The Academics of Secrets
A look at the research and science of keeping secrets
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Release Date: July 26, 2024
To Reveal or Conceal
When I think about family secrets like those at the heart of Call Me a Bastard, I tend to think in terms of genealogy, after all personal and family stories are the bread and butter of family history. But it turns out academia has a lot to say about family secrets, as well. And, just like genealogists, what they have to say is grounded in research.
Take Anita Vangelisti and her University of Texas at Austin colleague, John Caughlin, for example. Working in the field of Communication Studies, the two conducted a study on why some people reveal family secrets while others conceal them. And what they found offers some pretty great insight into Mary Martha and Aimee Henry, and the secrets they kept.
According to Vangelisti and Caughlin, keeping secrets is all about controlling information by intentionally hiding and concealing specific information from some, and revealing it to others.
When it comes to family secrets, they identified three forms of secret keeping:
Some secrets are known by all members of the family but concealed from outsiders.
Some secrets are known to some family members but concealed from other members of the family.
And finally, some secrets are known by one member of the family but kept hidden from the rest of the family. 1
If we think of Mary Martha’s secret as being that she had gotten pregnant and gave birth to a child outside of wedlock, then that secret falls into all three forms of secrets. It’s likely every member of the immediate Parker family knew about Mary Martha’s 1891 pregnancy, and agreed to keep it a secret from outsiders, but also from Aimee. But also that the secret had been shared with at least some outsiders.
Mary Martha’s father, Richard Tucker Parker, knew. He covered for Mary Martha when she went to New Brunswick to conceal her pregnancy, and again later when he took her to Europe following Aimee’s birth. It’s not known if Richard ever had any direct contact with Aimee, but it is known that he did not revealed Mary Martha’s secret to her while he was alive.
Mary Martha’s brothers, James and Charles Parker, likely knew about Mary Martha’s pregnancy and Aimee’s birth, as well. James lived just down the street in Boston when Mary Martha was pregnant with Aimee, and Charles was a doctor and well aware of the signs of pregnancy as well as postpartum.
Beyond that, they both kept Mary Martha’s secret despite the possibility that folks would believe Aimee was their child. After all, if Mary Martha and Aimee were actually aunt and niece, as they were portrayed, then one of Mary Martha’s brothers would, by definition, be Aimee’s father. As with Richard, there’s no record of Aimee and her uncles ever meeting, so the possibility of them revealing their sister’s secret to her is likely nil.
Then there was Archibald Taylor. Although he wasn’t officially a member of the family until he and Mary Martha were married in 1907, as Mary Martha’s private attorney, he was intimately involved with Aimee’s care just about from the beginning. He likely arranged for her to live with the Byers in Baltimore when she was an infant, and was instrumental in making the arrangements for her to live with Mary Minor in Virginia. There’s no question that he was in on keeping Mary Martha’s secret.
Unlike the members of Mary Martha’s family of origin, Archibald and Aimee did have a relationship, and a long-standing one, at that. Archibald had plenty of opportunities to reveal Mary Martha’s secret to Aimee, however he chose not to, whether out of personal loyalty to Mary Martha, professional ethics or, perhaps as with others, because his secrecy had been bought and paid for.
And finally, as Mary Martha’s private nurse and companion, Amelia Wright was perhaps the one person who knew more about Mary Martha’s secret than anyone else. Yet even she didn’t know the true identity of Aimee’s father, suggesting there may have been parts of Mary Martha’s secret which she alone knew.
As for sharing Mary Martha’s secret with outsiders, there are some obvious situations where it likely was shared, including with lawyers and accountants, for example. It’s also likely, Charles shared parts of Mary Martha’s secret with his wives — spouses are often privy to private information and family secrets.
So, in a very real way, there were a lot of folks who were keeping Mary Martha’s secret from others and outsiders, but especially from Aimee.
Did you know there are 38 different categories of secrets? Or that, according to author and researcher Michael Slepian, about 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories?
Here’s another stat for you — the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories!
To find out how you stack up when it comes to the number and types of secrets you keep, Slepian has created a survey. Head over to KeepingSecrets.org to check it out!
And, if you’re interested in the whole topic of secrets and secret keeping, I highly recommend his book, The Secret Life of Secrets. Quick, insightful read, and one that will stick with you well after you close the book.
The Price of Shame
Mary Martha wasn’t the only one with a secret – Aimee had one, too. Her secret was her illegitimacy, and although it was intimately related to Mary Martha’s secret (that she had gotten pregnant and given birth to a child outside of wedlock), the two were very different.
Mary Martha’s secret was about something she’d done.
Aimee’s secret was about who she was.
And, according to research conducted by Columbia University’s Dr. Michael L. Slepian and others, that difference can have significant consequences when it comes to mental health. 2
Guilt is associated with self-statements like, “I feel bad about something I’ve done”, or “I feel remorse and regret”, while shame is associated with self-statements like, “I’m a bad person”, “I am worthless and small”, and “I feel helpless and powerless”.
Big difference.
In addition, when people experience shame around a secret, they’re more likely to think about both the secret and their shame. Slepian calls it mind-wandering, and his research suggests that the weight of a secret isn’t caused by the effort to conceal it, but rather by the space it occupies in our minds.
The more our minds wander to a secret, the more shame we feel, and the more shame we feel the more we see ourselves as worthless and small, helpless, powerless and as being a bad person.
But, according to Slepian, it doesn’t end there.
Since there’s “no quick fix for making a bad person into a good person” someone like Aimee who carries a lot of shame around her secret can quickly feel overwhelmed, unable to cope with challenges, and powerless to change.
And those feelings can lead to things like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as hormonal, immune system and cardiovascular dysfunction. 3
If we look at Aimee’s life up through 1925, it’s easy to see how this cycle played out.
