The Mel Robbins Podcast - New Research: The Surprising Psychology Behind the Secrets Everyone Keeps & What Your Secrets Say About You

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

In today’s episode, you and I are discussing the fascinating science of secrets: why you keep them and how keeping secrets directly impacts your relationships, your self-esteem, your health, and holds you back from living the life you deserve. Dr. Michael Slepian is a bestselling author, psychologist, associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, and former scholar at Stanford. He has been researching secrets for over a decade and will help you understand what secrets are, why we keep them, and the harm of holding them inside. Dr. Slepian's research is shocking: studies prove you are keeping 13 secrets right now. 5 of which you’ve never told a single person. Not your mom. Not your best friend. No one. Even more shocking is the impact they have on your life. My mission today is to help you free yourself of the burden of secrets. Listen and you’ll understand how the secrets we have shape our physical and psychological well-being, who we are, how we connect with others, and how we cope with our challenges. You will also learn: The most common secret that 61% of you are keeping right now.Why you always feel shame, isolation, and uncertainty when you keep a secret.The fundamental difference between secrecy and privacy, and why privacy is better for your health and relationships.Why the shame of secrecy kills your self-esteem.How to use guilt to get rid of shame (yup).How babies learn to keep secrets from their parents and caregivers.The one person you should REALLY tell your secret to. Keeping a secret is the easy part; the hard part is having to live with it. Let’s change that today. Xo, MelIn this episode:2:00: The jaw-dropping secret that inspired this conversation today.9:45: Curious about the kinds of secrets people keep? Here are the top 10.11:50: How exactly do we define a secret?14:45: Are there any good secrets?15:45: Don’t feel too bad; we’re not the only animals that keep secrets.18:00: Keeping the secret isn’t the hard part; the hardest part is this.21:00: Listen to the secrets my listeners revealed. Recognize yourself?24:45: Some secrets are no big deal but we make them big in our heads.28:00: So what’s the difference between privacy and a secret?31:00: Here’s how to frame a mistake, instead of feeling shame.33:30: Research finds keeping serious secrets as kids can impact us as adults.35:30: Here’s what parents should say when their kids admit a secret to them.38:00: What do you say when friends keep you out of the group?39:40: How do you tell your partner that you’re having an emotional affair?42:30: The family secrets parents should never reveal to their children.47:15: What about traumatic family secrets?50:00: Choose the person who is your “coping compass” wisely.54:30: Questions you can ask anyone to develop a closer relationship.59:50: Here’s my hardest memory and what I realize about it now.Want more resources? Go to my podcast page at melrobbins.com.Disclaimer

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so glad you tuned in today because I am on the edge of my seat right now because of the conversation we're going to have. I have been talking about this topic with my friends and my family for a long time, but I wanted to wait until I found the perfect expert before you and I broached this subject. So prepare yourself. Because right now, you and I are going to discuss something that we've never spoken about. The topic, secrets.

Why you keep them? And how the secrets that you hold are directly impacting yourself, esteem, your relationships, your health, and how they're holding you back from living the life you deserve. My mission today is simple. I want to help you free yourself of the burden of carrying your secrets and your family's secrets. Dr. Michael Slepian is a best-selling author, psychologist and associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School and a visiting scholar at Stanford.

According to Dr. Slepian's 10-year research study, you probably have 13 secrets. No, not probably. You do. Five of which you've never told anyone. And you're not alone. We all have secrets. In fact, I asked five million of my Instagram followers to share their secrets and boy oh boy, they sure did. Just wait until you hear what fellow listeners of this podcast are struggling with in secret.

And that's why I wanted to talk about it because keeping the secret, it's the easy part. The hard part is forcing yourself to live with it. Let's change that. Please help me welcome Dr. Michael Slepian to the Malrabans podcast. Thanks for having me. Of course, I am so excited about this. You are inspired to write your book, The Secret Life of Secrets because of a secret in your own life.

Tell us that story. Yeah. So, this story takes place 10 years ago and I was presenting this new research on Secret Seat as part of a job interview at Columbia. And after a sort of a tough day of having meeting after meeting after meeting, having dinner with the people who would become my future colleagues and drinks and all the way to wait until the night around midnight, I get a call from my dad. And I'm like, that's so weird. He wouldn't normally call me at this hour. But I was actually just

still having my drinks with these folks who I was interviewing with. And then he called again, and I thought, oh, no, something bad has happened. This family, there must be like a death in the family or something. And so I call him back. And he says, Michael, I need to tell you something. Maybe you could sit down for this. Oh, God. I'm calling to tell you that I'm not biologically able to have children. He was calling to tell me that he was not my biological father. And this was a secret that they had been keeping from me and my younger brother and then surprise. He's actually my half-brother born from a different donor and they told me

this was a secret they planned on never telling us ever. And that was of course shocking and it wasn't the truth that was sort of shifting the ground under my feet. It wasn't learning that fact. I quickly thought, this is okay, I'm okay with this. This is the reality. And you know, this doesn't change anything between us, but why are you telling me this? And why now?

