The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are by Michael Slepian

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are by Michael Slepian Think of a secret that you’re keeping from others. It shouldn’t take long; behavioral scientist Michael Slepian finds that, on average, we are keeping as many as thirteen secrets at any given time. His research involving more than 50,000 participants from around the world shows that the most common secrets include lies we’ve told, ambitions, addictions, mental health challenges, hidden relationships, and financial struggles. Our secrets can weigh heavily upon us. Yet the burden of secrecy, Slepian argues, rarely stems from the work it takes to keep a secret hidden. Rather, the weight of our secrets comes from carrying them alone, without the support of others. Whether we are motivated to protect our reputation, a relationship, a loved one’s feelings, or some personal or professional goal, one thing is clear: Holding back some part of our inner world is often lonely and isolating. But The Secret Life of Secrets shows you that it doesn’t have to be. Filled with fresh insight into one of the most universal—yet least understood—aspects of human behavior, The Secret Life of Secrets sheds a fascinating new light on questions like: At what age do children develop the cognitive capacity for secrecy? Do all secrets come with the same mental load? How can we reconcile our secrets with our human desires to relate, connect, and be known? When should we confess our secrets? Who makes for the ideal confidant? And can keeping certain types of secrets actually enhance our well-being? Drawing on over a decade of original research, The Secret Life of Secrets reveals the surprising ways that secrets pervade our lives, and offers science-based strategies that make them easier to live with. The result is a rare window into the inner workings of our minds, our relationships, and our sense of who we are.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Hey, we're just coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Got an announcement here to make. Let me read my sheet here. Say something funny, interesting, or stupid to make people laugh. Well, fuck, that's just not going to work. Anyway, guys, thanks for coming in. Be sure to show your friends, neighbors, relatives. We appreciate you because remember, the Chris Voss Show family is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. I threw that paper off into the distance and now

I'm going to find where it is behind the desk. So if that's not funny, well, it's stupid. And that's kind of funny. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership,

how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show as well. His book comes out today. We've had some really great authors on the show. We've had thousands of great authors on the show. What am I saying? We only had a few. And today we have another. Michael Slepian is on the show with us. He is the author of the hottest new book to come out, launching today, June 7, 2022. In case you're watching this 10 years from now. The Secret Life of Secrets. We're going to get into secrets.

The Secret Life of Secrets. How our inner worlds shape well-being, relationships, and who we are. He's going to be talking to us about this amazing new book and all the stuff he put into it, all the research. The thing I love about this show, I must say, as an aside, if I can aside here, because it is, after all, my show, but I love how we have all these brilliant minds on the show, and they spent like 10, 20, 100,000 hours or whatever researching this stuff,

and we get them on the show, and we get kind of a nice core hour and up front. Of course, then you buy the book and you learn everything they learned. Is a, is the, I shouldn't say a, the Sanford C. Bernstein and Company Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He is a leading expert in the psychology of secrets. He has authored more than 50 articles on secrecy, truth, and deception. But did he publish them?

Because maybe they'll be on to tell us. His research has been covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Economist. We've never had anyone on the show from the Economist. We should fix that. The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The Economist. We've never had anyone on the show from The Economist. We should fix that. The Wall Street Journal, the BBC or the BBC, the NPR, and I'm never going to get through his bio and more. And he has spent the last decade studying the psychology of secrets and is finally revealing those secrets he's been keeping or we've all been keeping. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you?

Good. Thanks for having me. There you go. Has anybody introduced you as stupidly boring or funny as I did? You can pick any of the three. I'm not going to put you on the spot. So give us your dot com so people can find you on the internet. You can michaelslapian.com or the secret life of secrets. You can go to keepingsecrets.org as well. There you go. And is that a secret? Is it inside? Can everyone access it? Available to anyone. We might use this callback joke all show. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Is this your first book too? Yeah, this is my first book. I've been studying the psychology of secrecy for more than 10 years now. And so we've learned so much about secrets

over the years, so many things we didn't know, and it was time to share them in a broad way. Are you sure they're really secrets? Because if they're secrets, how did we learn so much about them? I don't know, but I imagine you're here to tell us. That's right. So give us an overview of the book, if you would, and some of the details inside so we can tease that out. Yeah. So the book is about what we keep secret and how our secrets affect us. And often that means our secrets hurt us, but they don't have to.

