Keeping secrets can harm your health and bring harm, says author

Michael Slepian had just given a presentation at Columbia University in the United States on the results of his research into secrets when he looked at his phone and realized that there were two missed calls from his father.

The behavioral scientist was about to discover something his parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts had known about him all along: that he had been conceived by artificial insemination with sperm from an anonymous donor.

In his recently released book “The Secret Life of Secrets”, Slepian writes: “This was revealed to me at the end of one of the most important days of my professional life. I couldn’t sit down. “

And asked, “Why was this kept secret?”

Slepian, who is now a professor of leadership and business administration at Columbia Business School, spoke of the answer to that question in an interview in which he also mentioned the larger implications of taking an oath to stand together not to say anything about something. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

What exactly is a secret? I define secrecy as the intention not to let certain information come to the knowledge of one or more people. The information in question is the secret. Even if you haven’t been forced to hide it recently in conversation, it’s still a secret you intend to keep from reaching the ears of others.

What is the difference between secrecy and privacy? There are all kinds of things that we don’t usually talk about but that are not secrets. For many people, it’s their sex life. Her details may not be something they’re necessarily keeping a secret — they just consider that not the sort of thing that gets talked about. But if someone with whom I have a close relationship asked me about it, I would answer the question. If you wouldn’t respond, if the intention is to keep the information silent if the subject ever comes up, then it’s a secret.

Does keeping something a secret hurt the person who keeps it? The harm caused by a secret does not seem to stem from having to hide information during social interaction, but from living with it when you are alone with your thoughts. The more a person’s thoughts turn to secrecy, the harder it becomes to not have emotional support or advice. When we’re alone with something important, especially something hurtful or uncomfortable, we tend not to develop healthy ways of thinking about it.

What kind of secret is the hardest to keep? The secret you think about all the time is the hardest to keep.

There are three primary dimensions in which people think about their secrets. One is what we call “social bonding”—secrets that involve other people. Another dimension is the moral aspect of secrecy. The third is how secrecy is linked to our goals, which often mean our profession. Each dimension has a harmful side of its own.

What are the best conditions for sharing a secret? If you choose the right person, if you have the opportunity to talk about your secret and it is still a secret, then this is an effective strategy. Only if the interlocutor reacts very negatively does trusting a secret make the situation worse.

So basically, if the caller has different moral standards than yours, or if you think he would be scandalized by what you would reveal to him, then this person is not the right person to hear your secret. The person most likely to keep your secret is someone who would look at it from a similar point of view as to the morality of the matter.

Do we need to worry that we are putting a burden on a friend if we tell them a secret? People can be glad that someone felt comfortable enough with them to reveal something delicate; it is an act of intimacy that can bring the two people together. But if the two people are part of the same group of friends, it can be difficult, because the secrecy can weigh heavily on both people and neither of them can talk to others in the group about it. If a person far away from you reveals something monumental to you, it won’t necessarily worry you that much.

If actress Reese Witherspoon called to say that she chose “The Secret Life of Secrets” to be on her Book Club Highlights list, would you keep the secret until it was announced? In the case of positive secrets, there is usually a plan for when they will be revealed – and since they have an expiration date, these secrets can be thought-provoking and encouraging.

So maybe I won’t be able to mention her phone call during the month of May, but once the news is public knowledge, I can talk about her in June. I think the question to ask is, how can we steal the benefits of positive secrets and apply them to negative secrets?

How do our personal beliefs affect our relationship with secrecy? A sociologist has found that if you are against abortion, you are less likely to hear about people close to you who have had an abortion. People don’t want to reveal a secret to someone who will be scandalized by it or who will find it so morally repugnant that they will reveal it to a third party. This means that we do not receive the same information from our social networks; it means you don’t understand how common a given experience is.

How does our relationship with secrets evolve with age? Even young children understand the intimacy involved in sharing information. If you ask a child what makes someone your best friend, they might respond, “It’s someone you share secrets with.” This is because children often keep child-sized secrets and because they gain positive social reinforcement from sharing those secrets with friends and learning about their friends’ secrets.

Things start to change when they reach adolescence, and suddenly they’re worried about social approval, and there’s the possibility that they’ll have more problems. This is when secrecy starts to become more adult-like, where people are more concerned about the consequences of disclosing information.

Do you think your job helped you deal with that conversation with your father? One of the hard things about having a secret is that even when you want to reveal it, when is the right time? I think that’s what my parents were facing when I came of age. There is no perfect time to reveal a secret like this. Sometimes you have to make that moment happen, and that takes a bit of courage.

Finding out I wasn’t biologically related to my father was shocking, but it also made me reflect on what it must have been like for my parents to keep this secret. Years later, when I was writing this book, I asked them how it went. What they experienced corresponded to what I was discovering from my research: that even a secret that is never mentioned in conversation can be a burden. Hiding secrets is the easy part. The hard part is everything else. The hard part is having to think about this thing and not share it with others.

Translation by Clara Allain