And why didn't you tell me sooner? It was the secrecy that was harder to understand. What was his answer for why then? So essentially what had happened was a couple days before my brother found out, my mom dared to tell him a story about being an argument with our grandfather, her father, and my brother was like, that's so weird, I've never heard of you ever having an argument with your dad ever, like what were you arguing about? And she said, oh, I can't tell you. He was like, what? He's like,

it's it's related to a secret that I promised your father I would never tell you, which as you can imagine, is a great way to make the other person insist that you reveal the secret, which is what happened. And they wanted to not tell me before my interview, because kids that would be distracting, and they were very correct to do so. Could my dad have waited until the next morning? Yeah. But he, you know, he told me that night

when the interview was over. Did they know that you were studying secrets? Yes, yes, they did. My mom would later tell me one of the reasons she thinks she essentially let it slip when talking to my brother is she was really ready to reveal to secret. I mean, I was not part of the plan. There were multiple people who had a pact to never tell us essentially and my mom was ready to essentially break that and she'll say the reason she started becoming ready to reveal the secret is because she was reading about my research

and realizing like, oh gosh, secrets are not good for you. I have to tell them. How does it make you feel knowing that your research on secrets led to this happening in your family? I can't find the word for it, but it's gratifying and just so sort of odd and strange, you know, this sort of story begins when I first started my, when I first started this research on secret sea, and I learned this big major secret.

And then 10 years later, writing this book about the past 10 years of research I've been doing and I'm interviewing my parents for this book and then I found out that the reason that I learned that secret of the first place is because of my research, it's just, it's, I'm glad to know. And I'm glad that that is a secret. They don't have to keep any longer. I think they could have told

me sooner and I certainly didn't fault them for not doing so, but it's good to be able to talk about it. Well, I think you've done everybody in your family this extraordinary service. You've given everybody a gift because after really digging into your research, one thing that I've concluded is that secrets are like birds trapped in cages and they want to be free. And that's why they torture us so much. And why did you want to look at secrets in the beginning? I mean, do you kind of feel like this is the universe or God or some sort of cosmic intervention for why you started studying secrets to begin with? So when I first started studying secret C, I was studying with this idea that people talk about secrets as if they have physical weight,

people talk about being weighed down by a secret, as if they were carrying a weight on their backs when a secret is coming to their mind. And we saw some evidence. The people were thinking about a secret that they had, the role around them seem more challenging to interact with. And so this sense of burden, you can really feel it in a way that can be hard to articulate, but to try to measure that way, essentially ask people to make judgments that we know actually vary by being physically uncomfortable.

And so if you're tired or out of shape or carrying a bunch of grocery bags, you will judge a hill at steeper because it truly is now going to be harder to scale that hill if you're compromised in some way, if your resources are compromised in some way. And we essentially found the same thing when people were thinking about their secrets. They asked them to think about a significant secret. And when they were doing so, they just judged the world around them as more challenging to interact with. Hills appeared to be steeper distances, appeared to be farther as if that the secret was burdening them to the point where they felt like they had less ability or resources to tackle whatever lies ahead of them.

You're actually held back by a secret. And when I started presenting that research to people, some people thought, oh, this is very interesting. And that's when I realized we don't know anything about secrecy. And so I then got serious about sitting secrecy. What secrets do people keep? How many? What does it look like when a secret comes to mind? And it was something different than what the prior assumptions suggested from before.

We're all on the edge of our seats. What kind of secrets, based on your research, are the top secrets that people keep? So that was one of the first things to look into this idea of, you know, if we want to learn anything about secrecy, we should look at people's real life experiences. We should study people's real secrets because studying sort of made up secrets in the laboratory, it just might not tell us anything about about real-world secrecy. And so we've asked a couple thousand people what's the secret you're keeping right now. And so from the couple thousand people who told us about our secrets, we developed this

list of 38 categories of secrets. And we know this list turns out to be really comprehensive because now we've given this list of secrets to 50,000 people. And on average, the person will, at any given moment, have 13 secrets from that list of 38. We see 97% of people say they have at least one of those secrets right now. When we have asked someone to open ended,

what's the secret you're keeping? 92% of the time, it fits one of the items on the list. So we can on a single page paper, we can really cover well the universe of secrets that people keep and what they are. Can you give us the top 10 big categories? The most common secret is having told a significant lie. You can also not lie to keep a secret, so someone can ask you something and you can honestly

say, oh, I don't want to talk about that. And then a lie itself can be a secret because of some significant untruth we've told and we don't want that to be learned by other people. After that number one lying number two is romantic desire, then it goes fine-lances, sexual behavior, one really interesting one that we call extra relational thoughts. You're in some kind of romantic relationship with one person and you're having some kind of romantic thought about another person. That's something people don't talk about. Family secrets are very common, secret ambitions, discontent with your social life or physical discontent, the list goes on and on mental health, violations of trust and so on. Well what's interesting is we put out a call for people's secrets to nearly 5 million followers

on Instagram. And I'll tell you what, first of all, y'all showed up and poured your secrets into me and we're going to reveal some of them throughout this interview and kind of unpack your research with these real life secrets that people have right now that are fans of this show. But I will confirm that every single one and we received hundreds and hundreds and hundreds within hours we had 36 pages of them printed out That they all fall within your top list of 38 which we'll link to in the show notes and I think it's very interesting that

Everyone yes you listening has an average of 13 and Maybe that's why we should start with a definition. What is a secret? I define secrecy as the intent to withhold information from one of more people. There are plenty of secrets that you might keep that you just never have to actually conceal in conversation.