And so the book also helps us think through how to cope better with the secrets that are hurting us. There you go. What motivates you to get in this field or study this and write the book? So I actually studied, began this research in a very sideways way. I did not mean to study the psychology of secrecy, but it turned out this very unusual look upon secrecy that I first took is what would launch this entire program of research and this 10 years of research. And where I first started was looking at this metaphor

that people would use to describe secrets. I was interested in metaphor, not secrecy. And people will describe a secret as something that weighs you down. There can be, a secret can be heavy, a secret can be weighty. And so my original study is explored if people talk about secrets this way, do they in fact think about secrets in this way? Think of them as like, like a physical burden. And our initial studies showed that they do. Yeah. So sometimes our secrets are burdens or are they always burdens because we're hiding something? No, no. So not all secrets are burdens. Some secrets are more burdensome. Some secrets hurt our well-being more than others. And before my research, what we believed the reason why our secrets hurt us was the stress of hiding them in conversation. And for decades, we've believed it's that moment of hiding that's so harmful. But that turns out to be wrong. When we look at the secrets of the everyday secrets people keep, when we look at thousands of people's experiences with secrets, it turns out that you very rarely

have to conceal your secrets in conversation, but we can think about them all the time outside of those conversations. And that turns out to be where the harm is. Ah, so are there good secrets then? There are good secrets then? So some secrets, even if they are difficult to keep, you might be keeping them for the right reasons. So you might be doing some good. But then a very different answer to that question is sometimes we keep positive secrets. You know, a marriage proposal, a surprise gift, a surprise party.

And those secrets tell a different story for sure. They're different, as you might imagine. Yeah. I've got a good one. It's a divorce filing. No, I'm just kidding. That's not a good secret. But no, I didn't think about it that way.

There are good secrets. What are some things that you found about how they, I mean, you talk about how our inner world shape well-being, relationships and who we are. Do most of us, I mean, what percentage of our secrets are bad and good, would you say? If I had to put a number on it, I would say, you know, there's some secrets that we keep that are totally trivial and it's not a big deal. And that's kind of the end of the story for those. But if I were to put a number on it, I would say probably at least 10%, maybe 20% of our secrets are causing more harm than they need to be. Oh, I remember watching, I was watching a show. It was, let's see, it was the Michael Jackson documentary of the two boys. I don't know if you, if you heard or saw or heard

of that. I mean, I think everyone heard about the point. It was Leaving Neverland. That was the title. Okay. Yeah. And after the show, Oprah had a bunch of the two of them on, and they kind of had an open format with some audience interaction. And I remember a gentleman stood up quite poignantly, and he'd written a book on child abuse. He'd been abused by it in his neighborhood. And the secret had torn him up for most of his life until he finally let it loose. And he made a comment that was really interesting to me where he said,

the secrets can be like a poison inside you, and they just fester and you die unless you let them out. Kind of like a snake bite, where you get the poison in you until you bleed that thing out and maybe suck out some of the poison and get it out of your system. It's going to fester and eat at you and almost

become malignant in, you know, in the case of a rattlesnake. And for some people it does. I mean, some people commit suicide over their secrets. Yeah. And the reason that our secrets can take us to such harmful places is when we choose to be alone with something, something that bothers us, something that's upsetting, something that's upsetting, something that's traumatic, we don't develop healthy ways of thinking about something when we're all on our own. And this is the problem of having a secret. It's not the moments of hiding. It's having to live alone with that secret. Yeah. A lesson I learned in social media, there's a story I tell about how, you know, I always kind of kept a

public presence on social media and never talked much about my home life. And then when my dog passed of a seizure, just like within 30 minutes, it was, you know, a shocking emotional jolt to my system. And I poured out this, you know, this emotional post on Facebook and I really didn't want to share it. I'm like, this is way too emotional. No one cares. This is something I should just keep to myself. It's kind of my private sort of experience and my secret, if you will. And I ended up sharing it.

