What kind of secrets are we keeping tonight

He was Averell Harriman, a tough-minded American millionaire businessman chosen by president Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Britain. We know what happened next. But what about Randolph and Pamela? Randolph was no prize husband, nor a faithful one. He drank too much, spent too much and gambled what was left. It had never been a good marriage and ended in divorce in December But he was still a son, the only son. The other secret about Randolph, now well known, is that his mother, Clementine, disliked him.

Dear God. Then it was revealed he was nursing a bloody great secret himself. He had become physically dependent on the anti-anxiety drug Clonazepam. Peterson has many enemies because of his conservative stance on issues like identity politics.

Several delighted online in the revelation. But did anyone feel sorry for movie mogul Harvey Weinstein when his secret finally leaked that he was a serial sexual harasser and rapist? He had got away with it for years, kept aloft on a tsunami of Hollywood success and seeming riches. A New York judge sentenced him to 23 years in jail and he faces more charges in California. Without ever articulating it, society has made a judgment call.

But if your secrets benefit you at a cost to others, or give you power over people, or allow you to trick, humiliate or abuse them, we will feel very differently.

While I was researching this story, the secrets of Labor Party powerbrokers and alleged branch-stacking efforts in Victoria erupted. I was also watching the BBC dramatisation of the Profumo-Keeler political imbroglio that involved the then British secretary of state for war, two pretty young women and a Russian spy. In one truly horrible scene, John Profumo played by Ben Miles stands stalwart before the House of Commons and tells his fellows, and watching wife in her pearls and sapphires, that he had not committed any impropriety with the then year-old Christine Keeler.

It should be reassuring for the average person to know that no matter what their secrets, somewhere in the world there will probably be a politician with far worse. The characters on TV sitcom Friends drew laughs through their secrets and self-deception.

Credit: Getty Images. Michael Slepian is a psychologist and associate professor at Columbia Business School who has specialised in the study of secrets for the past 10 years. Astonishingly, those who were preoccupied with an important secret did estimate a hill was steeper or a target further away. Their secrets did make them feel weighed down.

Slepian knew he wanted to go further. The field is new and huge, but studies conducted so far by Slepian and his colleagues around the world indicate what we must instinctively suspect: secrets can hurt our health, relationships and sense of wellbeing and produce depression and anxiety. Ninety-seven per cent of us will have at least one big secret at any given time, Slepian discovered, and the average person has 13 secrets.

Five will have never been divulged to anyone. Secrets are often self-protective. Use your imagination. Slepian has built a website keepingsecrets. Julia Robson, a Melbourne private investigator, will present a dossier to a partner, husband or wife that reveals yes, their other half has, in spite of all denials, been secretly cheating. They can trust themselves again.

We can make amends. Shame makes us feel helpless and powerless and is very much related to how often you think of your secrets. Some secrets hardly matter except to their keeper.

Some grow with time. When my attractive mother met my equally attractive father, she was more than kilometres from home, and thus from anyone who knew the basic details of her life. She was free to concoct a little. Guilelessly, flirtatiously, she nevertheless chose to change the one thing that would ride on her back all her life, her age.

Instead of being a few years older than my father, she became one year younger. Her sisters, safely away in another city, still had to be roped into the deception.

Did she ever imagine when she first falsely stated her age what that secret would cost her and those around her? By then, even as I agonised for my mother for those years of pretence, I knew what it had done to our own occasionally fraught relationship. In my late 20s, for instance, my then husband and I moved to London, where we worked for seven years.

It seemed incomprehensible, given they had the money and the time. Even now I can remember the hurt line that ran straight to my heart. It was to do with the date on her birth certificate and the complications of applying for a passport.

She had instructed my sister to tell me only after she had gone. The researchers asked participants if they were keeping any of 38 different common categories of secrets which ranged from infidelity to financial secrets to secret hobbies. The most common secrets that people shared with no one else were: extra-relational thoughts thinking something romantic or sexual about someone other than your partner , romantic desire, sexual behavior, and lies.

But in this paper, the actual act of hiding—the moment a person makes up a lie, or changes the subject, or simply omits certain information from a conversation—proved to be only a minor part of the experience of having a secret. Instead, what seems to affect people much more is how often they think about the secret. When you consider that the point of secrets is to keep them—keep them close, keep them safe, keep them inside—it makes sense that the primary way we experience secrets is alone.

All these secrets may potentially become burdens to carry around on our own. Recently, I worked with a team of business leaders. We worked with their mental diversity and agile thinking, and we talked about their visions for the company compared to the reality.

Suddenly, one leader stated that she would like to express how she really felt — and a silence spread across the room. And then she talked about how frustrated she was about what they did.

She felt this frustration so deeply that she had lost her sense of meaning, even though her engagement at work was still expected. Another team member joined in on the conversation and framed her story in his perspective. And consequently, they started talking about it in new ways, not to find any solutions, but just to discuss it. I think this sharing of her secret opened up a new and honest way of seeing and meeting each other and a higher quality in their leader conversations.

I know of another team that has established a habit at their meetings. Some are emotional, some are from the private sphere. What is important is that they have made the space open for sharing secrets. The ambition is to live in an organisation fit for humans, where they can bring their whole selves to work rather than just bringing half of themselves and playing the corporate theatre. Together, the team can handle inner struggles and secrets and make sense of them in order to cope with life and its adversity also outside the team.

If team members want to, they can share secrets and gain perspectives on them, supported by empathy, meaningful conversations and mutual sharing. This is something that the many leader teams I work with can really learn from. But even if you are on a secure and collective platform where burden-sharing is acceptable, secrets are paradoxical, as a secret is precisely a piece of information that we would rather not share with anyone — but at the same time, it is also tempting to share with an appropriate confidant.

At least only one. Or two. And carrying secrets can be difficult, because we often want to share them with someone. This enhances the risk of spreading the secrets. But why do we inherently want to share our secrets? Science tells us that by revealing ourselves to others — i. As humans, we are constantly seeking meaning, and it has always been one of the primary motivations for human beings and part of re gaining mental health Frankl, When we create meaning, we define our identities through our narratives White, which has an influence on our psychological and mental health Pennebaker and Seagal, And in case of adversity or challenging experiences, we would usually go from refusal and denial to a process where we can gradually cope with the situation by finding a new way of interpreting what went wrong and integrating it into our narrative to put the world back together Baumeister, It is in this light that we must see our innate desire to share our secrets.

But there is still a paradox to revealing a secret. The chance that they will use our secret against us also seems reasonably small, and as we are not related as such, there is no notable consequence if they decide to pass our secret on. We should share more secrets, and there are many reasons why. One is that we use a lot of mental capacity keeping secrets. A study showed that we are actually thinking about a secret three times more often than actively hiding it from others.

This results in a cognitive burden that is associated with poorer mental and physical health Slepian, Chun and Mason, So, just thinking about our secrets can burden us and thus decrease our motivation seen from this cognitive perspective.

Neuroscience can explain how a secret will create conflict in the brain. By not allowing the cingulate cortex, which is naturally wired to tell the truth to perform its natural functions, it causes the cortex to become stressed.

It will cause an increase in cortisol levels, affect memory, blood pressure, gastrointestinal tract and metabolism — all of which will affect our emotional and physical well-being Slepian, Masicampo and Ambady, But it can be difficult to reveal a secret, especially if the experience is related to guilt or shame. Sensemaking happens when we reframe our experiences and assimilate them into our world views.