The shame she felt was ever-present.
In boarding school, who she was and where she belonged was the source of constant speculation and rumor among her classmates. Powerless to respond with any story of truth, she coped by lying, and was further isolated and stigmatized.
When Aimee revealed her secret to John, he used it against her, throwing her illegitimacy in her face and heaping even more shame onto her already burdened shoulders. Feeling worthless and small, she allowed his abuse to continue.
With the death of Amelia Wright, Aimee’s secret must have become all-consuming as she grappled with the possibility that she would never know the full truth around who she was or where she belonged. Unable to cope with that as her future, Aimee was quickly overwhelmed and sunk into depression and anxiety, leading to what may have been a suicide attempt in 1925.
In a paper titled “Emotion Appraisals and Coping with Secrets”, Slepian and his colleagues, Zajija Liu and Elise Kalokerinos, offer some hope, and perhaps a way forward for Aimee and others who experience feelings of shame around their family secrets: While the content of one’s secret cannot be changed, the emotion appraisals around that secret can be changed for improved well-being. 4
Maybe that’s what Dr. MacKendree sparked in Aimee.
Maybe his words allowed her to see the space between her secret and the secrets Mary Martha forced her to keep.
To think about who she was and where she belonged as something she could define and own rather than just an artifact of her unfortunate birth.
To let go of the unbearable and undeserved weight of her shame.
And to reclaim life on her own terms.
A Roadmap for Interviews
Secrets are often revealed during interviews, especially those having to do with family issues and family history. As genealogists, family historians and writers, it can be challenging to know what to do when that happens.
When Dr. Maria Galvanic Valdivino Silva and her colleagues at the University Institute of Lisbon, set about researching how lives of family members are linked and the impact of those links over time and generations, they weren’t looking for family secrets either. But, as they conducted individual biographical interviews to collect family histories from 49 members of 15 different families, family secrets kept popping up.
Realizing the important role family secrets play in the creation and structure of family life and biographical narratives, Valdivino Silva and her team thanked serendpity and embraced this new area of research.
Like all academic researchers, they were already bound by a code of ethics, however, in choosing to actively research family secrets, they needed to establish some ground rules, especially since they would be interviewing multiple members of several families.
Here’s what they came up with, and I think its a great roadmap for all of us as we conduct family or oral history interviews where the chance of bumping up against family secrets is high. 5
“First, since [family secrets] was not something directly asked [about] during the interviews, but rather a topic that emerged through the initiative of participants, we quickly realized that we should make sure not to treat the issue as something trivial, and move on to the next question in the script. We validated their initiative to introduce the subject, we showed interest, we gave space for them to discuss it, we asked further questions, and tried to deepen – carefully and with parsimony – the topic. When we realized participants were reluctant or unsure if they would go deeper in their narrations, we usually told them that we would like to know more, but we understood if they did not feel comfortable addressing the subject.
“Second, we were particularly careful not to make comments or questions that could make the respondents feel resentful or believe we were making any kind of judgement or hetero-victimization, especially when it involved deviant behavior or illicit practices within the family.
“Third, in many situations there was a fear of spillover. We were aware that respondents might be afraid we would share this sensitive information with the other family members being interviewed for the project. We made sure to reinforce, not only at the beginning of the interview but also whenever we felt necessary, that everything was shared in the context of the interview would not be reported to the other participants.
“Fourth, we made a conscious effort not to let ourselves be conditioned by the secrets we knew when interviewing other family members. As tempting as it may be to ask specific questions to know more about the topic, we refrained from directing the interviewees’ speech to talk about the family secrets we already knew.”
In choosing to pursue the topic of family secrets as part of their research, Valdivino Silva and her team were able to expand the understanding of the social and cultural norms involved in keeping family secrets, and how secret keeping is used as an information management tool within families.
In their conclusion, they noted: Keeping secrets shows that certain events and paths can affect many lives interdependently; people and societal norms, linking biographies and society, even if — perhaps precisely because of it — in silence.
As we come across family secrets in our research and in talking with family members and others, I think it is well to remember the ways those secrets impact family stories and histories, why they were created and kept in the first place, and approach each secret with sensitivity and care.
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Copyright 2024 Lori Olson White
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So, what do you think? Does academic research provide insight into the family secrets at the heart of Call Me a Bastard, or the secrets your own family keeps? What about the ways you’ll approach family secrets indoor research and writing? I’ll be dropping into the chat to share some of my thoughts specific to the secrets already revealed in Call Me a Bastard, as well as how I’m handling the ones still to come. See you there!
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Endnotes
1 Anita L. Vangelisti & John P. Caughlin, “Revealing Family Secrets: The Influence of Topic, Function, and Relationships”, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, SAGE Publications, (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 14 (5); P. 680.
2 Michael L. Slepian, The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are, Crown Publishing, 2022.
3 Zaijia, Liu, Elise K. Kalokerinos, and Michael L. Slepian, “Emotion Appraisals and Coping with. Secrets”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol, 49 (9), 2023.
4 Zaijia, Liu, Elise K. Kalokerinos, and Michael L. Slepian, “Emotion Appraisals and Coping with. Secrets”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol, 49 (9), P. 1382, 2023.
5 Valdivino Silva, M.G. Nico, M. and Caetano, A. (2023) Can You Keep a Secret? Family Histories, Secrets and Ethics, Families, Relationships and Societies, XX(XX): 1-19 DOI. 10.1332/20467435Y2023D000000006.
This article should be required reading for genealogists and historians. Sooner or later you will stumble into family secrets and there is a skill for navigating the facts, lies and emotions of relatives. Well done Lori Olson White!
Excellent article! Thanks for sharing the resources on secrets. I'll check it out for my ancestral healing / family patterns work.