret, it turns
out it's all the other moments when you're not actively
hiding in where there's more room for your secrets to
(31:10):
harm you, when you think about on your own time,
that's where the problems often begin. So, as a scientist
and professor of secrets, what is the one big thing
that you want people to take away after reading your
book about secrets? If there's a secret that's bothering you
(31:31):
or upsetting you, or I think you're struggling with, you
don't have to reveal it so the person you're keeping
it from, although sometimes that's the right choice, but talking
about it with another person can just make the world
of difference because it turns out you need so little
from other people to feel much better, and they have
so much to offer when it comes to confiding a secret.
(31:52):
That's fantastic. So now, Michael in my podcast, go ask
Ali I. As you know, I've just asked you a
million questions, and now that we've reached the end, I
allow you to ask me. A question. Can be about anything. Okay, Um,
(32:13):
you told me earlier that you'll reveal secrets to your
children to sort of test them. I certainly love hearing
stories about kids secret keeping if if any come to mind.
Oh god, um, yes, let's see. Uh. When they were
little kids, you couldn't tell them anything. You couldn't say like, Okay,
(32:35):
we're going to have a cupcake, but you know it's
our secret because dinners in half an hour and then
you know, giggles, giggles, what's so funny? We had up
gigs before, Tony, So I very early on I learned, well,
these kids that they're going to divulge anything, So you know,
especially if you say to them Okay, this is a secret,
or it's a secret between you and me. It became
(32:57):
you know, common knowledge and out three minutes. So um,
but thank you Michael. The Secret Life of Secrets, How
our inner world shaped well being, relationships and who we
are is such a fascinating book on so many levels.
So thank you, so much. Thank you. So this is
(33:18):
our first mail bag moment of the season, and to
go along with our episode about secrets, these are a
couple of questions that my listeners are asking me about
my secrets. Hi. Ali is looking fantastic and actually looking younger. Well,
thank you. Has she had lasers? Peels and our boats? Oh,
(33:41):
we're asking beauty secrets. Okay, here's the secret. I've never
had lasers. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I've
never had peels. But yes, I have had botox. I
don't love it because it hurts, and I'm squeamish about
that kind of thing. When I give blood, I pass out,
So I don't like needles. I don't love the idea
(34:02):
of batuli is um being shot into my body. So yes,
occasionally use botox. I haven't used it in a long time,
and I know I should. But thank you for thinking
that I look younger. I have to say, I, Um,
I'm not somebody that goes oh, I just drink a
lot of water. I don't drink any water. I walk
a lot. But I'm happy like I'm happy. I love
(34:25):
my husband, I love my kids, I love my friends.
So sometimes I think where you are in your life
can can sort of show up on your face. So
right now it's good. Next question, Hi, Ali, I just
want to say I love you to pieces so sweet,
love your humor. I do have a question. I'm fifty
three years old and I'm starting to see the effects
(34:47):
from menopause. My skin is not looking as firm on
my face anymore. I just want to know the secret
what women are doing to help with that in your fifties.
Is it plastic surgery, creams, lotions? I just want to
know what I can do to help improve myself through menopause.
Thank you so much, Love you dealing. Okay, Well there's
a lot to unpack here. But the great thing about
(35:09):
menopause now is that there's so many new brand startups
and there's so many women that are creating cream specifically
for menopause. So in our show notes, I'm going to
give you a couple of links of of places to
go to find these lotions and potions um because they
really address exactly where we are in our life. And
(35:34):
in terms of plastic surgery, I about ten years ago
had my eyes done. Now I had bags under my
eyes that were inherited from my father. Anyway, I had
something called bluff roplastic where they take the fat from
under your eyes out. And I have to say I
was very anti plastic surgery. But afterwards, because it was
(35:56):
like my Moby Dick, it was something that it just
pained me every time I looked in the mirror. I
felt much happier afterwards. So I listen, if there's a
little something you can do, whatever it is, even if
it's like losing five pounds or buying kind of an
expensive oil for your face, do it because it makes
you feel good. Thank you for listening. To go ask
(36:20):
Alli to learn even more about secrets. Michael's book, The
Secret Life of Secrets is out now and you can
follow him on Twitter at Michael Sleppian and check out
our show notes for links and other info. Be sure
to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me
on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth and
on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth. Now if you'd
(36:42):
like to ask me a question, or suggest a guest,
or tell me a secret, I'd love to hear from you,
and there's a bunch of ways you can do it.