And by sharing it, I not only found that I wasn't alone, like you mentioned before, where we end up alone, but also there was a lot of other people that sharing it helped. And I had people write me and go, you helped me resolve, get closure with some of the deaths in my life that I hadn't gotten. And that was all because I shared my, you know, what I intended to keep secret.

I mean, it took me like, I think it was half an hour before I would press that button. I just didn't want to press the button. And I think thankfully I was a half a bottle into vodka and that got it over the, I just said, fuck it. This is my suicide note. If I wake up tomorrow and fuck it. But, you know, example of how secrets can leave us alone, but also if we share them, we can help others. Yeah, absolutely. Having conversations, even difficult conversations, or especially difficult conversations,

there's so much to gain from them. When we share perspectives from each other, we learn something that we can't obtain on our own. We all have different experiences and perspectives, and there's so much to learn by sharing them and hearing them. I'm sorry. Are there some personalities that tend towards keeping more secrets than not? I know, you know, some people have overt communication styles. Some people have covert communication styles. Sometimes it's sex-based in how people, you know, they communicate. And a lot of that's from a biological imperative or eons of time and how people develop. Is there certain people or personality styles that tend to keep more secrets?

Yep. And some of these won't surprise you. So people who are more introverted tend to keep more secrets. People who are less emotionally stable, this is the polite word for neurotic and that psychologists use today, keep more secrets. And then one that I find really interesting is the more conscientious, the more sort of very diligent and careful people also keep more secrets. What about like narcissists and stuff? That's a real big thing these days. They keep a lot of secrets.

Yeah, we haven't studied that, but I bet they keep fewer secrets. Sure. Oh, they keep fewer secrets? That's my guess. Maybe we should find out. Because they tend to share everything in your face. Yeah. And that's part of the, yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. All right. everything in your face and that part of the, yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what, what's a good way to address or do you address in the book how to be better with your secrets, manage them better and maybe, you know, take a look and go, Hey, maybe we should clean that out and maybe keep those and you know, stuff like that, run a better inventory of secrets. Yes. So really what you want to do is if there's a secret that's hurting you, you're probably stuck in your way of thinking about it. You're probably ruminating on it in a harmful way, rehashing the past. The way to move forward is to sort of find a more healthy perspective. And there's ways that you could try to do that on your own, and we can talk about that. But the best way to do that is simply talking to another person. You don't have to reveal the secret to the person you're keeping it from, but speaking to a third party can make the world of difference for the very reason we were just talking about. They can validate your experience or, or say that, you know, what you

said to them was brave or, or that, you know, that they're here for you or, you know, that sucks. I'm so sorry for you. It turns out we don't need very much to feel a lot better. Wow. So, so if we have a secret that's poisoning us and maybe we're festering, at least going and talking to somebody, a psychologist or telling a friend can kind of help with that burden. Yeah. It's, it's just so hard to do on your own. Yeah. And it probably goes back to that thing I said earlier, you know, the secret inside you, you know, once he made the comment that once he told someone it made a difference and you know going back to that i mean you you look at a lot of the secrets maybe the boy scouts catholic church i'm using some you know extreme secrets here but but uh overall no one called out some of those activities are

going on there's a lot of different things like that throughout the world i guess but as an example you know until enough people said hey that happened to me too. And I've kept it secret all these years because I thought it was only me. You know, then you see a sea change in attitudes or see a sea change in, I don't know, social standards and stuff like that. Yeah. As isolating as it can feel to have a secret, it turns out actually we all keep the same kinds of secrets. We're not really. We find in our research that with 38 categories of secrets or 38 different kinds of secrets, we can really comprehensively cover what people typically keep secret. So when I give people this list of 38 secrets, we see the average person right now is currently

keeping 13 of those secrets. Wow. I'm going to have to take the test in the book then to see how many secrets I'm 38, man. That makes me tired just thinking that like i'm already carrying a lot here as it is you know i i don't know i don't know i imagine i do keep a lot of secrets is there anybody who ever gets clean where they don't have any secrets is there anybody with no secrets yeah i would i would be skeptical maybe there's someone out there but they'd be a real rare case. Yeah. What's the difference between a secret and something you just don't tell anybody? Because like, I don't know, no one cares.

