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Web Exclusive. . .
The Battle of Divulge
By Meredith Wadman, September 2006
Keeping a secret is tough enough. But after doing so for many years, older Americans may find it even tougher to let go
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John O'Connor vividly remembers the day that he first raised the subject of Deep Throat with Mark Felt, the ex-FBI agent who he was convinced was the anonymous informant at the heart of reporting about the Watergate scandal.
It was the spring of 2002, and O'Connor, the Felt family's new lawyer, was embarking on what would ultimately be a successful quest to coax Felt, then 88, to go public with his secret identity. Sitting opposite Felt in his Santa Rosa, Calif., apartment, O'Connor ventured that he thought Deep Throat had been a Justice Department man. Felt, an affable fellow with a full head of white hair—who until that point had been mellow, witty, and welcoming—"grabbed the arms of his chair almost in white-knuckle fashion," O'Connor says. "His face tightened, his jaw jutted out, he got very formal. His entire personality changed. The contrast was amazing. My first thought was: This is a divided man."
Ultimately, after several years of tormented indecision—Felt was fearful of besmirching the reputation of his beloved FBI—Felt went public in an article published in summer 2005 in Vanity Fair.
Unburdening himself has changed a circumspect, sometimes-agitated, often-aloof man into a guy who shouts "I love you" when his daughter or grandson leaves the room and belts out "The Star-Spangled Banner" while resting in his old blue recliner.
"It has been wonderfully relieving and freeing for him," says Felt's daughter, Joan Felt, 62, who lives with him in Santa Rosa. "Dad has just become much more open. He's happier. He's at peace with himself."
Share Your Own Secret Online
Readers wishing to reveal a secret to the PostSecret website should mail an artfully designed post card to PostSecret, 13345 Copper Ridge Road, Germantown, MD 20874. Only selected secrets ultimately appear online. For more details or to view others' secrets, visit www.postsecret.com.
You also may divulge your own long-held secret—with just a few simple keystrokes—in our special message board tied to this article. (Note: All message-board submissions are moderated and subject to removal.)
There's probably no human being old enough to recognize a secret who doesn't have one. Knowledge kept from others—whether for higher motives, or out of shame, fear, guilt, or guile—is a fact of the human condition. That's especially true for many older Americans, who not only have had decades to do the living that produces secrets, but who also were raised in an era that encouraged them to protect secrets—an era in which "dirty laundry" wasn't to be shared as freely as it is in today's tell-all, talk-show culture.
But as we age and our mortality becomes more palpable, long-kept secrets can assume a new significance and force tough decisions: Will we take them to the grave, or come out with information that—while perhaps not as monumental as Mark Felt's hidden story—may shake our own carefully constructed world and change how we're seen by those we leave behind?
"There begins to be the thought, as you reach an older age, 'Am I going to have no more chances to open this or deal with this?' It starts to involve questions of legacy, and 'What do I want people to know about my life?' " says Evan Imber-Black, a family therapist and author of The Secret Life of Families (Bantam, 1999). She is also director of the Center for Families and Health within the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City.
Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist who writes an online column on relationships for the Today Show, says that she regularly gets anonymous emails from older people tremendously conflicted over whether to reveal a secret. "For instance: 'I gave a baby up for adoption decades and decades ago. Do I tell my current children that somewhere out there they have a half-sibling? Do I find that person or let that person know?' Often, they are very fearful of the ramifications of disclosure."
Enter the Internet, where people can unburden themselves of secrets anonymously at sites such as PostSecret—a public confessional of sorts that may serve as a dry run before people share secrets more directly with friends, family, or counselors. At PostSecret, founder Frank Warren publishes anonymous, artfully designed post cards—more than 60,000 of them have found their way to his rural Maryland mailbox—that reveal personal secrets big and small.
Our Writer Shares a Secret of Her Own
My husband, Tim, keeps a secret from the one person really affected by it, but he loves to share the details with just about everybody else. He was golfing with a buddy 34 years ago, and his friend came three inches from sinking a hole-in-one. Waiting for his friend to arrive at the green, my husband playfully kicked the ball into the hole, fully intending to put it back where it had been. But when his friend came over the rise, threw his club in the air, and shouted "hooray" at the top of his lungs, Tim knew he was never going to tell him what he had done. To this day, the golf ball sits in a trophy stand on the mantle in his friend's living room, labeled "One."
