"So God," Adam said, "what's the deal with (chomp) apples?"
And thus, according to reliable sources, the first secret was revealed.
It wasn't the tart bite of a Granny Smith that the Original Couple was after, of course. They, like all their progeny, wanted uncommon knowledge, insider information on how things really tick. From the very beginning the human race has been fascinated with all things clandestine. The impulse to discover — and hide — information is coded in our DNA just as surely as hair and eye color.
In fact, psychologists say secrecy is essential for human development. Carl Jung believed secret keeping was important for individuation, the process of separating from parents and becoming a distinct person. Once a child establishes a sense of self — generally around age 5 — she realizes she has the ability to possess secrets. As secrets are acquired, self-identity, in turn, is enhanced. Like most things, we get better at it with age and experience. Psychologists even see such enhanced guile as a mark of maturity. In fact, they worry if someone can't keep a secret; it can be an unhealthy sign.
The stuff of secrets changes as children grow. According to a recent Israeli study, the secrets of younger school-age children were mostly about possessions and were driven by a need for exclusivity. A young boy, for instance, might hide the fact that he has a stash of candy in his room. By seventh grade, he would more likely hide incidents of misbehavior and relationships with the opposite sex. The motive for the cover-up shifts from a desire for exclusivity to shame and fear of punishment. With more wiliness under the belt, older children begin to implement the time-honored what-you-don't-know-won't-hurt-me strategy.
We've all been there and done that, of course, which is why the furtive cover-ups of childhood are so transparent to adults. Sometimes the giveaway is behavioral. When a kid is too good and/or evasive, parental warning bells start clanging. Other times the beans are spilled by telltale physical evidence and a lack of guile.
My own parents regularly amazed me with their preternatural ability to sense whenever I attempted to get away with something. My mother stunned me one day in seventh grade when she correctly accused me of smoking. With my parents out of the house on a shopping trip, I had decided to sample the delights of Alpine menthol cigarettes. It took me about five puffs to decide not to take six. Sicker but wiser, I carefully flushed away all the evidence — matches, unused cigarettes, package — confident that my secret was intact.
Unfortunately, I was not yet familiar with the concept of second-hand smoke. Within 30 seconds of my parents return, my mother, who was familiar with the concept, turned to me and, without missing a beat, said, "You weren't smoking, were you?" So much for wiliness under the belt.
Secrets, however, serve more than the protection of self-interest and the care and feeding of self-identity. They're the coin of the realm when it comes to status. Knowledge is power, they say, and secret knowledge oozes might. Studies have shown that people of higher status know more about those of lower status than vice versa. Secrets offer an edge, an advantage, a way to control others. And here's the best part: They don't even know (heh-heh-heh) that you control them.
Clandestine knowledge radiates a sense of power and defiance, psychologist Barbara Almond says, because, by definition, the information is exclusive and special. If you're in on the secret, you must be part of the inner circle. Conversely, if you're not one of The Ones Who Count, yet somehow know what they know, you steal their control, turn the defiance around and thumb your nose at the High and Mighty. You, after all, have a better secret: You know theirs.
Precisely because secrets are weighted with power they play a role in forming intimate relationships. It's hard to imagine friends and lovers without secrets. We naturally trade secrets with those closest to us. A shared confidence is relationship super glue, a strong force binding people together. When we share a personal secret we give the other person power over us. Like a dog or cat rolling over, exposing itself to attack, we make ourselves vulnerable by entrusting our personal dynamite.
"The mutual disclosure of secrets so typical of genuine friendship implies securing total and unconditional acceptance by the significant other without criticism or resentment, " clinical psychologist Marilyn Mason of the Family Therapy Institute of Saint Paul, Minnesota, observes.
We have a real need for this. Human beings are hard-wired with a hunger for unconditional love, and under the right conditions revealing a secret can yield what we yearn for most. In fact, it's been said that if secrets did not exist, God would have to invent them since revealing a deep, dark secret to one who is trusted can feel so good. If we tell someone the "most shocking" thing about ourselves and yet it doesn't matter to them, doesn't lessen their regard for us, we can't help but feel accepted and at home, and we return the love. A gay person who reveals his orientation to his family and straight friends and is not rejected is affirmed and liberated.
Nonjudgmental acceptance is absolutely essential in a confidant, insists Notre Dame associate professor of psychology Anita Kelly, who has been studying secret keeping much of her professional life. A nonjudgmental attitude is especially important because personal secrets usually deal with the dark, less-than-respectable side of human nature: those episodes of sin, shabbiness and stupidity that lurk in the dusty corners of every person's soul. Or as the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper calls them, those "What were you thinking?" moments.
Such moments pose a real dilemma. "Secrets are a source of inner conflict," Mason points out. "On the one hand, they tempt their possessors to reveal and share them, on the other hand, they are guarded and withheld because they may arouse shame, guilt and anxiety if revealed." That, of course, is why we naturally seek out nonjudgmental confidants.
