Family secrets

Every family has its skeletons, its don't-ask, don't-tell stories, its dirty laundry, But is silence always golden?

Hers was the deepest of secrets--a nightmare Sabrina Carmichael-Yaw kept buried for 20 years. In a cedar-lined footlocker in a bedroom closet in Brooklyn, the truth lay wrapped in a yellowed newspaper from November 4, 1979, the year she was 9. She had convinced herself that, in the end, silence would protect her, her siblings and her mother. But her younger brother, Andre, was suspicious, and he was determined to uncover whatever the family was hiding.

Andre had been only a toddler at the time, but he was haunted by a vague recollection. Over the years he continually questioned his older sister: Didn't he used to have a twin sister? What happened to her? Sabrina initially brushed his questions aside. In 1999 when Andre persisted, she gave in, but not before insisting that he sign a pact swearing never to reveal what she was about to say.

Sabrina told Andre that she remembered watching her mother, Madeline Carmichael, and her older brother, Gregory, then 17, slapping her baby sister, Latanisha, until the screaming child went limp. Then she had looked on as they placed the toddler's body in a garbage bag, the garbage bag in a wooden trunk, and the trunk in the closet. After a horrified Andre broke his pact with his sister and called the police, authorities found the trunk wrapped in cellophane and surrounded by piles of newspapers, air freshener, incense and packs of baking soda.

It was a moment of punishment and rage that went too far, Sabrina testified, after the police had taken her mother and older brother into custody. She also testified that she was frequently beaten as a child and still bore the emotional and physical scars. After Latanisha had disappeared, her mother, who never reported the child missing, told anyone who inquired that she had "sent her to live down South." The mother's attorney insisted that Madeline hid Latanisha's body because the child died accidentally, and she feared welfare officials would take her other children away. "She felt we would all be placed in homes," explained Gregory. Though he faces up to seven years in prison for criminally negligent homicide, he expressed relief that the "great burden" he had carried for so many years had finally been lifted. His mother, Madeline, who has terminal bone cancer, is expected to die before completing her 15-years-to-life second-degree murder sentence.

Few families will ever find themselves in such desperate circumstances as the Carmichaels. But other types of secrets are surprisingly common: An affair. Credit-card debt. A battle with addiction. A love child. Sexual abuse. Adoption records. Abortion. Mental illness. Chances are, you have one or more of these in your family's background--even if you don't know about it.

And you're probably reluctant to reveal those secrets you do know about. Many of us were warned as children never to "air our dirty laundry" or "go public with our drama." Sometimes family members bury a secret to make a fresh start or "protect the innocent." Other times, they deceive in order to manipulate or control. Often the person harboring the secret is ashamed, and he or she truly believes that to save face, silence is the only option.

But secrets never really go underground, say experts. They create a negative energy that takes on a life of its own, sometimes affecting generations of loved ones. A secret can live among you like another member of the family, explains Marlene Watson, Ph.D., author of the forthcoming book The Black Shadow: An Exploration of the African-American Psyche (Ballantine). And when the truth is finally revealed, it can lead to pain or to healing, to understanding or to a sense of, betrayal--depending on how and when it is uncovered. Ultimately, what we choose to share or keep silent about can affect our relationships, our emotional health and even our unsuspecting children in surprisingly complex ways. Only when secrets are opened responsibly and with the welfare of everyone involved in mind can a family move toward healing.

How Secrets Breed Shame

"For years, my mother told my two sisters, my brother and me not to tell anyone that my father had left us," my friend Valerie (some names and identifying details have been changed) recently confided to me. "He'd had another family on the side for a long time before he left, and he eventually moved in with them. Keeping this secret made me feel like we--my siblings, my mom and I--had done something wrong to make him leave, and that's why we couldn't tell." But Valerie says her mother's well-intentioned wish to shield her children from public ridicule had an unintended consequence: She had sent them off into the world burdened with a secret and its collateral legacy of shame.

