Psychological Effects of Keeping a Secret

"Secret secrets are no fun. Secret secrets hurt someone."



At some point, you've probably heard this rhyming guilt-trip as someone's effort to force someone else to divulge some juicy tidbit. However, keeping a secret is not always quite so drastic. Benign secrets can help contribute to an individual's healthy sense of self, and malignant secrets can cause deep psychological anguish. The key is in recognizing the difference.

Healthy Development

• As children, teens and adults grow older, the desire to keep harmless thoughts, actions and feelings private from parents or others can create healthy boundaries between the self and the rest of the world, instill an essential sense of uniqueness, and establish a meaningful sense of independence. However, when secrets are malignant or feel imposed, such as in cases of abuse or knowledge that could be detrimental to themselves or someone else if shared, they can actually deter healthy adjustment, development and well-being.

Sense of Safety From Judgment

• Secrets can also reasonably help individuals avoid undesired judgments or negative consequences from others. Anita Kelly, psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame, conducted a 1998 study and found that 40 percent of patients kept secrets from their therapists yet felt no stress as a result. She determined that in some cases, revealing a secret can create more problems than it addresses -- such as when individuals disclosing embarrassing information that could harm their reputation begin to internalize negative thoughts about themselves due to how they believe others stigmatize them because of what's been revealed.

Inner Conflict

• When there are secrets that people are not sure whether or not they should share, the longer the secrets are kept, the more inner conflict they impose. Worry, anxiety, stress, sadness or depression may develop and even lead to physical health issues. A 2008 study by researchers in the Netherlands found that in instances where individuals had kept secrets entirely to themselves and experienced psychosocial problems as a result, those problems decreased within six months of confiding their secrets.

Secret Life

• According to Saltz, keeping secrets becomes psychologically detrimental once people lose control over their secrets and begin allowing their secrets to control them instead with desperation, guilt, shame, and real or imagined consequences. In these cases, people may begin leading secret lives which revolve obsessively around their secrets and severely alter their relationships due to the internalization that their secrets can never be revealed to anyone.

Isolation

• Malignant secrets can diminish the quality of people's relationships, alienating them from others and imposing loneliness. In an article in "Psychology Today," psychiatrist Evan Imber-Black discussed three siblings who felt estranged from one another due to troubling secrets that had divided their family for about 30 years. In therapy, each of the siblings shared a need to bond with one another that had continually gone unfulfilled. Another patient who had grown up in a secretive family still felt difficulty opening up to to form friendships or romantic relationships (never having sustained one beyond the second date), even after having lived away from home for 15 years.