essay on family secret

The Power of Family Secrets

Family secrets can destroy the love and trust the family has fought so hard to build.

Secrets are powerful tools often used to hide a family’s potentially embarrassing or shameful event. But when discovered, family secrets can destroy the love and trust the family has fought so hard to build. What else can secrets do?

Secrets Alter Reality

Katie was adopted as an infant and everyone knew that except Katie. One afternoon, when she was 11 years old, a friend at school asked her a casual question: “Do you know your birth mother’s name?” Katie didn’t know what to say.

“Birthmother? What are you talking about?” Her friend went on to tell her that her mother had said Katie was adopted and had another mother somewhere. Katie didn’t know how to answer. But she did know how she felt — shocked and scared. Her world had changed. She did not know what to do with her feelings and this new reality. Secrets not only alter reality but they can create exclusion and division.

Secrets Create Exclusion and Division

Keeping a secret can divide family members — those who know the secret and those who do not. To keep a secret, according to Harriet Webster in Family Secrets, the secret-keeper must carefully guard all communication with others close to him. This defense mode often leads to distance, anxiety and awkwardness in relationships with others. Harriet Webster, Family Secrets: How Telling and Not Telling Affects Our Children, Our Relationships and Our Lives, (Reading: Mass: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1991), 11. When there is exclusion from the truth, there will be division. Where there is division the probability of mutual caring, mutual understanding, and mutual honesty is diminished. Betsy Keefer and Jayne Schooler, Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child , (Westport, CT: Begin and Garvey Publishers, 2000), 10.

Bonus content originally excerpted from Handbook on Thriving as an Adoptive Family , published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., © 2008 by Sanford Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

⚙📝 Instructions & Documentation (WIP)

• Learn About Age & Stages
• Learn About Ages 0-3 (Baby/Toddler)s
• Learn About Ages 4-8 (Preschool/Primary)s
• Learn About Ages 9-12 (Preteen/Tween)s
• Learn About Ages 13-18 (Teen)s
• Ages 19+ (Adult)

• Learn About Building Blocks
• Constructive Use of Time
• Empowerment
• Positive Identity
• Positive Values
• Social Competencies

• Learn About Parenting Q&As
• Ages 0-3 (Baby/Toddler) Q&A
• Ages 13-18 (Teenagers) Q&A
• Ages 19+ (Adult Children) Q&A
• Ages 4-8 (Preschool/Primary) Q&A
• Ages 9-12 (Preteen/Tween) Q&A
• Blended Family Q&A
• Everyday Parenting Q&A
• Grandparenting Q&A
• Mental Health Q&A
• Quick Parenting Answers
• Sexuality Q&A
• Single Parenting Q&A
• Spiritual Growth Q&A
• Technology & Entertainment Q&A

• Learn About Parenting Traits
• Adaptability
• Boundaries & Limits
• Grace & Forgiveness
• Intentionality

• Learn About Topics
• Everyday Parenting
• Mental Health
• Spiritual Growth
• Technology & Entertainment

About the Author

Jayne Schooler

Jayne is an adoptive parent as well as the author/co-author of eight books in the foster and adoptive field, including Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child and Wounded Children, Healing Homes . She is one of the primary authors of the Trauma Free World’s Trauma Competent Care giving series and trains internationally. For more information on the training series, visit www.traumafreeworld.org .

Read More About:

You May Also Like

Foster Care to Adoption: 5 Questions to Consider

If you’re hoping to adopt a child, becoming a foster parent is often a great way to bring into your home a child who may,

What is it Like Adopting From Foster Care?

I stared at an email from our social worker stating that my husband, Gerritt, and I would not be approved as foster parents in the

From Empty Nesters To Foster Parents

Setting up for an evening training, I looked forward to sharing the impact of foster care and adoption on the biological children in the family.

• 1-800-A-FAMILY (232-6459)
• [email protected]
• 8605 Explorer Drive Colorado Springs, CO 80920-1051
• Jobs & Volunteering
• Press Center
• Find a Counselor
• Daily Broadcast
• The Boundless Show
• Adventures in Odyssey
• Radio Theatre
• Focus on Marriage Podcast
• Focus on Parenting Podcast
• Practice Makes Parent
• All Shows >>
• That the World May Know
• The Truth Project
• All Products >>
• Make a Donation
• Other Ways to Give
• Manage My Donor Account
• Donor Tax Statements
• Get our updates straight to your inbox.

Whose Life Is It Anyway: Writing About Family Secrets

When is it okay to write about family stores.

Posted October 25, 2020 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

My mother and my sister never wanted me to write about them. Ever. It wasn’t my business, I was told. I should be loyal. I should only say good things about them both. Did I want to be sued? "We have nothing to feel guilty about, so don’t make us feel that way," my mother told me. And she meant it.

And of course I did write about them. Because that was the only way I knew to try and understand everything that was going on in a family that kept secrets out of shame , people who would rather eat nails than divulge or examine something uncomfortable or painful. What are you writing about, I was always asked but I knew the question was really: are you writing about us?

Of course I was.

My debut novel Meeting Rozzy Halfway was fiercely autobiographical, a novel I had written when my sister, whom I had grown up adoring, had suddenly changed personality and had dropped out of college to marry young and have one baby and then another. Not only was I sad for her, I was miserable for me. My sister had been my anchor, my touchstone, and no one would talk about the downward turn of her life, and so I wrote a novel, in a fever, about two devoted sisters, one of whom has her life spiral out of control. I was hoping that at least on the pages of a novel, our lives together might all turn out differently and that sister would see the love and appreciation for her, and my desire to help, in every sentence. And to my shock, the book was published, and it made me famous for a while. I waited for my sister to approach me, to tell me she recognized herself in the gorgeous young woman character whose life is curtailed, but she never did, and when I finally asked her if she saw herself, she looked at me as if I had three heads. “That character isn’t me at all,” she insisted. To my surprise, I realized that the story I thought I had written for her, was really more for me, for my understanding.

