The nine secrets that torment us most

Most secrets are shy creatures. They bury themselves deep in the furthest corners of the memory and rest there quietly and contentedly. Some, however, rumble restlessly underground, and yet we keep them hidden. We fear that they may cause alienation, that we may be despised or laughed at because of them.

It is correspondingly tedious to research the shadow creatures. The first one to succeed on a grand scale is Michael Slepian, now a junior professor at Columbia University. The New York psychologist, a boyish type with a happy face, is a well-known expert on the dark corners of the soul in the USA; many well-known newspapers have already reported on his studies.

He has tracked down, sorted, and categorized thousands of secrets. In 2017 he developed an inventory from them, the “Common Secrets Questionnaire”. It lists 38 types of secrets, including some dazzling species, such as being secretly in love or pursuing an eccentric hobby, but also shady and tragic events, such as lying and cheating, abortion, and professional failure. Many belong to the category of moral misconduct or intimate life; others are personal embarrassments such as struggling with one’s own body, job, or private life. And then there is the large group of psychological problems, including addiction and depression, trauma and suicide attempts. Among voluntary test subjects, 97 percent said that they guarded at least one of the 38 “Common Secrets”. On average, they had never told anyone about five secrets.

With this list, the psychologist and his colleagues are now repeatedly fishing in the most private spheres of their subjects. They want to find out how secrets influence feelings and thoughts. Initial experiments had already suggested in 2012 that they could be a burden. Among other things, test subjects should think of a personal secret and hide it in the further course of the experiment. As a result, they felt more exhausted than a control group, which was also supposed to keep personal but not secret information to themselves.

It is not the concealment but living with the secret that weighs on the soul. It gives the feeling of not being authentic.

How important a secret appears to be when viewed from the outside is irrelevant to subjective suffering. Rather, according to Slepian, it depends on how often thoughts revolve around it. And this happens even without any discernible reason, i.e. independent of conversations in which the secret must be kept. Once the danger is averted, the thoughts do not disappear, he explains, “they stay with us. They lead a life of their own.

The most important insight of the psychologist is, therefore: Not to keep it secret, but to live with the secret and to constantly think about it, weighs on the soul. It gives the feeling of not being authentic, makes you tired and lonely.

In 2019, Slepian and her colleagues investigated which secrets rumble most powerfully within us in a series of studies. About 1000 people asked her with the “Common Secrets Questionnaire” whether they were currently keeping something secret, how often they had hidden it in the past 30 days, and how often it had crossed their minds. Other subjects were asked to recall a secret that they hid from their partner and what they felt ashamed or guilty about. The next morning they too were asked to report how often they had thought about it.

Both studies show: the greater the shame, the more often secrets without concrete reason enter their thoughts. And the most painful ones always revolve around one of three major themes: bad deeds, status characteristics, or mental illness and trauma.

Violence, auto aggression, infidelity

To have done violence to a human being is, according to Slepian’s recent findings, the most shameful of secrets. And a particularly momentous one, because the shame itself is not only the consequence but the cause of aggression. Exercising violence gives a feeling of power and strength, drives away shame, feelings of inferiority, and the associated “social pain” that leaves patterns in the brain similar to physical pain. This is an effective remedy for shame, but in the long run, it leads to even more shame.

Avoiding and dispelling unpleasant feelings is a powerful motive behind many behaviors. Auto aggression such as suicide attempts or other forms of self-harm are also among them; they also help to get rid of the unbearable feeling of shame in the short term. The therapeutic goal here as with other forms of aggression is, therefore.

Feelings of guilt only refer to concrete behavior and the resulting damage. They arise from internalized social norms and warn that others might reject, leave, or reject us. They usually prevent further bad deeds or encourage us to make amends. Chronic shame is more destructive because it involves a devaluation of the whole person.

In terms of the amount of shame, infidelity is second only to assault. Nevertheless, a fling is less on the minds of the apostates than one might expect. This also applies to emotional infidelity, that is, falling in love with another person. What is perceived as worse in a partnership depends, among other things, on gender, as studies suggest? Men are more sensitive to sexual infidelity and women to emotional infidelity.

Body, account, career

No secret is so constantly on the mind as dissatisfaction with one’s appearance. Overweight people, in particular, tend to feel more ashamed — even when figure and weight are not important because they are not visible to others. This was shown by a computer experiment in which the test subjects played ball on the screen. If overweight people only rarely received the ball from their supposed online players, they reacted with more shame than normal-weight people, who were equally ignored by their fellow players.

