by John Friel
Ask any recovering alcoholic family what it was like “in the old days” when everyone spent all of their time figuring out how to hide Dad’s alcoholism. Children make excuses to their friends about why they can’t have anyone over to the house. Mom tells the children that “Dad’s tired.” Dad’s parents become adept at the use of “creative euphemisms,” such as “He just went into the kitchen to have a little nip.”
The perplexing thing about these secrets is that they are only secret at one level of consciousness. At other levels, everyone knows the secret and everyone in the family becomes part of the game.
Or take the family where healthy anger is frowned upon. Everyone walks around with smiles plastered on their faces all the time. I step on your toe, you smile. I need some time alone but you don’t want me to, and I smile. You forget to pick up Suzy from school, and I smile.
In a family where no one is allowed to use anger in a healthy way to set boundaries, the secret is our feelings. At a very superficial level of consciousness, we are all very happy and smiley. Underneath it, we are all angry as the dickens. The end result is craziness.
Our non-verbal language is saying “I’m mad. I’m very mad.” Everyone else picks up this non-verbal language, but they pick it up unconsciously and non-verbally. Thus, everyone is walking around living in two worlds simultaneously and feeling crazy. As the secret becomes more and more embedded in the fabric of the family, individual family members begin to “act out the secret.”
Suzy does poorly in school and gets depressed a lot. Dad worries about Suzy a lot. Mom spends all of her time frantically trying to cheer everyone up. Jimmy gets into drugs or masturbates a lot. If they get into therapy (ostensibly to help the family member who is identified as the one with “the real problem”), the therapist will probably ask if anyone ever gets angry. A resounding chorus from all family members will be, “No. We don’t believe in getting angry at each other. We love each other.”
Secrets are kept outside of the family, too. Even trained professionals help us keep our unhealthy secrets. Not a week seems to go by that we don’t get someone who is clearly alcoholic or obese, and who has been in therapy before, but who was never asked about their eating or drinking behavior.
We know of a man who had spent $15,000 on therapy with three different therapists, and not one of them had ever asked him about the fact that he weighed 325 pounds. It wasn’t surprising to find out that in fact this man had learned to control his secret so well from such an early age that he couldn’t remember anyone ever talking to him about his weight in all of his 42 years of living.
We asked, “Have you ever tried to do anything about your obesity?” and he said, “No, I’ve been too ashamed of my weight my entire life to ever ask for help.”
Months later, and well into his recovery from compulsive overeating, he shared with us how that one simple question represented the beginning of a new life for him. It had exposed the secret and removed its burden from his life.
Covert Behavior
Psychotherapists speak of needing to make the covert overt. Overt behavior is that which can be seen. Covert behavior, thoughts or feelings are those which cannot be seen directly.
We explain to our clients that in unhealthy families, the most important action is really going on underneath the table. Above the table we are all lightness and smiles. Beneath the table we are angry, frightened, ashamed, lonely, confused and so on. Above the table we are in control, composed, relaxed. Beneath the table we are feeling out of control, tense or terrified. Because of the shame attached to our secrets, the fear of being emotionally naked in front of our loved ones is what keeps the covert hidden.
“If we don’t talk about Dad’s depression, maybe it will go away.”
“If we don’t talk about Mom’s alcoholism, maybe it will go away.”
“If we don’t talk about work addiction, maybe he’ll eventually spend more time at home.”
When we get down to the real root of the problem, what we really don’t want to talk about is how we feel about it. Some families are great when it comes to talking about someone else’s problem. “My husband doesn’t like sex. That’s our problem.” But how do you feel about it? What does it mean to you? Do you ever fear that he doesn’t like you?
Very often covert issues will come out in a relationship around issues of money and sex. Couples will battle for years about how their money is spent, when the real covert issue which needs to come to the surface and become overt is that they aren’t getting their emotional needs met in the relationship. But that’s so scary to say. If I say that, she might run away. She might be so hurt that she’ll die. Or she might be so incensed that she’ll leave me. Or she might think that I’m petty and stupid for feeling that way. If I expose my true feelings, I’ll be shamed by her.
Sex is a powerful arena for acting out our covert issues in destructive ways. I am angry at you, so I don’t want to make love. Or I am angry at you and want to control and possess you, so all I want to do is have sex. I am so dependent and unsure of myself that I need to make love with you all the time, and if we don’t, it confirms my sense of worthlessness.
The power of secrets in the maintenance of our symptoms cannot be over stressed. When someone is work-addicted, there’s a secret beneath it. When someone is addicted to television or exercise, there is an emotional secret lurking beneath the surface.
Removing the addictive agent is only the beginning of recovery from addiction. Getting to the secret and letting it come out without shame or blame is the key to healthy recovery. If this is true, why don’t families just realize this and get it out in the open? We are asked this over and over by people with grade school educations all the way up to Ph.D.’s.
