What Horrors May Come When We Keep Secrets

Tuesday, September 30, 2014


The ebb and flow of being a writer is something I still find myself adjusting to even now.  I have been diligently writing my blog for fifteen months now.  I have kept a journal of some sort off and on for about fifteen years.  And yet I still find myself learning each and every day.  To learn and to be willing to embrace life changing new habits is a strong recipe for health and continued personal growth.  The opposite of openness and the acceptance of inevitable change leads, inevitably I often think, to stasis, isolation and eventually pain.  But changing isn't always easy.

I embarked on a big change last week.  I decided to be more transparent regarding the cause of my past health issues with my employer.  I chose the path of improved transparency after coming to the conclusion that defaulting to a more familiar way of being (being very circumspect and almost secretive) would not serve me.  But learning this has not been easy.

I grew up in a family that strikes me as pathologically determined to be secretive...even to the point of willingly allowing such behavior to alienate others.  I walked away from any sort of 'real' relationship with my paternal family of origin over the course of the last twelve months.  I felt profoundly alienated.  And, to a certain extent, I believe I might always feel that way.  I came to a point in the trajectory of my own development in which I chose to no longer tolerate the immense anxiety, fear and dread I had long endured as a child and younger adult.  What gave rise to my anxiety, fear and dread?  I felt an abiding anxiety that there might be a lot more darkness within the story of my father's life history that I might never know.  I felt anxiety wondering if he has lied to me in ways that I have still have never learned about.  I felt anxiety wondering if perhaps my father has a serious mental illness that he has somehow managed to avoid dealing with for about five decades.

It has required an immense amount of maturity on my part to move beyond a temptation to blame my father for his poor choices in regards to how they ultimately affected me.  He did what he did and chose what he chose.  I cannot necessarily change him any more easily than I could the first stranger I encounter out in the world later today.  But choices always have consequences.  And his choice to avoid engaging in an authentic conversation last year about longstanding and deep-seated unresolved issues was all I could handle.  I chose to walk away from him and his dysfunctional life.  And yet the legacy of being his son still influences me to this day...for better and worse.  And one obvious manifestation of the way it influences me is revealed in the difficulties I still sometimes experience in engaging in the art of creating, building and sustaining relationships.

When fear finds it way into your heart and mind it so often colors so much of how you see the world.  I know this to be true from my own personal life history.  As I journey onwards without any sustained and sustaining relationship with my paternal family of origin I am doing the challenging work of how to live an authentic life and allow people into my life in a healthy way.  Healthy boundaries are vital to the daily experience of healthy relationships.

I see clearly that I often find the experience of cultivating healthy relationships to be a challenging endeavor.  And it's no wonder this is so given my own life history.  But I can nonetheless become a healthy man.  I can seek out healthy examples of individuals who model healthy relationships well.  I have the ability to choose to do that.  Again, as I have noted, it isn't necessarily an easy journey.  But with sufficient dedication and support anything is indeed possible.

It is also clear to me that the distress I too frequently feel regarding the state of our world today is due in part to my perception that we humans aren't really learning very well from our collective history.  I see some of the same mistakes being made over and over again.  I am thus left wondering what will become of us if we, like an individual addict whose life is often a journey dominated by a fixation on surviving from one fix to the next, do not genuinely address the collective issues of our time.  And keeping secrets that ultimately harm ourselves, our families, our communities and even our world is certainly a practice we need to examine.

I am a walking poster boy for what may happen when a person is repeatedly mistreated by his own family of origin.  Though the wounds I experienced in my childhood are by and large healing the process of attending to them is not a small one.  As I have noted over and over again: Change takes time.

It saddens me immensely that I felt the healthiest choice I could make in regards to my relationship with my father was to have nothing to do with him anymore.  When people become so dedicated to avoiding pain that they will willingly risk their most significant relationships to protect themselves I cannot help but find that so very sad.  And I think it is also true that such behavior is an indicator of potentially deep-seated narcissism.  If the only pain you can be present to is your own then what does that say about you as a person?  If your pain, your life, your wishes, your desires and your dreams are the only ones you will consider especially worthy of your attention how can you possibly be a social being capable of healthy relationships?  In my opinion you cannot really engage the world at large if you are that obsessed with yourself.

Despite what I have endured I am moving forward.  I am committed to healing and a good, future life.  And I am committed to sharing the wisdom I gain through this blog.