They just don't come up in conversation. People don't go around asking you, have you ever cheated on your partner for you ever abused as a child, you know, have you had an abortion? These aren't topics we typically encounter. And so there might be a bunch of secrets that you don't have to actively work to keep for most of our secrets. We can think about them quite a lot, but we don't have to hide them very often. And so we don't want to define secrecy as an action because that's a really small slice of

the overall experience of secrecy. We only sometimes hide our secrets in conversation. And most importantly, our secrets exist before those conversations and our secrets exist after those conversations. They don't just disappear after you successfully hit it, right? And so the moment you intend to hold information back from from someone, that's the moment you have a secret. Imagine someone is traveling for work and they cheat on their partner. They've never done it before. They'll never do it again, but that moment they decide, oh, I can't tell this to my partner

who would destroy our relationship. That's the moment they have, oh, I can tell this to my partner, who distra our relationship. That's the moment they have a secret, even before they have the sort of opportunity to hide it. Got it. So a more benign example might be you're supposed to be doing something at work and you're actually out running errands and your boss calls. And you step somewhere where they can't hear the announcer at target and you conceal the fact that you're not anywhere near your desk.

That is another example of a secret. Do you have to feel bad? Nope. Nope. It's just the intent to not disclose something. Exactly. So now I'm a little confused because our secret's good or are they bad? I mean, it seems like you're saying sometimes keeping a secret is a good thing?

Hold your answer, Michael. I've got to take a quick pause so we can hear a word from our amazing sponsors. And I'm going to have you answer that when we come back. Stay with us. Welcome back, I'm Mel Robbins, and I'm talking to Michael Slepion. He's the world's leading expert on secrets, and he's just about to tell us, are all secrets bad? Are there any good secrets? Michael?

Yes, there are some good secrets. Keeping a secret can protect a relationship and that can feel good or be good, but it can also be burdensome at the same time. Sometimes people will keep secrets about good things, but that's a much rarer form of secrecy. It certainly happens all the time, but it's sort of eclipsed while the negative secrets we keep. Right. It doesn't bother you to keep the fact that you're planning a surprise birthday party for somebody. But it does eat away with you that you got caught at target shopping when you should have

been working or some of the bigger ones that we'll get into. Is keeping a secret something that is innate in all human beings or is it something that we learn to do? It's both. There's some evidence to suggest that we're not the only beings on the planet who keep secrets. There's some really fascinating studies on chimpanzees. And they seem able to keep secrets to, and children start to keep secrets as soon as they figure out how to, as soon as they understand that the things that are inside their head are not necessarily in another person's head unless

they tell them, they start understanding that people have these mental worlds that are unknown until discovered or unknown until shared. And as soon as they figure that out, they realize, like, oh, maybe I can knock in trouble for this spell if I can hide it. And so it seems to be a pretty natural way of interacting with people around us. So let's talk about the hardest part of keeping a secret. of keeping a secret. So, it turns out that what's hard about having a secret is not that we have to hide it, it's that we have to live with it alone in our thoughts. And so for my family's secret, it wasn't a secret that they had to hide very often. It wasn't something that they had to frequently pull back from us in conversation.

That didn't mean the secret didn't exist there, because sometimes they would think about the secret. They might think about the secret after that conversation. They might sort of linger in their thoughts, and that turns out to be where the harms are. You hide it when necessary, and so when those moments come, even if they feel awkward, you're pretty prepared for those moments. It's something you can do with relative success and ease, but you have all the time in the world to rust like back on the secret and wonder whether you're making the right choice and then maybe you start doubting yourself or maybe

you start feeling bad for keeping this secret. These are things you don't have the time or bandwidth to think about in the moment when you're holding a back-and-com recession, but at all the other moments your mind can go to these places that are harmful or that make the secrecy difficult. You know what I find so fascinating is that you're basically saying that concealing it's the easy part, living with it, is the really damaging part. And when I think about secrets that I had, you know, in my past, for example, the weight of that was crushing, hiding the fact, and I'm thinking specifically about cheating on boyfriends when I was in my 20s. And holding the secret, managing the information, feeling like an asshole, I still to this day regret

and think about the things that I did when I was very self-destructive, when I was younger, that I kept secret for a long time. And how liberating it is to be able to talk about these things. I was younger that I kept secret for a long time. And how liberating it is to be able to talk about these things. You're so focused on the other people in your life and how they will judge you or react. That I think we tip the scales toward protecting other people and we don't realize, and this is what your research bears, we don't realize how profoundly secrets negatively impact you. Have you discovered in your research, if there so many reasons why just having to live with

a secret and your thoughts can be harmful. You know, if there's something really big going on or something that's upsetting or some struggle you're working through and you're choosing to be entirely alone with it, you're just not going to develop the healthiest way of thinking about it. You know, as healthy perspectives, those come from chatting about these things with other people, getting other people's perspectives can kind of curb our overly negative view of things. And, you know, those overly negative views don't get tempered when we just hold back from everyone.

And then you might feel, feeling some shame when a secret comes to mind, you might feel really isolated with a secret, you might feel really inauthentic for keeping it, you might feel at a loss for what to do. And what do you do with those feelings? You just have to revisit them every time the secret comes to mind if you're not gonna find a way forward. Well, it's very clear in the listening to the way that you describe this, that the secrets

that you keep, keep you disconnected from yourself, because by shoving it down, managing information, feeling the shame and isolation and uncertainty that comes with holding this secret solo that you are eroding this trust with yourself to just own your life experience. And in preparing for this show today, I did a little research of my own. I asked the 5 million people that follow me on Instagram to share their secrets. And I was floored by the burden that people are carrying. I'm going to read them. And as I read them to you, I want you to just feel the weight of what it must be like

