The Secret Life of Humans

Hi Guys, CJ here. Well, what’s-his-name is putting his feet up, again. Hopefully not on those lovely white (what the hell was he thinking?) cotton cushions though. Do you think he has sprayed them with the water-repellant, anti-stainy stuff yet? Given that he is, well, a bloke, I’m thinking the chances are fairly slim. Oh, the inhumanity. I just can’t watch. I feel like cushion-napping them, bringing them to Sydney and telling them ‘It’s ok. You’ll be safe here. The bad man has gone now.’ Am not weird.

I hope the beginning of your year has been fabulous and you’re well on your way to achieving all that you set out to do. Because it’s now the twenty-ninth of January. Yep. That means that the year is already – hold on a tick, we all know that maths is not my friend – um, 7.6% gone. That’s nearly 10%. Already. How did that happen? And does that mean that we should be almost 10% closer to achieving our 2010 goals? Oops. Ok, I’ll stop talking now; this could get ugly.

As the Big Guy says, on with the show …

Classified Information

Do you have any secrets? Are you the trusted custodian of someone else’s? If you answered ‘no’ to both these questions then you might want to go and make yourself a nice cup of tea because you’ll find the rest of this post quite dull and irrelevant. … Hmmmm. I can’t hear the kettle boiling. Certainly not at my house, anyway.

If we define secrets as simply ‘stuff about us that we would prefer not to be broadcast on the evening news’ then, of course, we all have them. They can range from the mildly embarrassing, to the potentially life-changing… to the reputation-destroying. Do any of the following sound familiar to you? Maybe from your own experience or that of someone you know? 

• I drink a whole bottle of wine every night once the kids are in bed.
• When I was sixteen I had a baby and gave him up for adoption.
• I use recreational drugs.
• I’m taking anti-depressants.
• My wife can’t have a baby so I donate sperm because I can’t bear the thought of dying without leaving behind a son or daughter (or seventy-three).
• Every time my husband is out of town I eat my own bodyweight in icecream.
• I have cancer and I haven’t told my family.
• My partner is so bad in bed that I want to scream (and not in a good way).
• I have a gambling problem.
• I was retrenched three months ago but I still haven’t told my parents.
• I’m not really a size ten. Actually, the last time I was a size ten was when I was, like, ten.
• I’m 52 and I’m still looking for my parents’ approval.
• I no longer believe what my church is telling me but I still go through the motions every Sunday because I don’t want to lose my friends.
• A co-worker kissed me at the office Christmas party and I can’t get it out of my mind.
• My father isn’t really working overseas – he’s in prison for tax fraud.
• I had a nervous breakdown four years ago.
• They’re not real.
• I haven’t had sex for two years. I’m waiting for the government to declare my nether regions a ‘drought-affected area’.
• I’ve had Botox.
• I read my teenage daughter’s diary to find out if she is taking drugs.
• My husband thinks we’re trying to get pregnant but I’m still taking the pill because I’m not ready to give up my career.

Now, clearly, the above examples can’t all relate to me so please cancel the intervention you had booked for tomorrow night. Unless you were planning to bring coconut macaroons in which case I’ll happily pretend to be a 52 year old man. Or maybe not. Because that could be a little weird.

If We Have a Pulse, We Have a Secret

It’s pretty much a given that we all have secrets. Yep, every single one of us. But have you ever wondered why? Why don’t we just reveal everything about ourselves to everyone? If we stopped avoiding, evading, concealing, selecting, omitting, dodging and skirting or perhaps even lying – would that not make life simpler? Would it not make us happier?

If you just broke out in a cold sweat at the mere thought, I’m guessing that’s a ‘no’.

One of the most obvious reasons for keeping our secrets is if they relate to something we have done which is a little bit, well, illegal. If our ‘skeleton in the closet’ is of the literal variety then it’s probably wise to keep our mouths firmly closed. Unless prison orange is our colour. And we would enjoy being spooned every night by a 200kg armed robber who likes to be called ‘Krystaal’.