But my sister wasn’t the only character in my novel who came from family. I wrote about my mom, too, a woman who had been jilted at 19 by the love of her life, who had married on the rebound, and when she was pregnant , her first love came to visit her—with his wife. She never got over it, and she began to distrust and dislike all men, including my boyfriend and my sister’s husband.

My sister’s reaction to my book made me anxious , but to my surprise, my mother recognized herself almost immediately—and with a kind of delight. Maybe because it gave her a reason to track down this guy, to tell him that her daughter had written about his bad behavior in a book. And to both our surprises, they reconnected as friends, something I thought was as strange as it was wonderful. And if my sister insisted the book had nothing of her in it, my mother happily told everyone.

Later, though, when my mother began to have the beginnings of cognitive decline , she changed her mind about my writing about her. I wanted to write about how I had become friends with the man who had jilted her, how they had become friends, too, but this time in a personal essay, rather than fiction. “I guess so,” she said, but then half an hour later she called up furious and upset. “Stay the hell out of my life!” she said. “This is my story, not yours.”

But was it? Wasn’t the fact that I was friends with the man she had loved part of my own story and not wholly hers?

Some people believe you should only write about family after they have died. You protect them. You protect yourself. But I would never tell a story about my family that did not involve me and my perceptions. But then my mother was getting older, more forgetful. She had fallen and when we put her into independent living, she called me every night, railing at what a horrifying daughter I was to do this to her. So I did what I always had done to understand things. I began to write my novel Cruel Beautiful World , and I put in a character called Iris, a woman like my mother, put into independent living. And then, as I was in the middle of writing my novel, to everyone’s astonishment, my mom, at 94, fell in love for the first time with a man named Walter, and he loved her back for four years until he died, and she followed soon after. Those four years were the most joyous of her life and I was lucky enough to be witness to them. How could I not write about that? I thought how happy my mom would have been had she known how many people said that Iris was their favorite character, how much they loved that woman because she gave them hope that love was always possible. And what brought me the most joy was that I got to give my mom a version of her best self, a kind of immortality in a book.

My sister is a different story. She has estranged herself from me because she feels I have the life she wants and that I have stolen everything good from her. She won’t talk about it, so to understand it, I write, and I write what I know, which is my memories, my side of the story. In fact, coming up next here is a piece I already had published in The Manifest-station. It’s a cri de coeur, a letter to my sister about why and how we are now so distant, how much it tears at me and breaks my heart. My sister blames and hates me, accuses me of lying and has told me she wants me dead. How can I understand something like that if there is no discourse about it, if she refuses to speak to me. And more importantly, do I have the right to tell my story, to reveal details about my sister?

I write it to understand it.

Anne Lamott says, every that happens to you belongs to you in some way, filtered through the prism of your memory . And you must tell the story through that prism.

Anne Lamott has also said that you should write about anything you want, and if people didn’t want you to write something bad about them, they should have been kinder to you. I’m not sure I totally agree with that, because trauma , conflict, is part of what makes us human and to heal it, we need to understand it. There are, of course, certain things in my sister’s life, in my mom’s, that I would never, ever divulge to anyone. Because they were told to me in confidence . Because I wasn’t there.

You might ask, when does someone else’s story become your story, too? Maybe the answer is that it was always your story all along because you were living and experiencing it.

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times Bestselling author of 12 novels, including Pictures of You , Is This Tomorrow , Cruel Beautiful World , and With or Without You.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Telling Family Secrets: Proceed with Caution

A researcher of family secrets shares her perspective on how to move forward from the shock of discovery and address, with care, the elephant in the room. It’s one in a series of forthcoming stories representing different viewpoints on when and how to reveal family secrets and exploring the repercussions of secrets and strategies for minimizing them.

By B.K. Jackson

When family secrets are unveiled by DNA tests or otherwise revealed, the secret discoverers and the secret keepers are faced with thorny decisions about whether to come clean about their secrets or double down on them. For each, the stakes are high. And with secrets related to genetic identity and origin stories, there may be many stakeholders and a ripple effect on many others individuals who might be deeply affected by the maintenance or divulgence of inconvenient truths.

If you’ve discovered, for example, that your mother has kept to herself the fact that you were conceived during a clandestine relationship, uncovering her affair is likely to trigger shock waves not only for you, but also for your social or birth-certificate father, your biological father, and all of their families. It might even affect your relationships with your significant other and your children. This is equally true if you’ve found that you’re a late-discovery adoptee or were donor conceived, the latter widening still further the ripple effect since the size of your biological family is potentially large and the revelations may be ongoing.

You may wrestle continually with whether to “come out” with your story knowing that in doing so, you will “out” someone else and there will be consequences. But because secrets pertaining to your origin story—to your truth—are fundamental and foundational, you may feel you have no choice. To not reveal your genetic identity may make you feel inauthentic or mired in a shame that isn’t yours.

Setting aside the issue of whose secret is it to tell and who has the right to open these hornets’ nests (we’ll get to that in another article), it may be in your best interest—in fact it may be essential to your well-being—to set the record straight. But unshrouding long-hidden truths is likely to trigger a cascade of reactions, including guilt, anger, shame, and feelings of betrayal, among all the parties involved. Whether families will withstand the impact or crack may depend on how the family skeletons are let loose.

The truth, it’s often said, will set you free, but there are ways of allowing the truth to come to light without leaving you with—as the song goes—“nothin’ left to lose.” Being mindful of the potential repercussions and talking about them may help reduce collateral damage.

There’s no right way to go about unburdening oneself of a secret, and when it comes to the consequences, every family is different, says Katy Barbier-Greenland, who studies family secrets as part of a PhD program based in sociology and psychology—Family Secrets, Secret Families. Inspired by the discovery of a major family secret of her own and a resulting fascination with the ways in which identity, secrecy, silence, stigma, taboo, knowledge, and power function in and around families, the project aims to explore how reproductive family secrets—those involving conception and birth—affect people’s lives. These include secret or hidden children, siblings, and half siblings; secret adoptions, surrogacy, donor conceptions; children conceived in ways seen as taboo; and misattributed or unanticipated parentage.

As part of her research, Barbier-Greenland interviewed adults about their secrets to “shed light on what these immensely personal and transformative life experiences mean for people, their identities, and their perspectives on families.” This research will provide a base that professionals can use to support individuals going through these difficult experiences.