Like mildew in a basement closet, "shame grows in hidden crevices and thrives in silence," says Evan Imber-Black, Ph.D., a Mount Vernon, New York, family therapist and the author of Making Decisions About Secrets: When Keeping Secrets Can Harm You--and How to Know the Difference (Bantam Doubleday). "A secret can paralyze one's sense of self," she explains, noting that the capacity to relate positively to others is often crippled when we feel trapped in a web of secrecy. Brenda Wade, Ph.D., coauthor of What Mama Couldn't Tell Us About Love (HarperPerennial), agrees. "The energy that it takes to hide and pretend is the energy you need to live your life and move on," she says. "Trying to sit on a secret is like trying to sit on a volcano."

Case in point: hidden sexual abuse. As a child, Marcee Rowley-Lassiter was molested by an uncle during a summer visit. For years, she had no recollection of ever having been sexually abused. "After something on TV triggered my memory I eventually told my best friend." says Rowley-Lassiter, now 31. "We just cried together. She had experienced abuse, too, so I knew she understood."

But three years later when Marcee began dating the man who is now her husband, the molestation issue came to a head. "I had always had a feeling that no man except my father would ever be good to me," she says. "I was in a constant battle with men. My husband finally begged me to talk to a counselor and, most important, to my mother."

Marcee heeded her husband's advice, and when her mother came to visit her in the summer of 1999, she mustered the courage to reveal her secret. "It broke her heart, because she hadn't been able to protect her baby," Marcee says.

"I am proud to say that God has delivered me from that dark, sad secret," she continues. "My help came through prayer, my husband and my therapist. Anyone who has been through something like this must talk about it. Tell someone. Seek counseling. Do not live alone in the dark."

Mary Jones knows that harboring a secret can destroy your emotional and physical health. She recently unburdened herself to family members about having been raped by a man in her neighborhood on her way home from school when she was 9, and the abortion she had as a college student. "Suppressed anger and pain must ultimately come to the surface," she says. "It may come in the form of depression, guilt, shame or panic attacks--for me, it was all of the above. I had to seek therapy to heal from the abuse, the injustice and the lies." Now that the secret no longer has her captive, she says she is happier with her life and more at ease with herself.

Secrecy--or Just Privacy?

Of course, not all secrets are dangerous, and many are even necessary. Think of sweet secrets, like the private rituals that keep couples close, the diary that helps a teenager develop her identity or the plans for a surprise birthday party.

The kind of secrecy that is toxic is often tightly intertwined with power, or the lack of it, says Wade. A wife who fakes orgasms, who denies causing the dent in a fender or who sneaks into the house the new outfits she bought when her husband isn't home says a lot about who holds power in their relationship. Similarly, a husband who is hiding assets or debt, the loss of a job or a mistress is using secrecy to maintain control.

In fact, power over another is often what distinguishes a matter that is simply private from one that is secret. "What a wife-beating husband or sexually abusive stepfather calls privacy is actually secrecy," says Imber-Black. "A person with AIDS may be accused of keeping a secret from neighbors, when actually she is acting out of a right to privacy. When that same woman refuses to tell her sexual partner that she is HIV-positive, maintaining privacy rapidly shifts to keeping a dangerous secret."

But how can you clearly judge whether a secret is dangerous? If keeping the secret--either your own or someone else's--involves putting a life in jeopardy, you can be sure it's toxic; but even a seemingly less dangerous secret can slowly rob a person of his or her quality of life. For example, keeping secret the circumstances surrounding a parent's absence can leave a son or daughter feeling off-balance, plagued by self-doubt and suspicion. And by keeping certain issues such as substance abuse hidden from outsiders, and particularly from professionals who can offer help, well-intentioned family members can become enablers who actually help a loved one spiral out of control.

