“Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
One never knows all the secrets harbored by one’s parents, and one of the great surprises of my own life occurred well into my thirties. I was at the family home one day, banging around on the piano, and overheard my mother talking to my father on the other side of the room, when she casually made passing reference to her “first husband.”
Stunned, I swiveled around on the piano bench and said, “What did you just say?”
Realizing she had just divulged something entirely new to me, she paused a second and remarked, trying to be as casual as possible, “Oh, I thought I told you about that...I know I told your brother about it back when he got divorced, but I thought I told you, too...”
She then proceeded to relate to me the story of how she was working in a munitions factory in Las Vegas during World War II, sometimes handling explosive materials, when she met and married an older gentleman from the area. He owned a taxicab company, and had once been a bootlegger for Hollywood figures like Jean Harlow. But he turned out to be overly controlling of her, so after a year of marriage she procured a divorce and moved back to the Midwest. She spoke wistfully on another occasion about the time one year later when he traveled all the way across the country to show up at her workplace in Illinois, essentially begging her take him back. She said it broke her heart to send him away, since she still loved him.
I’ll never forget the sensation of learning about that entire episode so late in my life. It was one of those odd times when I’ve honestly wondered whether I was dreaming or awake.
My father had secrets of his own, which I found out about in an especially roundabout way, although those didn’t impact me in quite the same way.
He was born in 1905 in Door County, Wisconsin, and raised on a farm, but at the age of twenty traveled to the big, brawling town of Chicago. This was the Roaring Twenties, and he eventually found work as a mechanic in a Cadillac garage. But in his off hours he apparently had quite a good time visiting the speakeasies, dating women, and earning a nickel for each woman he danced with at the Aragon Ballroom (a pastime offered women at some venues during the Depression). He was very good-looking, so he amassed quite a collection of nickels.
One day I received a message through Ancestry dot com from a woman who said she and I were apparently related—closely so. It turns out her mother was born in Chicago during the 1920s around the time my father was working there. But her mom never found out who her father was. All signs point to my father. It became clear to me that while having his rip-roaring time in Chicago, dad got this woman’s mother pregnant, and may well have never even known about it. The upshot being, this woman’s mother was a half-sister to me, and she was herself a half-niece to me. And my dad was her grandfather, of course.
That’s not all. My brother Greg moved to Phoenix for several years in the 1990s, and attended a church in the area every Sunday. He noticed that there was an older man in the congregation who looked so much like my father he could have passed for his twin. It was startling. Curious about the stranger, Greg eventually struck up a conversation with him to find out more about him and his past.
Lo and behold, the stranger was born in Chicago in the mid-1920s, right when my father was working there, and just like that woman’s mother from Ancestry dot com, he never found out who his blood father was. Greg decided not to tip his hand as to his real intentions for questioning him, since he didn’t know whether he might be opening up an emotional pandora’s box for the fellow. Do I personally doubt he was a half-brother to me? Not really. (The stranger would have been around 30 years older than me, incidentally—quite an age difference, but my father didn’t have me until he was almost 50.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about secrets lately. Of course, some secrets are actually good to keep. You don’t really need to be telling your friends and neighbors about the embarrassing mishap you had in the bathroom this morning, or about the trip you had to make to the local food kitchen recently because your cupboards were bare. But some secrets are not so good, like those involving great shame over some past misdeed, or a public humiliation you had in high school. Those can metastasize over time, if you keep pushing down on them hard enough.
Everyone has their secrets. I do, you do, the woman walking by on the street has hers, the Pope has his. There is an ocean of secrets inside each of us, and that is as much if not more about who we really are as all those features and behaviors we openly display to the world. Anton Chekhov put it like this
“He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret.” (The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories(
But over the years I’ve come to wonder a great deal more about the secrets we keep from ourselves. The ones we’re conscious of can at least be addressed—but the others? They operate in the shadows. A classic example is racism. Many years ago, I knew a dyed-in-the-wool racist who hated every member of a certain skin color. On a conscious level, he’d convinced himself this was because of the perceived faults of that group (this, despite the fact he’d never actually had a negative run-in with anyone from that race himself). Having gotten to know him quite well over time, I realized that he actually hated himself, and was simply projecting that disgust onto an entire community of people.
We all do things similar to that, to one extent or another, camouflaging our real intentions and reasons without realizing it. Whether that unawareness on our parts is due to fear or some strange amalgam of defense mechanisms, I don’t know, but I’m sure there are many layers of such emotional maneuverings extending down deep into our past that involve actively hiding truths from ourselves.
Mind you, there is no absolute necessity for any of us to become aware of all these buried secrets. No federal law demands it. But for someone who’s interested in self-understanding and in peeling away the layers of that psychological onion, it can be transformative to engage the process.
So, what are some ways of going about that?
Dreams are a powerful tool, and can tell us truths about ourselves that rational methods can’t quite capture. It takes a certain symbolic talent to accurately interpret dreams, it’s true, but simply noting the repetitive situations or issues portrayed in dreams can alone reveal a great deal about what is occupying your subconscious. I remember a few years ago when I was feeling relatively upbeat about my life as a result of things going smoothly with my work; yet during that period I started having recurring dreams about war—something I normally never dream about. Obviously, there was some issue or conflict taking place within me, and those dreams prompted me to look more closely at certain anxieties I was having but had brushed aside as not being important. Yet they were important, and I realized I’d been turning a blind eye to a moral conflict involving a professional decision I had to make, which I was in denial about. The dreams corrected that.
Therapy is certainly a valuable method, of course—having someone outside of you who can look at your issues from a more objective standpoint. The key there is to zero in specifically on those areas involving matters of shame, humiliation, fear, obsessions, addictions, and embarrassment—each of these being cellar doors into that subterranean realm of secrets.
One especially simple method of unearthing secrets is to carefully see what—and who—pushes your buttons in daily life. To paraphrase Carl Jung, those things which irritate us in others offer a surefire window into your own unconscious “shadow” issues. Is it the egotistical co-worker whose constant bragging rubs you the wrong way? Or a specific political leader whose personality quirks drive you crazy? I mentioned earlier about racism, which is a particularly common example. Instances of extreme button-pushing like these almost always mirror qualities or traits one doesn’t want to face in oneself.
Some would even suggest that those buried secrets can be mirrored back to us in the symbols and synchronicities of waking life, especially those which involve recurring situations that frustrate and encode key lessons around one’s dysfunctions. Do you continue to run into similar problems centering around matters of deception? Did you experience synchronicities involving the recurring name of a celebrity who was recently mired in a scandal? As with our nightly dreams, such coincidences require a keen symbolic eye to properly interpret.
In the end, there is one thing I’m sure of. If we choose to engage in this archaeological excavation of the soul, we need to be gentle with ourselves, loving even. We’ve all made mistakes, we’re all human, we’ve all hidden things from both others and ourselves because they’re painful. But however horrible those secrets may seem to you, they’re not the entirety of who you are.
So, gaze into those secrets with clear eyes and zero judgment. The world is hard enough without us having to make it even harder.
Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books including The Waking Dream, An Infinity of Gods, and Under a Sacred Sky. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.
