Once upon a time during my girlhood, I was a teller and keeper of secrets. Secrets among friends were a form of bonding, and keeping someone’s secret was a sign of loyalty. Who told you their secret, and to whom you told your secret, reflected a hierarchy of trust. Best friends were lost or found through their ability to be a container for what you did not want others to know. Such is the power of secrets: to be shunned by the secret-telling circle is to feel excluded, less worthy, left out. Humans are social pack animals that thrive in small cooperative, interdependent groups. Our connection to others is crucial for our well-being, mental and physical.1

We all have secrets, including secrets from ourselves. The secrets we keep from ourselves are often facts about ourselves or our lives we find uncomfortable, unacceptable, or even frightening. Swiss analytic psychologist Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to describe aspects of ourselves we believe are undesirable and repressed. These would include our fantasies, desires, instincts, negative feelings like anger, or positive aspects like creativity. What frightens us about ourselves, what feels endangering, we keep blocked off from our conscious mind—in other words, our private secrets.

In recent literature, popular memoirs describe the role of a victim in keeping the secret of an abusive relationship, or in protecting a predatory family member or trusted elder. Others of us may keep secret our sexual orientation, gender orientation, or our mental or physical illness.2 Something in these stories touches our own experience of unexpressed private and transgressive feelings that go against the norm. Relief arrives when we........

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