Disclosing a secret is especially scary because down deep we know if we tell one other person potentially we've lost the secret for good. The cat is out of the bag and we don't know where she will roam — or what mischief she will make. Divulging hidden thoughts can have unforeseen and sometimes devastating consequences, as the Jenny Jones TV show proved not long ago. When Scott Amedure revealed his secret attraction to Jonathan Schmitz on the nationally syndicated program, Schmitz, who had a troubled psychiatric past, blasted Amedure with a shotgun a few days later.
Even when the confidant is not troubled, revealing a secret is risky business simply because most of us dislike being told about another person's weakness. One study found that those who openly discussed their struggles were rejected more often than those who acted as if nothing was wrong. Another recent study found that confidants subsequently avoided people who told them a personal secret. Such rejection can domino into diminished self-esteem and isolation, Kelly warns.
We would rather not know secrets that dimnish our respect or good feelings about someone we like. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld dealt with the issue humorously in an episode of his TV show. After accidentally dropping his girlfriend's toothbrush in the toilet, retrieving it and not telling her, the perpetually squeamish Seinfeld couldn't look at the woman without remembering where the brush had been. The secret, of course, forced him to end the relationship.
Romantic partners often blurt secrets about their past that diminish their partner's respect for them. "There are some secrets that may be better off never shared," Kelly observes. As Ann Landers perpetually advises, it's generally not a good idea to recite chapter and verse to a new love about one's previous romances.
In some cases an ill-advised shared secret may not only diminish your partner's respect for you, it may damage your partner's respect for themselves as well. When former Colorado football coach and head of the Promise Keepers Bill McCartney told his wife of an affair that took place 20 years earlier, the news initially left her feeling suicidal. Although they subsequently reconciled, she confesses the subject still is painful.
Personal secrets often weigh us down because they concern troubling events and ideas with which we have not yet come to terms. The bitter, big secrets, the stuff of personal anguish, are the worst: mistakes that have caused harm, infidelities, broken trusts of one sort or another. It's a relief to be rid of them. Yet, Kelly argues we don't merely want to vent. What we really want is insight. We tell others our darkest private thoughts because we're looking for another opinion; we need to make sense of the secret.
"If a confidant can help the revealer see the secret in a new way, it's particularly valuable," Kelly says. "A confidant who can offer new insights can provide closure on the incident for the revealer." That, of course, is the idea behind psychotherapy.
Unfortunately, when confronted with a troubling secret, most of us react by diminishing the seriousness of the revelation. "The secret causes discomfort so we say really lame things to lessen our anxiety," Kelly says. One survey found that 80 percent of the responses people received were unhelpful. So if a person reveals he has AIDS, we may babble on about new treatments instead of telling him we love and accept him. "Looking on the bright side" is rarely what people want to hear.
If we can't impart the wisdom of Solomon, usually we can relate our own experience — and often that is enough. For instance, Kelly says, "A senior faculty member may tell a junior professor who has confided to doing a poor teaching job that she, too, had difficulty but turned things around by revising her teaching plan. The insight that an experienced professor could have problems yet recover may help the junior faculty member.
"We shouldn't withhold helpful remarks," Kelly says. "But determining what is insightful can be tricky, and there's always some risk that the revealer will not find it helpful."
Knowing when to tell a secret may be just as important as knowing whether to tell a secret. If you wait too long, it's a violation of trust. "The confidant may feel hurt and angry because the secret wasn't shared sooner," Kelly points out. The person begins to question the relationship and wonder if other relevant information has been withheld
An acquaintance was stunned to discover in high school that he had been adopted. His parents withheld the information thinking he wasn't ready earlier. The experience left him feeling betrayed, knowing that others were in on his secret, yet he was not.
However, telling too early may be as big a problem as telling too late. It's important to know someone "well enough" before sharing personal information, Kelly warns. A person needs to know her potential confidant's beliefs regarding the issue at hand. Monica Lewinsky, for instance, clearly misjudged Linda Tripp's intentions toward the Clinton administration before confiding in her.
If you tell a secret too soon, you have no idea how your confidant will react, especially whether he will divulge it. Therefore, Kelly suggests testing a potential confidant's secret- keeping ability. "People test for discretion all the time, floating out little secrets to see if they get leaked before dropping the Big One," the ND psychologist says. "You can never predict what a person will do with your secret, but you can see how discreet someone has been in the past."
Discretion, as one might expect, is a highly prized trait. When Kelly surveyed a group of ND students not long ago, "will keep my secret" was tied with "understands me" as the most valued quality in a confidant. "It was even more important than ‘being nonjudgmental' or ‘being similar,'"she says.
