Family Secrets and the Emotional Process Behind Them
Imagine your sister tells you something at the kitchen table and ends with, “but don’t tell Mom.” You feel the weight of it before you’ve decided anything. Your stomach tightens. Already you’re calculating what to say to your mother on Sunday.
That tightening is the part I find interesting. It’s no secret that family secrets are an emotional process. And understanding the emotional process is the secret to secrets.
What does a systems perspective have to say about secrets? Quite a bit in fact.
Family secrets often come out of an anxiety-driven emotional process. It’s not the secret itself that matters as much as the emotional process around it. A secret is a symptom of an emotional process worth investigating.
Dr. Murray Bowen wrote about responsible, private communication and contrasted it with what he called irresponsible communication. I’ll work through both.
Why do people keep secrets, and why do we gossip?
Family secrets are driven by some form of discomfort or anxiety. If you find yourself wanting to keep something secret, you might pause and do a self-check. What are you worried or anxious about if you reveal it?
Irresponsible communication, on the other hand, often involves sharing unverified or private information. Gossip falls into this category. Tension or discomfort can drive the process, but so can an unrecognized desire for attention or approval. A triangle can form here: the revealer and a third person take an inside position, and the person the secret is about is left on the outside.
What stands out to me is how much a secret is a relationship system process, energized by some level of anxiety.
Emotional drivers of secrets in relationships
Several feelings tend to drive secrets and the careless sharing of them. Here are the common ones.
Fear of conflict. Revealing a secret can anger another person for various reasons. Anyone wanting to dodge conflict will keep the secret to avoid that anger.
Fear of rejection. A shared secret might cause another person to reject the secret holder, with disapproval, shock, or disgust.
Fear of loss of trust. The other person might not show rejection or anger, but they might simply decide not to trust the revealer any more.
Fear of being threatened. Another person might use the secret against the revealer in a way that is truly a threat, aka blackmail.
Desire to harm the other. Sometimes a secret gets revealed precisely because the revealer wants to wound the other person.
Desire to feel important. Revealing a secret can boost a person’s sense of importance, their pseudo-self (Bowen’s term for the parts of self that depend on social approval), in the eyes of others.
Desire for attention or approval. Dr Michael Kerr pointed to attention and approval as primary social cues, both of which can be fostered by sharing a secret.
I find that once you see this list, it’s harder to think of a secret as just content. Dr. Bowen made the same point: process before content.
It takes two to keep a secret
If family secrets are an emotional process, which I believe they are, then without another person you don’t have the process. The drivers above are all anticipations of how another person will react. The revealer is reacting to a prediction. Will the receiver feel threatened and react negatively? Or will they offer attention and approval for being let in?
Like a shout in an empty forest, if there is no one to share a secret with, is it really a secret? I think a secret requires a relationship to be a secret. Which of your own secrets, I wonder, would lose their weight if you stopped imagining the other person’s reaction?
How family secrets affect an open relationship system
Dr. Bowen wrote that “An ‘open’ relationship system is one in which an individual is free to communicate a high percentage of inner thoughts, feelings, and fantasies to another who can reciprocate. No one ever has a completely open relationship with another, but it is a healthy state when a person can have one relationship in which a reasonable degree of openness is possible.” [Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice]
I notice that a more reactive or fused person is more sensitive to conflict, disapproval, and rejection. This emotional reactivity gets in the way of the open communication Bowen described. A useful test of a relationship is the number of topics that are off-limits. Less differentiated or more reactive individuals tend to have less open communication, which creates emotional distance.
There is a difference, worth naming, between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is choosing what to share. Secrecy carries the emotional charge of what you can’t.
What is a valid secret in a family system?
Responsible, private communication respects the safety and privacy of another person. It respects the emotional impact on the system if the secret is revealed. Pulling a secret into the open can also cause harm. Kerr and Bowen put it this way:
“However, revealing family secrets can be as destructive for a family as keeping secrets if the intensity of the family emotional process that creates secrets is not recognized. The goal of unearthing a secret is to address the relationship processes that created and perpetuated the secret.” [Kerr & Bowen, Family Evaluation]
Again, it’s less about the content than the emotional process. The same content (e.g., a brief sexual affair) might end one relationship and, in another, lead to a stronger one. Level of differentiation of self, among other things, shapes the outcome.
Sometimes revealing a secret to protect a person, even when it costs another, is the responsible action. The question is what is driving the reveal. An anxious process? An over-functioning “this must be fixed” reaction? Or a measured, thoughtful response? Abuse in relationships falls into this category. Fear of disrupting the family system can’t be the sole driver of a decision not to reveal. The impact on the person being harmed has to weigh in. Lower reactivity tends to promote a more thoughtful, responsible outcome.
How should you respond when someone shares a secret?
A response built on a “seek to understand” stance, using curiosity and objective thinking, can reduce reactivity and foster more open communication. If a secret has just been shared with you, the questions below may help. They shift the focus from the content of the secret to your own response, which is the part you can actually work on.
- Do I understand what led to the reveal at this time?
- Can I appreciate what it cost the secret holder to not reveal it sooner?
- Can I understand the anxiety that promoted the secret in the first place?
- How well do I understand the process that contributed to the behaviour the secret is about?
- How aware am I of my part in that process?
- How might I have contributed to the revealer’s anxiety?
- How much do I feel threatened, and how is that shaping my response?
Because family secrets are an emotional process, it’s hard to be rational and objective about them.
It’s no secret that working on your level of differentiation helps in navigating the emotionality around secrets.
Further reading on secrets in family systems
A few quotes worth sitting with.
- “Relationships can become distant and hostile when there are secrets.” [Friedman, Family Systems Thinking: A New View of Man]
- “Secrets prevent communication, and probably intimacy.” [Friedman]
- “Most family therapists employ some kind of working rule about not keeping secrets.” [Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, Chapter 14]
- “The basic problem is the relationship pattern in the family rather than the subject matter of the secrets and confidences.” [Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, Chapter 14]
Thank you for your interest in family systems.
Comments are welcome: dave.galloway@livingsystems.ca
Learn more about Bowen Theory here.
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