Like, you know, my dog pooped on the floor today. Is that a secret if I don't tell anybody? So there's definitely things that people don't know about you that aren't secret, right? And so what's really important and the way I define secrecy is a specific intention to hold that information back and so if that's the reason people don't know then it's a secret is it always about shame or guilt or does it have to be about something like that nope that is often part of the story but there are other secrets that we might keep that we're not as you know that we don't feel guilty or ashamed of. In fact, one of the most common secrets is romantic desire, for example.

Oh. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Like, I'm attracted to so-and-so, but I won't tell them, but I'm a secret. What do they call it? Secret admirer.

So secret admirer secrets. Yeah, there you go. I'm attracted to Pamela Anderson, but I haven't been able to tell her, but that's because I don't have her phone number. I don't know what that means. I grew up in that age of Baywatch. What are some other things that we can tease out about the book to get people to pick it up? Yeah. So if you feel not ready to talk about a secret with someone, ways to think through how to find that more helpful perspective.

We see essentially there's three different ways in which a secret can harm you. The more immoral you consider a secret, the more you might feel ashamed and guilty. That first one you just hit on, the more a secret feels very individual and personal, the more isolating it can feel to have a secret. And the more a secret is sort of emotional in tone, the less insight we might feel we have into that secret. And so there's three different ways a secret can hurt you. But the good news in that is there's three different ways in which a secret doesn't have to hurt you. And so understanding the ways in which it's hurting you or sort of help you realize the ways in which it's not hurting you. And that sort

of is your first clues on the helpful paths forward it is i've seen people that have had issues with anger and gaslighting and different issues that give them rage and by exposing their secret they that was the psychology behind it the whole time they were they were fighting to the secret was poisoning them, it was driving them mad. And by releasing that and telling people, it freed them from that thing. And it was torturing them in the inside. And that's why they were acting that way with gaslighting and when they would react to gaslighting or stuff. You know, a lot of people with trauma go through that.

Let's see, you researched more than 50,000 participants. And you went through people with ambitions, addictions, mental health challenges, hidden relationships and financial struggles. What was, what was something that comes out of it that's like a favorite story of yours or maybe something that you're maybe surprised to learn? One of the most surprising things to learn when I first started this research, you know, where I first started was, you know, looking at this metaphor people had for secrets, right? And those studies were finding that simply thinking about a secret would bring online this sense of burden. And some people, when they heard about that research, they would say,

well, that doesn't, you know, that's not secrecy. To study secrecy, you need to have two people in a room and have one person hiding something in conversation from another. And so that's when we first started thinking, well, maybe part of the harm of secrecy is not just moments of hiding. Maybe it's just having a secret in your own head and having to think about it time and time again. And so when we first started looking at these two different ways that a secret might hurt you, having to ruminate on it and having to hide it in conversation, I expected we would find harm from each of those experiences. But it turns out that after you account for the harm of simply ruminating on a secret on your own time, we see no harm left over for concealment. It turns out that concealing secrets is the easy part.

Hiding in conversation, you just don't say the thing that would reveal the secret. We don't often ask people about their secrets. We don't ask people, have you ever cheated on your partner? That's not a very common question. And so we don't often have to hide our secrets. And when we do, we're really prepared for those moments because that's the whole point. But what we're not prepared for is all the times our mind is going to return to that secret when we feel alone with it in our thoughts. Yeah. You almost, I mean, sometimes you keep a secret for a long time and it's, you know, to, to go back on what you're talking about. Sometimes

we fear the result more than the secret itself and, and holding it a secret actually does more damage. I'll give you an example. One of my, a gal I dated, I was engaged to for about a year and a half. I knew she had a prior marriage and about a year and a half into the relationship, I was, I think we were having a Sunday dinner at her mother's house and her brother was over and her brother let slip that she'd had two marriages instead of one. And I had not been told that on purpose. That was the secret. And if she had told me initially that she'd been married twice, the second one was like some quick annulment sort of thing or problem or actually I don't think it was, but it was enough to make me go. It wouldn't have bothered me if I would have been told up front, but it was the fact that had been hidden from me and would have continued to be hidden from me probably up until the time

I married her that made me, that really made me lose a lot of trust. And it made me also go, well, you know, tip of the iceberg. What else is there? And so that might have been a good example of what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's two really important lessons in that story. One is that often it's the secret keeping that can hurt more than learning what the secret is about. We see in our research that when people reveal secrets, it goes far better than they expect. It's never the worst scenario.