to live with this. I struggle with compulsion, whether it's finances, shopping, purchases, binge eating. I'm desperately unhappy in my marriage, but I'm too scared to make the break. My husband and I are struggling financially. I've never been satisfied in the bedroom with my partner, and I love them anyway. I've fallen in love with somebody that isn't my husband. Nothing has happened, but still I feel so ashamed. I'm keeping a secret from my partner that I took out a high-interest loan. I had an affair with an employee

and it gave me so much anxiety in the end, I had to move. I didn't graduate from high school. Everyone I know thinks I'm thriving post-divorce and I'm worse off than I've ever been. What are your thoughts about these? Yeah, so they all jumped out at me in their individual ways. When I think about the relationship ones, which is a huge theme that we'll see in this

secret, it's not people keep. Think about the person who is not thriving after their divorce and they're just holding that information back. That's someone who really, really would benefit from others' help. And it's not because we're helpless, it's because other people just have so much to offer. Someone could just hear you out, someone could just listen to you,

someone could just vow you out. Someone could just listen to you. Someone could just valedate your experience. Like that's, I'm so sorry you're going through that. Just, you know, sympathy, empathy. These sort of little morsels that we get from talking about these things are really helpful. It's just really hard to struggle with something alone and bringing people onto the conversation can help so much.

The person who said that they're in love with someone else, someone who's not their husband, they haven't done any wrong actions. This is a common theme. We see two where people will feel a thought they've had or feeling they have is a secret that they hold, even though they haven't done anything wrong, it just goes to show you how weightiest secret can be, and we're just talking about a collection of thoughts or a collection of feelings, not even an action. The other one that popped out at me is I didn't graduate from high school, And the reason why that struck me is that

if you keep that a secret, it means you feel ashamed. And the secret keeping makes the fact that you didn't graduate from high school. Somehow a problem. You know, like you think there's something wrong with it. And so keeping it a secret makes it an even bigger issue in your life. When most people, if you tell them that, won't give a shit. And we'll probably acknowledge you for how you're successful and, you know, you've done a great job without it and see it as something that is a thing to be proud of. These things can seem so much bigger, it loops so much larger in our heads

and we putting them out in the world is never as bad as we think it's going to be. I was at a party with a friend and all of a sudden, she just said, I have a secret to tell you. Oh, okay, Michael, I wanna know what the secret was, but I gotta take a quick break so we can hear a word from our sponsors. When we come back, we're gonna go to this point in the story

and you're gonna have to share that secret with us too. Everyone, stay with us. Welcome back. I'm with Michael Slepion, who wrote the book called The Secret Life of Secrets. He's the world's leading expert on the psychology of secrets, and he's about to tell us the secret that his friend felt she couldn't keep from him anymore. She knew him for years. This was weighing on her. So Michael, when she leaned in and whispered the secret she had been keeping from you for years, that was it. I didn't do well in college. What? That's it. And it was like, well, what made you think to share that? And she's

just like, I realized I didn't have this. Not a secret I have to keep. And she was right. Of course, learning that my really good friend didn't have good grades in college. It's like, okay, that's totally fine. That doesn't change our relationship. When we learn things about other people, they're just drops in the bucket of all their experiences with them and all their histories with them and learning something new, even something surprising, even something difficult, that's not going to just change everything about your relationship.

So you said it's never as bad as you think when you tell a secret. It might be a little uncomfortable or absolutely awful the moment it comes out of your mouth. But just in your example alone, you adjusted pretty quickly to what the truth is. It was the fact that it was withheld from you for so long that truly upset you and bothered you. And I think we've all had experiences like that where somebody confesses something, you're pissed off, you're disappointed, whatever, and then you forgive them, and you move forward. But you're kind of upset that they didn't come to you sooner.

But knowing that intellectually doesn't help us actually confess our secrets, which I'm kind of gathering, telling somebody is one of the best ways you can start to relieve this burden. I want to talk a little bit about secrecy versus privacy. So what is the line between having a secret between having a secret versus this is information about me that I just would like to keep private. So not everything that people don't know about us is a secret, right? There's certain things people don't know about us because it's

never come up in conversation and you And there's the subset of those things that we consider private, because it's just something we would never talk about. For example, maybe you don't talk about your sex life with your friends, or maybe you don't talk about your sex life with your family, for example. And these are things that are not secrets. It may not be secret that you have a sex life.

But if it's just the kind of thing people don't talk about or it's the kind of thing you don't talk about, that might be considered something private, but not secret. If you had a specific, for example, sexual experience that you would not want people to know about and something you would intentionally with hold if it was ever relevant to a conversation. Now we're talking about a secret. It's interesting because I feel like the word secret feels like I've done something bad and the word private feels like I'm just not freaking telling you.

Like that's private information. I'm in control of this, but there is a huge difference between shame and guilt and I personally believe that the area That is most important for everyone to pay attention to when it relates to your research is how secrets create shame And shame being not that the thing that I did the cheating was bad. It's that I'm a despicable person for doing it. The fact that I didn't graduate from high school is bad. No, no, no, no, it's, I'm a stupid imbecile and there's something wrong with me. The shame and the weight were you indict yourself.

And that's why I wanted to talk to you because I don't think any of us realize how damaging it is to keep a secret because you are piling shame on yourself, because you are judging yourself when you don't feel free to disclose certain things because you feel ashamed of yourself for having this secret. What is your research bear out? So, that's exactly right. We all make mistakes. Every human unearth makes mistakes and that's okay, right? In the face of these mistakes or

admissions of guilt or things we feel that are wrong rather, you know, misdeeds, we could say, oh, I'm a terrible person. And that's what we call shame. And what's really problematic about that way of thinking about the issue at hand is it's really hard to find a way to change that view. If you feel like you're a bad person, you feel like, well, I guess there's nothing I can do about that. That's not good.

