
Toxic Secret Keeping
In my view, we have a culture that conflates respect and confidentiality with secret keeping. There are multiple examples of how secret keeping either creates or exacerbates emotional harm. Secrets protect the abuse of power. Respect is conflated with fear of retribution or shame in powerful contexts. In a family, the perception of violating secret keeping (outing, ratting, revealing, exposing) may lead to being permanently ostracized. The resulting depth of loneliness is fel