You can call or text me at three to three
three six four six three five six, or you can
email a voice memo right from your phone to Go
Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave
a question, you just might hear it. I'll go ask Gali.
(37:13):
Go Ask Gali is a production of Shonda Land Audio
and partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Go, Ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I think like
eriginas have a lot to say. I think we should
let them speak out of it and they'll just talk. Yes,
one of the hardest things to absorb for those who
are new to these kinds of fights. Again, if we
want all of them, we wouldn't be here. If you
(00:20):
see a monster, don't try to run away, step right
up to it and say, what do you have to
teach me? Why are you? In my mind, I want
to be the person who has cancer and doesn't run
a marathon, Like, do I have to work that hard? No,
it's the best excuse not to run a marathon. Welcome
(00:41):
to go, Ask Allie. I'm Alli Wentworth and I have
a secret. Did I get your attention? That's right, because
secrets are enticing. But the question is are they good
for us? Are they bad for us? We all keep secrets,
We've all told secrets. Do you feel bad about a secret?
(01:01):
Are there any secrets you take to your grave? There's
just so many secrets, So what is the science behind secrets? Well,
my guest can tell us all these things and probably
divulge a few secrets of his own. Michael Slappian is
an Associate professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University.
As a leading expert on the psychology of secrets, he
(01:24):
is a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the
Association for Psychological Science. Slappian has authored more than fifty
articles on secrecy, truth and deception. His research has been
covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker,
The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, NPR, and more. Hi, Hey,
(01:46):
Michael Slappian, how are you the secret? Life of Secrets? So?
First of all, it's the most compelling title in the world,
because you know, secrets are enticing, terrifying, being somewhat delicious,
depending on what it is. Tell me, what is so
compelling to you about secrets? Why write a book about them?
(02:09):
We all keep secrets, and for most of those secrets,
we really don't talk about them, and so we really
don't have a good understanding of our own secrets. We
certainly don't have a good understanding of how secrets affect us.
There's also a lot of misconceptions, including in the academic
set of things, about what secrecy even is, and so
(02:30):
it doesn't have to be shrouded in mystery. We can
learn about how our secrets affect us because it will
help us better cope with them and help us better
decide what to do with these secrets. So I think
we should just jump in with the basics, which we
kind of need for context. What is a secret? I
define secrecy as an intention to withhold information from one
(02:53):
or more people, and the information is the secret. And
so there's plenty of things that about you that other
people don't know that or not secret. What makes one
of those things a secret is you intend to withhold
that information from at least one person. So tell me
a little bit about the difference besides the obvious, between
a big secret and a small secret. Yeah, So I
(03:15):
think when a secret seems small, it feels like the
detail is not very significant. Whether that's not significant to
us or not significant to the other person. Um that
there's no huge problem with keeping that kind of thing
a secret when we start thinking about big secrets, if
it feels big to you, then to me it indicates
perhaps is something you need help with or something that
(03:37):
you're not sure about, or it seems like a major
event and it's creating some kind of problem for you
that you're trying to work through. Um. For a secret
to be big, it has to feel like there's something
to do or there's something to figure out, you know.
I think to me, indicates there's there's some work to do,
whereas a small secret, you know, I don't really need
(04:00):
help with it. But this is just this little thing
I keep to myself. And nothing is harder than living
with the secret that can't be spoken. UM. And I
love how you talk about Tony Soprano in the book,
because I mean, he's such an iconic figure and you
know the idea of him having so many secrets that
(04:20):
caused him anxiety and depression, which leads him to therapy,
which is also a secret. And I'm I'm sort of
always fascinated by trauma and anxiety and depression, and I
think that secrets have many, many roots to all three
of those. And I you know, so many novels and
(04:41):
films have been written and made about the person that
find finds out they're not who they thought they were.
And that is a secret that when it's revealed, have
huge consequences. The kind of secrets that completely implode your life.