And while the great majority of post card secrets that he receives come from younger people, enough older folks have responded for Warren to put together a book with the working title A Lifetime of Secrets: Secrets of Older Americans. HarperCollins expects to publish it in 2007. "The most precious and powerful secrets come from older Americans," he says, "who have in some cases been carrying secrets and burdens for most of their lives."
Consider this post card, published on PostSecret in January 2005: "Almost 50 years ago, I vandalized cars and harassed people at a synagogue. It is my greatest shame." On the accompanying post card, there's a drawing of a man in blue robes kneeling beside a synagogue with his hands over his face. In an inset black-and-white photo, a black spray-painted swastika covers a window.
The site, which has hosted more than 32 million visitors, has become a pop culture phenomenon, gaining notice in venues from The New York Times to Newsweek to 20/20 and spawning one book (PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives) already. An exhibit showcasing thousands of the post card secrets drew lines around the block in Washington, D.C.'s fashionable Georgetown neighborhood early this year.
Warren, 41, is well aware of a big generational difference in people's willingness to share secrets. His own father brought that home to him as Warren drove him to the airport after the Georgetown exhibit. "The question he had for me was, 'Why would anybody want to share a secret with a stranger?' "
If they wrestle with fears as long-lived as their secrets, older Americans also may benefit disproportionately from the appropriate revelation of a secret, and the attendant healing that it can bring, says psychiatrist Saltz, whose book, Anatomy of a Secret Life: The Psychology of Living a Lie (Broadway, 2006), was published in April. "Sharing a secret can bind you together with somebody else in a positive way. And the older you are, the more intensely you may value your relationships."
Does unburdening yourself of a particular secret also help you physically? As long ago as 1913, Sigmund Freud observed that it could. Looking at it another way, can keeping a heavy secret "eat you up" inside? While there are no scientific studies that answer the question definitively, social scientists have learned that people who describe themselves as secretive in general report more physical and psychological symptoms—such as anxiety, depression, back pain, and headaches—than those who say they aren't prone to keeping secrets. Separately, many studies have shown that people who are asked to keep confidential journals about secrets experience greater physical and psychological benefits than subjects who write about trivial events.
Still, there's no hard evidence that keeping a single secret from others does harm to the health. Anita Kelly, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame who studies secret-keeping, says that the common wisdom linking improved health to the telling of a significant secret is "overrated."
"I'm discovering over and over that it's being a secretive person—not keeping a major secret—that is related to symptoms of all kinds," she says.
For instance, in an as-yet-unpublished study of 86 undergraduates conducted by Kelly and her colleague Jonathan Yip, those who reported keeping a major secret for nine weeks reported no more psychological symptoms (such as depression, paranoia, or anxiety) or psychosomatic symptoms (such as chest pain, nausea, or faintness) than those who said they weren't keeping a secret. But those who described themselves initially as secretive were more likely to report such symptoms.
"I'm not by any means saying people should be more secretive. It's just that, a lot of times, people are okay with their secrets," says Kelly.
Susan Turner, an in-home care manager for elderly patients in the northeastern United States, recalls a 94-year-old client named Sarah* who died five years ago. A beautiful woman even in old age, Sarah never let Turner—or anyone else—get close, always using humor as a way to deflect intimacy. She came from a "stiff upper lip" New England family and had never married.
Sarah neglected herself. When Turner first began working for her, dust covered her home. She was seriously depressed. She could be angry. And she was going blind from glaucoma that had never been treated. Turner visited her weekly for three years before Sarah died. "She stayed on the joking level," recalls Turner, "never letting anyone touch her."
After her death, Sarah's cousin, who was 12 years her junior and the closest family contact, pulled Turner aside and related a story she was clearly anxious to share. As a young girl, the cousin had dropped by the house one day when Sarah was about 20. She had found Sarah naked, bound to a chair. Sarah's father immediately "disappeared somewhere." The incident was never discussed, but the cousin began to notice the unusual bruises that Sarah often had. The cousin's family suspected Sarah's father of abuse, but never confronted him.
"I so wished I had known before Sarah died—just on the chance that I could have broken through to her feelings at some point," says Turner. "She was really a lovely lady. She never said anything bad about anyone. She was quite ready to laugh, just not cry. And that's what she needed to do."
