The Shame of Secrecy. The Secrecy of Shame

If your family kept secrets and never talked about hard things, you grow up feeling a lot of shame and loneliness about struggling. 
Healing comes in relationships with people who don't live like there's shame in talking about hard things. 
And don't pretend not to struggle.
~notesfromyourtherapist, Instagram

The first person I called was my mother. And like good mothers throughout history she immediately and completely was in my corner. She expressed empathy, support and a rock-solid faith in me. She didn't vilify my husband but held him accountable. She held me, she listened to me and she was always, always on the other end of that phone when I needed her.
I was lucky.
Others, not so much.
I hear often from you about how abandoned you feel. Your mothers won't talk about it or you're afraid to tell them. Your siblings take sides or cast judgement. Your friends, in the interest of supporting you, insist that the only way to respond is to file for divorce. 
And that's if you tell anyone at all. Far more often, we don't. We hold our secret close. And it poisons us. 
It poisons us because secrets carry shame. Even if we know, in our heads, that we are not the reason he cheated. Even if we understand that people don't cheat because there's something wrong with their spouse, they cheat because there's something wrong with them. Because they're lost or afraid or lonely and they don't know how to feel those feelings and so they avoid and they distract and they lie to themselves and others. 
Their secrets have poisoned them. 
My family kept the secret of my parents' addictions. And because I was young, I learned that I should be ashamed. Why else would I not being able to talk about what was really going on at home. It must be shameful. It must be kept hidden. Nobody had to tell me that, of course. It was understood. And that silence, that secrets poisoned me for a lot of years.
When my mother got sober and began telling her story (she took her 12 steps seriously and wrote letters of apology and shared her story far and wide), I slowly began sharing mine. I was leery. In my twenties, at a time when there wasn't nearly the cultural conversation around addiction that there is now, I knew I was opening myself up to judgement. But what I've learned since is that no-one's judgement was harsher than my own. Nothing anyone ever said to me matched my own feelings of shame, that I still needed to wrestle with.
It has been a similar experience with my husband's infidelity.
I told my mother but very very few others. One of those others cast judgement, which sent me scurrying back into my silence. 
And that's mostly where I stayed. Silent. And filled with shame.
Until I began telling my story here. And, over years, began opening up to friends. I was (am!) still careful about who I tell. Trust is earned, not assumed. And though I no longer feel shame about my husband's infidelity, there are parts of my life I keep private. And there's a difference between secret and private.
For instance, I don't widely share (except on this blog, in which I remain relatively anonymous) about my daughters' mental health challenges. There are people in my life with whom I'm close who don't know my eldest was hospitalized. I don't hide that. But I respect my eldest's wish to keep it, mostly, private. That's a choice rooted in healthy decision making. Not shame.
Similarly, though plenty know about my husband's infidelity in our city, many more do not. It was long ago. He has done much work. It isn't what defines him or our marriage. And so we, mostly, keep it private.
We haven't told our children, not out of shame but for many other reasons. We keep it private, something some experts such as Caroline Madden, a family therapist, supports and encourages. Others do not. Our choice.
I share my story when I think it can do some good. Either for me or for the person on the other end of it.
And that's where I hope you can all get to. I wish you an army of people in your life who can love you through this pain. Who can listen to you, without judgement. Who can see your pain and run toward it, not away. Those people are, sadly, rare. But their fear of your pain is rooted in their own shame and secrecy. It's a consequence of their own inability to talk about hard things. 
Life is a marathon of hard things. If we never learn how to talk about them, we fail to learn how to really life. Authentically. Deeply. And too often, we don't heal from those hard things. We don't grow from them.
You get to choose what's private and what's not. But secrets? Exorcise those. Be honest about them, at least with yourself. Cultivate relationships with people who don't operate from fear but who are honest about their own struggles. 
Find your family, built on honesty and a willingness to hold each other up.