I'll draw on my personal experience here. Um. I and
(05:04):
I started the book Revealing this secret as well. UM
almost ten years ago. Now, I was just starting at
my secrecy research and I was actually on the job
interview this day and I was presenting this new research
on secrecy. And as the day was winding down, I
got a call from my dad which I didn't pick up.
(05:24):
And then I got another call from my dad and
I said, oh, no, something bad has happened. And he
then goes on to tell me when I eventually got
him on the phone later that night, where it's like
after midnight at this point, he says, Michael, I have
something to tell you. I'm not biologically able to have children.
I am not your biological father, is what he was saying.
And for me, of course, I mean for anyone, that's
(05:48):
going to be shocking to learn just you know, you
have these assumptions and to have them up ended can
be a lot. But I think for me in particular,
what was really shocking about that wasn't the new information.
As shocking as that was, I kind of readily accepted that.
I thought, well, you know, the relationships that matter most
to me, a lot of them are not based in genetics,
and so what does that matter whether I share jeans
(06:10):
with a parent or not. But it was the secret
keeping that really shook me, or that really shifted the
ground under my feet, because you know, this is a
secret my parents have been keeping for me my whole life.
I was in my twenties at that point, for for
more than two decades, and you know they planned on
never telling me about and our entire family knew except
(06:31):
for me and my younger brother. And so I think
when you get that, when you learn that kind of thing,
I could totally shake up everything my my younger brother was.
You know, it made it less shut about a lot
of things, whereas for me, it kind of made me
more sure about certain things. And so I think those
kinds of big secrets certainly cause you pause and start
(06:52):
asking questions that you might not have asked before. But
it's interesting that you say it wasn't so much the
concrete fact, but the secrecy of it. And I'm from
a family of a lot of secrets, and I when
I read your book, I really paused because I thought,
(07:13):
I think that's absolutely true. It's what is so painful
is not the fact, and Look, we can put it
into infidelity, because there was a lot of infidelity in
my upbringing. And it wasn't so much the fact that
you know, you did leave mom for this woman, but
the fact that you were with this woman for two
years and you know it was a secret, and it
(07:36):
was it was something you were withholding from your children.
And so to me, it's the repercussions of the secret.
So you know, and I think you say in your
book that one can be weighted down by secrets, then
I think that there are families that are so steeped
in secrets that everybody is weighted down, which brings me
(07:59):
back to it leads to anxiety and depression and alcoholism
and addiction. Um. Talk about the three dimensions of secrets.
So in in my research, one of the very first
things to do was to figure out what are the
secrets people commonly keep? How many secrets do people commonly keep?
When I started this research, you know, about ten years ago. Now,
(08:22):
that was a question no person had ever asked before,
which is crazy, um. And the reason why psychologists had
yet to ask that question was simply because when psychologists
before me studied secrecy, they have a very specific situation
in mind, one person interacting with another person and that
person asking you questions related to your secret, and that's
(08:45):
what they saw secrecy as. And the reason why that's
problematic is that that's just one moment of a secret,
and in fact, we don't often have to hide our secrets,
and our secrets exist before those moments, and they exist
afterwards too. And so because prior researchers were creating these
secrecy situations in the lab, they weren't looking at people's
(09:06):
real secrets. And so the first question was, now, if
we're gonna look at people's real secrets, which is what
we're trying to understand, what what are the secrets people keep?
And from asking a couple thousand people, we arrived at
these thirty eight common categories of secrets and includes all
the things you think would be on that list, issues
around sex, drugs, relationships, ambitions, and fidelity involving school work, abortion,
(09:32):
um self harm, harming another person, telling a lie, violating
another's trust, and so all use that in my research
to essentially look at a person's whole set of secrets,
because when you look at only one secret at a time,
you can ask, is this secret bad? Or good for you.