So what happens when you have a secret that's screaming to be told, but your potential confidant fails the discretion test? If it's really eating you up, Kelly suggests writing it down. Several studies have confirmed that writing serves as a safety valve, relieving the pressure of keeping the secret. The Trappist Thomas Merton vented into his voluminous journals and later tore out some pages he wished to keep forever private. Leonardo da Vinci kept prying eyes from his secret journal thoughts by writing in code and mirror-image script.
Relieving the pressure by journal writing is a healthy thing to do. One famous study James Pennebaker found that those who wrote about the facts and their emotions surrounding a traumatic event visited the doctor less often. Their immune response appeared to be enhanced.
In like manner, bottling up a lot of secrets over a long period is likely to send you to the doctor's office. Evidence suggests that people who habitually keep many secrets experience more depression, anxiety, back pain and headaches than their free-and-easy friends. Research also has shown that the more work expended in keeping a secret, the greater the likelihood of stress- related physical and psychological problems.
But Kelly cautions it's probably not the act of keeping the secret itself that is causing the difficulty. Several studies have shown that such traits as "shyness and tendency to socially inhibit" have a biological element, she points out. It merely may be that those with a hereditary tendency to be overly secretive also may be predisposed to stress-related problems.
Nonetheless, secrets are undeniably a burden. Tests have shown that as a person reveals a traumatic event his skin conductance decreases while the listener's increases. The revealer becomes more relaxed while the listener becomes more stressed.
Sometimes the burden of a secret is just too much. "People frequently feel compelled to reveal a shared secret, and often the revelation is unintentional," Kelly says. Secret keeping may be so difficult in part simply because our society has an aversion to them. "We have learned that one person's right to privacy is often another person's victimization and shame," Marilyn Mason points out. "Armed with this realization, today's culture sanctions the telling of secrets." The biggest benefit from this, of course, is that the "conspiracy of silence" that often covered up instances of child and spouse abuse in the past has been eroded.
A generation ago the dark secrets of family violence were too often papered over by a misguided sense of family loyalty that prompted relatives to circle the wagons around their kin. Mason says, "The attitude was ‘nothing is going on here — and don't ask.'"
Even when secrets aren't shameful our culture wrinkles its nose at them. Somehow secrets seem inherently immoral — or maybe just unAmerican. For decades pop psychology has preached the gospel of "letting it all out," and so we are awash with images of people dishing the lowdown on themselves and others. Celebrities can't line up fast enough to write tell-all autobiographies, sharing their struggles with drug addiction, amorous adventures and insights into how we too can achieve personal happiness, increased self-esteem, shiny hair and washboard abs for $24.95.
Then too we do love gossip, don't we? We want the lowdown, the juice, the dirt, the good stuff. Nosing around someone else's private business is always more entertaining than tending to our own. So we gossip about people we know and those we don't. Sally and Maury, Montel and Geraldo earn a comfortable living feeding our prurient interests, allowing ordinary folk to expose themselves coast-to-coast for their personal 15 minutes of fame and our entertainment.
The 1990s ideal may dictate an open book approach to life, but Kelly suggests closing the covers might not be a bad idea — or at least being very selective how we open them. In certain circumstances she says even a person in therapy may do well to button up a bit.
While two studies have shown that clients were less satisfied with therapy the more information they hid, the ND psychologist found in her own research that clients who kept a relevant secret from their therapist actually experienced a greater reduction in symptoms than those who were totally open. By keeping certain things off the table, Kelly says, the client was able to focus the therapist's attention on those issues she believed to be most relevant.
"Therapists are taught to be nonjudgmental, but if a client thinks that the therapist may judge her negatively about a peripheral issue, she may be wise to keep it to herself," Kelly suggests. "For example, an incest survivor trying to come to terms with her relationship with her father may not wish to tell a therapist about a history of promiscuity and abortions.
"I am not saying ‘watch out for your therapist,'" the ND psychologist explains. "I am saying there can be some benefit to selectively showing the therapist what you want to talk about."
In the end, the decision whether to reveal a personal secret comes down to a balancing act, weighing the costs against the benefits. The chief cost, of course, is that a person freely gives up information which may be held against him or her. That's a formidable consideration, and, as has been noted, there are good reasons not to tell all. On the other hand, as Marilyn Mason points out, revealing a secret allows a person to know others deeply and, in like manner, be known by them; it provides deeper insight into oneself, and, if the secret involves disgrace, it allows a person to separate themselves from shame.
If you're still unsure how to resolve the balancing act, fear not. On the basis of her research, Kelly has devised three rules of secret sharing wisdom: First, she advises, only tell a negative personal secret if keeping it really troubles you. Second, only tell a secret to someone you've known "long enough" but not "too long." Finally, only tell your secret to a confidant who is discreet, nonjudgmental, and able to offer new insights.
So there you have it: the inside scoop on everything hush-hush. Now just keep it to yourself, okay?