The big secret!
"The Secret" that shook the world. The secret to an easy life, the secret to success and abundance… It's a word that gives the feeling as if there is some secret that if we only discovered it, our lives would be like fairy tales. But we all also know that with all the happiness that is shown outside, that of Facebook and the like, it is not like what all of us or at least most of us feel. This gap between appearance and reality does not allow us to express out loud what we really think. To talk about things that are happening or have happened to us, things that we really feel. We conduct ourselves in secrecy and secrets in front of others but also among ourselves. We think we have managed to work on everyone who does not see the gap in us. But in the end it comes out of us in different behaviors and at inconvenient times.
The real, significant secrets are the ones that are inside us. They affect us, stop us, and are very difficult for us to see. They are usually our blind spots. Secrets have great power and they affect our self-perception. Our relationships. Our behavior. Secrets actually govern us from the inside and affect our lives.
This secret....
There are different types of secrets that can be addressed. Usually the explanation that accompanies the reason for the thing being a secret is what distinguishes them. For example, when faced with the question – Why don't I share? Whose secret is this? When the secret is yours, related to you and you alone, or when you keep a secret for someone else. A personal secret or a professional secret, a national one. Is it your job to keep the secret or did you choose to keep the secret out of a conclusion or thinking that doing so would be a good deed for someone else?
One day she discovered that her father had three more children from a previous marriage, before he married her mother and brought her and her brother into the world. "To suddenly discover in my teenage years that there were more brothers and a father who told a lot of lies, a mother who was an accomplice in the cover-up, and a family who lived in another country far from the father who was also mine….it changed everything for me…"
"My father shared his adultery stories with me. For some reason he thought I should know. I should have hidden it from my mother… It's devastating for a young girl, years later I only realized what it did to the girl in me, what it did in terms of trust, in terms of looking at the world…"
"After many years, I discovered that I had a brother who died. It's something that I somehow felt in the atmosphere in the family. But when things aren't talked about at all, even if it's for all the good reasons, you realize that there are things that need to be erased from life and thought. That you can also erase lives that don't exist. And if that's the case, how important is my presence really, and what do I need to do so that they don't forget me…"
The Secret Effect
I have heard many, many stories about the moment of discovery of the hidden family secret over the years. The common experience for all is the feeling that it is a formative experience. What came before – the trust, the closeness, the family, is shattered in a brutal and unforgettable way. It is not the event itself that is the drama, but rather its discovery. The realization that someone else, close to you, has hidden something so significant, important from you for a period of time and sometimes years, this realization is what undermines trust and closeness.
Everyone reacts differently to a secret, but the common feeling is a loss of trust, and a sharp and clear decision on how to proceed from here. A rapid formation of a worldview that is very difficult to change later. It can be said that revealing a significant secret randomly, and not in an organized conversation, is a kind of trauma – the life before is not the same as the life after.
Because we have no way of knowing or convincing them to reveal the secrets of others, those close to us. If we have understood that this has a huge effect on us, let's try to understand something about the secrets we hide. Each of us has some kind of secret that we hide, about an event, about who we are, about what we feel. A secret that we take great pains to keep and hide, a secret that robs us of energy and vitality in order to preserve it.
The biggest fear
The greatest fear can be fear of judgment, fear of hurting others, fear of the consequences of disclosure on me and on those around me. This immense fear feels like a question of life and death. It feels like living or dying. When the fear is so great, we avoid it, and the thought of the heavy price is what prevents us from sharing. On the other hand, we don't put the price we pay with our lives for not disclosing at stake.
Any of us who has ever hidden a secret knows that the effect, the price, the power, the energy required to hide it is devastating. It takes time to understand that it takes away our sense of vitality, makes us feel lacking, emotionless, indifferent to ourselves and the world. Or we risk all sorts of thrills to overcome the feeling of suffocation that comes from the secret.
The reason for this is that in the very act of secrecy, of concealment, we hide parts of who we are from the world. We present a partial image, different from what we really feel. When we do this long enough, difficult questions arise about who I am, what the truth is, and what our true feelings are. After a long time in this role-playing, the feeling between the real identity and the borrowed identity we present to the world becomes confused. The next level is a feeling of losing touch with who we really are.
Secret partners
"The thought arose in me that they didn't see all my greatness in me. They saw me as just another one, while my feeling was that I was the one, but they didn't see. My husband at home didn't see it either. My family didn't see it either. I held within myself the feeling that I was unique, but there's probably no one in the world who is able to see that."