And then also, if there's a secret that's going to be learned eventually or if it could come out accidentally, you probably want to get ahead of that and reveal it on your own terms. Yeah, that's probably why a lot of people, the politicians do that. When they get a warning, the New York Times is going to put out put a story they they're like we should probably just admit to it now because it's coming out and get ahead of it but yeah i mean like i said if she would have told me that you know it would have it would have it would have it would i wouldn't care i've been like okay cool you're married once you're married twice i mean whatever don't don't care but it was

the hiding of it that got me, and it just made me question and go, well, what else is there? What else have I been lying about? Like, who are you? And so it made me really wonder, and that was a good example of where a lie can really bite you in the butt. And I think it probably started the downfall or the spin out of that relationship. There's a few other things that were going on.

What else can we tease out about the book to get people to order it up that people can learn more about their secrets? Do women keep more secrets? So we don't see gender differences in the tendency to keep secrets, but there's an important difference here in that you can have a secret that you confide in a third party, right? While still keeping it a secret from the other person. And women do confide their secrets and others more than men do oh yeah well men we don't even really talk we just get together and punch each other in the arm and go how's it

going hey you want to go do some fishing drink a beer yeah okay that's it that's kind of yeah and it turns out that confiding in secrets is good for you. And so men can sometimes miss out on the help that they sometimes need. Well, I mean, you know, we're not mentally stable anyway. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Some of us are. One of them is not me. The one of them is not me.

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe it does. But you're the psychiatrist. You tell me. So anything more you want to tease tease on the book before we go? you're very concerned about the secret coming out and damaging the relationship itself. And so the big question is, what do you do in that scenario? You know, so the classic example is you've cheated on your partner and, you know, maybe it was a one-time thing and, you know, is there a benefit to revealing it to them? And that's a really tricky question. And so,

you know, a few things to consider if you're in a similar situation, even if it's not infidelity, something else, is the reason that you're revealing this thing to make yourself feel better, because there's a chance that revealing this thing can make you feel better, but make your partner feel a whole lot worse. But then the other thing to think about is, you know, do you think your partner would sometimes want to know this information? And, you know, there's some people who wouldn't, but there's some people who would, you know, by our best estimate, it seems about 25% of people or so would want to know about that. And so, you know, when you're stuck with something really difficult, when you're thinking about, is this a secret I should reveal? Do not make that decision on your own. Talk to someone else. There's no need to make such a

consequential, significant decision on your own. And that's what's so good about talking to other people. You don't have to reveal it to the person you're keeping it from, or if you think you might want to or need to talk to someone else and see what they think. You know, that's a good point. Yeah. Does the book help people determine if, you know, they, should this be a secret I should keep or should it not be a secret I should keep? Yeah, it sort of helps you balance.

It walks through thinking through those very decisions. I can go through all my decisions and be like, this is a good secret. Keep this one. No, get rid of that one. You know, that sort of thing. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have on the show, Michael. Very insightful.

And now I've got to think about my secrets and my secrets of secrets and all that good stuff. I like to tell people in relationships, my secrets, because I'm like, if you're going to leave me, here's some secrets. So let's see if that works.

Damn, they're going to stay. Now I got to come up with something else to drive them away so they can have some peace and quiet and go do whatever I want. I'm being annoyed, but that's how I, that's the only psychiatry lesson that you'll have to come back for. Thanks for coming on the show,

Michael. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Thanks for having me. You can go to michaelslepian.com to get to my website. You can go to keepingsecrets.org to look at what are the common secrets. Take the survey yourself. See how your secrets compare to people of your gender and age, or just look up The Secret Life of Secrets, which is the book. The Secret Life of Secrets. How our inner worlds shape well-being relationships and who we are by Michael Selepian. Thanks for Michael for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man.

Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. We always appreciate you guys, the family that the Chris Voss shows, the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, the best kind of family there is. For the show to your friends, family, relatives, youtube.com, fortune.com, Chris Voss. Let's see goodreads.com, fortune.com, Chris Voss. All the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,

all the crazy places those kids play. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.