Secrets are Pathogenic

There's a lot we don't talk about, that we should.

We love to talk about trauma. It is relatively easy to talk about trauma—much has been written, and more will be. It is a thing that happens to people for which they don’t have responsibility—this is appealing for helpers! We can debate, as professionals, back and forth the blamelessness of our patients and the harm caused by bad things. We can research treatments for them, for example. We spend too little time discussing one of the human consequences of lived awfulness—the tendency to keep it a secret.

This is the Frontier Psychiatrists. It's a newsletter.

As a psychiatrist and a human, I have one avoidable sequelae of trauma for everyone to avoid! It is also not easy.

Secrets are poison.

You hold plenty of secrets as an act of trust, in good faith; that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the secrets that eat you up inside. I've never seen this kind of secret be a good idea. I've only seen people have a secret and have things in their brains go from bad to worse. This badness leads them to take the potency of the secret and do something that might have originally seemed impossible: they take a terrible thing and blow it out of proportion. Disproportionally bad things, compressed by the weight of psychiatric illness? It is the thing atom bombs are made of, emotionally.

When we talk about the risk of suicide, I don't understand why we don't talk about secrets more. It may be hard to research secrets. There was a post-secret website dedicated to this for years. It may still be. I haven't checked. It stopped being novel when I started working full-time as a psychiatrist.

If something like this is burdening you, don't let it metastasize. There's a reason the Catholic Church had confessional. It's not because they didn't have their secrets; it's because they knew it was therapeutic to let you tell yours. Secrets, plus divine forgiveness, guaranteed? That is a plan for Health.

When we abandoned the divine, as enlightened citizens of modernity, we also lost the ability to be sure we would be forgiven. The word for that I'm familiar with is Grace. Grace is awesome. Everybody deserves it. Many people have secrets, and some of them are awful. Nobody should allow those to drag them down because we're all better not dragged down by things that we fear, hate, and are so wrong we can barely stand them.

Put your message in a bottle. Send out your SOS. Please don't keep it inside. I'm here to tell you that no matter how bad the thing is, the only thing worse is letting it turn into a time bomb that blows your world apart.

It's not worth it. You, on the other hand? You probably are. I've held onto a lot of people's secrets. I still hold onto many of them in trust.

As if to make fun of me from the universe, when this is what I was writing today, I just found out I've reached my 10th anniversary as an ordained minister. I got ordained to perform a marriage ceremony, but maybe I'll celebrate my ordination by offering all of you, every one of us, the knowledge that Grace exists.

I don't know if it's divine, but whatever it was that moved our maker, it might have been the desire to deliver us from something so pointless and toxic, poisonous secrets.