Just ask Kara Naughton, 29. She recalls visits down South to her great-uncle, a respected judge in his rural community. "For years," she says, "my aunt and cousins stacked his empty whiskey bottles, row upon row, in the cellar. As they reasoned, 'You can't put liquor bottles in a judge's trash heap.'" With every bottle the family hid, Kara's uncle became even more enslaved to alcohol. This eventually put the career and life they were trying to protect in danger.

In our community, mental illness often receives the same type of silent treatment. It's kept on the down-low because of a heavy social stigma--we tend to see it as a disgrace, not as a disease. Too often, say Black mental-health experts, rather than seeking help for ourselves and our loved ones, we go into deep denial about, say, a brother's increasingly paranoid and erratic behavior, or we try to "handle it" ourselves. So Brother lives down in the basement of Mom's house and drinks to self-medicate his schizophrenia. Or as Dad's depression makes him less and less functional over the years, others in the house simply "pick up the slack."

But hiding the truth can have steep emotional costs. When a family's secret involves a chronic situation--alcoholism, drug addiction, spousal abuse, mental or physical illness--both day-to-day family relationships and interactions with the outside world are strained, observes Watson, noting that "it takes away a family's soul." Often, as Imber-Black points out, "Family members must organize their everyday lives according to the requirements of the secret, while performing the breathtaking feat of pretending not to notice that anything is out of the ordinary." It's the proverbial elephant in the living room that everyone feels bound to ignore.

Handle With Care

Who owns a secret, and who has the right to reveal it? What if some family members know and some don't--or you suspect you're being kept in the dark? And what if the secret comes out at the worst possible time, such as when one aunt chose the party following her nephew's baby's christening to announce that her nephew hadn't been christened because he was born out of wedlock? Is there a way to prevent damaged relationships? The experts agree the answers are never absolute, and each case needs careful handling to preserve family harmony. (See "Should You Tell?"--a sidebar at the end of this story--for more advice from the experts.)

In this tell-all age of tabloids, talk shows and reality TV, secrets are rarely handled with enough sensitivity, says Watson. In extreme cases, the fallout can be deadly, as the July 2000 murder of Nancy Campbell-Panitz, a guest on the Jerry Springer Show, illustrates. The day that her role as the woman scorned in a love triangle was laid bare on a taped show billed as "Secret Mistresses Confronted!" Campbell-Panitz's badly beaten body was discovered in her Florida home. The two other members of the triangle were Nancy's ex-husband, with whom she'd had a tumultuous on-and-off relationship, and the "other woman," whom her ex revealed was really his current wife. Nancy's ex-husband has been charged with second-degree murder.

Yet beyond the glare of studio lights, in the everyday domestic dramas that unfold behind closed doors, haphazardly handled secrets can also cause significant pain. And when someone opens a tightly sealed secret as carelessly as they might rip open a bag of chips, the aftermath can be devastating.

Denisha Hardy-Lambert, M.D., 30, can attest to that. She recently graduated from a top medical school and is in the first year of her geriatric residency training at a major metropolitan medical center in Chicago, her new home. She has been married for eight years to her high-school sweetheart, Lenny, and they have a daughter and son, 3 years old and 22 months, respectively. They hadn't been settled in their new house two days before Lenny's secret shattered this perfect family portrait.

"After following me from Atlanta, where we met, to D.C., where I attended college, to Los Angeles, where I completed medical school, he says he is fed up with following me around and putting his career on hold," Denisha says. "He has also informed me that he is unhappy in our marriage and has met another woman who satisfies his needs. She's someone who'll prepare the meals and be available sexually no matter how tired she is, someone `traditional' who can stay in the background and support him while he finishes his B.A. and goes on to film school."

By keeping his growing dissatisfaction with their lifestyle and his ensuing affair a secret for so long, Lenny thrust their marriage into crisis and sabotaged Denisha at a pivotal point in her career. And what to make of his timing? Did he open this secret at a critical moment to undermine her success? More likely, his secrecy was a misguided effort to protect her from hurt, and perhaps to protect himself from guilt. "I've often seen situations where toxic secrets appear to have been opened carelessly, leaving a profound relationship fallout," says Imber-Black. "Upon closer examination, this seeming carelessness turns out to be anxiety that could no longer be contained."