But you can't get at the question of which of
your secrets hurt you and why until you start looking
(09:53):
at a person's whole set of secrets. And so that's
what I do in my research. Now, if you were
wanted to ask me of these thirty eight categories, which
secrets are more harmful than others, these dimensions come into play,
and what we can see is that people naturally think
about their secrets as varying along three dimensions. The first
(10:13):
dimension is how immoral the secret is, and so the
more immoral you think your secret is the behavior in question,
the more you feel ashamed of that secret. Um. Infidelity,
of course, is for an example of the secret people
see us immoral um. The next dimension is how much
does the secret involved with other people? Some secrets very
much involved other people, any secret about romance or sex,
(10:36):
for example, very highly relational. Some secrets involved no other
people and just involve yourself only. And so a secret
that seems only where related to yourself feels very individual,
feels very personal um and also as secrets that we
find most isolating. And then the third dimension is how
much the secret involves your goals? Right, you know your aspirations,
(10:56):
and so that often involves, for example, the workplace, career
goals and so on. So secrets about work, secrets about
money are really high on this dimension, where secrets really
low on this dimension aren't oriented towards specific goals at all,
but are more sort of based in feeling. Um, what's
useful about knowing that these are three dimensions that people
primarily experience their secrets by is it means there's three
(11:19):
ways in which a secret can hurt you. And what's
so useful about knowing that If there's three ways in
which a secret can hurt you, there's also three ways
in which a secret doesn't have to hurt you. And
the good news is that in all situations, and what
we see in the research is that there is one
of the dimensions of those three you say is not
(11:41):
hurting you. And what I do is help people figure
out what dimension that is because it points you to
your path forward to better coping knowing how your secret
isn't hurting you, right, And I believe you in your
book you said that being weighted down by secrets. You
use the example of Pablo ascar Bar hiding all his
(12:01):
money in all the cracks and the walls, which I
sort of love that as a visual because when you
are bogged down by a lot of secrets, you are
tucking them into your consciousness everywhere. There's a lot more
to come after the short break and we're back. So
(12:28):
let me ask you this. When somebody says to you, Hey, Michael,
can you keep a secret? How do you answer that? Yeah?
I mean, if someone is saying that to me, it
indicates that they have something really interesting that they want
to talk about. That's one reason for gossip, if we
want to call it that. But also they might be
asking for help. And so if someone ever says that
to me, and I'm like, well, yes I can, um,
(12:50):
I can help if that's what you want. And I
can listen to hear what you have to say if
that's that's all you want too. So is it curious
that when people say, hey, Ali, can you keep a secret?
I always answer it depends because I have found and
you you talk about this in your book that sometimes
(13:11):
I have been blessed or cursed with someone else's secret
and I don't want that secret. I don't want to
hold it, I don't want to think about it. I
don't even want to know it, and my mother used
to always say to me, if you don't want anybody
to know your secrets, don't tell anybody. You've heard all
(13:32):
the children's lyrics about secret secrets are no fun unless
you share them with everyone. But there is an impulse
in human beings to tell secrets. Why do you think
that is? What is the psychology of needing to tell somebody? Yeah? So,
so there's a class of situations where it's like you
(13:52):
need help, and it's really hard to work on something
that you're struggling with if you're entirely alone with that thing.
And I one reason why people want to reveal their
secrets as they want to hear how people respond to them,
whether it's validating your experience or giving you advice on
what to do differently. But on an even more fundamental level,
(14:13):
I think the reason we so often want to talk
about our secrets with others, reveal our secrets to others,
is we just don't want to be alone with them.
You know, it's hard to have something in your head
and to not talk about it with any people. That
feels lonely or it feels isolating, and we don't want
to be alone with our thoughts. I think that's what,
at the end of the day, makes partly why secrecy
(14:35):
is are difficult. So why would people, for example, uh,
tell secrets about infidelity? That's one of the ones on
your list. Yeah, I've never been unfaithful to my husband,
but if I was, there is no way I would
tell anybody for risk of it coming out or him
finding out. But I have found that people seem to
(14:58):
tell their infidel all these two friends a lot. And
I don't know if it's what you just said before
that they need validation of it. But you know, I
can't help. But sometimes think do they want to be caught?
I mean, why are you telling me this secret? And
how do I now sit across from your spouse at
a dinner party? But but my first thing is why
(15:21):
are you telling me this? I really think it's even
in that example, is this this thing that did happen?