So, how do you decide whether to reveal that secret you've long bottled up? Keep in mind that "the very same secret may be a blanket of protection one day and a bed of nails the next," writes family therapist Imber-Black in her book. She suggests asking some basic questions when deciding whether to reveal a secret:
- Who "owns" the secret? For instance, a secret about your sexual identity is clearly yours and nobody else's. But if your child's father was a sperm donor, that secret isn't yours alone.
- Who has a right to know it? While you may "own" a secret, it can be wrong to keep it from others whose lives it directly affects. If you've been diagnosed with a serious or terminal illness, your spouse and grown children in most cases have a right to know.
- How is your behavior affected by keeping the secret? If keeping a secret is sapping your energy, requiring a vigilance that has taken over your life, or distancing you from those you love, it's time to consider revealing it.
- Whose well-being is affected by its continued concealment? If the secret you're harboring means that others are unknowingly living under a set of false assumptions, revealing it may well be the right thing to do. Hiding tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt from grown children who think you are financially sound is no favor to either them or yourself.
"So much depends on your motivation," Imber-Black says. "What is the reason for wanting to open a secret at a certain point? Is it information you feel really belongs to another person? Contrast a birth-origin secret (kept from an adult child) with that extramarital affair that somebody had 25 years ago. Does their spouse really need that information when they're 80? I tend to doubt it."
Of course, there are times and places for secret revelation. Around the Christmas dinner table, where emotions are already running high, is probably not one of those, experts say. Nor are psychologically loaded events like college graduations and wedding anniversaries.
Jane* is a 45-year-old business consultant who knows all about powerful secrets. When Jane was a teenager, her mother died suddenly in her sleep, leaving four children, of whom Jane was the eldest. It was two weeks before Jane's father told her that her mother had swallowed a bottle of barbiturates.
"Nobody except my father knew how to tell us. It was just too hard," she says. "And as a family we never talked about what the heck happened. That was not a good thing. That was really, profoundly, not a good thing."
Years later, the day before she left home for college, Jane's father, as he put away tools at his workbench, asked her if she knew that her mother was Jewish—yet another significant secret. Jane's grandmother had asked Jane's father to tell Jane about her Jewish heritage because she thought she should know.
From her father, Jane learned that her maternal grandparents had fled Hungary for London in the late 1930s and that three of her four maternal great-grandparents had perished in the Holocaust. In order to escape the German bombing of London and move to Canada, which in 1940 had a highly anti-Semitic immigration policy, Jane's maternal grandparents, who were not religious Jews, converted to Christianity.
"A lot of things sure made sense to me once I did find out—like. . . how we observed holidays. There was a distinct lack of religiosity about Christmas in our house," says Jane.
As for when and how she was told: "For my mother's family, I think it is all part of a 'don't talk about it' phenomenon that [persisted] over lifetimes."
If you decide that the time has come to reveal your own hidden truth, there's one thing to be keenly aware of, says Imber-Black, the family therapist: the act of revealing a secret is just a start. What's key to resolution, she says, is being willing to deal with the consequences of your disclosure. "It's not a hit-and-run," she says. "If you're going to open a secret, you have to be prepared to hang in for the longer haul."
In her book, Imber-Black tells a story that makes the point dramatically. A couple in their mid-70s came to her for therapy because of the wife's pathological fear of germs—a fear so profound that she had not touched any human being, including her husband and grandchildren, in more than a decade. Midway through a months-long course of family therapy that included their adult daughters, the elderly parents shared a long-held secret: their oldest daughter had been conceived out of wedlock—a matter of tremendous shame to the young parents back in 1935. Their grown daughters were, in fact, already well aware of the "secret," but much relieved that their parents had at last brought it into the open. The end result was a revitalized, openly expressive, loving family—and the disappearance of the mother's morbid fear of germs.
It's also vital to choose the right person to tell, notes Kelly, the psychology professor at Notre Dame. "An appropriate confidant is discreet, nonjudgmental, and won't reject the revealer. If the person is insightful, that's an added bonus."
To be sure, few if any of us will ever face an audience as daunting as the American public. Still, Mark Felt, now 93, is sure that he made the right choice about revealing his own, famous secret. This spring, in an exclusive telephone interview with AARP The Magazine Online, he explained that the relief has been tremendous. "I'm glad to be out from under. I'm glad to be free."
* Some sources' names have been changed to protect their identity.
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