How to Consider Disclosing Secrets

Barbier-Greenland sketches the two sides of the issue. “The adult child might think, ‘ I don’t want to be dishonest anymore. I want to tell my story and begin to create my new identity. I want to search for my biological father and any siblings. I want to tell my kids the truth about our ancestry. I want to start to move on from the harm that secrecy has caused. I don’t want to lie about who I am anymore .” The parent, however, may think, “ I don’t want to be exposed. I don’t want things to change. I don’t want to face negative reactions and judgment from others. I don’t want aspects of my private life made public .”

How is it possible to bridge the distance or meet in the middle?

It won’t be easy to move from secrecy to honesty after decades of suppressing the truth—even when there hasn’t been a “web of lies or active deceit and dishonesty,” says Barbier-Greenland.

All of her interviewees expressed the wish that they’d learned about family secrets earlier, “mostly so they could have developed relationships with family members earlier on in their lives and because their lives would have unfolded differently.” Still, they agree, it’s best not to rush into decisions. Preparation and support are key. It’s necessary for both sides to communicate with each other and work through the repercussions of revealing or keeping the secret. Each needs to know what’s at stake for the other and what needs to be overcome.

When debating disclosure of secrets, the determining factor should be more than merely “honesty is the best policy,” says Barbier-Greenland. It’s more complicated, she says, with much more to consider. “Some of my interviewees have spoken with their parents or family members immediately in sensitive and empathic ways and they’ve been able to find a positive way forward; some have tried to do the same but have had families completely shatter and relationships crumble.” It’s difficult to strike a balance, she adds, advising that it’s wise to take time to consider your way forward carefully and avoid making hasty decisions or sudden disclosures.

If there’s a positive relationship, for example, between an adult child who wants to be open about their origin story and a parent who doesn’t, she advises not rushing to disclose the secret. Although she acknowledges that everyone’s story is theirs to tell, she recommends proceeding cautiously and with patience and deliberation. “Given some time to get use to the idea, the secret keeper might be willing to be more open, and together you can find a way to understand each other’s needs and preferences and navigate this difficult time together.”

Two Sides to Every Story

It would be helpful, she says, for the adult child who wants to be open to consider what’s gone into the secret-keeping—“how many years and how much of the parents’ identity may be wrapped up in this secret—and that unravelling it and sharing it with the world could have an immense impact on the parent.”

Take into account both how much their lives might be changed by opening this secret and be mindful of what the circumstances were in which the truth was hidden. Although sometimes secrets are kept for selfish reasons, says Barbier-Greenland, there are other reasons. “In doing this project, I’ve learned that compassion for secret keepers is of the utmost importance. People keep secrets for so many reasons, and it’s complex. Sometimes they keep secrets out of love, because they were obliged to, or they wanted to protect themselves or someone else.”

Further, societal taboos, stigma, and behavioral expectations might have been very different then than now, she observes.

On the other hand, the secret keepers must recognize that times have changed.

Decades of work concerning adoptees and donor conceived individuals have shown that understanding one’s biogenetic origins is essential to understanding oneself, says Barbier-Greenland. “It’s not everything, but it’s central. Since the 1990s, the literature globally has turned toward and recommended openness rather than secrecy in families and legislative and policy trends have shifted in response.”

Parents need to be aware of the reasons for this shift in understanding and realize that not knowing one’s origin story, or knowing it and not being able to share it, may be devastating. Learning that you aren’t quite who you thought you were and having to create a new identity will be an enormous and often painful hurdle, Barbier-Greenland observes. “Anger, anxiety, sadness, frustration—all these emotions are common, and the effects can be traumatic,” she says. “Discovering a family secret about your birth or conception is a transformative life experience and forces people to rewrite their life stories and reframe their identities and definitions of family. It impacts family relationships and can be utterly profound,” she says. It not only changes how you think about yourself and your future, she adds, but may even change how your children think about themselves and their future.

“People have to deal with the fact that close family members kept a major family secret from them as well as deal with the actual secret itself. This is huge.” Thus, there almost certainly will be trust issues to work through and your relationship can’t help but be affected in some way.

Parents need to be aware, too, that your discovery of a secret surrounding your conception may have been shattering. It’s essential, she says, that they understand both why you need to know the details of the secret and why you may need to share the secret.

“It’s important to acknowledge that the relationships will be affected in some way. It’s quite possible that relationships between other family members will also be affected, and that some families can come together and some will splinter and fall apart after such disclosures. To reduce the possibility of the latter outcome, seek support. A therapist can help you and your parent work together to understand each other’s feelings and viewpoints, to understand the possible repercussions, and talk about how to proceed with dignity and sensitivity.

“You’re not alone,” says Barbier-Greenland. “I encourage everyone in this situation to seek support.” In addition to therapists, genetic genealogists are especially well suited to help, she says, because they have a deep understanding of all sides of these issues. “There are also some great online groups where people can chat with others in similar situations and those who are at different stages in their journey, which can be immensely valuable.”

How to Disclose

It might be worth considering, Barbier-Greenland says, “that disclosure doesn’t mean shouting it from the rooftops or making a big announcement on social media or at a family gathering.” Instead, you can disclose in stages, giving people time to adjust, telling first a few family members and friends, and then over time others as it seems appropriate or necessary.

Reassuring your parent that you would only ever reveal the secret to appropriate people in sensitive ways is important, she says. While some may disagree with the need to restrict the nature of the revelation or be unwilling to be anything but fully forthcoming, being as sensitive as possible can help preserve relationships and reduce harm.

The parents, says Barbier-Greenland, “would also benefit from some strategies for having a conversation with people if they get approached by family members or others that the adult child has disclosed to. This would help develop their capacity and equip them better,” she says. “It also might help them feel more confident about shifting toward openness and honesty.”

Taking the time to work through things, says Barbier-Greenland, “gives everyone time to process the experience for themselves, ensuring that no one reacts in the moment without considering each other and others in the family. There’s the possibility that with time and work, and professional support, the parent will eventually feel able to support you in revealing the secret to the world.”