It did happen. You do have to find a way forward,
even if just by yourself, if if the decision is
to never reveal this to your partner, Um, it feels
good to just admit to someone that had happened. I
think again, it's just it's hard to be entirely alone
(15:43):
with something. You talk about confessing and confiding, and you know,
there's a whole structure built around, particularly the Catholic Church,
which is all about confessing and confiding and the idea
of relief seeing a secret that way in a safe place,
which I would also say therapy can be too. Um.
(16:07):
Is there a psychological release when you're able to confide,
when you're able to confess. Yeah. So the way I
distinguished confession and confiding is, Um, if you reveal a
secret to the person you're keeping it from, I call
that confession. If you reveal a secret to someone else,
I call that confiding. And so in terms of confessing,
(16:31):
sometimes that can be very complicated whether that's the right decision,
and fidelity is are you know we've already been talking
about is a great example, Um, confessing this to this
destroy your relationship. And so especially if you're trying to
decide whether it confess something, I think a good strategy
is often to talk to someone else about it to
be sure that you've made the right decision here. And
(16:52):
that's what I call confiding, talking to someone that you're
not specifically intending to hold that information from. And the
average experience people have with confiding is very helpful one. UM.
People feel like they get a lot out of those
conversations that it's And so what's helpful about confiding is
not just saying it out loud. UM, is not just
releasing your secret out into the world. It's that the
(17:14):
person responds and their research shows our research shows that
people respond in helpful ways. Maybe they give you advice,
maybe they give you emotional support, and maybe it's just
sympathy and they're like, that sucks, I'm so sorry that
you're dealing with that. Even that is really helpful to
just make you feel that you're not aline with this,
that you that that this is a tough situation, and
(17:36):
and that there is paths forward. UM. Maybe one reason
why people get so much out of confiding as they
choose the right people to confide in. UM. But even
a lukewarm response people find helpful. Only very negative responses
lead people to feel like confiding backfires and they're really rare. Again,
maybe because people choose the right people. UM. The other day,
(17:58):
a friend of mine said to do you think that
you will die holding onto any secrets? And I said,
I think there's probably two secrets I will die with
And I was thinking about afterwards, why why, And I
think that they're they're just embarrassing or shameful, like there's
no good or bad that would come out of telling them.
(18:21):
And I think that's got to be the sort of
bottom line of most of those secrets. You know that
it's shame on some level. Yeah, when it's something that
you feel ashamed with, if it's something that makes you
feel bad about yourself, it's very natural to imagine that
if you don't reveal it to people, that's better because
(18:44):
once people learn these things, then they're permanently out there
and you don't have control over them, and people might
draw the wrong conclusions. But I think talking about it
with some person, any person could be a therapist, could
be a bartender it you know, it could be like
a taxi driver ry right. Um, When we choose to
be entirely alone with something, we often don't develop healthy
(19:06):
ways of thinking about that thing. It's actually all too
easy to find unhealthy ways of thinking about that thing,
and that's hard to temper. That's hard to mitigate those
harms on your own because you're really locked into your
own perspective. It's really hard to find a way out
of that alone. You can try you can try journaling,
and that can help if you do it in a
(19:28):
way that challenges counterproductive ways of thinking. But that's really
easy to achieve in a conversation with anyone, um, someone
who you think could just be a sounding board or
someone who actually might respond with helpful advice, and you know,
maybe they have to be far removed from everything. That's
what it takes. I know, with like anxiety, holding in
(19:50):
anxiety can can cause all kinds of physical problems. Has
there been any studies about you know, holding secrets causing
cancer or any kind of internal damage because it's the
act of suppression or secrecy, yes, um, but it's often
not because of the suppression. UM. There's a famous study
(20:12):
that was conducted in the nineties on HIV positive men
who concealed their sexual orientation, and essentially, the more they
concealed their sexual orientation, the more rapid progression of disease, UM,
the more health problems than they even hide sooner. But
more recent research suggests that what's so harmful about that
(20:32):
situation is not feeling supportive enough to be yourself to
reveal yourself in the first place. It's not the hiding,
it's it's not feeling able to reveal. It is the problem.
And so having a secret is not harmful in itself,
but having a habit of secret keeping is because the
(20:53):
person who habitually keeps secrets as a way to deal
with problems is the person who's not working on those problems.