But if instead of thinking about how this reflects on you, if we think about how it reflects on your behavior, how it reflects on your actions, you could say, I've done something bad. And I've done something bad. It's a much healthier way of thinking about the problem than I'm a bad person. And when you think I've done something bad, that's not shame, that's guilt. And guilt is good in this context because if you're saying, okay, I've done something bad, that's not shame, that's guilt. And guilt is good in this context because if you're saying, okay, I've done something bad, that means you could do something differently next time. Your past doesn't dictate your future. When we feel guilty, we feel motivated to do better. And it's hard to get to that point when we're

overly focused on how bad we feel about ourselves when we feel ashamed. I want to highlight what you just said, like, take my imaginary yellow highlighter, because I want to make sure you're listening to us right now that you really got something, because I think Michael just handed us a script from 10 years of his research that you can borrow. I want you to start to think, you're a good person who did a bad thing. That does not make you a bad person. And when you go to confess to somebody, or you go to talk to somebody about it, because you realize you are a good person, and you have learned from that thing that you did, and you no longer are going to carry the burden of the secret,

that you're a good person that did a bad thing, and part of taking responsibility for it is being able to talk about it and what you learned for it, and to separate what you did from who you are as a person. Because I've just confessed to everybody that the thing that I regret the most is being a cheater in college and in law school. And I hate that about myself. And yet at the same time, I know I was just a good person that was really struggling. I was a good person with crushing anxiety. I was a good person that felt really lost. I was a good person that was coping in very self-destructive ways. And when I can look at myself that way, I don't have to hold the secret because I'm not saying I'm a shitty person.

Therefore I have to hide this thing because I'm afraid of what people are going to think about me. I have to prioritize Michael what I think about myself. And so steal this from Michael's research everybody. You're a good person, and the thing that you're holding onto as a secret is a bad thing that you did that you're going to learn from, and you're going to move on from. We have a lot of parents and also young adults that listen to this. How does the ways in which we grew up impact how we deal with secrets as adults, Michael.

So children, as soon as they start, they're going to have to keep secrets. They'll try to do so, not only successfully. When we're talking about three roles, they're not very sophisticated secret keepers, but they'll try. They'll say, oh, I didn't have any of the cookies, despite having cookie crumbs on their lips, for example. And so it's a natural place for kids to be at that stage to use secrecy as a way of getting out of trouble. But that's not a problem. That's normal. And where the problems begin is if children or teenagers, young teenagers are ashamed about

something or they feel like they're struggling with something, maybe they're being bullied, you know, something like this, something that needs to be addressed in some way. And if they're keeping those kinds of secrets, now we're talking about the kind of harmful secrets that we see in adults. And so what we want to do as parents is make kids feel comfortable bringing something difficult to talk about to you. They know if they'll tell their parents, they're going to get in more trouble. And so they might think, well, I'll just not tell them. And so the challenge for parents is how can you open that door for confession? And how can you keep it open? How can you sort

of express the disappointment that is sort of natural to do so without sort of making it harder for them? You know, how can you make them feel comfortable coming to you with trouble essentially? Can we roll play? Can we roll play real quick? Why don't you be the parent and I'm the kid? Because I'm serious, like we need scripts because I would love to have you coach us

and give a script on, let's just start with a parent child situation. You're reading in bed, I've gone to a party. I'm a junior in high school. Dad, I'm in trouble. I'm at this party. I was drinking. The police showed up.

I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. What should the parents say, Michael? Yeah. The parents should say, like, I'm here to help you. Essentially, let me talk you through this, let me walk you through this. This is something that we can get through together. This is going to be okay.

And yes, I'm upset that you weren't honest with me, but I understand how you got here. I'm glad you felt about bringing this to me, because we can work on it together. I literally just felt my shoulders drop. I love you, Dad. Now that was great. But when the kid comes home,

I think we make the mistake where then we ground him. Yeah. When you're really frustrated with your child or really annoyed or really angry, you probably need to communicate that. but what you want to try to avoid is like an angry outburst because You're modeling coping behaviors That your children will pick up on and if they learn that when I miss something to you you just lash out at me

They're gonna learn maybe that's not something I should do Maybe next time I'm in this situation, I should just keep it to myself. And that's when the harms of secrecy start. Well, two things that have made a difference, or at least I think they have, is that I've always thought to myself, if my kids in trouble,

I don't want their first thought to be, oh, fuck, my mom's gonna kill me don't want their first thought to be, oh, fuck, my mom's gonna kill me. I want their first thought to be, I have to call my mom, she's gonna help. And I try not to express the disappointment in that moment, because I know that we will be talking about this incident for weeks, months, maybe years to come. I want to keep unpacking this, because I think a lot of us have been in a situation where somebody that we know is keeping a secret from us. We kind of get it. I would love tools from you in how to approach these.

Let's take a scenario where you've got friends that are constantly getting together and they're not inviting you and they're sort of sly about it or they've planned a trip and you sort of pick up on it. What is the best way to broach with somebody that you know that they're keeping something from you without coming across like some psycho stalkerish, you know, insecure freak? The rundown situation we want to say like, hey, you hey, I know these kinds of things can be difficult to talk about, but I'm open to talking about them because I, you know, in this case, I think that might be better than secret keeping. Secrets are a chance to help each other with something. They don't have to be this thing that separates us and makes us sort

of turn inward. I love that. That you can use it as a way to actually be closer with somebody. I know you guys are planning a trip, it's totally fine, but I'd love to talk about the fact that you feel they need to keep it secret. What about interrelationship? You think that somebody is cheating on you. You have your suspicions and you don't even really have evidence or maybe you do.