She mindful that’s a best-case scenario. In many cases, the discussions can’t be broached because the secret keeper is adamant about maintaining the status quo. And in others, discussions breakdown, resulting in an impasse. In such cases, says Barbier-Greenland, “maintaining secrecy or colluding with deception is not an option for the adult child.” Still, a meaningful conversation and a meeting of the minds, she says, is something to strive for.

To learn more about Barbier-Greenland’s research, see her website and follow her on twitter @KatyBeeGreen.

The 5 Stages of Grief: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

Disenfranchised grief: mourning in the shadows, related articles, drained brain, never too late, filling in the blanks: a q&a with jon..., autonomy, dna surprises, and barbie: what’s the connection, step adoptees, meet your peers at the untangling our roots..., q&a with filmmaker autumn rebecca sansom, q&a with podcast host don anderson, q&a with podcaster alexis hourselt, q&a with the adoptee hosts of the making..., leave a comment cancel reply.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• About Severance
• From the Editor
• Submission Guidelines: How to Contribute
• abandonment
• DNA & Genetic Genealogy
• DNA Surprises
• Donor Conception
• Family Secrets
• Genetics & Heredity
• Interviews & Profiles
• Late Discovery Adoptees
• Psychology & Therapy
• Search & Reunion
• DNA surprises
• Secrets & Lies
• Short Takes: Books
• Short Takes: Film & Video
• Short Takes: People, News & Research
• Short Takes: Podcasts & Radio
• Coping Strategies
• Micro-Memoirs
• Your Video Stories
• Abandonment
• DNA & Genetic Genealogy
• Genetics & Heredity
• Late-Discovery Adoptees
• Psychology & Therapy & Coaching
• Search & Reunion
• Secrets & Lies

Subscribe to our occasional newsletter.

Thanks, I’m not interested

Friday essay: Can you keep a secret? Family memoirs break taboos – and trust

Lecturer in Sociology, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Ashley Barnwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

The television premiere of Benjamin Law’s adapted memoirs The Family Law may have had us laughing last night, but a foray into the recent past of the family memoir genre reveals an ethical minefield of sibling conflicts, clashing memories, and unwanted exposés.

In response to biographies scrutinizing his marriage to Sylvia Plath, the poet Ted Hughes said , “I hope each of us owns the facts of his or her own life”. In family memoir such hopes are dashed.

When writers tell the story of their lives they also divulge the experiences of siblings, parents, and lovers. They make the private public, often with a unique spin on events and not always with the consent of those involved.

Given the intimate nature of family life these tangles are perhaps unavoidable. The facts of our lives are always shared.

But life writing still raises important ethical questions. The memoirist’s candid account of family struggles can destigmatise taboo topics – such as divorce, sexuality, and suicide – but at what cost to those whose lives are laid bare? What should come first for a writer, loyalty to the truth of their own experience or respect for the privacy of others?

These questions have troubled a series of high-profile memoirs and autobiographical novels. Writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard , Hanif Kureishi , Lily Brett , and David Sedaris have upset family members by using personal details in their literary works.

These cases alert us to the difficulty of narrating shared life stories. How do we get to the truth when people remember the past differently and have conflicting investments in how the story is told?

But we might also see the potential social benefit of tell-all family memoirs. By representing the conflicts and silences that families live with writers can introduce more diverse and honest accounts of family life into public culture.

Whose struggle?

By the time literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard published the first volume in his six part autobiographical series, My Struggle (2009), several members of his family were no longer speaking to him.

The Norwegian writer’s aim was to describe the banality and drama of his daily life in raw detail. Critics have hailed the result as Proust for the 21st century . Readers have said they feel as though he has written their innermost secrets onto the page. For Knausgaard’s family this is more than just a feeling. It is their reality.

Knausgaard doesn’t pull any punches. While much of the series is devoted to vivid descriptions of ordinary life, like brewing a cup of tea or going for a run, there are also details that most of us would shudder to have on the record.

Gossipy, post-dinner party conversations that he and his wife have about their guests are recounted verbatim. The rancid excrement that stains his incontinent grandmother’s couch, his father’s descent into squalor and alcoholism, the spoken and unspoken insults of his marital rows, the fumbling sexual encounters of his youth, his second wife’s struggle with bipolar, his feelings of frustration and boredom as a parent: it’s all there on the page.

Not surprisingly, when Knausgaard sent copies of the first manuscript to his family, they were unhappy . His paternal uncle tried to halt publication, threatened to sue, and attacked the book in the Norwegian press. Tonje Aursland, Knausgaard’s ex-wife, recorded a radio program about the experience of having her private life exposed in the novel, and then again in all of the media scrutiny that followed.

Knausgaard admits that the series also took a toll on his current marriage. The relentless attention caused his wife, Linda Boström, to have a breakdown , which Knausgaard details in the final episode of My Struggle.

Knausgaard made a decision to publish a tell-all book. He exposes his own struggles to be a good husband, father, writer, brother, and son with disarming candour, sometimes even to the point of self-humiliation.

But the people who share his life did not make this decision. They didn’t know that their words and actions, sometimes at very vulnerable moments, would be published let alone read by millions of people, almost half a million in Norway alone. In a country of five million, that’s roughly one in ten people who know the intimate details of your private life.

The author is well aware of his indiscretion and what it costs him and his family. “I do feel guilty,” he has said , “I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives”. Knausgaard also understands his father’s family’s response to the novels:

I wish this could have been done without hurting anyone. They say they never want to see or talk to me again. I accept that. I have offended them, humiliated them just by writing about this.

Familiar characters

British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is less remorseful about using his family as source material. In 2008 his sister published a letter in the Independent titled Keep Me Out of your Novels .

She claims that most of his works use family members as characters. These include his parents in The Buddha of Suburbia (1991), his uncle in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), his ex-girlfriend in the film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), and an account of leaving his wife and children for a younger woman in his novel Intimacy (1998).

Yasmin Kureishi is most upset about her brother’s portrayal of her in the 2003 film The Mother . “It made excruciating viewing,” she says, “It was like he’d swallowed some of my life, then spat it back out.”

