For more years than I can remember, around my teens, I would wake up every morning with an upset stomach. The pain was always the same, always on time, knocking on my skin as soon as I began to function. I blamed it on lactose intolerance, my doctor wasn’t so sure. We did a battery of tests, all good. Then, it was decided that the most realistic reason was stress. Really? I thought. My mother ended up sending me to breathing & yoga practice at 13, long before it was a flex. For me, it was anecdotal and not particularly important. Until I came upon the work of the leading expert in the psychology of secrets—yay, it’s a thing and I am that geeky—and it completely changed how I’ve made sense of this moment.

Michael Slepian, psychologist and author of The Secret Life of Secrets, reveals that there are 38 categories of secrets. “On average, people have about 13 [secrets] at any one time, five of which they have never told another person.” Hiding a secret is stressful, right? Well, it gets deeper. “Keeping a secret is associated with lower life satisfaction, lower-quality relationships and symptoms of poor psychological and physical health”. In short, secrets make us sick. Interestingly, not because we hide them but because they live in our heads rent-free. We’re stuck with them. And while we obsess over them alone, our body and mental health pay the price.

The Trust Trap

Trust in a relationship can be weaponized when someone makes you absorb their emotional burden as a mandatory price of their love. This is what I call a trust trap. Turning what’s supposed to be a connection into a hostage situation. This is what Emily* experienced. She grew up carrying secrets that weren’t hers but her sister’s, such as struggles with an eating disorder, body image, and cheating episodes with her boyfriend(s). “There’s this dissonance”, she told me. “You want to draw a line—say Stop, I don’t want to hear this—but then you feel guilty, like you’re failing as a sister if you refuse.” It’s a suffocating, false choice. “There is this weird thing where my sister made me feel that sharing this with me was tied to a proof of love, like her love was conditional on my capacity to keep it.” I can’t help but think that compulsive secrets-bombing under the disguise of an act of “love” is really twisted. Becoming the bearer of secrets had physical consequences on Emily, who ended up with a constant tummy ache, like me.

Emily’s body was processing what her mind couldn’t. It also influenced how she relates to secrecy. “I knew the impact of carrying the weight of someone else’s secrets. So I became, myself, really secretive after that. I control what I share with intention. Not a lot of people know me deeply.” This is what psychologists call self-concealment: When you armour up with a thick social mask—even around the people you love.

For Emily, keeping secrets is also a coping mechanism. “It allows me to extract from reality”. I can totally understand why. It’s thrilling to project a more polished version of ourselves in public, based on what we believe people would think is more appropriate or normal. This relationship to secrets fed her dependency on alcohol, which she hid for a while. “I see a link between my [sister’s] secrets and my dependency. Both are a form of escape from what I didn’t want to face or see. It’s like forging a shell.” She admits, “It doesn’t explain everything, but it’s a part of it.” Which forces the question: Are secrets multiplying instead of dissolving when locked in? What I know for sure is that they ferment.

Back to my stomach issue. I stretched, breathed deeply, journaled, and did too many downward-facing dogs to count… but looking back, the real issue was my secret eating me alive. Maybe affirming the truth would’ve been the most effective therapy.

The Inverted Guilt

“I couldn’t defend myself, my reputation, or my career.” This is the case of Audrey, who signed a non-disclosure agreement after an incident in her previous work environment. “The NDA was really validating,” she told me. “It meant the situation was as bad as I thought. I wasn’t ashamed of filing the complaint or signing [it], but I felt guilty that I couldn’t tell anyone, even though it might have prevented others from having the same experience.”

Secrets have this strange and destabilizing power: the guilt they induce makes us change sides. It’s even more infuriating when the external image ends up being so far from reality. “I was so frustrated. These people were getting praised publicly and saying things like how excellent this work environment was, with all of these morals and values that I knew were untrue.” This feeling also impacted Audrey’s work relationships. “I find myself holding little grudges against people [insiders] whom I otherwise like, who haven't done anything wrong but keep frequenting the business or publicly supporting these people.” This can be hard to navigate, especially given how people can sniff out a secret when it’s close.

Let’s be honest for a second: secrets spread like viruses and their contagion is stronger than any NDA. Who are we fooling when we try to ignore that? “The whisper network is pretty effective and the fact that I had to keep a secret is a testimony of how bad it was anyway. There is something kind of powerful and ironic in that,” Audrey said.

The Moral Dilemma

When you’re the receptor of secrets, you’re not directly involved but still deeply affected. That was Alex’s story. She shared a secret with a group of friends about someone cheating. But she didn’t hear it firsthand from the person concerned. Once the words were out, they spread from one person to another. Until the secret was no longer private. “I had a moral question of course, I wanted to address the thing but was it my place to say it? And at the same time, inaction was against my values.” No win-win, just a constant mental loop. Until the day it was made public—when the group of friends was together in a cabin with the person who had been cheated on.

“The couple had split, it was months after, then a friend slipped that everyone in the group knew at the time. I can tell it eroded our friendship a lot… and the trust, of course.” The longer it lasts, the more damaging it could be. Once out, secrets change everything. They often force endings. The end of previous people’s perceptions of you, feelings of trust, the way you relate to others… even the friendship itself.

That’s probably why it took me almost two decades to put mine out there. Around late primary school, I joyfully french-kissed girls. This was during the real Y2K and I never saw a lesbian in my French town. So keeping that under the radar was the price I thought I had to pay to be liked and not mocked, as I saw the other kids in my class didn’t feel the same urges. I didn’t want to be left alone on my school’s playground.

PSA: Free Your Secrets

When I timidly shared what I had hidden for years, I all of a sudden discovered that I wasn’t the only one. A friend immediately responded, really casually, “Oh, I had a similar experience! I discovered my body with a girl, my neighbour, when I was younger”. I wish I had talked about it sooner, I thought. It turns out I just needed another perspective. That’s why I want to talk about a revolution of revelation. For the things we hide with shame and guilt, and the ones that bring back frustration in a closed loop. Secrets thrive in the dark, once out, they lose their power. Because we can see for the first time that we are not alone in this.

“I had this posture of ‘I can’t tell [my secret], what will others say?!’ When I said it, it cleansed my relationship with others. There were fewer things to hide.” Emily confessed. Relief is an obvious after-effect, but why exactly? What I learned from Slepian’s research is simple: secrets hurt because they stop us from being totally ourselves. They are walls preventing real connections about the good, the bad, and the ugly. They make us doubt our rightful choices. They paralyze decision-making and can distance us from our values when facing a moral dilemma. I can see more clearly now how they impact our behaviours with their little shady voices, forcing us to be smaller.

We don’t need more secrets lurking in the background, we need more spaces to drop them somewhere. This is how we deflate them. So, we need free spaces to abandon them. I know not everyone has the kind of money to go to a therapist and doing it with ChatGPT sucks. We need more imagination than that. What about using book exchange libraries to drop some secrets? Should we bring back public phone booths to discuss them with (empathetic) strangers at any given time? Should we create secret-sharing events? It sounds naive and I don’t care, I don’t believe our secrets should hurt us. Like our brain, secrets don't deserve to rot. They need spaces as much as they need light.

*Names of the interviewees have been changed