DENIAL, ANGER & MY TOXIC SECRETS

My counselors and therapists told me this over and over and over 7 years ago:

DON'T KEEP TOXIC SECRETS

I fought and argued with them repeatedly about this for a good 18 months or more, until the stark truth came to me. They were right. Secret keeping is TOXIC.

I am not talking about privacy here. Things like your personal information, your intimate life and so on aren't this topic. This is about things that people try to shut you up about. Or things that you learned to be in active denial or 'cognitive dissonance' about.

I went on many spiritual learning quests over the last 15 years or so. I have been twice to Sedona, Arizona for meditation and retreats. I've seen healers and spiritual teachers. I went to lectures at the Kabbalah Center. Lectures at the Open Center. While each and every one of these experiences was restorative and instructional, not one touched on the sickness that was eating away at my (and many other people's) personal foundations.

Denial.

Every one of those retreats & lectures got back to personal responsibility. I am very big on personal responsibility and holding myself accountable. But I gave everyone else a pass. I took everything that went wrong in my life on myself. I believed in the 'codependency' model in my abusive marriage, I believed I was just stupid and naive and inside my own head I internalized that I was not worth very much.

I was wrong. Every single bit of that was wrong.

Why? Because I was in denial that I had been abused by a narcissistic parent who had trained me that black was white, white was black and I was a useless freak and everything was my fault. EVERYTHING.

I was in denial that I have been brainwashed to believe no one would love me or care about me unless I looked the other way while they used my mind, body & heart like a doormat.

I was in denial that I was being abused by a number of guys in my life, friends & boyfriends: those who used me for sex, talked behind my back, smeared me, got me pregnant & abandoned me without a second thought, manipulated me and took full advantage of the fact that I was a walking target for abuse because of my pathological upbringing.

I was in denial that my ex-husband had slowly and methodically taken away everything I loved: my career, my friends and criticizing every single thing I did right down to the way I breathed until I felt like a shadow. He took away any sense of healthy intimacy and made me feel responsible for my genetic problems with infertility, my femininity, my trust and even my dignity when I became disabled. As well, he'd seriously eroded my ability to make choices about my religious beliefs and the raising of my children.

I was in denial about friends who said one thing to my face and made a mockery of me behind my back. I thought that was just what I deserved. And I had to be a "nice" person.

I was in denial that some people I trusted would take my secrets and use them like weapons against me to manipulate and purposely hurt me.

And worst of all, I was in denial that I was ENTITLED to be angry about any of it. I could not show anger when I was child. I could certainly never show anger when I was married for 23 years but I was supposed to just sit there and take it. Even with the care & custody of my children I am still expected to sit and take it. And I was not supposed to get angry about the world around me, the treatment of women, the treatment of children, the lies of politicians and most of all - the way I was being treated.

I was not supposed to be angry about being slowly screwed down into the dirt until I was a prisoner of shame and blame. A prisoner who was making bad choices because of the mental and profound emotional dissonance I had to live with every breathing moment since I had been born.

The biggest factor in all this denial and anger? Secret Keeping. Secret Keeping about what was being done to me.

In my junior year of high school, the mother of a girl I knew approached me one evening at a school event. I clearly remember she told me that she "saw how [my] mother was treating me" and wanted to know if I wanted to come stay at her house for a while as she could get me counseling. I said "no" and walked away in fear. Unfortunately, she also approached my mother who in turn beat me and berated me at home thinking I had somehow put 'ideas' into this woman's head to make her "suggest such a horrible thing!" I had already been treated to years of being rousted from my bed in the middle of the night when my mother felt like raging at me, having my purse or drawers gone through, having no privacy, having diaries opened and read aloud and made fun of... in a place where I was supposed to be safe and unconditionally loved. Home.

I felt that somehow I deserved all those things and I lived for years with undiagnosed anxiety and PTSD, fear of getting help because the wrong person would 'find out.' All of these kept me from spiritual wholeness and from truly connecting with God or the real spirituality around me.





I wrote about some of these things in other posts as well:

AN IN-DEPTH VIEW OF THE SICKNESS INSIDE AN ABUSIVE MARRIAGE

ISRAEL & ME: PTSD OF THE TRAUMATIZED

TELLING IS A MITZVAH

WHY VICTIMS & SURVIVORS MUST KEEP TALKING

I doubt I will ever like myself or feel "good enough." I know I will never be in another relationship but there is one thing I will never ever do again:

KEEP A TOXIC SECRET.

Are Secrets Spoiling Your Spiritual Life?
by John Howard Prin, LADC

As an addictions counselor, I often see people who want to grow spiritually but who are using addictions as shortcuts to their goals. Over the years I've identified two major conditions that persons trapped in addiction claim for staying addicted: boredom and misery.