The timing of Lenny's announcement is also in line with Imber-Black's belief that the biggest revelations often come at the bumpiest junctures. "Many secrets get made or opened at periods of intense relationship change--during marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, leaving home or death," she says. When a secret is constructed during such times, it can paralyze a relationship. Imber-Black recalls one client, Sam, a 34-year-old whose life had been short-circuited by a family secret when he was 19. During his first semester in college, his mother came for a visit not with his father but with Duncan, a close friend of the family. He soon learned that Duncan and his mother had had an ongoing affair and that Duncan was actually the father of his younger sister. By deciding to keep his mother's secret, Sam entered a pact with her and became what experts term an "insider" to the deceit. Sam did poorly that first semester, dropped out and went back home to "keep an eye on things" and protect his father and sister--the "outsiders"--from the truth. What resulted was a tangle of intrigues, alliances and deception that would rival any on the show Survivor. Meanwhile, the whole family remained in what Imber-Black calls "a developmental deep freeze," characterized by strained, artificial relationships. "Relationships that would ordinarily change and grow become frozen in time," she says, "as the presence of a secret locks people in place."

That's one reason secrets confronted during adolescence, when so much of our identity is shaped, can influence behavior for the rest of our lives. For instance, Tatiana Young, now 32, discovered her own adoption records when she was in her teens. Pauletta--the loving woman who'd raised Tatiana for 15 years--wasn't, as she'd always believed, the woman who'd given her life. The papers she'd found made this plain, and "Mama," when confronted, admitted to the secret. Years before, her husband had had an affair with a woman who lived in the apartment building where he did maintenance work. The woman gave birth to Tatiana months after it ended and made plans to start over in a new town--without her child. Gordon Young, Tatiana's father, confessed to the affair, and the couple put aside their painful reckoning of his betrayal long enough to come to an agreement, and a pact of secrecy, "in the best interest of the child."

But if Tatiana's childhood was filled with love, her teen years were filled with turmoil. She began feeling sad, worthless and isolated. Learning the secret didn't free her, but made her feel less lovable. "So how do you like that? My real mother didn't want me," she said to her best friend the day she discovered the truth. "Why didn't she love me? Why'd she give me away?" As if to prove herself unworthy of love, she went on to have a series of disastrous affairs with married men. Her fog of confusion has contributed to her years-long battle with alcohol.

Authentic Telling, Real Healing

Regina Mathews, 27, recalls the day her favorite cousin, 24-year-old Lena, came out to her and her husband about her homosexuality. "Ron and I were the first relatives Lena trusted with the knowledge that she was a lesbian," Regina says. "But she was in agony about keeping such a huge part of her life secret from her parents. Lena's mom has a heart condition, and Lena literally feared the news might kill her."

With Regina and Ron's support, Lena eventually disclosed her committed relationship with her partner, Bess, to other family members, one by one, as she sensed it was safe to do so. Finally she mustered the courage to come out to her parents. Her mother, Carrie, was nearly hysterical, and her father, Henry, retreated into an angry silence that threatened to become permanent estrangement.

But as the weeks passed, Carrie discovered that other family members already knew her daughter's secret and had embraced her nonetheless. That eventually helped Carrie set aside what had been a crippling fear: that her relatives would reject the daughter she loved so much. As Carrie became more comfortable with the news, she began working to heal the rift between her husband and her daughter by encouraging them to talk again.

This family's experience illustrates what Imber-Black calls "authentic telling," which is the key to preserving the joy, freedom, inclusion and resilience all happy families share. In authentic telling--the opposite of "talk-show telling"--sensitive secrets are opened in the context of committed relationships; the past, present and potential future of relationships are carefully considered before deciding to open a secret; reliable support is sought prior to the revelation; and above all, the truth is spoken with love and concern for everyone involved.