Her husband was beating her up all those years, and we never knew it. And he’s a doctor! How could that happen? Why didn’t she say something? Well, think about it. If you lived in a $350,000 house, drove a Jaguar and dressed like Jackie Onassis, would you want everyone in the community to know that your husband was beating you up?
“Oh, and by the way, after you’re finished tuning up the Jaguar, would you sit down and talk with me about the beatings I’ve been getting for the past 10 years?”
Many psychologists believe that all of our behavior serves a purpose, and we tend to agree. The secrets that we have learned to keep may have served a useful purpose once. At age seven, on a long car trip you wet your pants because you couldn’t wait for the next gas station. Everyone feels badly for you, you get cleaned up and then the trip proceeds happily. Nobody wants to focus on it or make a big deal of it because they know how embarrassed you felt. The family is tactful and respectful and that’s the end of it. And it never happens again.
Or Dad goes on a camping trip and drinks too much and makes a fool of himself. It never happened before and it’s not likely to happen again. He feels sheepish about it, shares it with the family when he gets back, they all have a little laugh about it and then they go on. No problem.
Unhealthy secrets begin in much the same way. Mom and Dad have a rip-roaring fight until 1:00 in the morning, and you go to school the next day worried and tense. You don’t want anyone at school thinking that something is wrong with your family (and therefore, by implication, something wrong with you), so you don’t say anything about it. You come home from school that evening to find that Mom and Dad have worked out their problem, and that’s that. No big deal.
But it turns out that they haven’t worked out the problem. Five days later they have another late-night fight. And then two days after that. Then Dad leaves for a few days.
Your stomach is in knots. You can’t concentrate. Your grades start to suffer. You’re sad a lot. You wish things would get better. You wish there was someone to talk to about it. But you can’t. Your shame kicks in and you feel too embarrassed to say anything. Maybe Mom and Dad told you not to say anything to anyone. Or maybe you just start to hope and pray that if you ignore it long enough, it will just go away
. Over the days, weeks and months, the secret becomes an unhealthy secret cemented into your unconscious, seemingly forever.
Or maybe Dad is extremely rigid and dogmatic when it comes to television. He grudgingly lets you watch television, but he covertly lets you know that he’s not pleased with you for watching it. You don’t even watch it very much. After awhile, you watch it but you talk as if you really hate it. But you keep watching.
As an adult, you can’t stop watching TV. You don’t have any true friendships. You’re lost without television. But when the topic comes up, you’re quick to say that you don’t watch much TV.
One secret is that you watch TV. But an even deeper one is that Dad has shamed you, and you hate him for it. That carefully protected secret will come out years later with your own son. You’ll criticize him constantly for something. Maybe it will be his hair or his clothes or his interest in music or sports or his table manners or the amount of television he watches. You won’t know why you’re doing it. You won’t even see that it’s damaging him. You’ll simply feel that something is terribly, deeply wrong with him.
And what is really going on, underneath the table, is that you still feel that there is something terribly deeply wrong with you. The secret is about your own shame, which was the shame that was passed down to you by your father.
Secrets in families can be overwhelmingly difficult to get out into the open. In cases of incest or sexual abuse, it may take years or even several generations before the secret is revealed. And in many cases the secret simply doesn’t get out in time.
At least once a year we read in our local newspaper about the successful doctor or lawyer or star high school student who went home one day and blew his brains out with a gun, sometimes taking the rest of his family with him. In each case there was a very important secret that was embedded within the family. Secret taboos against “failure,” against being masculine or feminine, or secret taboos limiting the range of feelings that we can allow ourselves.
Over the years we become so divided within ourselves that we don’t know how we really feel anymore. We become like two people: our outside mask and our inner self. Being split in two emotionally, we may eventually become split in two physically (in a metaphorical sense) and die.
One of the reasons that 12-Step programs (such as Alcoholics Anonymous) are so successful in helping us with our addictions is that they begin to allow us to come to grips with our secrets and our shame. Ask anyone how they felt going to their first A.A. meeting or going to treatment for cocaine addiction. They felt that it was the longest walk of their life. As if they were approaching death row. It is an admission of powerlessness (which we confuse with helplessness and failure until we begin to recover). It feels so shaming.
“I am so embarrassed about having to do this,” we say. Our spouses say, “But I just don’t think I can tolerate the humiliation of being married to an addict.”
And yet usually within days of taking that first step, most people who work their programs courageously begin to feel a tremendous surge of relief. The weight of carrying all of that shame and fear of humiliation is no longer so heavy. We have exposed ourselves, surrounded by people, encircled by them, and we have bared our deepest, most frightening secret, and no one shamed us. No one pointed their fingers at us and said, “Shame, shame, shame on you!” No one said “We are stupid or ugly or clumsy or worthless or bad” because we admitted we were alcoholic or co-dependent or sex addicted.
