You can't imagine how destructive those hidden secrets are to your family.

Not long ago, I saw the results of a study on Katrina survivors, and found that every August, hurricane survivors concentrated on depression, headache and stomachache.

The hurricane disaster occurred in August 2005.

With the support of family and friends, these symptoms will disappear soon, but only for a short time.

These symptoms will recur every year near August. This phenomenon is also called "anniversary reaction".

Each of us has an internal "calendar" on the edge of consciousness, which records all our "anniversary reactions".

It is worth mentioning that this phenomenon is not only in the small probability event of hurricane disaster-the "annual response" of more than one person. It's all related to some secrets that their family has experienced.

It may be as trivial as a trivial matter, but its impact is as great as a hurricane.

Secret holders or other family members may experience this "anniversary reaction". No matter which way you keep a secret, family relationships and individuals will pay a painful price for it.

Just as I am shocked by the possible harm of secrets, I am also shocked by their wonderful healing power after exposure. I was deeply impressed by two of them.

1. ode

A few years ago, I participated in a family therapy case. In order to protect their true identity, we first call their mother Carol.

She is still healthy and energetic in her 70s, but she refuses to leave home and forces herself to wash her hands dozens of times a day.

As a result, her husband Bill always felt that he was a prisoner, and all their adult children and grandchildren were kicked out of the house by her. Bill Carroll argued about washing hands many times, but to no avail. Now Carol's behavior has seriously hindered the normal life of her family.

Carol's symptoms get worse every March and 1 1, even so severe that she needs short-term hospitalization. Even as a family that doesn't like outsiders, they still choose to drag their mother to a new major, hoping that someone can treat Carol's symptoms. All four children actively helped their mother recover, trying to find out the cause of her pain. During these two months, they made great efforts to solve the "mother's problem".

I was thinking, maybe something happened in this family?

When Carol was finally able to tell her story, I heard a secret that made her deeply ashamed. A story that happened in the last century. Carol got pregnant for the first time at the age of 17, and her two oldest children were born before marriage.

This marriage was strongly opposed by her parents, but in that era of underdeveloped medical care, her parents had to send her to have a baby, and her future parents-in-law also wrote to accuse Carol of what she deserved. In the United States at that time, having children out of wedlock was still an unsightly scandal. When Carol came to me for treatment 50 years ago, she never revealed this letter to her husband.

Although her family will spend the rest of her life with her for decades, she still feels that she should keep the secret of having an unmarried child in front of her children.

She hid the marriage certificate at the bottom of an old suitcase in the basement, and never celebrated the birthdays of her two daughters in June 5438+065438+ 10 and March. The couple never celebrate their wedding anniversary, and even the wedding date is taboo at home for fear of revealing the fact that they are younger than their daughter.

However, her children found the marriage certificate that was deliberately forgotten when they were teenagers and understood the hidden meaning of this date. The shame in Carol's eyes was caught by the children, and the secret began to torment her more and more strongly. And the accumulation of fear and shame year after year finally brought Carol to the brink of emotional collapse.

When Carol revealed her long-standing secret, her children immediately responded to her in the most enthusiastic way. They also said that they knew the secret they were trying to hide, but failed to think that it was the root of her extreme anxiety every two years. Mother's forced hand washing has always been considered a personal problem, and they have never associated it with her shame.

Looking at it now, you may be surprised: the secret she concealed is nothing today, but she still paid a huge price for it.

Carol's insistence on this secret comes from the opposition of her parents and in-laws, as well as the social culture of her time. This proves that to solve the core of family secrets, first of all, individuals should really get rid of the broader social, cultural and political environment and look for things that both individuals and families are ashamed of.

Shame and secrets often live in a closed cycle. -the more humiliating, the more confidential. The more secretive, the more shameful.

2. Jamie

Look at the second story

The emotional harm caused by secrets is not only manifested in the parties who hide secrets, but also in the people who are kept secret. Parents hide bad stories from their children out of goodwill, but they are likely to be misunderstood by their children and eventually hurt the whole family.

This is the story of another tourist, whom we call Zhan Mu.

Zhan Mu, 17 years old, is a very promising high school student and athlete. One day, a strange "sound" began to bother him and caused him to hurt his stepmother Anna.

He was rushed to the hospital after the sound appeared. Diagnosis: schizophrenia.

He started taking related drugs and received a lot of treatment, and his family was also informed to participate in Zhan Mu's treatment. Coincidentally, this episode in Zhan Mu's life happened to be the second anniversary of his beloved grandmother's death. None of the family members associated this date with Zhan Mu's abnormal behavior.

