Trust and Secrecy

I'm not really sure where this fits, so I'll let a moderator move this if it needs moving.

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Quoted from one of my posts in the Autism/Asperger's forum.

It's a thing I've thought about time and again over the years but especially the past year or two, ever since I discovered the Autism/Asperger's thread on DragCave and took the Rdos Aspie test, v2. Autism carries a negative stigma and so I didn't want to talk to my parents about it because why would they want to believe their child has a disorder? More than a year later I opened up to my mom about it and she admitted that she had considered the possibility that I had Asperger's but had never wanted to say anything to me because she didn't want people to slap a label on me. I mean, it's not like I never had any issues, social or otherwise, when growing up. :roll: We brought the idea to my dad and he just got really quiet and distant. I think he took the idea worse than my mom.

There's some fear of what people's reactions would be if I were to tell them things. Will they not take me seriously? Will they overreact? (I'm more worried about the overreacting, thinking I'm some sort of sicko.) And that's normal I suppose.

What's disconcerting about it are these:

• Sometimes these issues are really important, things that would greatly affect finances and things like that. Things like, "Oh hey, I'm bored with my major, I want to switch but that would also mean switching colleges and I'm already a full two years into my current degree and I don't have all the "right" classes to have my AA which is what would qualify me for an in-state transfer."
• It leads me to not talk about things at all either because I'm afraid of their response because it's so deep and dark (or ridiculous), or I feel there's nothing I can do about it and that there's no point in talking about it, or I haven't been able to find a way of wording the issue so that I'd be comfortable saying it.
• Ergo, I can't tell anybody anything. What if they ask questions and get into that darkening area that pokes maybe a little too close to what it is I don't want people to know?

And yet....

I can tell complete strangers online about this stuff. It's probably because by the time I've gone through the above bullet points, I'm bursting at the seams to tell somebody, somebody whom I would not have told if I knew them in real life. And they can't do a thing about it, which is why I'm so comfortable with it.

But even then, there are things I'm not even comfortable writing in my diary. (I actually don't keep a diary; don't log enough, can't keep them up to date, etc.) Or the occasional journal entries that I write only when I get all introspective like this. Even though I'm a Christian, I don't even pray to God about this kind of stuff, which is probably one of the most hypocritical things I can do.

Different things can trigger this mindset for me, but the latest onset came from marathoning the first two seasons of House, M.D. One of House's favorite things to say and live by is that "Everyone lies." Patients never tell the whole story unless coerced somehow by their life-or-death situations (or, if the patient is incapacitated, their spouse/partner/relative's difficult decision to have a test, the results of which could indicate that they lied at some point), and it all leads back to a trust issue that runs rampant within the human race. And it should. Because everybody lies.

So here's my question. Do you have anyone, in real life or a religious deity, to whom you can tell absolutely anything, including your deepest darkest thoughts and personal secrets? Do you trust anyone enough to show them the whole you?

Hi snickie! Thanks for sharing. In order for me to come to terms with some of the things that have happened to me, I have needed to share with others. It has helped them understand who I am. Some of the really "bad" stuff has only been shared with my doctor, a psychiatrist or a therapist.

There's never been anyone that I could tell anything. The most I can ever tell anyone is "a few" things. It comes from having a family where everything you say will be used against you, no matter how mundane what you happen to say is. I've found it's not something that I can really unlearn unfortunately.

~ Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person; one that they choose to show to the world and one that they choose to hide.

I believe it is natural to keep secrets as everybody does to some extent. I, myself, happen to be more secretive than most.

I only share on this site because of anonymity. The way I see it is, I will most likely never meet anybody on this site in person so if somebody judges me I will be no more hurt by it than by the 12 year old internet troll who makes bad your mom jokes. Even then though, I don't share some things about myself here.

As far as everywhere else, I don't trust anybody with everything and I have maybe 5 people that I've opened up to. I suspect hidden motives in everybody no matter how nice they appear to be and I live a very secretive life. I'm single and haven't been in a relationship for more than 3 months because of trust issues. I see trust as a weakness and I believe that opening up to somebody fully is like asking to be hurt.