Certainly, there will be plenty of people “out there” who will perhaps be quick to judge us and criticize us. But with the strength of a healthy surrogate family system behind us in the form of a 12-step or therapy group, we are able to let go of our secrets and our shame and, therefore, our dysfunction.
The most common secrets we see are about:
1. Addictions
2. Incest or Sexual Abuse
3. Physical Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Perceived Failure
6. Mental Illness
13
What Happens to
Our Identity?
We have thus far described what we believe to be the family system’s roots of our dysfunctional lifestyles. But what happens to us in terms of being a whole person? What does family dysfunction do to our sense of self, to our inner clarity, to our sense of who we are? These are all questions of identity.
By identity we mean one’s self-definition. We mean self-knowledge of, and commitment to, a set of values, beliefs, behaviors and lifestyle. Our identities include what we like and don’t like, what risks we are willing to take, what we believe in, both religiously and philosophically, as well as politically and scientifically. Identity includes our sexual behaviors and feelings, our career choices, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with them, whether we choose to be parents or not. Whether we choose to go to church or not. Whether we choose to be in a spouse or lover-type of relationship. What we like to do with our free time. Whether we are alcoholic or cocaine addicted or sexually addicted or running addicts are also part of our identities, as is whether or not we are recovering from these addictions or are still acting them out. The famous developmental theorist Erik Erikson (Erikson 1963, 1968) devoted a great deal of his life to the study of identity formation. He generated a series of eight psychosocial stages to help us pull together and explain how human personalities grow and change from birth to death. These stages, and the work that Erikson has done around the identity stage, offer us a powerful mechanism for looking at what happens to us if we grow up in a dysfunctional family system.
Even in a very healthy family, the task of growing up and leaving home with a clear identity of our own is a difficult task. Somewhere between the ages of 18 and 25 or so, our main developmental task is to come to terms with who we are as a separate adult. This task hinges on the relatively successful fulfillment of four earlier developmental challenges, according to Erikson, and actually includes issues and skills from earlier tasks.
The four stages leading up to the identity crisis are:
0-11/2 Trust versus Mistrust
11/2-3 Autonomy versus Shame, Doubt
3-6 Initiative versus Guilt
6-18 Industry versus Inferiority
These stages represent psychosocial crises or tasks, and each one builds upon one another. This means that if the stones at the base of the foundation are weak, or almost nonexistent, the entire structure will be weak or actually collapse later on. In the same way, if we have developmental stages that were handled less than ideally early on in life, then we will run into a lot of trouble later as we try to grow up and become an adult.
These crises or stages are broadly defined. They are labeled according to when they first became a major task in our lives. As you peruse the list of stages, you will see that they are tasks and challenges that face all of us throughout our lives, not just when they first appear. And lastly, each stage and the skills that we learned as we pass through it become incorporated into the later stages.
For example, the Initiative versus Guilt stage includes issues of Trust and Autonomy. These Trust and Autonomy issues are age-appropriate, though, so it does not mean that to take the initiative we have to go back to infancy and breast-feed again, or that we have to learn how to walk again.
1. Trust versus Mistrust
The first challenge facing us as human beings is to develop a basic sense of trust in the world. This means that we are left with a feeling that we can rely on those we need, that the world is basically a safe place to be and that we can survive. If our basic needs for food and shelter and affection and touch are met during early infancy, then we most likely will develop a sense of trust. But trust means more than just that. It also means that we can trust that things will work out in the end, even if we don’t get what we need right away.
A two-year-old, for example, does not have to be the tyrant of the house, demanding and getting everything they want on the spot. If our two-year-old is told that they will have to
wait a few minutes until dinner is ready, or that they cannot have everything that they see in a store, it will not erode their basic sense of trust.
In fact, if we go overboard on giving things to our kids, we actually undermine their sense of trust, because we are setting them up to live in a world that doesn’t exist. Few people in this world, if any, get everything they want when they want it. And thus, one of the most important themes of development throughout our entire lives begins right here, in the first stage. And that theme is: Too much or too little of what we need is no good.
Things that leave a child with a basic sense of mistrust about the world and themselves include overt physical or emotional abuse, neglect or abandonment. These are extremes. The more subtle forces that operate during this stage are inconsistent care (babysitting or daycare do not have to be inconsistent), tension and stress in parents that is communicated by inability to be nurturing, spontaneous or comfortable with our infants. Too much overt conflict can upset young children, also overprotective parents who do not allow their young children to explore their world and their own bodies in normal ways. Infants need to learn that they can depend on us, that the world will not always give them what they want and that they can still be “okay” about it. They do not need to be scared, spoiled, neglected or abused. A basic sense of mistrust leaves us with severe fear of abandonment issues.
2. Autonomy versus Shame, Doubt
The issue to be resolved here is one of separateness. Between one- and-a-half and three years of age, our children become mobile, they learn the power of language for defining their separateness (the word “no!” for example), and their task is to begin to become autonomous while still feeling safe and trusting of the world.