After reading Intimacy, Tracy Schoffield, Kureishi’s ex-wife, criticised him for thinly veiling the break-up of their marriage as fiction:

He says it’s a novel. But that’s an absolute abdication of responsibility. You may as well call it a fish.

In defence, Kureishi argues that by writing candidly about his life he gives voice to a collective experience:

Why would you vilify me? I’m just the messenger. I’m writing a book about divorce – an experience that many people have had - or separation, children, all that. … That book was a record of that experience. I don’t see why I should be vilified for writing an account of it. … If you’re an artist your job is to represent the world as you see it – that’s what you do.

The same has been said of Knausgaard’s work. He disregards the privacy of his family. But he also challenges the rules of what we can and cannot say. He drags the darkness of our everyday thoughts into the light. In doing so, he de-shames social taboos, or at least offers the truth of what he thinks rather than what he should think. He sees the role of an artist as that of a social truth-teller.

But the tension around family memoirs brings into question the idea that an artist is simply documenting the truth. In some cases families are not upset that their lives are being represented so much as that the representation is, to them, inaccurate.

That’s not what I remember…

Can the memory of one person capture the true complexity of social events? What happens when people recall things differently? Kureishi’s sister and mother insist that he is not simply a messenger. His descriptions of his roots support the identity he desires in the present. Yasmin Kureishi, for example, recollects a very different image of her father than the one her brother paints in The Buddha of Suburbia.

In the radio documentary Knausgaard’s ex-wife recorded in 2010, Tonje’s Version , she says what annoys her is that her memories will always be secondary to his work of art. People assume they know the truth of what happened in her life because they have read My Struggle.

Doris Brett was so opposed to her sister Lily Brett’s autobiographical renderings of their childhood that she published her own counter-story . Lily Brett has written novels and essays based on her experience of growing up in Melbourne as the daughter of Holocaust survivors .

In Eating the Underworld (2001), Doris claims that her sister wrongly depicts their mother as depressed and sometimes cruel. Doris doesn’t recall her mother screaming in the night. The two sisters seem to remember their mother as two very different women.

When Lily Brett and her father received copies of Eating the Underworld, Lily issued a statement :

There are some things not worth replying to. This book is one of them.

Her father, 85-year-old Max Brett said :

This book by my daughter Doris, is a book of madness. … I recognise very little of our family life in this book.

Doris Brett chalked their public response up as further evidence of the bullying and favouritism she describes in her book.

For Yasmin Kureishi, Tonje Aursland, and Doris Brett the issue is not simply about privacy. They are all willing to tell their own stories in the public eye. Rather they want their life represented accurately, as they remember it. They insist that there is more to the shared story of their family than what is seen through the quixotic eyes of the memoirist. But of course the same question of memory’s unreliability also applies to them.

Tangled lives

With tongue in cheek, David Sedaris addresses the blurring of memory and imagination by describing his family memoirs as “ realish ”. Sedaris has forged a successful career by recounting the foibles of his family life in best-selling collections such as Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004).

Along the way, his sister, Tiffany, requested to be left out of his stories. In a 2004 interview with the Boston Globe, she said “I was the only [sibling] who told him not to put me in his books. I don’t trust David to have boundaries”. Like Aursland, she became upset by the consequences of the stories. People read them as fact, and an invitation to discuss her private life.

In 2014, Sedaris came under fire for an essay he published in the New Yorker, Now We Are Five . The essay describes the Sedaris family’s attempt to deal with their grief over Tiffany’s suicide.

A friend of Tiffany, Michael Knoblach, published a letter in the Somerville Journal accusing Sedaris of ignoring her request not to be a subject in his stories and exploiting her death for artistic and monetary gain. (The letter has since been taken down, but a similar version is reposted in the comments here ).

Should Sedaris have published Now We Are Five after his sister’s death? Some may argue that he should have respected her request not to be represented in his stories. On the other hand, the story is also about her parents, and her siblings. It speaks candidly about grief, guilt, and the way death jolts us into reality. Even when faced with estrangement and loss, the life of the family remains intertwined.

The Family Law

Australia’s own David Sedaris, Benjamin Law, has written a memoir about growing up in a large Chinese-Australian family in 1990s Queensland. The Family Law (2010) was adapted for television and premiered on SBS yesterday. Law’s memoir offers a funny take on the everyday quirks of family life, but it also deals with sensitive issues such as his parents’ divorce.

The Family Law is unlikely to draw the kind of scandal that greeted Kureishi or Knausgaard. In a recent keynote at the Asia Pacific Auto/Biography Association’s Conference , Law noted that when he gave his family the manuscript to read before publication, they were mostly concerned with correcting his grammar. Law’s father insisted that audiences are smart enough to know the story is told from only one point of view, and with comedic license.

Law may win our hearts with the help of his siblings. They weren’t to know their teenage travails would be re-staged on national television. It might also be strange for his parents to hear the public weighing in on their divorce. But Law’s story will be a welcome addition to a television landscape that currently doesn’t come close to representing the diversity and richness of Australian families.

Social secrets

In her research about family secrets , sociologist Carol Smart talks about two kinds of families: families “we live with” and families “we live by”. Families we live with are our actual families, which may be ridden with tensions. Families we live by are the ideal versions of happy, cohesive families that Smart says we draw from popular culture.

We tell family secrets, Smart thinks, to bring the reality closer to the ideal. We edit certain experiences from the public eye so our family fits with dominant ideas about what a family should be.

In this context, to reveal a family secret might be to refuse pressures to pretend. To disclose conflicts within families can open up a space to talk honestly about family life, to question social norms, and acknowledge different kinds of relationships. It can be a way of bringing the ideal closer to the reality.

Revealing family secrets can be insensitive and ethically dubious when the teller is not the only one who has to live with the repercussions. But it can also be a way to rethink the reasons why we keep certain things secret in the first place.

For family memoirists, where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy? This is not an easy question to answer. And the answer would be different in each case.

But it is worth remembering that the true stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. It is not only Law who gives generously of his life to bring a new story to Australian viewers this week, but also the supporting cast, his family.

