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 wor…