Bonus: In Conversation with Lori Gottlieb

Published Aug 15, 2019, 3:59 PM

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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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 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. 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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

Family Secrets. We all have them. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially be terrify 
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