Too Many Secrets
Sep. 17th, 2005 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo (do I start all my posts with that word?) the combination of the "Choir Practice" on Thursday and a number of other things the past couple of days with my students and my friends have synchronistically brought up an interesting question: When is it acceptable to have/keep secrets? When is it a positive weal, and when is it an active or passive harm?
One of the side effects of being a Cancer/a priestess/a good listener/an intelligent person/a teacher/an adult who isn't related to a student who is willing to talk to them is that I end up getting told a number of things in explicit or implicit confidence. This is flattering, of course; it implies a certain level of trust. But it causes conflicts on a number of levels.
The most common conflict is when two people have both told me something in confidence that they really should have told each other. On the one hand, the impulse to "fix" the problem by passing the information to the people who need it is quite strong. On the other hand, losing the confidence of the people who had given me the information is not only bad in and of itself, it means other people will be less likely to trust me with such information later. The loss of future opportunities and the pain of betrayal are clearly not worth fixing the immediate problem directly, obviously, but the tension of the dramatic irony can be quite painful.
Less common but more troublesome is when I'm told something that is probably in confidence, but not explicitly so. In that case, I have to figure out whether the person in question will be betrayed if I pass the information on to someone who can help more than I can, or (in the case of my friends) whether it is okay for me to share the information with the Spouse, if he was not present at the telling. As a general rule, it is my assumption that anything that is told to me is told to me as an individual, but I know many couples proceed on the assumption that anything that is told to one half of the couple is told to the pair as a whole. And on top of that, there's the whole issue of things that are not explicitly made secrets but are probably intended in confidence - usually I think to ask, but not always.
And of course, there's the issue of my own secrets. I know at least a few people in my social circle consider having secrets from someone a betrayal of the relationship in and of itself. However, there are, in almost all of my close relationships, things that one person or another really doesn't need to know, that would cause harm if they were known. This ranges from big elephant-in-the-living-room things like the triple closet I'm in with my parents, through my avoiding the question of my religion with my students and colleagues, down to trivial minutia like not sharing erotic dreams about people who would probably not be flattered to know about them.
I like "radical honesty" as a theory - it has a strong intuitive appeal for me - but it seems like one of those things that only works if (a) everyone does it, and (b) everyone who does it is empathic and gentle, whether by nature or through meticulous care. The other option seems to be to rely on people letting you know when they want their privacy invaded, the Callahans' rule of "no snooping," which I try to hold to - but even in Spider Robinson's universe, there are moments when a hurt feels unspeakable until someone asks for it, even under the threat of Fast Eddie's sap. I probably err on the side of privacy, but it's quite a tension sometimes, especially with people who aren't comfortable saying "nothing against you personally, but I don't feel like sharing that."
And just for the sake of irony, I'm going to make this a public post. :)
One of the side effects of being a Cancer/a priestess/a good listener/an intelligent person/a teacher/an adult who isn't related to a student who is willing to talk to them is that I end up getting told a number of things in explicit or implicit confidence. This is flattering, of course; it implies a certain level of trust. But it causes conflicts on a number of levels.
The most common conflict is when two people have both told me something in confidence that they really should have told each other. On the one hand, the impulse to "fix" the problem by passing the information to the people who need it is quite strong. On the other hand, losing the confidence of the people who had given me the information is not only bad in and of itself, it means other people will be less likely to trust me with such information later. The loss of future opportunities and the pain of betrayal are clearly not worth fixing the immediate problem directly, obviously, but the tension of the dramatic irony can be quite painful.
Less common but more troublesome is when I'm told something that is probably in confidence, but not explicitly so. In that case, I have to figure out whether the person in question will be betrayed if I pass the information on to someone who can help more than I can, or (in the case of my friends) whether it is okay for me to share the information with the Spouse, if he was not present at the telling. As a general rule, it is my assumption that anything that is told to me is told to me as an individual, but I know many couples proceed on the assumption that anything that is told to one half of the couple is told to the pair as a whole. And on top of that, there's the whole issue of things that are not explicitly made secrets but are probably intended in confidence - usually I think to ask, but not always.
And of course, there's the issue of my own secrets. I know at least a few people in my social circle consider having secrets from someone a betrayal of the relationship in and of itself. However, there are, in almost all of my close relationships, things that one person or another really doesn't need to know, that would cause harm if they were known. This ranges from big elephant-in-the-living-room things like the triple closet I'm in with my parents, through my avoiding the question of my religion with my students and colleagues, down to trivial minutia like not sharing erotic dreams about people who would probably not be flattered to know about them.
I like "radical honesty" as a theory - it has a strong intuitive appeal for me - but it seems like one of those things that only works if (a) everyone does it, and (b) everyone who does it is empathic and gentle, whether by nature or through meticulous care. The other option seems to be to rely on people letting you know when they want their privacy invaded, the Callahans' rule of "no snooping," which I try to hold to - but even in Spider Robinson's universe, there are moments when a hurt feels unspeakable until someone asks for it, even under the threat of Fast Eddie's sap. I probably err on the side of privacy, but it's quite a tension sometimes, especially with people who aren't comfortable saying "nothing against you personally, but I don't feel like sharing that."
And just for the sake of irony, I'm going to make this a public post. :)
