In Alcoholics Anonymous a common adage is, “we are only as sick as our secrets”. I think one of the biggest driving forces behind addiction is disconnection from other people. Our addiction or secrets that we keep cause us to feel more alone and disconnected than we’ve ever felt before. And it’s a vicious cycle. Because the more we carry in secrecy, the harder it is to make connections with others that might help us feel less alone.
One of the most compelling Ted Talks I’ve heard was from Johann Hari who said that everything you think you know about addiction is wrong. He talks about how disconnection from others is at the heart of it and it’s fascinating. It totally changed the way I looked at it.
Addiction aside, people harbor all types of secrets. And when we keep secrets, not only is our mental health deeply affected – so is our physical health. Research has linked keeping secrets to increased anxiety, depression, poor physical health and more rapid progression of disease. And when you think about it, keeping a secret is exhausting! You have to be on guard when speaking to make sure you don’t say something you aren’t supposed to say. You may have to do things regularly to evade being “found out”. To keep your secrets, like Madeye Moody would say, you need to employ constant vigilance!
As stressful as it all is, the real problem with keeping secrets isn’t even the concealment of it. It’s the fact that you have to live with it and think about it. And this is where we can get stuck in our own heads. Whether the secret you’re keeping is something that happened to you or it’s something that you have done or are doing that causes you to feel like a fraud, those feelings ignite shame in us.
As Brené Brown says, shame needs three things to grow: secrecy, silence and judgement. But shame cannot survive being spoken about and receiving an empathetic response from someone who you’ve shared your secret with. Think about times when you had a secret, and you finally broke down and told someone. I know for me, when I have confided in just one person and they express understanding and compassion, I immediately felt a huge weight lifted from me.
Interestingly, even if you confide in just one person, it’s obviously doesn’t reduce how often you have to work to conceal the secret with others. But what it does do, is it reduces how often your mind wanders towards the secret at various times.
When I was volunteering at Crisis Text Line, one of the most common themes I saw was texters expressing a sense of relief at the end of the conversation. For many people using the service, they were confiding secrets that they had never told anyone before. And as counselors, just by providing validation and empathy, it made a huge difference to the person on the other end of the conversation. Just telling another soul, even via text message, what they were experiencing made them feel less alone. And I can honestly tell you from counseling a lot of people there, many of us feel alone, but we are all struggling with the same or similar things.
What secrets are weighing you down? Who is one person you feel would be safe to confide in?