Zhan Mu was brought up by his grandmother in Mexico. The summer before his grandmother died, Zhan Mu's father took him to new york to live with his father and stepmother, which forced Zhan Mu Jr. to be separated from his grandmother with terminal cancer. When her grandmother died in August, Zhan Mu stayed in new york, and they never met again.

"I don't want to make him sad, I just want to protect him and let him have a happy summer," his father explained.

In new york, Zhan Mu's family did not prepare any ceremony to commemorate her grandmother's death, and Zhan Mu was not allowed to go to Mexico to attend her funeral because of immigration. When contradictions began to nourish and grow in the dark, a dialogue about life and death and family was very important to Zhan Mu, but it seemed to be deliberately forgotten.

After his grandmother died, his parents, stepmother and he never talked about his biological mother, never communicated the reasons why his father and stepmother immigrated, and never shared their lives with grandma. It was a suffocating long silence.

Like many families, their secrets are complicated and interrelated.

So, why does this "voice" want Zhan Mu to hurt her stepmother Anna? Where is Zhan Mu's real mother? It was not until his stepmother Anna revealed the secret that had been hidden for many years that the story behind it gradually surfaced.

She told Zhan Mu that maybe her grandmother was a kind elder to him, loved him deeply, took care of him and encouraged him to become an excellent student, but she was not a good mother-in-law. She did not welcome, in fact, even abused his biological mother and Anna.

In order to avoid conflicts with her grandmother, her stepmother and father chose to immigrate to new york with their daughters, leaving Zhan Mu to be raised by her grandmother. In order not to damage the beautiful image of Zhan Mu's grandmother, Zhan Mu's father and stepmother kept silent on this matter.

On the contrary, when he was growing up in Mexico, his grandmother kept telling negative stories about his stepmother, which subtly induced Zhan Mu to resist his stepmother.

You see, this family was full of goodwill, but the layers of secrets and absolute silence almost brought permanent tragedy, almost caused the wrong treatment of mental illness and the irreparable breakdown of the relationship.

Just before the anniversary of his grandmother's death, Anna began to help Zhan Mu apply for university. This anniversary lacked commemoration and communication. "I'm confused. My grandmother told me never to let Anna interfere in my life. I have to listen to grandma, but Anna is so kind and lovely! Nobody here cares about my grandmother's death. I know she doesn't want me to live here, especially with the help of her stepmother. This is an insoluble situation. I think I'm going to explode. "

This profound communication between three people changed everything. Zhan Mu is determined to acknowledge and accept his complicated and contradictory feelings for his grandmother and stepmother. The "voice" disappeared from Zhan Mu's world soon after the secret of this family for many years was revealed.

These two examples just illustrate how secrets and family relationships are intertwined: Carol is ashamed to let her children know her past, which is prohibited by social moral standards. She hoped to maintain a qualified mother image in the eyes of her children, but she secretly suffered abuse and humiliation and finally collapsed in fifty years of torture. Zhan Mu's parents kept silent about their love for Zhan Mu, hoping to protect him from the truth, but they caused real contradictions and panic in unsuspecting Zhan Mu.

This is the "anniversary response" of the family. It takes us to capture the secrets buried deep underground, perhaps in Zhan Mu and his family recently, or in Carol decades ago.

However, in their family relationship and personal identity, they all paid a huge price for silence.

People need secrets, but they also need to share them. If you keep secrets from the closest and most reliable people, it's easy to isolate yourself from the world, put shackles on yourself, push the people you love the most away from your world, and confuse TA. It is not conducive to promoting the development of mutual relations, nor is it conducive to venting one's emotions.

As social animals, if they can't meet the needs of belonging, individuals will have a series of negative manifestations such as cognitive decline and anxiety. Then, there is endless fear and anxiety. The more afraid you are, the more afraid you are to say it. The more scared I am, the more scared I am.

Repeated exposure to chronic stress will affect the function of individual nerve cells, which is related to decreased immunity and depression.

Then, a long silence will finally break out.

Therefore, the "hidden secret" in the name of love and ashamed of the truth always draws a line between close people, making them go further and further on different roads. Such a home, seemingly calm, has long been turbulent.

To make "home" a real shelter from the wind, I'm afraid everyone in the family needs to be sincere, frank and accept each other.

Unfortunately, this is always difficult.

This article is edited by simple psychology.

Original text:

Other reference materials:

Rice Clark (1988). Interpersonal processes in intimate relationships. Yearbook of Psychology, 39( 1), 609-672.

Baumeister, R.F. Twenger, J.M. Yunus, C.K.(2002). The influence of social exclusion on cognitive process: expected loneliness will reduce intelligent thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83,865,438+07827.

Wollebo, E.S. Franklin, Iwata, m.(20 16). Neuroimmune system integration in neurobiology of depression. Nature review neuroscience.