The writer Danny Shapiro has an amazing podcast called Family Secrets in which people talk

about the emotional fallout from things in their family that were hidden and then later

discovered.

I suspect that when families hide something, the thing they are really hiding is always

their own shame.

I know that when families pretend something didn't happen when it did totally happen, it

is to try and avoid the emotional toll of the truth.

But it doesn't work like that because secrets accrue interest over time.

Eventually, there is an emotional balloon payment because growing up in a family in which

a secret is being kept from you is like growing up in a family which has its own poltergeist.

You can't see it, but you know you can feel it.

You know you can hear it rattling things in the attic.

You know something is wrong, but the truth of it is hidden from you.

And when there is a difference between what you are sensing and what you are told, it erodes

your trust in yourself and in others in a way nothing else can.

Many of us who grew up in families with secrets we sensed while everyone around us was saying

nothing's wrong, just come to the conclusion that well, then something must be wrong with

us.

Which is why I started to suspect that secrets don't hide the truth.

They just metastasize it.

My guest today tells me about the cost of her mother's secret and the one she herself

kept from a father who loved her.

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