Why do we keep secrets?

If you don’t read Ann Voskamp’s a Holy Experience, you should. If you only have time to read one blog, then quit reading this one and read hers.

Everything she writes is moving, but this one really hit hard.
Guest blogging at inCourage, she tells the riveting story of her mother’s mental disease and how she soldiered on as a nine-year old girl, never telling a single soul.

When the walls of my heart cracked, I leaked out slow, in the dark, in my pillow, in my begging prayers. I never told my best friend, Melanie Vermeer, where my Mama had gone. I never stopped pressing the lips tight. In her ward room in the city, my Mama sat in shadows and wrestled the demons, and secrets of what her own father had done to her in a long ago dark.

She tells the story of secrets, of shame and solitude.

Tight lips can suffocate till life lies limp, and secrets can smother and leave you for dead. Mama was living proof that keeping secrets keeps you sick. Or maybe her and I were both the dying proof of it. I grow up. I keep my secrets tight and my secrets keep me tight.

But secrets withheld never keep us safe. Instead, they begin to devour us from the inside out.

We all thought the secrets would save us… but they slowly slay us.I know the terror of telling the truth. But for me, after my Mama’s childhood, after mine, I am far more scared of the secrets. Because it’s keeping secrets that keep us from being real. From being fully alive.

I recently wrote a story about Frank Warren’s Post Secret effort. (Warning if you click. Some of the secrets are salacious and might be offensive.)
Warren has several best selling books and a website that has had more than 350 million hits. He encourages people to mail him their deepest, darkest secrets. It’s a place for people to reveal their souls.


Secrets. Photo by Ann Voskamp, by permission



With the breakdown of family, a destruction of real community, and withering church attendance, we have no outlet for honestly. We prop our lives up, like old-West facades.

The secrets stay bottled up. They can’t be held. They must be freed.
Ann writes, “The only way to be real … is to reveal.”