Secrets create a barrier to receiving love as kind words land with a hollow twinge of doubt.

The person holding a secret often suffers more than anyone around them realizes.

Disclosure is never easy, but it is the only path to being fully known and fully loved.

There are times when taking a secret to the grave is understandable.

As a mental health clinician with a moral, ethical, and legal obligation to confidentiality, I am often on the receiving end of disclosures and confessions people have kept from the people closest to them. To give one religious community its due, the Catholics were onto something when they recognized that receiving confession is holy work.

People will often endlessly rehearse the scenario of confessing or, worse, being exposed. They imagine the faces, the silence, the condemnation, the disgust. They have projected their own judgment and ridicule onto their potential audience, and in therapy, they wait with bated breath to see if their prophecies will come true. Perhaps some part of them knows that, as a therapist, I am likely to respond with unconditional positive regard. But many still wonder if this response, much like the acceptance they may have experienced in religious communities, is just another front for a judgmental interior.

Thankfully for them, I truly don’t have to fake anything. I have a lot of compassion for people who have held a secret. My tenderness toward the suffering of their circumstance is entirely separate from whatever moral judgment I might be tempted to hold toward their behavior. Those two things can coexist. In fact, I think they must.

When a secret is revealed, whether by admission or........

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