So let me ask you about responsibility of being the
recipient of confiding or confessing um because in therapy there's
doctor confidentiality. But if we were friends, even if we weren't,
(21:17):
even if I just sat next to you on a
train and I said, you know, I once killed a man.
When somebody reveals one of your quote unquote big secrets,
what is your responsibility of the recipient. If the secret
is about somebody who's being harmed, or if the secret
(21:39):
is hiding some kind of harm that's ongoing, that's a
problematic situation, especially if you think about like children or teenagers.
If someone asks you to keep a secret on their behalf,
if it's about something harmful, that's going to be a problem.
And so I think those are the kind of secrets
that you do have some kind of response ability to
(22:01):
address in some manner, Whether or not that's telling someone
else about it or talking with the person who revealed
this to you. If it's about somebody who's being harmed
by this information being contained, you should do something about him. Um,
you're right that people can feel burdened by others confessions
or being confided and can be a source of burden
(22:22):
if now you have to carry the secret on their behalf,
or now you have to think about this thing over
and over and so especially when you're unloading something heavy
on another person, They're going to help you, but recognize
your you might be placing a burden on them too.
And then there are the secrets that you've told somebody
that are revealed. There's a tremendous fear of telling somebody
(22:47):
a secret and having it exposed, which is why I
think so many people are tormented and keep so much
inside because the risk is too high and in most cases,
and it's time for a short break, welcome back to
(23:11):
go ask Alli. I have kids, right, and I think
secrets are probably the hardest thing for them because every
time I've said to either of my daughters, okay, promised
to keep a secret, I know that they're either going
to tell each other or tell my husband. So I
actually set them up to divulge information because I know
(23:33):
if they can't do it. So when you think about
the brain itself and cognitive thought and in the maturation
of the brain, can children keep secrets? Yeah, they can,
and they get better at it of course the older
they get. But even by age three, children will sometimes
try to keep secrets not very well. Um, and so
(23:54):
they're on their eight track as far as competent secret
keeping goods, and their youngest years they might just try
to keep a seat by denying it, saying I didn't
eat any cookies except for having cookie crumbs on their lips.
But as they get older, not only do they have
a better sense of what is the information that only
they know about that other people were not witnessed to something,
but they also have a better sense of how to
(24:15):
keep that information secret. So for example, if they broke
a vase, they might say in their younger years and
a ghost did it, whereas in their older years they
might say the cat did it, which is more believable.
So they have a better sense of what to say
or what not to say to keep a secret. All right,
So in in context of that, and as an example.
One of the things I was thinking about when I
was reading your book is what is the difference between
(24:38):
a secret and a lie? So secrecy and lying is
interesting because they can cross over in two different ways. Um.
The most important thing is they're different things. And so
there are plenty of times and there are plenty of
secrets that you can keep without telling a lie. UM.
So one can ask a question, you could say I
don't want to answer that, or you can say I
can't tell you that's secret. Um, or you could just
(24:59):
say something subtly different as a way answering a question
without revealing a secret. So lying is a way to
keep a secret, It's not a way I would typically recommend.
There's much better ways to keep a secret besides telling
something totally untrue. Also, you can keep a lie of secret.
So you said something, You've had some significant moment of
saying something that was not true, and you do not
(25:21):
want people to learn that you are not being truthful
in that moment, you might specifically intend to hold that
lie back the truth back. So yes, with children, the
secrets are pretty much all small secrets. But then when
they get older, in the teenage years and young adult years,
secrets become more dangerous, So talk to me about that.
(25:44):
The two differences between younger children keeping secrets and teenagers
keeping secrets is, first of all, teenagers can just get
into more trouble, into more complicated situations. Um, it doesn't
seem that childhood size in discretions, secrets about sort of
childhood sized accidents and so on, are are that harmful.