You've seen a text message or something. Typically, what happens in these situations is you're emotionally triggered and you accuse and then there's the defense and the standoff. How do you even approach this topic? Knowing that somebody's likely going to lie to you. But to truly invite the discussion, the open the door. So I really like this question because it's hard. Right. Well, let's take our example, Michael.

So let me just read to you this woman. She says, I fall in love with someone that isn't my husband. Nothing has happened, but I still feel so ashamed. Let's say that this person's spouse just has a suspicion. How does the person spouse? Open up this dialogue in that situation I was talking about the most common secrets number five is what we call extra relational thoughts By which I mean having a romantic thought about someone who's not your romantic partner or an emotional affair

your romantic partner. Or an emotional affair? Or an emotional affair. But among the secrets people keep, it's the one people talk least about. Maybe you you feel like, okay, I think my partner is like really close to the Southern Person or seems to sort of be unavailable to me. It can be something that we can work through together. It can be something we can talk about. This is something we can figure out what it means. Maybe we need to do some work together. Maybe we have some work to do on our end. But, well, I think that's what you kind of say to yourself, to coach yourself up, to get the nerve to actually broach the topic. And it is profoundly normal to be attracted to other people. But your partner, finding somebody else attractive or leaning on somebody else emotionally is kind of how human beings operate.

And so if you can understand that it might not kill your relationship, but it's something that you have to talk about, it's the secrecy of it that really will pull your relationship apart. How would you broach that? Like what's the first sentence that you say to try to get somebody to open up about a secret?

The first sentence is not an accusation because that's what might lead to defensive responses. You just want to say, I want you to feel comfortable bringing something to me. I hope that I can do that with you. And if you feel like there's something we need to talk about or there's something about our relationship, that's not as good as it can be. I want you to know that's something I want to talk about. That's something I want to work through. Relationship issues is really high on the list of things

people don't want to talk about with their partner. It's awkward. We're not practiced at it. I probably wouldn't mention this other person on your own. Oh, geez. See, Michael, I would have taken a totally different approach. Having cheated in my past, I literally am the one like, yeah, I don't feel there's anything need to talk about with you. Because I'm more comfortable with you not knowing. And so I loved where you were going where you're like, you know, look, first of all, I want us to have the kind of relationship where we can talk about.

But I want to work through everything with you and I'm feeling very insecure about how close you are with someone. So yeah, I think that's good. And I think that's a good framing. What I really like about that is you're still talking about yourself. You're not saying, I have a problem with what you're doing, but you're saying, this is making me feel in a way that I feel like I need to bring to you. You know, I want to dig into family secrets, because I was

very struck when we asked our audience to share secrets that they were keeping. How many family secrets people felt obligated to keep. And I'm going to give you a couple examples and then let's talk about them. There was a woman that wrote in talking about how she knew that her uncle was making his kids keep a secret from their mother, that every other weekend, when they were growing up, their father would take his two daughters fishing with his other woman. And the daughters have kept it from the mother forever. I've got another listener who wrote in, Mel growing up, it was acceptable for me to sit with my parents and get

high. I feel that because of my parents lifestyle, we always had to keep it a secret. And so I never let anyone in. These patterns carry over into relationships and end up looking like secrecy. It's just comfortable to me to not let anyone in. And then this one, my mom was sexually abused as a child by her late father. And my living grandmother doesn't know. And it bothers me every time she talks about what a wonderful guy he was. Family secrets are also in the top 10. Here's this thing that's incredibly difficult

to talk about it, but I want to. And I want to feel able to, and how can we get there? When it comes to children, I think you want to feel able to and how can we get there when it comes to children. I think you want to think very carefully as a parent what it means to be asking your child to keep a secret with you or on your behalf because it should self some alarm bells. I actually think it's emotional abuse. I think it is completely inappropriate for adults to be burdening children with details about their marriage or with secrets that you're supposed to keep

because it makes you as a child start to associate love with loyalty and obedience. And I get so angry, Michael, when I see parents disclosing issues about their marriage to their children, where they try to triangulate and get kids to go against an expaus or a current spouse. And, Bar, I just, this is, you can tell it's, it pisses me off. For me personally, I feel like this is more than be careful. Don't fucking do it. Because I let's focus on Kristen growing up. I've become so overly independent. I never know when to ask for help. I feel that because of my parents lifestyle, we had to keep a secret. And so now I never let anyone in. And these patterns carry over into relationships. How does having family secrets as a child impact someone as an adult? What did you see in your 10 years of research, Michael?

So I think in a situation where there's a lot of family secrets, you start getting the idea as a child, like secrets are how you solve problems. Make sure this person doesn't know about this, and we can all move forward. And of course, what we've been talking about is secrecy creates problems. People who have a habit of keeping secrets as a way of dealing with the stress, as a way of dealing with difficult issues, these are people who develop a habit of not coming to others, we need it, help. You don't want children to think like the way to solve difficult conversations to just

never have them. That's going to make things worse. When you think about how prevalent sexual abuse is, that one in four women, one in six men, at least based on the research, have experienced it. We know how it can become generational and be a big secret inside of families. And so I think about this listener that wrote in, talking about the fact that her grandmother has no idea that her late husband molested their daughter. How does somebody start to deal with a secret of that magnitude? Because I would imagine that you're like, well, should I tell my grandmother? Should I not tell my grandmother?

