that Father had had an affair early in his own marriage. Then younger brother came in with older brother and talked about his difficulties in getting his parents off his back, so I suggested a session with the whole family. The parents had been in once before and opened this second meeting with: “I suppose this is going to be ‘get the parents night’ again. Why do you kids always blame us for everything?” Deciding that I was not interested in an evening of fighting denial over rather inconsequential issues, I responded: “Well, I must hand it to you both. I have never seen parents take things so calmly especially when they have two grown intelligent sons, neither functioning very well at work, one whose marriage has just dissolved, and the other having just knocked up a black girl.”
Mother’s response was to yell, “Oh, no,” and to burst into tears, stand up, and start to walk out, but not very quickly. I suggested she stay and help the family open up. She stayed. Shortly afterwards I got around to asking Mother and Father what was going on in their marriage when Father had his affair. And lo and behold, it turned out that the adopted son had never known about that. A little later we somehow got on to Ibsen’s play Ghosts, in which the father, an old roué, had VD, and the son, despite the mother’s tremendous efforts, in a dramatic close to an early act, is seen going after the maid. And that reminded me to let out the fact that the adopted son now had VD. This did it for Mother. She got up again and left, while Dad, following her out, turned to me and said, “That was a low blow.” The sons stayed a while and then left.
At the beginning of the following week, Mother called for a separate appointment. She had during the family session intimated some burden she had been carrying for twenty-eight years. What she told me was that while her younger son knew he was adopted, as did the whole family, she and her husband had kept the identity of his “real” parents secret: the natural mother of her adopted son was Father’s sister.
At this point I dreamed I was in the middle of the last act of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and kept waiting for some foster mother or little Miss Buttercup herself to slip in and put everybody’s past back in proper order. I quickly realized, however, that the mother in front of me was in fact the foster mother, and she would have to do the explaining. She took it upon herself to do just that, informing both of her sons: the adopted one that she was also his aunt, and his father his uncle, and her natural son that his brother was also his cousin.
Most important, however, is this. The older son, who was my original client, always had problems in even knowing what feelings he was trying to express. All efforts to work out problems were always taken on halfheartedly, and he seemed to have a light, denying veneer that he pasted over all his emotions. From that family session on he began to get in touch with himself, take himself more seriously, and make constructive moves towards his own growth. His parents, in turn, have pulled back into their own relationship. Younger son has moved out of the house, broken up with his adolescent girlfriend, and gotten a job in the same place as older brother, who now has risen to a position of responsibility. In terms of the integration of self that resulted for the older brother, I would say that the family secret-revealing session, if one can quantify such things, was worth a hundred analytic hours. In family terminology I would say that the effect of that session was to de-glob him from the undifferentiated mass of the system. The black teenager, by the way, aborted soon after this.2
In summary of this section on the effects of revealing secrets in families, I would like to say that I never cease to be amazed at the changes that follow such uncovering. It seems always to be much more than I would have predicted. That is, changes occur that apparently have nothing to do with the subject of the secret. And perhaps that is the most important point I could make. It is the fact of the existence of a secret, rather than its subject matter, that seems to affect the relationship system.
When secrets are revealed it is almost as though relationships deeply locked into one another in one particular way suddenly uncouple and are given an opportunity to recouple in different ways.
III
Finally, I would like to deal briefly with some of the ethical questions raised by not being “dependable” about keeping secrets, either in one’s family or in one’s office.
First of all, let me say that taking this approach has not come easily to me. I still do a lot of soul-searching about it, and as each new situation presents itself, despite my previous successful experience, I do it with heart in mouth.
When you “betray a confidence,” as the expression goes, have you been a traitor to your family or your patient? Here is some of the thinking that has gone into the position at which I have arrived.
The management of information works both ways. I have decided that I am not bound to keep information secret if I am told it is a secret after I have been given the information. In other words, if someone tells you something and then says, “But promise me you won’t tell anyone else,” or “Don’t tell X or Y,” then they have in effect thrown a lasso around your neck and, with the request for silence, pulled the noose tight. It seems to me that what is unethical is to bind people with information or perceptions unless you have first asked them will they keep it secret, that is, are they willing to be lassoed?
In those situations where they ask for confidence first, before giving you the information, it would seem that the ethical thing is to say, “No, I can’t keep a secret.” I usually phrase this as, I feel I must be the judge of what I should do with information I have about the family. I am not going to run about as a tattletale but neither can I be bound to one member. I find most people are so burning to tell you the secret by that time they tell it to you anyway. And if they don’t, you’re still free, of course, to tell other members of the family that this one has a secret.
It is possible to argue that even if a member of a family has not gotten a prior commitment of confidence from you, that is their expectation because of the way psychotherapy and religious confession are practiced today. This seems to me to be a valid point. In actual practice, however, I have not found that point to matter much. I have almost never been attacked by a client for revealing a secret, if I can get the family to deal with it immediately. I believe this is true because I convey that my client is the family, and that I will be able to help the family best if I have no secret alliances with any of its members.3
Ultimately, however, my rationale for revealing secrets is pegged to two other ideas, one practical and one philosophical. The practical one is simply that I believe that when I engage in keeping confidences with certain members of the family from other members of the family, I am at the worst helping that family to destroy itself and at the least making all my other efforts to help the family a thousand times more difficult. I am stuck on a level of what I have previously referred to as secondary family process.
The philosophical point is that I deeply believe in civil liberties and the rights of human beings to have free access to all those aspects of their environment that might make their own choices better informed. It is really rather illusionary to try to formulate an “I” position when it’s not clear where you are standing. While some might think revealing secrets is playing God, I see keeping secrets as playing God, as acting with great presumption about what information is good for people to know. And my constant surprise at the effects on a family when a secret is revealed convinces me that revealing secrets can be a great humbler for the therapist, in terms of what he thought the problems and the causes were and what the proper direction should be.
I should like to conclude with one short story that illustrates my position. Last summer in Atlanta at a special seminar on death during a rabbinic conference I had been taking a strong position about the importance of openness in the face of death. One of my colleagues who disagreed with my position on openness gave as an example a woman in his congregation whose husband was killed suddenly in a 75 mph head-on crash. He had to be the one
