Unburden Yourself of Secret Shame and Feel Happier

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

Do you have a deep, dark secret?

Edgar Allan Poe is popularly known for writing early-American horror stories. But for me, he is a social scientist who used fiction instead of theory and statistics to make his arguments about human behavior. My favorite example of this is his 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which describes a man slowly going mad because of a dark secret. The narrator recounts a murder he has committed, of an old man with a filmy blue “vulture eye,” whose regard the murderer simply could not endure.

The narrator’s objective in telling this story is to demonstrate his own sanity; Poe’s objective is to study the effects of this terrible act on the murderer. The narrator-killer hides the old man’s body under the floorboards of his house, but then he begins to hear the beating of the dead man’s heart beneath his feet. The sound—clearly a metaphor for the murderer’s tormenting shame and guilt—grows louder and louder. In the end, the narrator can stand the thumping no longer; seeking relief, he confesses his crime to the police.

You, of course, are unlikely to have committed a crime like the narrator’s and suffer insanity as a result, yet the genius of Poe’s psychodrama is that it gives you a glimpse of how your mind works. Most, if not all, of us have guilty secrets, secrets we have never told anyone. For many people, including perhaps you, these secrets are an emotional burden, harming your quality of life. Fortunately, you can find easier ways to get relief than confessing to the cops.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: Edgar Allan Poe’s other obsession]

Psychologists call the secrets we keep about ourselves self-concealment. Although what you self-conceal might feel uniquely shameful, the experience of carrying a guilty secret really doesn’t vary that much across the population. Michael Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia University, maintains a website called KeepingSecrets, which organizes into various categories the things that people are hiding from others. Murder is not one of the categories on the site; the most common secrets anonymously cataloged involve what moralists might call infidelity or indiscretion, but what in more social-scientific language we’d label “extra-relational attraction thoughts” (attraction to someone who isn’t your partner) and undisclosed sexual behavior. In short: Your own tell-tale heart probably involves love and sex.

These themes are fairly consistent among men and women, and at all different ages. If you assume that these kinds of secrets would be less frequent among older adults, think again: According to Slepian’s data, more than half of men aged 60 and older have engaged in sexual behavior that they’ve never disclosed to a soul. Among women of that age, extra-relational thoughts that they keep to themselves are just as common as such secrets are for women in their 30s.

Some secrets go unshared for eminently practical reasons, such as not telling your colleagues that you’re on the job market. For the most part, though, a secret stays hidden for self-protection against the disapproval of people whom we care about. For example, confessing to your family that you have a crush on a co-worker who isn’t your spouse would be costly for you in multiple ways. For this reason, scholars have noted that secrets are an effective way to avoid unnecessary conflict in relationships.

Secret-keeping can also be motivated by your own negative emotions of guilt and shame. Psychologists define guilt as an adverse evaluation of an act, accompanied by remorse or regret; shame involves feeling bad about yourself as a person. To express this distinction in more concrete terms: You feel guilty for telling a lie to your friend; you are ashamed of being a liar. Or put another way: Guilt is more about harming others; shame more about a threat to one’s self-conception. So keeping certain behavior secret means not having to reveal a source of guilt or shame—or perhaps even deal with it yourself. In that sense, self-concealment can include not only hiding an awkward fact about yourself from others, but also hiding the knowledge of it from yourself.

Some evidence backs up the idea that guilt can be alleviated with this sort of occlusion. With shame, however, dark secrets create torment. As Professor Slepian and his colleagues showed in a 2020 article in the journal Emotion, shame tends to provoke the unwelcome intrusion of the secret into your thoughts throughout the day. Other research has shown that concealment itself tends to elicit shame. In other words, shame and secrecy can feed on each other in a vicious cycle to bother you.

This vortex of shame is very bad for happiness. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that shame activates both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for mental pain, and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which processes rumination. Psychologists observe that concealing secrets predicts negative affect (sour mood), physical malaise, and general distress.

Another unhappy effect of secrets is that they undermine intimacy. By creating a barrier between loved ones, secrets can make close relationships dysfunctional. If a friend or family member is cold toward you, don’t assume that it’s because of anything you did; a secret shame could be the cause.

[Read: I love secrets too much]

Keeping a shameful secret is like carrying around a heavy object. It weighs on your ability to think about other things; it makes you enjoy life less; it is uncomfortable, even painful. The research is clear that if you can find a way to put that object down, you will feel much better. One 2019 study of adults practicing self-concealment showed that, as expected, the correlation between guarding a secret and quality of life was negative—whereas revealing that secret to someone had a neutral effect on the sharer’s quality of life and being free from the preoccupation enhanced their quality of life, to the point where the secret no longer had a negative impact. In other words, to feel happier, tell your secret to someone and then let it go.

Not so simple, I know. To begin with, if the troublesome secret involves an ongoing behavior that you’re ashamed of, you may need to address that issue before anything else. We are typically encouraged to think that shame itself is the problem, but this paints with too broad a brush. Some behaviors are rightly regarded as antisocial and stimulate shame for good reason. In that respect, your shame might be perfectly appropriate and betoken a healthy conscience, which confers benefits. Psychologists have pointed out that shame can dissuade you from engaging in harmful conduct. If your secret revolves around an illicit activity such as drug abuse or an extramarital affair that might hurt your family, or is damaging to your body and soul, abstaining from the action may be the most important step.

Second, when unburdening yourself to someone else, who that person is matters a lot. Coming clean to a person who reacts negatively will tend to justify your self-concealment in the first place, and create bigger problems. Psychologists researching this topic have recommended selecting people whom you can expect to react positively, those you regard as trustworthy and not liable to be harmed by the information.

That last point matters because unburdening yourself in a way that hurts someone affected by the behavior you were hiding can be a selfish act. When making disclosure to a loved one is not appropriate, more formal and safer ways to resolve self-concealment are available. Seeing a therapist is an option, and will assure confidentiality. In many religions, this is also the role of a confessor.

The third step, after ceasing the underlying behavior (if necessary) and unburdening yourself, is to stop ruminating on the secret. That might no longer be an issue, because steps one and two can by themselves interrupt the cycle of secrecy and shame. But if uninvited thoughts about a past shame are still intruding, psychologists have developed a number of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help you move on. These include rumination-focused CBT, which works to break perseverative negative thoughts; mindfulness-based CBT, which teaches you to focus on the present; and cognitive-bias modification, which reinforces attention toward positive memories and experiences.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to escape the happiness guilt trap]

All of this can help you if you have a troubling secret. But I have one other perspective to bring to this problem, one that I doubt would have occurred to Poe, who, according to his 1849 obituary, “had very few friends” and “was the friend of very few—if any.”

Say you have a friend whom you know to be haunted by their past. You can invite this friend to do the unburdening thing. Obviously, you must be completely trustworthy in this invitation: You must never mention the secret to a soul. Performing such a service, according to a 2018 study, tends to deepen the intimacy of a friendship, which can take it to a higher level.

But bear in mind that doing so also imposes a burden upon you, as this secret becomes yours. To lighten your friend’s load, you accept some of it. That is an act of pure kindness.