Although most of our secrets wouldn’t land us in prison, they may have the potential to land us in something else. Some of our secrets could have a devastating effect on our lives and we may not be ready to deal with the consequences. We may need to hold onto the job we hate until we are officially offered a new one so we keep the fact that we’re sending out applications to competitors, to ourselves. We may be financially or emotionally unprepared for a divorce so we conceal our unhappiness and our plans from our partner until we are ready.

It could also be that we suspect people would think differently about us were they to know these private details. Perhaps our experiences, decisions and actions of the past seemed like they happened to a different person – we don’t want to be judged, pitied or condemned now for what seems a lifetime ago. If our secret relates to a current issue, we may also want to avoid people’s well-intended but smothering attempts to ‘help’ us. Perhaps we couldn’t cope with their jealousy, I told you so’s, or awkwardness. Or maybe we just don’t want to hurt them.

Or, if we are to be completely honest here, we simply don’t want to be stopped from doing what we’re doing. Not necessarily because we’re doing something harmful or immoral (or maybe we are?) but because we know that those around us may not understand and accept it. We know that our motorbike gang probably wouldn’t fully appreciate our new penchant for scrapbooking.  Or that we wouldn’t be able to convince our conservative, borderline-Amish family that ballroom dancing isn’t necessarily a quickstep to hell. So we keep it to ourselves.

Spill or Chill

Given that a secret is a piece of information that we have labeled as ‘classified’ because its disclosure would bring us harm, why do we so often feel compelled to reveal our secret to another human being? Sometimes even without alcohol. Surely doing so is, well, a little dumb?

He at him-dot-com says that everything we do is in an effort to avoid pain or gain pleasure. Or maybe both. So, whether it’s a spur-of-the-moment confession or a carefully rehearsed ‘We need to talk’, unless we are talking – or texting – in our sleep, we’re making a conscious decision: spill or chill. And we know that once those words are out, there’s no going back.

Gaining Pleasure

Using the avoiding pain/gaining pleasure model, our decision to confide in another person is, therefore, motivated by our expectation that doing so will bring us some form of benefit. Our complex mind will be conducting a risk-benefit analysis and spitting out an answer. A little like one of those BMI calculating scale thingies at the shopping centre. Unless we are talking to someone called ‘Your Honour’, we tell our secrets because we want to. It’s that simple.

This doesn’t mean that we’re all horrid, cold, calculating, Machiavellian strategists who are only concerned with our own wellbeing. Well, not always. Most of the time the benefits we hope to gain can be, well, nice. For example, if the secret is about our past, perhaps we may choose to reveal it to a particular person because we know that without that information they cannot truly know or understand us – our background, character, idiosyncrasies, fears and flaws. Confiding in someone builds intimacy and can deepen a relationship. However, it can also destroy a relationship if we tell them about whole skeleton thing – some people are such goody-goodies.

We may also feel that the person in whom we are confiding could be helped greatly by our revelation. They could have been feeling guilty about something for years, believing everyone else to be faultless when it’s clearly not the case. They may need to hear: “What? You’re feeling guilty because you sneaked into the movies when you were 14? Pffft! You know the Great Sydney Bank Robbery of 1987? Yep, that was me.’ See? Now they feel better. The benefit for us is the pleasure and satisfaction we gain from helping someone else. Um, can you hear sirens too?

When the secret is about something in our present, we may choose to spill the beans because we want to benefit from that person’s advice, objective opinion and guidance – especially if we respect them immensely. We may need to make an important decision and we don’t want to do it alone. Or maybe we just need to cry on their shoulder. It could also be that we need their practical help and we therefore have to reveal our secret by way of explanation.

