You can tell your therapist anything. They are bound by confidentiality, so it isn't even breaking a confidence for you to tell them. Therapy is a place to clear out the secrets, as secrets keep us stuck in dysfunctional patterns.

Maybe asking your dad for permission to tell your husband would be best. Besides respecting your dad's confidence in you, it also lets your dad know that he isn't the only one who needs to be able to talk to someone.

I agree with previous posters about the damages done by keeping secrets. That is how families stay stuck in dysfunctional patterns and spread mental illness from one generation to the next. My family didn't talk about mental illness either. As a child, I was continuously depressed, and was not allowed to tell anyone that I was unhappy. I did try to talk to people, but my family followed up by discrediting me and calling me selfish and bad. That is how people who don't want to change and feel threatened control other people who are trying to change and may be threatening the status quo. I didn't get treatment for depression until I had grown up and left home, which was very hard to do, as they fought that too. After I broke free, I was distanced from my family and it was like I didn't even exist to them for several years. When I started to make contact again with my siblings, I eventually learned that the majority of my family had depression, anxiety, etc., including grandparents, cousins, siblings. It was just something that they didn't think should be talked about.

My brother developed schizophrenia and was sometimes institutionalized. My parents kept the secret from their parents and siblings. My brother didn't receive visits or letters or support, because nobody was supposed to know where he was. They didn't tell me until I asked why I hadn't heard from him in a long time, and then they told me not to tell anyone. My brother committed suicide, and at his funeral they told some of his story. Not everything, but enough to have relatives commenting that they knew something was strange but didn't want to say anything because my parents obviously didn't want them to know. And I heard about other extended family members who had been institutionalized with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, that my parents had never told me about.

For the sake of secrets, many of us were not treated for mental illness when needed, and contact between family members was prevented, and support denied. I don't mean to keep secrets from my children, but they don't know my family because they didn't grow up with them, and much of it just doesn't come up, and I don't know how to bring it up. But if we could be open and honest, how many problems could be prevented or lessened?

Secrets don't do us any favors. Those who are keeping the secrets may mean well (my parents didn't want their aging parents to worry, for example), but they need to know that the results are more mental illness and more suicides and that telling the secrets helps to stop the cycle.