Keeping Secrets: Beneficial or Detrimental to Relationships

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Everyone has had one, you may have one now, sitting there in the back of your mind, or on the tip of your tongue waiting to come out. Secrets are all around us. What can bearing secrets do to people and their relationships with others? There can be both negative and positive outcomes.
Choosing secrets for the topic of my research, -being an obvious theme in the readings- seemed both interesting and easy to collect information on. Secrets are common experiences so there are various opinions on this subject, they affect some people in different ways than others. So surely theres a lot of information out there, but what i’m getting to is the feelings and problems that secrets can bring into a relationship or into a persons life, using the information gathered from books, real life experiences, and research to prove points on my theme. As displayed in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, and Freefall by Mindi Scott, secrets can have a negative effect on the relationships between people, but once revealed, there is a sense of relief on the subject.
The bearer of a secret faces many obstacles to feeling inner peace. When someone is holding in a secret they are also holding back from peace, keeping things bottled up inside usually makes people unhappy. It can be mentally exhausting having to repetitively think of this thing thats haunting your mind. There is proof of this in both my readings and my research but the example used is from the play A Doll’s House. When Nora -The main character and wife of torvald- and Krogstad -Torvald’s employee- are talking about her secret, he’s telling her that she must not think of leaving the children or harming herself. When she asks how he could possibly know what she has been feeling, he explains that...

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Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll’s House.” World Literature: An Anthology of Great Short Stories, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Donna Rosenberg. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, inc, 2004.
142-202, Print.
Isay, Jane. The secret that became my life, Psychology Today 2011. web. 2 April. 2014 http://www.pshychologytoday.com/articles/201312/the-secret-became-my-life Lickerman, Alex. The danger of keeping secrets. Psychology Today 2012. Web. 16 April, 2014. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201209/the-danger-keeping-secrets Scott, Mindi. Freefall. New York: Simon Pulse. 2010. print
Slepian, Michael, E.J. Masicampo, Negin Toosi, Nalini Ambady. The physical Burdens of secrecy,
American Psychological Association. 2012. Web. 16 April, 2014.
http://ambadylab.stanford.edu/pubs/Slepian-Masicampo-Toosi-Ambady_Physical-Burdens-of-Secrecy_in-press_JEPG.pdf

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