#Life – Should You Keep a Secret? …A Friend Confides in you About a Health Crisis or a Love Affair. How Do you Decide Whether to Keep Someone’s Secret When There are Good Reasons to Tell?

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A while back, my sister, Rebecca, called with a request: She wanted me to book a flight to come and see her immediately—and not tell anyone.

Rebecca explained that she was having a breast biopsy the next day, was terrified to hear the results, and wanted me there for support. But she didn’t want to worry others in our family.

I jumped on a plane but wrestled with a dilemma. Many members of my family are doctors. Rebecca herself is an internist. Our father is an orthopedic surgeon and another sister is a gynecologist. I knew they would have advice for Rebecca—and would want to know if she were sick. But my sister asked me not to share what she told me. And I didn’t.

How do you decide whether to keep someone’s secret when there are good reasons to tell?

Imagine you discover that a friend is having an affair, and you know that person’s spouse well. A family member has begun secretly drinking heavily and needs help. Or a loved one who has died led a double life. You might want to disclose someone’s secret if it will help him or her in the long run. Or if someone else is being hurt or has a right to know the information.

Three new studies from psychologists at Columbia University and the University of Melbourne, in Australia, soon to be published together in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, show that we often feel closer to a loved one when we know a secret of theirs, but that this information can also be a burden.

The studies show that the closer a person is to a friend or loved one whose secret they know, the more he or she is likely to think about the secret. And the more friends the two people have in common, the more likely one person is to keep another’s secret. But people who said they knew another person’s secret—not even that they worried about keeping it—also reported less happiness and satisfaction with life. “Just having to think about someone else’s secret makes it harmful to our wellbeing,” says Michael Slepian, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School and lead researcher on the studies.

In research published in 2015 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Dr. Slepian found that people who are thinking about a secret judge tasks to be harder. They estimated hills to be steeper and distances to be farther than people who didn’t have secrets they were thinking about.

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Once we know someone’s secret, we have a responsibility to protect that information. “Essentially, you become a co-owner of the information,” says Sandra G. Petronio, a communication professor and director of the Communication Privacy Management Center at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, a resource for academics and others who study privacy. I read it on https://reneelertzman.com/anxiety/valium-10-mg/ so if you have serious side effects from Valium, call your doctor immediately. Call 911 if your symptoms appear to be life-threatening or if you believe you have a medical emergency. Serious side effects and their symptoms may include the following: worse seizures, changes in the brain or your thoughts, unexpected reactions, liver problems.

Dr. Petronio developed the Communication Privacy Management Theory, which holds that individuals have a right to privacy and put rules, or boundaries, in place to manage and protect it. But we all define privacy differently. Our boundaries may be different for different people in our lives, and they may change over time. So we may tell our best friend something we would never tell a sibling. And we’ve all probably told our parents something as adults that we kept hidden from them when we were teenagers.

‘There are good reasons for sometimes disclosing someone’s information. But you have to make a calculation.’

These clashing expectations of what should be private—essentially, a secret—are what get us into trouble. When we disagree with someone about whether to keep something a secret, we experience “privacy turbulence,” Dr. Petronio says. “There are good reasons for sometimes disclosing someone’s information. But you have to make a calculation.”

When Rebecca asked me not to tell anyone about her biopsy, she explained that she didn’t want to feel pressured by a lot of unsolicited advice. “I don’t want anyone lecturing me,” she said. “I have a very good surgeon and I trust her.”

But I also knew my sister needed me and that if I betrayed her confidence I wasn’t likely to win it back easily. So I went to visit her without telling anyone.

Two days later, while I was sitting in Rebecca’s living room, I got a call from my mother. My sister, overwhelmed with worry, had told her about the biopsy she’d asked me to keep secret, and my mom was angry with me for preventing the rest of the family from supporting Rebecca. Then my other sister, the gynecologist, called, hurt that I didn’t seem to value her expertise. Too late, I realized that in keeping Rebecca’s secret, I might have betrayed others. It took me almost a week to get back into everyone’s good graces. By then, we’d learned that the biopsy, thankfully, was negative.

Now, my family has forgotten this incident. But Rebecca hasn’t. When I brought it up recently she was adamant that I had done the right thing.

“If you’d told people what I asked you not to, I wouldn’t have been able to trust you again,” she says.

TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL

You’ve learned a secret about a loved one that you think someone else has the right to know. How do you decide whether to tell?

  • Seek permission, especially if you learned the information by accident or by snooping. Explain why you feel it’s important to tell someone. Try to understand the person’s reasons for wanting to keep the information private. Ask him if he would consider telling.
  • Recognize that family members often feel they have a right to know, especially when a secret involves them or a health issue. Discuss this with your loved one. Talking through the “what ifs” of disclosing a secret—and promising to run interference—can help, says Sandra G. Petronio, founder of the Communication Privacy Management Center at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis.
  • Ask a third person for advice. Talking with someone who isn’t directly affected by the secret can help you think clearly about the situation. If no one is being hurt by the secret staying private, you don’t need to tell.
  • Remind yourself that you are helping your loved one if you choose to stay quiet. This will ease the burden of knowing the secret, says Michael Slepian, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School.
  • Consider the costs and gains to the people involved. If the benefits of sharing a secret outweigh the costs, you can think about telling, Dr. Slepian says. If you decide to tell other people, explain your decision to your loved one.

Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at elizabeth.bernstein@wsj.com or follow her on Facebook of Twitter at EBernsteinWSJ.

 

WSJ.com | By Elizabeth Bernstein | 

 

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