Even though we may all be driven by the same generic need to gain a benefit (pleasure), our perception of those benefits will, of course, differ greatly between individuals.  We are all built differently and we can all view the same situation in an infinite variety of ways. Some of us may have a very strong need for approval, support, validation, acceptance and understanding so we will, therefore, highly value the sense of intimacy and connection which results from such candid conversations. Whereas some others would perceive there to be no benefit in it at all. Perhaps that is one of the major differences between the sexes. Or maybe being our own confidant is simply a sign of maturity – that we are strong enough to carry heavy loads ourselves. Or maybe it’s just that damn ‘islandness’ thing again?

Avoiding Pain

When we decide to reveal a secret, it’s usually because our risk-benefit analysis has determined that there is a very minimal chance that the person in whom we have placed our trust will disclose the classified information and therefore cause us pain. Unless we’re a struggling celebrity who desperately needs publicity. In which case the higher the risk the better.

Whilst we all want to avoid taking unnecessary risks with our secrets, we all assess those risks differently. For example, I have been told that I’m too naïve and trusting – quite the achievement at my age. It’s probably because I have never been betrayed by anyone. Really. No-one. Ever. Which could mean quite a number of things: I’m just plain lucky; I choose my friends very wisely; my life is so frightfully dull that no-one could be bothered gossiping about me anyway or I am, in fact, so naïve and stupid that I haven’t realised that my friends have launched a website called cj’sdirtylaundry.com.au – a waste of time really given that it would probably get fewer hits than a site dedicated to cornflakes that look like continents (apparently Australia is considered a continent but Greenland is just an island although there is no internationally recognised definition of a ‘continent’ anyway – who knew?).

On the other hand, if in the past we have been ‘burned’ by someone we believed we could trust, we’re probably not going to begin many conversations with ‘Please don’t tell anyone but …’. Because our past experience has shown us how duplicitous and disloyal people can be, we perceive the risk as being unacceptably high. Our reluctance to share all of ourselves may keep us safe from pain but it may also rob us of the pleasure of intimate and trusting relationships.

Our perception of risk can also be affected by some other factors. In the same situation, a woman can assess the risk as minimal and trust her friend implicitly whilst a man would feel less vulnerable having a prostate examination. Or vice-versa. Except for the prostate. Sorry. We may also have been brought up in a ‘trust no-one’ environment where we were told to keep our cards close to our chest – no one has ever betrayed our trust because we’ve never given them the opportunity.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The need to share our disappointment, apprehension, fears, excitement, embarrassment, joy, anticipation, hopes or bewilderment with another trusted person is part of what makes us human. It is not a flaw; it is natural. However, when our secret involves another person, revealing it to a third party can be a betrayal of trust. For example, we may desperately need our friend’s comfort and support in relation to our struggle to fall pregnant but that would mean revealing our husband’s impotence (awkward enough?). Or perhaps we would love to confess to our best friend that we have reluctantly taken on a second job but then we would need to explain that our wife foolishly lost $20,000 through a Nigerian inheritance scam.

A Venting Booth

Therein, lies the challenge. Perhaps we need to reinvent the confessional. Maybe every shopping centre should have a well-designed, beautifully-decorated, soundproofed booth where we could sit in a comfortable chair for fifteen minutes, sip a latte and reveal all (metaphorically, of course, it’s not one of those booths) to an understanding, non-judgemental, secular wise one who is concealed behind a tasteful screen. I wonder how many women would confess to having an affair with Tiger Woods? – now there’s someone who needs to recalibrate his risk-benefit analysis. Or, slightly less frighteningly, how many men would admit that they secretly watch ‘Glee’? And I wonder how long it would take for the ‘wise one’ to reach secret-saturation point and wish that he’d kept his job at the McDonalds’ drive-through?

What do you guys think? Is it normal and harmless to have secrets or are they an indicator that we are not quite what we seem? Why do you think we sometimes feel the need to reveal our secrets to others? Do we consciously calculate the risks and benefits or are our revelations usually just emotional responses to situations? How do we determine whom we can trust? Can we truly trust anyone?

As always, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

CJ xox

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