These misguided folks persist in heavy drinking, compulsive shopping, internet pornography, casual sex, shoplifting, eating disorders, and more in order to achieve the mood change from negative emotions that they seek — in order to escape from their boredom or pain and achieve what feels like a spiritual high. Unfortunately once the high disappears, what is left is shame, guilt, remorse, and disapproval from the important people in their lives. This tends to lead to secrecy.

Avoiding the shame, guilt, and remorse is a whopping challenge in itself and failure, or refusal to even try, is rife. About one-third of the clients whom I see actively steal hours away from their public lives, including home and work lives, to indulge in their hidden addictive habits — secretly attempting to reach transcendence from reality.

Are you someone who lives out a secret life as a way to cover up and avoid the disapproval of others, especially loved ones? Do you, or somebody you know, carefully calculate when to indulge in your favorite rituals whenever nobody is looking? People who do so may be seeking to fill an undefined but persistent core need, a spiritual connection. Their quest is doomed however by cover-ups, alibis, excuses, and lies (hardly authentic spirituality).

Secret Keepers, I've learned, are troubled people who seek significance and meaning in a "parallel universe" of their own secret design where they intentionally conceal shameful and discreditable behaviors. The problem is, the moment their artificial mood-elevation ends (the high ends), they once again face the same boredom or misery. No change, other than the added suffering from self-inflicted hangovers, headaches, sexually transmitted diseases, financial debts, lack of nutrition, impaired sleep, liver and lung damage… or some other shock to their system!

Hidden addictive behavior, regardless of how cleverly concealed, will never resolve the core predicaments of boredom and misery. Bored people lack direction, purpose, and meaning in their lives. Drinking or drugging or sexual acting-out in isolation or stealing hours to pursue risky solo thrills may divert someone temporarily from boredom, but these will never supply permanently the meaning and significance that comes from a lifestyle of seeking authentic spirituality.

Miserable people feel the hurts of their past, feel powerless in the present, and fear for their future. Perhaps they have tried to find spiritual solace and peace but it has eluded them. Feeling resentful of their early suffering and justified in their victim mindset, such an individual escapes the here-and-now in any way he or she can. Again, no permanent meaning and significance (which build self-esteem and well being) results.

As a counselor, I verbally acknowledge these two kinds of Secret Keepers' genuine need to live a sincere spiritual life. Every human being has this need built deep into their genes, I believe. But I point out the downward spiral of the destructive risks and consequences of their choices. I aim to help them see the futility of reaching their spiritual goals by using addictive substitutes and shortcuts. Instead, I coach them on discovering the rewards of shedding their secret-keeping habits and revising their beliefs and attitudes in order to live the H.O.T. (Honest, Open, Transparent) life, a way of living that releases them to be the person they were born to be.

We arrive on earth as spiritual beings in tangible bodies. As we grow from being babies to children, especially in Western societies, we come to believe that spirituality resides outside us — beyond, separate, apart. Sadly, the divine spark within flickers and fades, and in time disconnection occurs.

As some children grow up, their tender emotions experience damage from developmental deficits — hurtful feelings that destabilize children due to real suffering or unfairness in their upbringing. For these kids, damaged emotions and disconnected spirits generate distorted thoughts or self-talk that limit their options. This combination of disconnection and damage sets the stage for addictions in adolescents and can readily lead to destructive mood-altering behavior as a shortcut to escaping negative emotions. Over time the body will experience disease or medical disorders, and disaster or even death may follow…. unless the individual makes a decision to abstain from their addiction(s) and accompanying secret-keeping by committing to recovery.

Resolution for bored people starts as they learn to deconstruct their distorted thinking ("Life sucks, then you die") by revising their beliefs and self-talk ("Life offers endless possibilities and I'm alive to try them."). For miserable people, resolution starts as they learn to identify the distorted thoughts that were linked to hurtful feelings from childhood suffering or injustice, and it continues when they learn to practice acceptance and forgiveness. For both bored and miserable people, the payoff gets even better whenever they learn to re-connect spiritually with the divine spark of a Higher Power.

Then the benefits of a genuine H.O.T. life grow as one lives in recovery and old ways of secretly hiding addictive habits give way to authentic spirituality.

SOURCE
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John Howard Prin, a former addict, is now a licensed alcohol and drug counselor, speaker, and the author of" Secret Keeping: Overcoming Hidden Habits and Addictions." His articles and books address the ways people get trapped in unhealthy secret habits and offer effective methods to escape the harm of leading double lives.