The Secrets We Keep ... Including from Ourselves
Secrets! Hidden stories. Concealed experiences. While secrets make for great movies and dramas, they generally have a corrosive effect in family systems. Members of families keep secrets from one another for various reasons, foremost of which is usually either to protect the secret-keeper or to maintain or enhance social standing. Whether a secret is told to hide wrong-doing or conceal uncomfortable facts from other members of the system, secrets provide temporary benefit to some and (eventually) cause suffering for others. This could be explaining away an uncle who sided with the losing side in a war, or denying a child given up for adoption, or concealing an affair.
How do secrets corrode family relationships over time? Oddly, secrets are like pockets of trapped energy in the system that continue to ensnare energies in the family members even after the generation that created the secret has gone. We sense the twists in relationships, the lack of full transparency that nibbles away at our trust of the intimate members of our family circle. We have to split off from our somatic self in order to maintain the secret and the toxic energy that it contains. We are, as Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger says in her wise book, The Ancestor Syndrome, forbidden to remember yet forbidden to forget. This paradox and the residual feelings this creates become encoded in the family’s interpersonal dynamics: the look on mother’s face when the memory of her youthful abortion comes up, the incongruent smile on our uncle’s face when asked about his brother’s death in the war, and so on. These secrets literally become encoded in our very tissues and in our patterns of communication, the things we don’t say or can’t talk about, the anger or other emotions only one member of a family is allowed to show, and so on.
Fortunately, family constellations point to these secrets and help us bring into light love and acceptance of the challenging circumstances of our family’s past. Once seen without judgment or blame, harmful secrets can be laid to rest with those to whom they belong.
But what about the secrets that we keep from ourselves?
Author Courtney Warren, in Lies We Tell Ourselves: the psychology of self-deception, points out that facing our foibles and less-than-stellar qualities is hard. It takes courage and a willingness to keep learning and growing. That requires resources to sustain. When we feel beleaguered by life or overwhelmed, it becomes increasingly difficult to face the hard truths that will enable us to grow. As Bert Hellinger would point out, we seek comfort when courage is what is needed. This is, of course, very human. And yet, without the willingness to know ourselves in our systems, in other words, to understand how our actions or non-actions are affecting those we love, we remain blind to the ways we could improve our relationships. We could even, as couples’ therapist Terry Real likes to say, be “perpetrating from the victim position.”
It's challenging to see ourselves as others experience us, yet real compassion and growth arise when we begin to understand ourselves not just as an isolated ego, but as an interconnected and interdependent self-in-relation-to-others. We start to make sense of our partner’s and children’s complaints, and become less defensive, more open to real connection and honest relationship. When we start this movement, our whole family can benefit from the clarity and kindness towards ourselves and others that can result.
Family constellations are helpful here, too. When you set up a constellation you have the unique opportunity to see yourself in relation to others you care about. When you see how you hurt your partner’s feelings with the anger you learned from your father, or the way the passive-aggressive habits your mother modeled from her mother and then taught you are frustrating your dearest children, the pathway to positive change become visible, too. In its relatively gentle way, constellation work simply shows you what is happening in your family (and business!) relations, leaving the choice of whether you take the opportunity to improve up to you.