(26:06):
And maybe it's just because it's you know, small potatoes. Um,
But teens can get into more trouble, whether it's drug
use or you know, driving dangerously or things of that nature,
or maybe they're struggling with something at school, or struggling
with something relational, or with their friends or identity, right, identity,
(26:26):
it's as a huge one and so you know, the
struggles are bigger. But also in that shift to adolescents,
teenagers become a lot more concerned with how other people
will respond to them. And so as children become older
and start shifting into those teenage years, they become way
(26:48):
more concerned with saying the wrong thing. You know, they
become concerned with social approval. And at that point when
teenagers start becoming so concerned with saying the wrong thing
and so concerned with social approval that they'll hold something
back that they're struggling with. That's when secrecy starts to hurt.
(27:09):
And that's what secrecy looks like in adulthood, to where
our fears of being rejected eclipse our ability to place
trust in others and to obtain help and support. But
you do have a whole section on positive secrets. So
maybe I just grew up in a family of infidelity
and divorce and all I could think of is a
(27:31):
secret is a dark and it's an ominous thing. But
so tell us about positive secrets. Positive secrets, as you
might be expecting, are quite different from from the other secrets.
And it's not just because they're positive. Um. Some of
life's mss J is you know, occasions start off as
secret and marriage proposal, of pregnancy that a couple has
(27:53):
been trying to make happen, and so you know, a
surprise party or some kind of big surprise gift, and
the whole point of the secrecy is this big exciting reveal.
And so if you're carefully planning out you know, your
marriage proposal or you know, the surprise that you're pregnant, um,
(28:15):
because you're carefully planning how that information gets revealed. You
feel really in control over that secret, and feeling in
control over your life is one of the most fundamental
feelings you can have in terms of healthy living. When
people feel in control over their lives, they they more
effectively cope with life' challenges, they're healthier, they're happier, they
(28:35):
live longer, and so positive secrets can tap into this
because we feel so much in control over that. So
one thing your book I thought was interesting was the
thought that sharing secrets can actually make friends with people.
So can you talk to me about that? It's really
easy to see the sort of positive social power of
secrets and children. If you ask a young child to
(28:58):
tell you what a secret is, they might say, it's
something you would only share with your best friend. Um.
They understand that secrets don't have to be this thing
that we struggle with. It can be this special thing
that we share with other people because they're special people
in our lives. Um, you know, that's the stuff of
intimate relationships. Making yourself vulnerable revealing something. Um. You know,
(29:21):
a child might say a secret is something you can
tell your friend and they won't make fun of you,
and so you know, when we talk about secrets that
were struggling with or that we feel ashamed with, it's
really easy to lose sight of this amazing power that
these secrets have, where if you reveal it to someone,
something you wouldn't just tell anyone. It's this profound act
of intimacy that we can find with our secrets. Is
(29:45):
there anything in your research that surprised you? Yes, of
something I started doing was saying, you know, look at
this list of secrets. Tell me which secrets you're currently
keeping from this list, and then when is that secret
on your mind? And how much does that secret hurt you?
And because of my original studies looking at how just
(30:06):
thinking about a secret can devote a sense of burden,
anticipated that having to think about a secret a law
on your own time would be related to well being
harm and having to hide a secret in conversation with
people frequently would also be harmful. That we would find
these two different harms, one we could call the sort
of mental load and the other one of the sort
of stress of hiding it in conversation. It turns out
(30:28):
that the secrets that harm us the most are not
the ones we frequently conceal in conversation, it's the ones
we frequently think about outside of those conversations. Um, for
the most part, it's really actually hard to find harm
when it comes to concealing, And that kind of flies
in the face of what we used to think about SECRETSY.
It turns out that the average secret is just not
(30:48):
difficult to conceal. If you get asked a question related
to it, you answer a subtly different question, or you
redirect the conversation in another way. UM, all those secrets
we don't want people to know about us for the
most part that they don't know them. It's a while
it's technically not difficult to hide a secret, it turns
out it's all the other moments when you're not actively
hiding in where there's more room for your secrets to
(31:10):
harm you, when you think about on your own time,
that's where the problems often begin. So, as a scientist
and professor of secrets, what is the one big thing
that you want people to take away after reading your
book about secrets? If there's a secret that's bothering you
(31:31):
or upsetting you, or I think you're struggling with, you
don't have to reveal it so the person you're keeping
it from, although sometimes that's the right choice, but talking
about it with another person can just make the world
of difference because it turns out you need so little
from other people to feel much better, and they have
so much to offer when it comes to confiding a secret.