Regina's Aunt Carrie eventually accepted Bess as a member of the family and thanked her daughter Lena for opening her eyes to what it means to have unconditional love and acceptance. Regina muses now that her Aunt Carrie's "heart," once the seat of her cousin's anxiety, turned out to be the key to Lena's happiness.

RELATED ARTICLE: SHOULD YOU TELL?

Experts stress that each family and circumstance is different, but all agree that any family secret requires delicate handling when being revealed. A therapist, counselor or member of the clergy is a recommended source of support. Ask friends for referrals, and look for someone familiar with such African-American family structures as informal adoptions. Other suggestions from the experts:

* Use care in forming secrets. Ask permission before confiding in someone if you expect her to keep a weighty secret for you. That person may not be willing--or able--to keep the matter private.

* Give the secret an expiration date. For instance, if Tina is too little to understand her aunt's mental illness, decide that you'll explain it to her when she's 10. Most secrets shouldn't last forever.

* If you decide to reveal a secret, consider the pros and cons. Be honest with yourself: Is your revelation for the good of the person you're telling, or are you acting out of self-interest or even malice? Is the secret yours to tell, or is it better left to someone else? Consider each relationship within the family and the potential impact that opening the secret would have. Don't forget to think about potential benefits of responsible truth telling--alleviation of shame, more open communication and less pretending.

* Find ways to release shame. Writing about the secret in a journal or sharing it with a friend or counselor can help you shed light on a dark secret, weakening its power to shame you. It also helps to understand that what is taboo or disgraceful is often determined externally, by society. Knowing this can help you avoid internalizing shame.

* Rehearse telling your secret. You may want to Write a letter that you don't send or enlist your therapist's help in role playing. This will alleviate anxiety once you're ready to speak the truth.

* Set up a support system. Perhaps you could join a survivors' group before confronting your uncle about sexually abusing you as a child. Consider first disclosing the abuse to one or two loved ones you know you can trust. "In the case of dangerous secrets--those involving physical harm--the secret keeper requires a plan for safety first, including, at times, police protection and an alternative place to live," says family therapist Evan Imber-Black.

* Avoid unveiling a secret during the holidays. "Don't be known as the person who ruined Christmas," warns Imber-Black. Sure, everyone's in one place, but resist the temptation to spill the beans. Opt instead for planned, careful telling later on, to those individuals--one at a time--who need to know.

* Share your secret in an age-appropriate way. You might tell your youngster, for instance, "When we visit Grandma's, you'll notice that Cousin Jackie is sick. He has a disease called AIDS, and the doctors are taking good care of him. We're not ashamed of it, but it's private business that stays in the family." You can then let her know it's open for further discussion. Her cues and questions will let you know when she's ready for more details. With elders, be sensitive to the social mores of their generation.

* If you suspect that someone's keeping a secret from you, don't approach him or her in a confrontational manner. Instead, gently express your concern to know more about that part of your family's history. You could say, for example, "I'm preparing a family health history to help us stay as healthy as possible. Nobody ever talks about Granddaddy's death. Can you share how he passed?" If a relative refuses information, consider who else in the family might provide insight. Encourage kin to share cherished memories as well.

* Understand that unveiling the secret is only the first step in restoring the family to harmony. Don't expect a favorable response right away--anger and confusion are often the first emotions to surface. You'll need to continue communicating as you build a new reality and a healthy trust over time. Enlist professional support and encourage loved ones to be patient.

--C.M.

Deputy editor Claire McIntosh's last article for ESSENCE was "On Intimate Terms." Has a family secret changed your life? Tell us at essence.com.

"The women I interviewed cast a healing light on dark parts of their past," says our deputy editor, Claire R. McIntosh, who wrote "Family Secrets" (page 128).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group