Two other status characteristics occupy us almost as much — money and career.

But even if some people don’t like to give information about them, account balance, income, and career ambitions are far less shameful than many other secrets.

Worry about appearance can even develop into a physical dysmorphic disorder, the constant preoccupation with a supposed or minor physical flaw. A typical object of such an obsession is, for example, a crooked nose, impure skin, or even the figure. In this way, the dissatisfaction with the body becomes another kind of mystery that dominates the mind and is often very shameful: a mental illness.

Trauma, addiction, and other mental illnesses

Addictions and mental disorders, in general, are still considered personal weaknesses. Many affected persons adopt this view, therefore feel inferior, ashamed, and hide their problems. Shame, in turn, can lead to a vicious circle, for example as a consequence and cause of addiction and depression. The same applies to women with borderline personality disorder: according to a study by the University of Freiburg, they tend to have a particularly pronounced shame. This tormenting feeling triggers typical behavior patterns, such as tantrums, self-harm, and drug use, which may reduce shame in the short term but maintain it in the long term.

Behind many of these mental illnesses lie early traumas. Although it seems absurd, trauma victims, of all people, often suffer from feelings of shame and guilt. Australian psychiatrist Paul Valent writes that even the victims of the Holocaust felt guilty: They felt they should have saved their fellow victims or died in their place.

The more violence people have experienced, the more they suffer from feelings of guilt and shame as well as fear and depression. Experiences of violence in childhood, violence by close relatives, and sexual violence are particularly full of shame. This was shown among other things in telephone interviews in Norway, in which more than 4500 adults were asked about possible traumatic experiences. It is no different from natural disasters. After the earth shook in Italy in 2009 and more than 300 people died, around one in two of the nearly 900 survivors interviewed reported feelings of shame or guilt.

Trauma consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder are closely related above all to feelings of shame. Although feelings of guilt contribute to the severity of the trauma, they only occur when they are also associated with shame. A good trauma therapy should therefore definitely address feelings of shame.

Shame is a barrier to self-revelation. How do you get rid of them?

There are many good reasons to share a secret: to end the game of hiding, to free oneself from a burden, to feel belonging, understood, and supported. “A shared reality ensures survival in the complex social world,” explains psychologist Slepian. Those who isolate themselves do without new perspectives, good advice, and the feeling of being able to cope with their problems.

However, revealing oneself to the wrong person carries the risks mentioned at the beginning, from embarrassing silence on the part of the other person to systematic discrimination in the workplace. The person who is chosen to listen is therefore above all someone who reacts compassionately and helpfully to the worries and problems of his fellow human beings. Polite or even exuberant behavior, on the other hand, instills little trust. But even if you trust a person and want to take the risk, unpleasant feelings of shame still stand in the way of self-revelation. How do you get rid of them?

One possible way is to be a good friend to yourself. Interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can help with this. They teach us to see suffering and inadequacies as belonging to being human, to accept thoughts and feelings as they are, not to judge them, and to treat yourself with kindness and compassion. This reduces feelings of shame and inferiority and thus those negative self-evaluations that drive many psychological sufferings into a vicious circle.

Interventions that promote self-acceptance and self-pity have proven to be effective in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders, among others. The empathic attention and reliable relationship in the context of psychotherapy can also help to “unlearn” chronic feelings of shame. By profession, psychotherapists are suitable as confidants anyway, as they are subject to the obligation of confidentiality. They are only released from this obligation if someone represents an acute danger for themselves or others.

Those who nevertheless prefer to help themselves can “breathe away” any feelings of shame, at least for a short time. A study in Asia showed that ten minutes of breathing meditation is sufficient to relieve the shame associated with a secret in people with borderline symptoms. The 88 volunteers were first asked to write down an event that they had never told anyone about before: a personal failure, a bad deed, or a traumatic experience for which they blamed themselves. Some of them, the control group, were then asked to let their thoughts wander for ten minutes at will. During the same period, the second group of test persons was instructed by sound recording to meet themselves and others lovingly, and the third group was to consciously concentrate on their breathing.

Breathing meditation was the best way to reduce the feelings of shame associated with the secret. Conscious breathing directs attention away from unpleasant feelings and rumbling thoughts. Thus the secret shrinks in consciousness — until it appears harmless and insignificant and is allowed to come to light or finds peace in a quiet hiding place.