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Jan 14, - Relationships with family members come not only from biological bonds but also from the bonds of maintained connection. When secrets enter.
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From the perspective of the individual and the family, secrets can certainly be both oppressive and destructive.

Escape Grandpa’s wrath and save your family!

In some situations, they can amount to a doubling of violence as, for instance, in families where the abuse is not recognised as such and the victim is perhaps even forced to keep living with the perpetrator. She describes growing up with radical survivalist Mormon parents in rural Idaho, isolated and at odds with mainstream society. When she was a teenager, her elder brother started to become abusive toward her, subjecting her to physical as well as psychological violence.

He pulled her around by the hair, flushed her head in the toilet, called her a slut, and threatened to kill her. When she finally summoned the courage to tell her parents, they refused to acknowledge the violence and tried to convince her that she was being delusional, which again made her question her own memory and sanity.

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Such secrecy is hurtful as well as ethically problematic, if not downright criminal. Yet, there are many situations in which the politics of secrecy are more ambivalent. While all interaction between human beings is predicated on some level of mutual knowledge, it also invariably entails a degree of obscurity or nescience. Try as we might, we can never entirely disclose ourselves to the other, nor can we ever fully know someone else — or ourselves for that matter.

A degree of secrecy, one might say, is a fundamental human impulse, and social life would be impossible without it. Such a secret might be known by only one person, or it might be known by everyone but one. It could be deep, which is to say that not only is the specific information concealed, but the fact that something is concealed is itself concealed. Or it could be shallow, which means that other people know that something is hidden, but not what this something is. A secret has a chronology and its trajectory can change over time; it might start out as open knowledge and end up as a deep secret, or vice versa.

We might have a feeling, almost visceral, that there is something untold in our family but instinctively avoid confronting it, because we sense — whether correctly or not — that it might be unpleasant or even damaging to insist on getting it out in the open. This is sometimes the case in families with members carrying trauma from the Holocaust. Such tacit and emotional mechanisms, one might say, help to define the family.

Socially and culturally, the deliberate hiding, the shirking and the pussyfooting exist for a reason: they help us straddle the gap between the ideal and reality, between what was expected of us and what we were able to do or what we actually did. Over the past couple of centuries, as it has gradually lost many of its practical and economic purposes, the family has simultaneously become idealised as an emotional safe space, as a set of mutually supportive relationships characterised by warmth, intimacy and tenderness.

Love has not only conquered marriage, as the historian Stephanie Coontz has phrased it in Marriage, a History ; it now envelops the entire family.


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Unlike this ideal, however, real-life families might be unhappy, stifling, conflict-ridden and even unsafe. Secrecy can provide a protective shield, guarding the family as a whole from disgrace and stigmatisation. Because secrecy is a way to deal with issues that are deemed compromising or even illegal, what we find necessary to conceal fluctuates with the mutations of morality.

Things that seem relatively harmless in most of Europe and North America today — such as conceiving a child out of wedlock — might have been explosive years ago; and certain practices — such as wife-beating and the corporal punishment of children — which are illegal today were more acceptable in the past. In the future, some taboos will be lifted, and certain secrets will therefore become superfluous, but others will emerge with the changing historical circumstances. In any society, there will be moral prohibitions and social expectations, all of which help to keep in place a specific social order.

Every individual is bound to violate them at some point or other, and frequently also to try to cover up such violations. No matter how much DNA testing and the internet might help us expose uncomfortable truths or shameful acts, this dynamic is unlikely to ever disappear. But perhaps this is not entirely deplorable. In some cases, secrecy can provide a protective shield, guarding individual family members or the family as a whole from disgrace and stigmatisation.

In such situations, sharing the information with only a tight circle of trusted people might seem like a better option. Think of Edith, the forgotten sister in the British TV series about the Crawley family and their servants, Downton Abbey , which portrays an abundance of family secrets. When Edith becomes pregnant outside of marriage, at first, she lets herself be persuaded to give up her daughter, Marigold. However, deeply tormented by the separation from her child, Edith eventually manages to bring her home by pretending that Marigold is an unfortunate orphan, whom she wishes to raise as her own.

One might think of this as hypocrisy. Or one might view it as a fraught situation in which family secrecy performs a socially important function of protection. At the time, I knew that it was a bit odd, and definitely not right. I think things like having delusions, hearing voices and some of the treatment, like the electric shock treatment, was really quite brutal. Prue was given a DNA kit as a present for her 70th birthday.

Who is my biological father?

The Family Secret

When she got the test results back, it revealed that her father was not her biological parent. I understand but I still feel angry. It makes me feel sad as well. Feeling that something was wrong with me. He just ran away a lot. He was lovely but he was very irresponsible.

It must have been a terrible shock, awful to live with. If I was her age, I would have probably have done the same.

5 BIG DISNEY PRINCESSES FAMILY SECRETS

This article is based on the Family Secrets series that has been airing on Woman's Hour over the past few weeks. More Woman's Hour content can be found here. The reporter on the series was Jo Morris. Woman's Hour. Main content. Six family secrets.

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Six incredible stories. All families have secrets of one kind or another. You must enable JavaScript to play content. Back Find a Therapist. Back Get Help. Back Magazine. Subscribe Issue Archive.


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    Replies to my comment. Leave this field blank. About the Author. In Print: Love in the time of medical school: Build a happy, healthy relationship with a medical student. Read Next. Follow This Rule. The Case Against Family Secrets.