Too Many Secrets

[omorka]

So (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. :)

Comments

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I tend to go for the radical honesty which is for the most part refreshing and humorous but leaves people somewhat dumbfounded. I tend to share things told to me with my significant other because he is important in my life, and I value his insight. My sister got really upset at me for doing this once for something that I do not remember.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I find that being honest up front prevents you from becoming able to hurt someone by revealing things about yourself.

Erring on the side of caution with other people's info sounds like good policy. I don't think it ever hurts to ask specifically.

For the record, anything I tell you can be told to Noah as well.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I think there's an important distinction to be made between secrecy and privacy. This came up a while back on a.c., and the definition offered by several people more-or-less simultaneously was this:

A secret thing is something you don't tell ANYONE.
A private thing is something you don't tell EVERYONE.

There are some modifiers, of course; among other things, your situation with your parents would qualify, to me, as "secret" because they are close enough to you that under normal conditions they could be expected to know those things. But keeping certain things private from your students or your co-workers doesn't have the same flavor (again, to me) as "keeping secrets".

The flip side of "not keeping secrets", of course, is TMI -- and I think we've all been subjected to things we'd Really Rather Not Have Known about someone else on occasion! :-) So that's another issue to take into consideration.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

There are very few things that cause me to blanch and go "eww, TMI," but yes, I recognize that this is not the case for all (or even most) people. This is part of what I mean by Radical Honesty being a great theory but somewhat lacking in practice - most of the people I know who are actually trying to live by RH who are public about it also tend to tell one the details of their sexual peccadilloes during one's first conversation. :)