• Hanif Kureishi
• Family history
• Karl Ove Knausgaard
• Friday essay
• Authenticity in artwork

Senior Lecturer - Earth System Science

Operations Coordinator

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Deputy Social Media Producer

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy pp 1119–1125 Cite as

Family Secrets

• Evan Imber-Black 4 , 5  
• Reference work entry
• First Online: 10 October 2019

94 Accesses

1 Citations

Secrecy is as indispensible to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared. Both enhance and protect life, yet both can stifle, lay waste, spread out of all control. Both can be used to guard intimacy or to invade it, to nurture or to consume. And each can be turned against itself: barriers of secrecy are set up to guard against secret plots and surreptitious prying, just as fire is used to fight fire. – Sisela Bok

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable, but there it sits, calmly licking its’ chops. – H.L. Mencken

Secrets in the Therapeutic Context

“I know they know, because my sisters know and their grown children know. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve sat together with our sons and daughters, looking at their wedding pictures and never have they asked to see ours, not one of them!” These words of Carol Littleton (All names and identifying information have been changed.), reflecting on the aching half century secret that her two oldest children were...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Black, L. (1993). AIDS and secrets. In E. Imber-Black (Ed.), Secrets in Families and Family Therapy (pp. 355–369). New York: W.W. Norton.

Google Scholar  

Brill, A. (1990). Nobody’s business: The paradoxes of privacy . New York: Addison-Wesley.

Hartman, A. (1993). Secrecy in adoption. In E. Imber-Black (Ed.), Secrets in Families and Family Therapy (pp. 86–105). New York: W.W. Norton.

Imber-Black, E. (1993). Secrets in families and family therapy: An overview. In E. Imber-Black (Ed.), Secrets in Families and Family Therapy (pp. 3–28). New York: W.W. Norton.

Imber-Black, E. (2013). Secrets that won’t rest. Nautilus, 6 , 1–6.

Imber-Black, E. (1998). The secret life of families . New York: Bantam Publishers.

Imber Coppersmith, E. (1985). Teaching trainees to think in triads. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 11 , 61–66.

Article   Google Scholar  

McGoldrick, M., Gerson, R., & Petrie, S. (2015). Genograms: Assessment and intervention . New York: Guilford Publishers.

Mason, M. (1993). Shame: Reservoir for family secrets. In E. Imber-Black (Ed.), Secrets in Families and Family Therapy (pp. 29–43).

Welter-Enderlin, R. (1993). Secrets of couples and couples’ therapy. In E. Imber-Black (Ed.), Secrets in families and family therapy (pp. 47–65). New York: W.W. Norton.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Marriage and Family Therapy, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY, USA

Evan Imber-Black

Center for Families and Health, Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York City, NY, USA

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan Imber-Black .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

The Family Institute at Northwestern University, Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Jay L. Lebow

Anthony L. Chambers

Douglas C. Breunlin

Section Editor information

California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Molly F. Gasbarrini

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Imber-Black, E. (2019). Family Secrets. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_838

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_838

Published : 10 October 2019

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-49423-4

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-49425-8

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

7 Memoirs About Unraveling Family Secrets

Reading Lists

J. nicole jones, author of "low country," recommends books about the search for hidden skeletons in the family tree.

There are as many different kinds of memoirs as there are novels, maybe more. The public-figure memoir. The witnessing-history memoir. The survivor’s memoir. The addiction memoir. The let-me-set-the-record-straight memoir. The travel memoir. The memoir about one specific family member. The gardening memoir. (Jamaica Kincaid has one of each of the last three! All are excellent, but let me especially recommend My Brother ). There’s the year-in-a-life-bildungsroman memoir (commonly, but not always, a travel-memoir hybrid). The illness memoir. The year-I-got-divorced memoir. The birding memoir. The memoir-in-essays. The I-discovered-some-old-journals-in-the-closet memoir. The childhood memoir. The going-home memoir. The you-can-never-go-home-again memoir…

When I was writing my memoir, Low Country , I imagined it as a combination of the latter three. A story of an unusual girlhood in a place that I love, but that struggles with a violent history and uncertain future—the coast of South Carolina is as haunted as it is beautiful, and for good reason.

As I researched and wrote, I began to see my family’s own particular ghosts reflected in the hurricanes and folklore of the region, especially in the stories of my grandmother, who did what she could to hide the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. Even as my hometown of Myrtle Beach grew to welcome tourists from far and wide, the lives of the women in my family narrowed and faded away. I had to reconsider who I had been made by all of this history, and what I wanted to be. More and more, I turned to memoirs about family secrets not only for clues about how to approach my writing, but for comfort in the authors’ accounts of searching for unknowable answers.

In these seven memoirs, the authors untangle their family stories to find a place for themselves in history:

Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee

This memoir is nearly uncategorizable in the absolute best ways: part family saga and travel narrative, part nature writing and environmental history, part history of colonialism and the ensuing tragedies, part linguistic primer. A cache of autobiographical letters written by her grandfather, an immigrant from Taiwan, leads Lee to travel to Taipei and begin a search for his story. As she charts her family’s history, she is surrounded by the story of Taiwan and her family in China. Like so many family stories, the author is haunted by what’s been lost to history and time: people, places, language, all the potential selves contained in the infinite permutations thereof. Still, like a magic trick, it is forward-looking and optimistic. The prose is as lush and beautiful as the landscapes she hikes. Every paragraph is like picking up a natural treasure on a path: a shimmering shell, a fallen leaf, a beautiful flower. 

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins

Having grown up in New Jersey, the author begins with a childhood memory of her father introducing a photograph of unknown siblings. And that becomes the catalyst for retracing her paternal family in the South, while comparing her maternal family’s less-known journey. Jerkins’s search for her history and heritage becomes an inward journey, examining how the internalization of a “move forward and never look back” mentality shaped her, and what she missed by never looking back. She follows the “migratory routes of yesteryear” in writing that is compelling and propulsive, examining the traditions, anxieties, and lore that becomes history. I hope that this book replaces, or at the very least, supplements history books in classrooms across the country, but especially in the South.