(31:52):
That's fantastic. So now, Michael in my podcast, go ask
Ali I. As you know, I've just asked you a
million questions, and now that we've reached the end, I
allow you to ask me. A question. Can be about anything. Okay, Um,
(32:13):
you told me earlier that you'll reveal secrets to your
children to sort of test them. I certainly love hearing
stories about kids secret keeping if if any come to mind.
Oh god, um, yes, let's see. Uh. When they were
little kids, you couldn't tell them anything. You couldn't say like, Okay,
(32:35):
we're going to have a cupcake, but you know it's
our secret because dinners in half an hour and then
you know, giggles, giggles, what's so funny? We had up
gigs before, Tony, So I very early on I learned, well,
these kids that they're going to divulge anything, So you know,
especially if you say to them Okay, this is a secret,
or it's a secret between you and me. It became
(32:57):
you know, common knowledge and out three minutes. So um,
but thank you Michael. The Secret Life of Secrets, How
our inner world shaped well being, relationships and who we
are is such a fascinating book on so many levels.
So thank you, so much. Thank you. So this is
(33:18):
our first mail bag moment of the season, and to
go along with our episode about secrets, these are a
couple of questions that my listeners are asking me about
my secrets. Hi. Ali is looking fantastic and actually looking younger. Well,
thank you. Has she had lasers? Peels and our boats? Oh,
(33:41):
we're asking beauty secrets. Okay, here's the secret. I've never
had lasers. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I've
never had peels. But yes, I have had botox. I
don't love it because it hurts, and I'm squeamish about
that kind of thing. When I give blood, I pass out,
So I don't like needles. I don't love the idea
(34:02):
of batuli is um being shot into my body. So yes,
occasionally use botox. I haven't used it in a long time,
and I know I should. But thank you for thinking
that I look younger. I have to say, I, Um,
I'm not somebody that goes oh, I just drink a
lot of water. I don't drink any water. I walk
a lot. But I'm happy like I'm happy. I love
(34:25):
my husband, I love my kids, I love my friends.
So sometimes I think where you are in your life
can can sort of show up on your face. So
right now it's good. Next question, Hi, Ali, I just
want to say I love you to pieces so sweet,
love your humor. I do have a question. I'm fifty
three years old and I'm starting to see the effects
(34:47):
from menopause. My skin is not looking as firm on
my face anymore. I just want to know the secret
what women are doing to help with that in your fifties.
Is it plastic surgery, creams, lotions? I just want to
know what I can do to help improve myself through menopause.
Thank you so much, Love you dealing. Okay, Well there's
a lot to unpack here. But the great thing about
(35:09):
menopause now is that there's so many new brand startups
and there's so many women that are creating cream specifically
for menopause. So in our show notes, I'm going to
give you a couple of links of of places to
go to find these lotions and potions um because they
really address exactly where we are in our life. And
(35:34):
in terms of plastic surgery, I about ten years ago
had my eyes done. Now I had bags under my
eyes that were inherited from my father. Anyway, I had
something called bluff roplastic where they take the fat from
under your eyes out. And I have to say I
was very anti plastic surgery. But afterwards, because it was
(35:56):
like my Moby Dick, it was something that it just
pained me every time I looked in the mirror. I
felt much happier afterwards. So I listen, if there's a
little something you can do, whatever it is, even if
it's like losing five pounds or buying kind of an
expensive oil for your face, do it because it makes
you feel good. Thank you for listening. To go ask
(36:20):
Alli to learn even more about secrets. Michael's book, The
Secret Life of Secrets is out now and you can
follow him on Twitter at Michael Sleppian and check out
our show notes for links and other info. Be sure
to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me
on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth and
on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth. Now if you'd
(36:42):
like to ask me a question, or suggest a guest,
or tell me a secret, I'd love to hear from you,
and there's a bunch of ways you can do it.
You can call or text me at three to three
three six four six three five six, or you can
email a voice memo right from your phone to Go
Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave
a question, you just might hear it. I'll go ask Gali.
(37:13):
Go Ask Gali is a production of Shonda Land Audio
and partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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