Unless you’re a sociopath, psychopath, or pathological liar, keeping secrets will have a negative impact on your holistic systems. Keeping secrets causes the decline of your autoimmune system and leads to a decline of quality in your mind, body, and soul. This act of withholding powerful information, which you would be better served by releasing, leaves you keeping secrets and promotes deterioration of health, the onset of disease(s), premature aging and death.
Those who are keeping secrets are more likely to withdraw from social interaction, have fewer friends, and are prone to paranoia, feeling as though potential interaction with others will put them at risk.
Keeping secrets in a romantic relationship causes separation and prevents a relationship from progressing or deepening.
Secret keepers are highly proficient at projecting their issues onto the people they encounter.
If you hide unexpressed anger regarding people from your past which might include parental angst, keeping these feelings deeply held within will likely cause you to see these attributes applied to the people (or person) closest to you.
Children who suffered abuse and keep these details highly regarded secrets as adults will suspect any prospective partner as potentially abusive, even when no real potential for abuse exists.
For those who actively push down their past of having been abandoned in their early years, they are likely to be clingier in relationships and fear being abandoned by their partner.
These emotionally charged memories and thoughts, even if they are deeply hidden, possibly even from the cognoscente mind of the secret keeper, will become the filter through which the keeper of secrets views life.
The keeper of secrets is likely to hide many secrets which is likely to include their own feelings. In relationships, one partner might sense emotional disconnect or psychological distraction, and query, “What’s wrong?” To which the secret keeper will respond, “Oh, nothing.”
The solution to this self-destructive withholding is to find ways to find ways to express yourself, starting with surface issues, then digging deeper as you become more adept at sharing your feelings.
If you’re in the habit of keeping secrets, you’re likely to do it all the time, not speaking up when you are disappointed, disillusioned, or feel as though your feelings have been disrespected or hurt.
Start speaking up for yourself. The next time you go out to eat, and your food arrives in a way you did not expect, do not push down your feelings and force yourself to silently eat your dish silently vowing not to come back to this establishment. Instead, note your concerns to the server, offering the dish to the wait staff who can take it back to the kitchen and make it right.
Start speaking up and asserting your concerns, while allowing others to make accommodations which would be more pleasing to you.
Nest time someone asks, “What’s wrong?” Don’t hide your feelings. Tell them what’s wrong but temper your expression with respectful compassion. Your tendency might be to start your expressing yourself with the object of what’s bothering you, which places blame and puts the recipient on the defensive.
I Feel Like
If you want whoever it is to hear how you feel, then start with, “I feel like…”
No one can deny how you feel. How you feel is how you feel. Even though you may be expressing your disapproval of something that is based on someone else’s actions, no one can deny that whatever is the object of what has made you feel bad, it’s not disrespectful to the cause.
This is a safe way to express yourself, while taking full responsibility for your own feelings.
Once you get used to the idea of being more open and honest in this way, you can consider talking about things that you have encountered in your past which you have kept secret.
Whatever has happened to you in your past is not good or bad, it just happened. It was a part of your past. You are an amazing person today, and had you not gone through all those experiences, you would not have become the person you are today.
And it is highly likely that once you get to a level about peace about your past, you can help others who share similar tendencies to keep secrets, once you realize the benefits of not keeping secrets.