My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley

J.R. Ackerley is most well-known for My Dog Tulip , a tribute to his beloved German shepherd (yet another memoir category: the life-with-a-dog memoir). This book is dedicated to Tulip, and I think of it almost as a prequel. His single-paragraph-long forward is a shrugging, mea culpa–lite that lays out the main dilemma of writing memoir more plainly than I’ve seen anywhere else: that of how to balance the unreliability of memory with the reality you’re searching for: “The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art,” he warns.

Ackerley grew up in a modestly affluent English family, but upon his father’s death, he discovers that his father had a secret life and a second family. Ackerley must reexamine all the family history he took for granted, retracing memories of the father he thought he knew. Witty, self-deprecating, and confessional, a history that gets at the double lives we all live and the deceptive two faces of history: the real truth that is lost and what little we can ever truly recapture.

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford

As a younger daughter of an impoverished aristocratic English family, Jessica Mitford must learn the family history propping up their country manor even as it falls to pieces around her in every sense, all while being in the unique position of watching her numerous older sisters create what has become one of the more infamous family histories of the era. Most famously, her sister Diana—a Helen of Troy-esque beauty, who was the brightest of the bright young things, until leaving her prominent husband for England’s most-renowned Fascist. Another sister declared herself in love with Hitler and shot herself. Another sister, Nancy, also among the cast of bright young things, becomes a famous writer. Jessica joins the Communist party and elopes with Winston Churchill’s nephew to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, she becomes a footnote in 20th-history herself, emigrating to the U.S. and becoming a civil-rights activist and a journalist.

Ours: A Russian Family Album by Sergei Dovlatov

Reading anything by Dovlatov is the closest I’ve ever come to stepping in quicksand. The structure is wonderfully simple: with one exception, every chapter is centered around one family member. The literary aunt. The uncle in the red army. The cousin who can’t help himself. The family dog. The grandfather taken away and murdered in a labor camp. The exception is what’s become his most famous story, “The Colonel Says I Love You.” It’s about meeting his wife, and there are slightly differing accounts in The Suitcase and elsewhere, but that playfulness is what makes Dovlatov such a pleasure to spend time with. If there is a similarity between the sensibilities of Russian and Southern writing, that is it—the self-aware absurdity of mythologizing in real time on the page. There is a Netflix movie about Dovlatov that I’m too afraid to watch. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is… I defer to the colonel. 

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Like Dovlatov’s memoir, the structure of Broom’s is brilliantly and deceptively simple. It’s the story of her family as told through the history of her family’s house in New Orleans East. Reading feels like walking the halls, climbing the stairs, opening door after door looking for stories and secrets. One of the things I love about this book is the sense of extended family, and extended family history, that she connects in the lives of her neighbors and in the history of New Orleans. She describes how much of the interior of the house was left unfinished after her father’s death, and it feels as if her writing is an act of repair—before Hurricane Katrina. That a hurricane could change your whole life, could change your family history, is a fact I grew up with on the coast of South Carolina. 

The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

This extraordinary family-history memoir reads like a haunting, high-stakes detective story—Agatha Christie meets Stefan Zweig (both of whom wrote wonderful memoirs, as it happens). De Waal is an English ceramicist and artist, and this book is written in such elegance that it has the feel of one of the treasured heirlooms he writes about: his family, described as a wealthy Jewish banking dynasty, lost everything when the Nazis confiscated their property—except for a collection of small miniature sculptures. He begins to trace his family, the Ephrussi, from a patriarch in Odessa in the 1800s through expanding branches across Europe into the 20th century. The title of the book comes from their miniature sculptures, saved by a maid before the Nazis could take them, as they did everything else. De Waal describes making pottery with the same heartbreakingly fragility with which he handles his family’s stories. It creates a strange, unique tactile illusion of holding history itself in your hands. 

Take a break from the news

We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.

YOUR INBOX IS LIT

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

Chinese Cooking Helps Me Connect With My Mother—And Helps Me Prepare to Lose Her

Michelle Zauner’s memoir "Crying in H Mart" showed me how bonding over food could let me cope with anticipatory grief

Apr 8 - Nicole Zhu Read

More like this.

My Great-Grandmother Knew Our Indigenous Songs had the Power to Heal Our World

In the early days of the pandemic, I found strength in the story of how she convinced a famous composer to write a Coast Salish symphony

Mar 26 - Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe

I Want Settlers To Be Dislodged From the Comfort of Guilt

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe

Feb 8 - Natasha Varner

A Brooklynite Returns to Jamaica to Solve a Long-Hidden Family Mystery

Donna Hemans' novel "The House of Plain Truth" investigates the painful sacrifices that come with immigrating

Feb 2 - Carole Burns

DON’T MISS OUT

Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

• Relationships

Family Secrets

Ad Disclosure: Some of our MentalHelp.net recommendations, including BetterHelp, are also affiliates, and as such we may receive compensation from them if you choose to purchase products or services through the links provided

Did you grow up in a family where secrets were kept from family members? Were secrets kept from you? Were these secrets really hidden or did everyone know or suspect something was being hidden?

During my years of experience working with families, I have come across situations where the most unbelievable types of information were kept hidden from someone.

Some examples of family secrets:

Therapists are Standing By to Treat Your Depression, Anxiety or Other Mental Health Needs

Explore Your Options Today

1) A child is not told that he is not the biological son of his father who actually adopted him when he was born. However, he appears in a photograph with his parents on the day they were married.

2) A young woman is raped when she is in college. She keeps this a secret from her family, friends, and the police. This secret stays with her for ten years before she finally reveals it to her therapist.

3) A father of young children has a dark secret known by no one but his wife. He wears women's underwear under his clothes. He hides this when he is out of the house but the underwear shows when he is at home. He and his wife deny the fact that everyone in the family probably suspects what he is doing.

4) Two sons are raised by their mother after she divorces their father. A curtain of secrecy is kept by the mother about so that the two boys never learn much about their father or his family. Later in life, the older of the boys, now men, meets the father and his family, never telling his younger brother or his mother.