Right. And so I think this is the right question. Should I tell my grandmother? Because I think why do you want to tell a person, this person, your secret is it just because you just can't be alone with it anymore or you just, or is it that you really feel that they should know it? And that's the right thing to do. It's sometimes not clear. And I think that's a moment when you realize you should be talking to a third party about this and sort of get some other perspectives because once you tell it there's there's no going back. So you want to be really clear to yourself why you are considering telling someone this thing that there's no one do but and for do they need to know this thing. Would they want to know this thing, would they want to know this thing? If the reason you want to reveal it's just because you feel like you really want to talk about it, that's like, well maybe you should

first talk about it with someone else and see where that takes you and maybe get that other person's perspective on whether you should tell your grandmother in this scenario. It turns out that the secrets we think most about are the secrets that harm us, most, what's much more common as people feel like it's one dimension that's really hurting them. And so what's useful about knowing there's three ways in which a secret tends to hurt you is noting for yourself which of these ways don't apply? It's very easy. It turns out for people to point to one of those dimensions, be like, yeah, I'm not hurting on this dimension.

And that's really useful, because that's essentially your lifeline. You know, maybe you're like, this secret is hard, and I feel alone with it, and I don't know what to do with it. But I don't think it's wrong. That's helpful. That's huge. One of the things that I'm a little worried about

with this episode is that everybody listening, according to your research, has three secrets. You know, our 13 secrets, one of which is very active. We've probably stirred it up inside of them. Now they're like pissed off at me and feeling uncomfortable and like, Michael, you know, don't tell me that I'm feeling the shame, you're right, I should do something. Let's talk about something that you call the coping compass. So you have a secret

and you're feeling that it is a huge burden. And it's time to relieve yourself of that burden. Is finding somebody to confide in the first thing you should do? Yes. If you can find the right person to talk to you, you're in a really good place. And there's a lot of people who are the right people to talk to. The idea of the coping compass is essentially you're trying to point yourself to the resource that's most available to you. Okay.

In this context, I would say that you have someone you can talk to, maybe a really natural person to talk to is the person who told you this secret and you say, hey, I'm having a lot of trouble with this. I'd like to talk about it with you. This person is uniquely available to you to talk about this. And you know, it's easy to forget that you have this person who just knows the whole story and you can talk about it with them and just understand like where they headed with this because you're finding it hard. And there's a lesson we need to come back to you, which is choose your person carefully.

What you want to avoid as much as you can is putting a burden on someone else. Say, achieved on your partner, talking to their best friend, it's not your best option. It's maybe one of your worst options. You don't want to be just taking the burden off you and placing it on them. Someone outside of the situation is someone to talk to you and so you could also talk to a third party about it as well and just say, hey, what would you do in this situation? How can I work through it? Here's how I think about it. I love the word coping compass because even just in your and my conversation, I think that

anybody listening to the two of us, you probably have discerned that I would put Michael in the compassionate and caring camp, and I would put me in the assertive camp. And so if your compass is telling you, I got to talk to somebody. And I just need somebody who's gonna listen and be compassionate, you would likely go to Michael. If this is eating you alive and you're like, I gotta talk to somebody and I need a solution here. I gotta absorb some courage. You would go to the assertive person who's gonna go,

are you out of your fucking mind? You either need to end this or tell your partner. You clearly need to go to therapy, but this is killing you. And you told me because you knew I would say that to you. But you got two weeks to figure this out or else I'm telling your spouse. So I think that advice, Michael, choose the person that is your coping compass wisely because it matters. And the second thing that you said that I think is really important is when you're choosing to remember, you may be doing a bad thing or you may be embarrassed by this thing that

you need to work through, but you're not a bad person. The simple fact that you want to tell somebody indicates that you know that you don't deserve to live under the weight of the secret. And so I love the fact that in every situation, finding somebody to talk to, whether it is a compassionate or it's an assertive friend or it's a therapist, that's the number one thing because what that does, Michael, is it seems like it would honor the fact that you deserve to feel better in your life and that you're ready to relieve yourself of the pain that holding a secret has caused you. Yeah, that's exactly right.

There's essentially two forms of social support, and one is what we call emotional support. Do you just want someone to hear you out? Do you want just someone to say, like, that sucks, I'm here for you? Or do you need to do something? Do you have to take some action? And that's when you're looking for the assertive person.

The person, you know, is gonna push you to do the thing that you need to do. And you know, you choose your person carefully. And there's a study that I really like. It's not about secrecy. It's about, you know, the people read these stories about other people. And one version of the story is someone's done bad things in their past and now they're doing good things. And then in the other version of the story, people have done good things in the past and now they're doing bad things. And then in the other version of the story of people have done good things in the past and how they're doing bad things today. And essentially what the study has shared was most people at the end of the day believe that

most people will deep down are good. I believe that with my whole heart, I really do. I love your point, Michael, that when you keep a secret, it keeps you apart, but when you share a secret, it actually brings you closer to the people that you love. And I found these two questions in a New York Times essay by Mandy Katron that are questions you can ask anyone in order to create a more intimate relationship. And I think these two questions are great tools in any relationship to open up the door to have deeper conversations and even allow people the opportunity to

potentially confess a secret. And so I'm going to ask them to you right now, Michael. And the first one is, what is your biggest regret? Do you want to go first? Am I answering what my biggest regret is? Yeah. This is going to make us much. No, I mean, yes, I mean, let's try this out. Biggest regret, one of the regrets that comes to mind right now, because of the secret we were talking about earlier, the secret of learning about being donor conceived.