I won't keep a physical journal for the same reason, but I run a digital one in an encrypted file container protected by 256 bit military grade encryption with a 64 character master password that would take today's super computers millions of years to crack and I keep a piece of code attached to my journal that would force it to self destruct upon being copied to another computer which could tell you how fanatical I am about my secrets.

I'm often compared to an assassin or spy because of the extreme measures that I take to protect my inner life and my mindset in general.

In short, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having secrets although it can lead to a lonely life if one can't find a balance somewhere.

No, I don't think so. Sharing is hard for me, and I always hold back something. I would like to be able to though.

As an aside, I do not understand the "don't want to put a label on you" thing, especially for something like autism. Someone said that in another thread here recently and it's been bothering me.

i don't have anyone

For me it's not even that I grew up in an abusive household or whatever. My parents are very supportive of making sure I'm mentally healthy and stuff but I have this intrinsic fear that they'll make it personal or something. Also, we're all kind of schizoid by nature - my mom deals with people all day every day at work and comes home exhausted; my dad is depressed and in too much physical pain to go out often other than the occasional movie, church, and date night with my mom; I kind of piggyback off of their behaviors. We don't talk to anyone at church unless they talk to us first and we don't talk about anything deep, and we don't stay long enough afterwards to talk to anyone because my dad is in pain and we have to get home. And house guests are a pain - my dad will usually barricade himself in his office and leave me to entertain, except sometimes when it's his mother.

Going out is an inconvenience to all of us. Talking to people makes it worse. If I want to do something I have to put out for myself. If I want to go talk to a counselor at my church my parents will know and will ask questions and whatever I do there's nothing to keep them from prying and I don't want them prying because the more they pry the more I want to hold back which makes them worry, and if I let something slip they worry.

My mental health is my problem. Not theirs.

So we pretend we don't have problems and nothing gets talked about and things bottle up. We put our bottles on the fireplace mantle and then go watch tv in the next room and somehow we survive. Every once in a while something will happen that'll knock one of those bottles to the ground and the glass shatters and my mom steps in it (it's hard to ignore a field of glass shards all over the living room floor) and gets splinters and I try to tiptoe around it and then one of my parents inevitably stumbles into me and I get splinters in my feet too. Eventually it all gets swept under the table and we go back to ignoring the mantle. Sometimes it's that my dad knocked over a jar while stumbling to the bathroom. Sometimes it's me stupidly going, "I wonder if I drop this glass jar onto this tile floor whether or not it'll shatter," and then it does.
</metaphor>

So I get no solace there.

I do have emotional and spiritual needs. My spiritual health isn't great at the moment and it's leaking over into my mental health but I don't think there's anything I can do about it as long as I live in my parents' house under my mother's paycheck. Counselling and therapy cost money and it implies that I have more jars on the fireplace mantel than my mom thinks I do.

Also, I can't help but wonder if this is all inside my head. ("Of course it is inside your head, [Snickie], but why on earth should that mean that it's not real?")

Actually I'm referring something akin to being a hypochondriac or Munchausen's Syndrome (see the deliberate jar-dropping reference) or just a plain old drama queen attention ***** type of thing. Then then I like to think that I can satisfy my own emotional needs and don't need to feed off of someone else or attact attention to myself but apparently that's not true.

Is it incredibly selfless that I don't want to impose my problems on other people, or is it incredibly selfish that I think I'm the only one who can do anything about them?


I saw my former flute professor a few hours ago after the opening concert of this year's concert season at my university. She retired at the end of last year. I saw her and she was talking with one of my clarinet professors and suddenly I felt like crying but letting myself cry would mean disrupting their time and would mean I'd have to explain why I was crying and that would mean opening some jars and that was not the right environment to open jars, not to mention I wouldn't have even known which jars to open anyway, and I think opening the wrong jar is worse than not opening any jars.