Secrets

Yesterday I bumped into a wonderful and exciting word, Secrets. What is a secret? It is something that we keep hidden from the light of day for a reason.

I just looked up the word Secret in the dictionary and there are more definitions of it than letters in the word. It talked about everything from mystery to national security.

All of that sounded interesting but on a personal level, a secret is just something that you would rather others not know about.

When we were little everything that was around us was a mystery so when we learned about it, it seemed natural to share this with everyone else who might like to know about this mystery. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't want to know, perhaps they already knew but sharing the mysterious information was great.

Little at a time we found that some of the things that we learned about could and did hurt other people when revealed. So we learned to keep some of these mysterious things to ourselves.

We parked them in a place called the "hidden secret cave" which is located in the cortex of our brain. This can only be accessed by a password. Some of us put this all under the password of Guilt. Guilt isn't the only password to this area. A lot of people have it under the password of Prejudice. (Think of this in terms of Pre-judging.)

When a secret starts to build and expands, it naturally wants to get out of the cave. What do we do then? Most of us share this with a close friend, someone who will keep the secret with us so we don't have to carry such a big load. Once the door of the secret cave has been opened on a specific secret, it can never be shut again. There is someone out there that knows our secret. Does that make it "not" a secret any longer?

Not really but the side effect is that the person this was shared with now knows what a terrible person we are. The Secret doesn't make us terrible people but over years we have added to it until we are sure that if people knew about it, they wouldn't think well of us. The fact is that most people are so wrapped up in their own world that what is going on in other people's world, isn't that important.

There is an exception to what I have just said and that is when the person needs to feel that they are a lot better than you are. When this type of person gets information that would make you look smaller or terrible, they need to tell the world. I have run into people who have such small minds that they have no place to keep a secret, theirs or yours. The In and the Out door is always open.

As you can see, telling someone your secret can be very dangerous.

Let's go back to why we keep secrets again, basically so that we don't hurt ourselves or others. Yet to keep the secret seems to be hurting us; it is a conundrum that we don't want to face. So what do we do with all of this pain that keeps imposing itself on us without our consent?

What I have learned about this is to give it to a stranger. The guy on the bus, a counselor or any other stranger that you will never encounter again. (And probably never wants to hear from you again either.) Once the stranger has it, I let go of it. It no longer has a residence in my brain. Yes, I can think about it from time to time but it does not live inside of this body anywhere.

I am getting ahead of myself. First one needs to handle any problems that the secret entails. If this means quitting a job because I have to lie to make quota, so be it. If it means eliminating a relationship because I no longer wish to pretend to enjoy that person's company every Wednesday afternoon, so be it. If it means having an all-out talk with someone to clear the air, so be it. But then I am a Scorpion and we like to clear the air at all costs. (Sometimes it costs a great deal but again, so be it.)

Whatever the secret is, only the person keeping it feels like a bad person. The Secret is an experience that has been lived through or is being lived through. It has no power to hurt that person. The only power a secret has is hurting others or to make someone feel like they are terrible in the eyes of others.

Most of us do not want to hurt anyone so we take it upon ourselves to be hurt instead. The longer the secret festers, the more hurtful it becomes. Sometimes one has to cauterize a wound to make it better and by confronting the problem that created this secret, we do just that. Telling a friend the secret does not handle the problem that created this secret.

Again, one must test the water and find someone with whom to share our secrets. I have found that some people are most trust worthy and others are not. Choose wisely.