You know, one thing I didn't realize until way later is that, you know, that secret got out. I found it shocking and hard to grapple with. My brother founded even more difficult. And, you know, essentially, there was the day that both of us knew, and I had a phone call with my mom the next day, and I had that phone call with my dad, and then my brother came out to visit me in California, and we talked about it a little bit, and then we stopped. Like, like two weeks later, it was kind of like it never happened and nobody was talking about it anymore

and it made me realize that even once a secret is out we sometimes still don't talk about it and not even know now we have the opportunities to do so and where my regret really comes in to do so. And where my regret really comes in is I didn't realize until years later when I started interviewing my parents for the book that I learned that my grandmother and my dad's father played a huge role in this secret. And this is something I could have learned if I asked questions about the secret at the time I first learned it, but I just didn't, I don't know why. I didn't think too until years and years later. And I wish I did because I could have found out sooner why the secret was held in the

first place. And it turned out a lot of it came down to my dad's mother, my grandmother. She really didn't want me and my younger brother to know because she just felt so close to me and my younger brother and we felt so close to my dad's parents and especially our grandmother. And it was just such this special relationship and she didn't want to, she didn't want to hurt it. She was concerned that we would feel less part of the family. If we knew we weren't biologically related to our dad and his parents, and I just, I really wish we could have talked about that because it's exactly the opposite.

Learning that I wasn't biologically related to my grandparents now, I was so close with didn't make those relationships less special or less meaningful. It made them more meaningful and more special. And I just really wish I could have told her that. That's beautiful. My biggest regret is definitely cheating on people that I really cared about. The second question is, what is the hardest memory that you have? Let's think about this.

Also, when it comes to relationships and past relationships, I found all my old emails from an ex someone who I was with for five years and the relationship just ended in a really bad way. And, you know, you kind of remember your side of the story and it started reading these old emails and I was just like, oh God, I was really a terrible partner at the end of this relationship and all I remember was the ways in which my partner at the time was failing me not the ways in which I was failing her and did just see it so clearly on the screen, it was really confronting. To see that I would play a huge part in that breakup as well. And that's just not how I remembered it. Some of the things that I was reading about

are like some problems that I've carried on to my current relationship. And just it was kind of hard to see the other perspective on this problem, the one that wasn't mine. I guess it doesn't matter anymore, but it kind of feels like it does, and it's tough to think about things you've done that in retrospect or were wrong. But how beautiful that you now can reflect that there are some similar themes coming up that you can actually actively work on to better your life and your relationships.

My hardest memory is after sophomore year of college, I had a terrible breakup with this guy that I really, really loved. And we had had a really, really hard spring because it's father had died of suicide and I spiraled and We had big plans for the summer and I just Creatored and his mom drove up from Indiana to pick him up From our house in Michigan and I just remember Them leaving I could barely even look at his mother

because I just knew how much pain she was in. I was in, he was in, I think a lot, I was just a kid. And yet, if I could do it all over, I would. And it kind of also relates to another huge regrettamin, which is I just wish that I had known how much childhood trauma had fucked me up earlier, and that I'd gotten into therapy earlier. And how there were so many things that I didn't even realize that I was doing because I didn't

have the tools or the knowledge or the skills that I do now. So I look back with a lot of compassion for myself, but oh my God, there's always this like, it's not a secret anymore, but boy, they're like, oh, wait in your heart. It's what drives me now. Like if I can save anybody, the headache and the heartache that I caused myself and other people,

because I just didn't know how to do better, that's, I'm gonna do it. And so I wanna thank you, Michael, because I know that this conversation today, your research that it is going to cause a massive ripple of change and empowerment through people's lives around the world. So thank you for taking the time to be here today and to be so open.

Thank you for having me. Of course. Wow. I am so blown away by the depth of this conversation that I already anticipate that it is stirred something up inside of you. And I just feel the need to say something. I've never done this before on the podcast, but I want to be that assertive friend. So if there's something that got stirred up inside of you, and you now are looking for advice and coaching to be able to work through some secret, a burden that you've been carrying alone, I am raising my hand and saying, I will be that assertive friend. Go to MelRobbins.com. Go to the podcast section. You'll find a form there that says submit a topic and fill it out so that I can help coach you through this

secret. And you might just find yourself anonymously on the Mel Robbins podcast as I coach you through your secret, okay? Awesome. And in case no one else tells you today, I wanna tell you, despite what you're carrying deep inside you, you're a good person. And I love you, and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life. All right, I'll talk to you in a few days.

I've been discussing this topic with my friends, oh, excuse me, I just had a protein shake. Oh, God. Wow. It tastes good, but it repeats. Whoo! Could I have a sip of my water? Jesse, I'm sorry to.

How are ya? Or I'm gonna get my headphones on so I can hear you. I wonder if I should take these bracelets off because I'm making some noise. Yes, take them off. Okay, Jesse's like, get that jewelry off. There we go. Okay, I just do the limbo and get back in here. Okay. All right, never mind. There we go. Okay, I just do the limbo and get back in here.

Okay. All right, never mind. There we go. You're very intellectual, dude. Okay, excellent. Three. Three. Oh, and one more thing.

And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyer's right and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it?

Good. I'll see you in the next episode. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Stitcher. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