Dear Therapist,
Everyone in my grandparents’ generation of my family has died. Now the Boomers are also starting to pass on and we Gen Xers are inheriting all the unwanted family secrets.
Secrets such as your paternal grandmother was raped by your great-great-uncle. And your maternal grandmother was a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, changed her name, and fled to America under false pretenses. One uncle was secretly into BDSM. Another, secretly gay. Your abusive father suffered from schizoaffective disorder.
What does it mean when your inheritance is every conceivable kind of secret quashed under generations of shame and guilt?
Some of these secrets I am glad and humbled to learn, such as my family’s Jewish roots. But then there are the wincing anachronisms, like an unspoken shame over a gay uncle. And the implications of some secrets are truly awful: Is there a relative out there, born of incest?
Why me? Why any of us kids? And when it’s my turn, am I to become the speaker of the secrets of the dead? Is that a legacy I want to own for myself or my son?
Dear Reader,
I can imagine how overwhelming it must be to learn of this family history and not know what it means to be its custodian going forward. You don’t say how these secrets are being communicated in your family—are these deathbed confessions?—but secrets devoid of conversation and context can weigh heavily on their recipients because they come with a set of never-asked and never-answered questions. You’re left trying to make sense of them in a vacuum.
Part of your inheritance seems to be that, in addition to the secrets themselves, you’ve received them without attention paid to some important considerations. These considerations include: Am I sharing this information for my benefit or that of someone else? Have I considered how the person I’m sharing this with might feel and what the value is of sharing this now—or at all? It sounds as if you weren’t given those considerations, so let’s start with some context that might help you make sense of these secrets.
The first thing to understand is that secrecy is usually rooted in shame—will someone important to me, or to the society I live in, judge me or my family if I reveal the truth? Secrets can be about anything, but common stories involve mental-health conditions, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, an affair, adoption, addiction, sexual orientation, suicide, incest, abuse, or financial impropriety or failure.
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison” because of their deleterious effects, the greatest of which is alienation. Secrets isolate the keeper of the secret and lead to ongoing lies in order to keep it hidden, a pattern that in turn pushes others away. In addition, when some family members know the secret and others don’t, the former group develops an unspoken bond while the latter group feels excluded, even if they can’t pinpoint exactly why. This leads to distance and distrust, and if the secret is discovered or shared years later, there can be deep-seated anger at having been deceived all this time. For example, an older sibling might know that a parent’s “business trips” are actually rehab stints for alcoholism, and dismiss the younger sibling’s suspicions about their father’s drunken behavior—only to acknowledge this reality to their younger sibling decades later. The younger sibling, having been gaslit for an entire childhood, might harbor tremendous resentment toward that sibling for the rest of their life.
Secrets can be felt so deeply in a family dynamic that they result in a huge range of mental-health challenges—eating disorders, anxiety, and depression, to name a few—for those who perceive that “something is off” but don’t know what that something is. Worst of all, secrecy can create a culture of secret-keeping—children living in a household with family secrets tend to keep secrets themselves, not only while growing up but in their adult relationships as well, which can be a serious hurdle in forming genuine and trusting connections with friends or romantic partners.
In your family, the clumsily handled revelation of these secrets has left you feeling burdened (“Why me?”), confused about what having this family history “means” for you, and uncertain about what to do with this knowledge going forward. Let’s take those in order:
Why you? Because some people struggle with mental-health issues, make bad choices, and go to great lengths to hide their histories or true selves—and these people are a part of most families. You might feel alone in your situation, but please know you are far from alone.
What do their difficulties or behaviors say about you? Absolutely nothing. Just as you can’t change the past, you also aren’t responsible for it. Moreover, you are your own person, making your own choices in life—what came before you is part of your story, yes, but these are not your deeds.
Are you to become the speaker of the family’s secrets? Yes, but not in the way you experienced—as a heavy burden, dumped on you without consideration or context. Secrets lose their destructive power when they’re spoken about as comfortably in daily conversation as any other topic—and by doing so, you can choose to become a model for the next generation.
For instance, let’s say someone makes a comment about gay people around your son. You might say something like, “I had an uncle who was gay and he felt he had to keep it hidden. There was such discrimination, and that must have left him feeling very lonely his whole life. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone we know.” By talking with compassion about something that your family found shameful, you’re teaching your son not only about the importance of being upstanding with his peers but also about the benefits of living authentically rather than hiding in secrecy. Similarly, if the Holocaust comes up in your son’s history class, you can let him know that one of his relatives had to change her identity in order to come to the United States and avoid being killed. If your son wonders why you weren’t close with your father, you might explain that your dad suffered from a mental-health issue that led to him being frightening to you at times. (All mental-health conditions, as with any physical-health condition, should be disclosed to the next generation of biological children because they need to be aware of their genetic history, especially given how much more researchers now know about prevention and treatment.) And although you might not think there will be an organic way to bring up rape and incest three generations removed from your son, conversations about consent, shame, or patriarchy might lead to you saying something like, “I was stunned when I found out that this awful thing happened.”
What’s different about the way these pieces of family history will be received by your son is that now there’s no burden. They’re facts shared in a context of trust and empathy, so you’re modeling (in a developmentally appropriate way—be aware of your child’s age) that no topic is so shameful that it’s completely off-limits.
This doesn’t mean that you become so invested in not having secrets that you fail to model privacy. Your uncle, for example, deserves privacy around his personal sexual turn-ons. Likewise, everyone gets to choose their own level of privacy. Say your son wants to know something that you don’t feel like sharing—perhaps he asks how much money you make, and you feel he’s too young to responsibly handle this information. You can respond with, “It’s not a secret—but it feels private to me, and we’re all allowed to choose what we keep private. When you’re older and understand more about how money works, I’ll feel more comfortable sharing this with you.”
You have a great opportunity to create a new family culture around shame and secrecy, and it sounds like you might even have some relatives to join you in this mission—your fellow Gen X family members who are wrestling with the same issues. Imagine if all of you work to change the way these secrets live in your family, to talk openly about them with one another and—using the guidelines I suggested—create a new legacy for future generations in which “family secrets” become a thing of the past.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
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