Two are from my own family and two are from clinical practice. The two from my own family are one in which I received a “revelation” and one in which I was the revealer. In one of the clinical practice examples I encouraged a client to reveal a secret in his family; in the other, acting as the therapist, I revealed secrets to all the members of a family I was seeing, which some members of the family had shared with me.
The first situation from my own family was rather deceptively simple. I am not sure exactly why, but it actually had great power. As a young only child growing up, I found myself constantly berated for not being a better boy. My recollection of my childhood in all events is that I was constantly in a state of disgrace, that is, out of favor, in guilt for again having done something mischievous. My father appeared to me to be a very good and clean person, quite conservative and always law-abiding. I had heard vague tales of his going off to join the navy during World War I before he was of age, but always attributed that to sheer patriotism. Several years ago, and long after his death, I had lunch with a cousin of his who had been his contemporary and whose older brother had been his playmate. In reminiscing she remembered the time her brother and my father were playing in her father’s tailor shop and cut up the suit of a groom on his wedding day. I cannot begin to tell you the release I felt with the hearing of that information. I, of course, could hardly wait to tell my mother about it at the next opportunity and her reply was, and this is pretty close to an exact quote: “I never wanted you to know about those things when you were a child because I was afraid you’d wind up the same way.”
I believe if you try to analyze the details of this whole situation too carefully, that is, what went into the keeping of my father’s childhood secret, as well as the effect of the revelation of that vignette, you will miss the power involved in such family process.
In the second example from my family, my father’s sister had been going downhill for several months, losing weight and becoming obsessed with fears that she had cancer. I had once seen a family in which as soon as the son, an only child, finally got closer to his wife than to his mother, the mother’s heart went arrhythmic and she became convinced she had cancer despite the opinions of several medical experts to the contrary. I was beginning to suspect something similar was happening with my aunt because I had learned from her only son, my cousin, that he and his wife were terribly concerned about his hitherto adaptive, sweet daughter, now shacked up with a leftist admirer of Castro. He, of course, had revealed none of his concern to his prudish mother.
Around this time I had occasion to visit my cousin’s daughter at a New England college. Shortly after I arrived and we began to discuss the family, my kid cousin mentioned almost matter-of-factly as a parenthesis in a sentence going somewhere else, “after I was raped.” Donning all the cool scientific tone I could muster I asked, “Oh, when was that?” “Well,” she said, “remember that birthday party you gave for your mother two years ago?” “Oh, yes,” I said, “I remember.” “Well, two days later when I was back in Cambridge where I was ushering in a playhouse for the summer, I walked home in a way that I really knew I shouldn’t have, and it happened then.” She added that I should please not tell any members of the family and that she wouldn’t have even told her parents if it weren’t for the fact that as a result of questions the police were asking she really needed their advice.
I would say that from the moment she told me, there was no question in my mind that I was going to tell her grandmother, my cousin’s mother. But I wasn’t sure of the best way. I began by confiding the secret to my mother, and she said, “If my sister-in-law ever heard that she would drop dead.” Now I knew how to tell my aunt.
I wrote my seventy-six-year-old aunt that I had news that she would find very shocking and that my mother had said she would drop dead if she ever found out. I informed her that her granddaughter had been shacking up with someone and this was why her son, my cousin, was so upset about things. Then I added that what I had to tell her next was much worse. I informed her of the rape, immediately adding that her granddaughter had not become pregnant and that things seemed to be okay. I added that I thought her son needed her help because as an only son he wouldn’t understand how girls felt about things like that, and also added that while the family thought she was a prude (my mother having told me once she thought she had been frigid in her marriage) that I was sure she could take it.
Upon receiving the letter my aunt phoned me to thank me and to tell me that this made a lot of things she sensed make sense. She still complains a lot about her health, but there has certainly been no deterioration during the past several years, as she reaches seventy-nine — or maybe it’s eighty, she won’t tell.
Also, my cousin who was raped and at that time was fused with her friend who made periodic trips to see Castro is now in her senior year of medical school.
One other point may be important to mention here. While finding out the truth may make people more upset, it reduces, I believe, their general level of anxiety. I don’t think being upset has ever hurt anybody. I believe that anxiety kills.
The third example, one from clinical practice, involves my urging a client to reveal a secret in his family. The client was a professional man of about thirty living with a woman he had seriously considered marrying. He was Jewish; she was not. He had great fears about how his parents would react to the news that he loved, lived with, and might even marry a non-Jewish woman. He was unhappy about his relationships with each of his parents generally, and he had an older sister who used him as a confidant. Several years previously, in fact, the sister had told him that she had an operation on her back for a malignancy but made him swear never to tell Mom.
I suggested that he tell Mom when he brought his non-Jewish girlfriend up to meet them. My general experience in these situations has been that all attacks by parents on the marital choice of their children are red herrings, and that they stop almost miraculously if what is really bothering the parents in the system can be found and focused upon instead. He kind of let it slip out early on that weekend in front of his sister, who at first protested along with her husband that he had it wrong; it was a friend they were talking about who had the malignancy, but he innocently continued to press the point.
Some very interesting effects occurred. First, the parents never once mentioned the non-Jewishness of his fiancée throughout the weekend, nor have they made much of it since. And he reported that the following week after returning to the D.C. area he was functioning with much less over-responsibility for his paramour or the people in his work situation, which according to his perceptions was bringing positive results in both these areas.
He is continuing to work at the family relationship system, and it is my perception that many of his efforts would have had a more treadmill effect if the triangle between his sister, his mother, and himself had not first been ^stabilized.
The fourth example involves my revealing to all the members of a family I was working with secrets I had become privy to in working with several of the members alone.
This was a family of four: an overfunctioning mother, who was a lawyer; a passive father, retired on a disability; and two sons, one thirty-one and one twenty-eight, neither of whom were functioning very well. The older son had originally come in with his wife. He was having an affair and was jobless after losing his position with a civil rights organization. The twenty-eight-year-old son, who was adopted, had not held a job for more than several months after getting out of the army several years previously. The parents were constantly “on” the adopted son, who lived with them, to shape up and become responsible, and were unceasing in their advice-giving efforts to the other son also.
The older brother often talked about the problems that the younger brother was having, particularly how he had gotten a fifteen-year-old black girl pregnant. Mother did know he was dating a black teenager and was very upset about it. I had, during the course of seeing him alone, suggested that he tell “cop-out” Father rather than Mother, which would have been