The feeling was good, sublime, somewhat haughty. But practice and reality did not allow it to exist. Until he arrived. From the first conversations between us, which were completely professional, I felt this feeling of someone who understands you completely, truly. Someone who admires who you are, the way you think, someone who admires what is most important to you, and to me, intelligence was important. That's what I fell in love with.
In someone who is able to see in me what I see in myself, and for the first time in my life I experienced my own perfection. Me and the world see me the same way. It is perfection that creates the experience of falling in love. The perfection of the self through the other. This is how a love story begins, for which nothing in reality prepares you. Especially when reality is unable to contain such a story, and you are unable to separate yourself from the emotions that float and rise from all sides. In this clash between your private world, the world between the penis and the heart, and the reality connected to people and situations other than yourself, the secret is created."
The big clash!
A secret is the result of a clash between values, between worlds. The inability to answer both things at the same time, the inability to deal with the conflict, the inability to talk the conflict out are the ingredients from which the secret is created.
"And because I grew up like this, that a secret is a part of life, that there are things that are not talked about, that there are conflicts that are not revealed. That there are situations where a secret is the necessity of reality, that a secret is what allows for survival, life. So I used exactly this tool in order not to collapse what was. And so I lived my life with a difficult and oppressive secret, but with the support of rational clichés about why it is not right to reveal it, who will be hurt, and why it is unnecessary to tell. When the secret becomes part of everyday life, life is conducted in two worlds, and that is where confusion begins to arise between what is truth and what is reality."
Over time, the truth becomes blurred and even unimportant. Because what is truth if it cannot be spoken or lived… A lie allows one to live quietly in the short term and avoid conflicts, arguments, and accusations, but in the long term it is an influential and life-changing factor.
The meaning of time
There are several ways to divide the world of secrets. For example, secrets we hide from others that are related to us or to others. Secrets we hide from ourselves. Secrets we hide from ourselves are related to repression, denial, emotional manipulations that were needed to emotionally survive some struggle. Secrets we hide from others can be about us and the other, or related to the other. That's where secrets that deal with betrayal, shame, and lies come in.
The reasons for concealment and secrecy are usually related to the understanding of the meaning of the events as events with a high social and moral tag. Criticism and harsh judgments that will put us in a negative light in the eyes of the environment and in our own eyes. The way to overcome and escape this court case is to maintain secrecy. The price as stated is exacted from us.
In an attempt to find a definition of what constitutes a "standard secret," it turned out that there is no such definition. Anything that a person feels that they cannot share with their surroundings is a secret from their perspective. The reasons and motivations for the inability to share the secret differ from person to person and from society to society, and are directly influenced by accepted values. Likewise, the person's perception of themselves, the person's value in their own eyes, thinking about the power they have or do not have, and the ability to deal with conflicts. Opinions, values, and self-perception are what will determine the duration of keeping the secret and the price that this keeping will exact from the person.
The secret element
What is clear is that in any case, liberation from the secret, in most cases, produces, after a certain time, high and significant mental well-being.
Each of us has something to hide. Something he has done and is ashamed of, something about himself that embarrasses him. Something he is sure will portray him in a negative light or something he would pay a high price for if he were known about. It could be anything, big or small, more or less significant. But it is clear to all of us that the very act of concealment, the very secret that has accompanied our lives for so many years, has a destructive effect on our lives.
The secret begins like a small seed sown in the soul, and it grows and grows and grows and takes up more and more space, and requires more and more energy to remain a secret, energy that consumes us from the inside. And the more it grows from the inside, the smaller we are from the outside. We have less freedom of conduct for fear that it will be exposed. We invest so much time in it that we forget a little what it is to be without it. We give it so much meaning that it seems that without it we would not be us. And in fact, since the secret began to nest in us, we are not really us. Not in our entirety, because we are hiding a significant part of the world. The world only sees a part of us, a part of ourselves, the part without the secret. And as time goes by, parts of the personality that are not revealed to the world degenerate, to the point where it is no longer clear to us who we really are.
Time to discover the secret
There are secrets that need time to ripen within us before they can be brought out, there are secrets that come out in time, at the right moment, and there are secrets that rot and rot the soul. How can you know when the right time is? Is there such a thing as the right time to tell something that you have chosen not to tell for a long time? There are cases when life situations change and what was previously a secret of life and death becomes something that can be revealed and shared. Especially in a cultural and social context. Sometimes social norms create such great fear for yourself and for your family that time can be a significant factor in when to tell the secret.
But there are other cases where the secret simply sits inside us, waiting in shame, rotting and rotting until it blackens the whole soul. This is the time in any case to tell the secret. As soon as we feel ready to tell, even if not to everyone, at least to some, to make it easier on the soul, to make it easier on ourselves and to release this energy.