5) A woman knows she is adopted but her parents fail to tell her that her biological mother is alive and has made inquiries about her because she wanted to meet her.

6) A woman has alternated between two men who she dated for many years: the man she finally married and the former boyfriend who she couldn't give up. Although the two men know each other, the husband is unaware that his wife meets the other man at least twice per week. She cannot bear the thought of giving up either man.

7) A wife has good reason to believe that her family is financially secure because her husband is a very successful businessman. What she does not know is that he has a gambling addiction and they are on the verge of bankruptcy because of the enormous gambling debts he has accumulated.

One of the most toxic problems confronting many families is the existence of secrets that prevent open communication and ultimately lead to serious health and mental health problems for family members. In the end, some families are unable to maintain their cohesiveness because of family secrets. Yet, there is little written about family secrets and their impact on marriages, children, and kinship relationships. In this essay we will explore why people keep secrets, how they affect relationships and the types of problems that emerge as a result of secrecy.

It is important to stress that it is sometimes better to not reveal a secret - if it will cause undue and unnecessary damage with no benefit. However, it is the belief of this therapist that most secrets are better brought out into the open.

Motivations for Secrecy in Families:

Shame is a powerful motive for keeping secrets.

Some of the categories of things about which people feel shame:

A) Divorce: When I was a child divorce was rare compared with today. For most people it was embarrassing to admit to divorce. It was not unusual to attempt to hide a divorce from the community. My parents were divorced when I was 3 years old. When I became school age, I was instructed by my family to say that my father had died if asked by the teacher.

B) Mental Illness: Even today, when the public knows more than ever about mental illness, many families continue to maintain a shroud of secrecy around a relative who suffers from one of the psychoses, such as schizophrenia. Years ago these feelings of shame were so powerful that schizophrenic family members were permanently locked away in mental institutions where they were never seen or heard from. Other families locked their mentally ill relative in a room and maintained isolation and secrecy about this person.

C) Rape: I have a number of female patients who were raped either during their early adolescence, late adolescence or adulthood, and who kept the crime a complete secret. These survivors of violent rape attacks blamed themselves for the rape and continued to feel guilty well into late adulthood.

D) Women: Sexual issues and various types of sexually transmitted diseases are sources of extreme shame and embarrassment for women because they fear that they will be judged as promiscuous if they admit to a boyfriend that they have an STD. In this case, I am referring to the less deadly types of STD's such as Chlamydia and herpes, rather than the more serious diseases such as HIV, which has this as well as other issues surrounding it. I have seen many cases in which a woman is reluctant to begin a relationship because she fears rejection if she admits to having an STD.

E) Adoption: Even today, some families treat adoption as something to be ashamed of. Perhaps this has to do with the fear that they will be judged by others for not being able to have their own children. In addition, there are those parents who fear that if their children learn that they are adopted, they will want to find their biological parents and turn away from their adopted ones. As a result, there are those unfortunate families who keep the adoption a secret from their children.

F) Alcoholism or Drug Addiction: Some attempt to hide their drug addiction for fear of losing their jobs and others fear the loss of their loved ones if they admit to their addiction. The fear of judgment is a powerful motivator for secrecy because people find it difficult to admit, even to themselves, that they have an addiction. Yet, the possibility of recovery dictates that the addict recognize the addiction and find help.

G) Job Loss: In our highly competitive society in which success is measured by the amount of money that you make, being laid off, downsized or fired from a job is experienced as extremely painful and leads to feelings of depression for many people. Men feel most stigmatized by losing their jobs because so much of their self worth is measured by their ability to earn a living for their families. There are actually cases in which a father has lied to his children about his work status, pretending to the child that he still has his old job. In one case, the particular father went to work driving a taxi cab, changed his clothes at the garage to fit that of a driver and tried to make a living in this way so that his children and neighbors would not know the truth.

H) Extramarital Affairs: In example number 6 above, the woman lived a double life. The lover knew of the husband and wanted her to leave the marriage and be with him. She didn't want to leave her husband because she did not believe the lover could maintain a serious relationship leading to marriage. In addition, she feared condemnation from everyone and maintained strict secrecy around everything she was doing. She admitted that the entire secret could be discovered by her husband one day but, in fact, she was in denial about this possibility. She was constantly plagued by feelings of guilt, yet, could not stop the affair or leave the marriage.

I) Homosexuality: When I was a young man, studying for my PhD, the head of my dissertation committee admitted to all of us, students and faculty alike, that he had left his marriage of 25 years and his adult daughters, in order to live in a homosexual relationship with his lover. He had kept his real sexual identity hidden from his wife, children, colleagues, and friends, out of feelings of shame and the fear of rejection. It was the era of increased sexual tolerance and greater public awareness that allowed him to "come out of the closet." At first shocked, his daughters later came to accept him and his wife had always suspected something was not quite right.

J) Gambling: Tragically, in case number 7 above, the wife did not learn the full extent of the dire financial situation for herself and the children until after her husband suddenly died of a heart attack. Learning the reality of the situation was disastrous for her and led to a complete life style change due to the seriousness of the debt.

This is not a complete list of all the reasons why families keep secrets. Criminal behavior, violations of the incest taboo, and suicide are additional examples of the many other factors leading to lies and secrets.

Consequences:

Secrets lead to lies and secrets and lies can have serious consequences. That is really the theme of the novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, in which one character's secret and lies lead to more secrets and lies committed by others in the family and community.

In the real world, I heard of another case in which a son was not told that his Dad is not his biological father. The father who raised him died of a heart attack caused by congenital heart disease. The son, believing that this was his natural father, assumed that he inherited the same gene for heart disease. He spent twenty years carefully limiting his diet and working out in order to delay the onset of what he predicted would be his own demise due to the same heart disease suffered by his father. Then, on her death bed, his mother admitted to him that his Dad had adopted him when he was a small child and neither one had ever told him the truth. The reason for the secrecy was the fact that the biological father was a convicted criminal. The parents feared that the only hope of having this boy lead a normal life was if he knew nothing of this biological father. Needless to say, it came as a tremendous shock to this man to learn first, that his Dad was not his biological father and also that he harbored no genes for heart disease.

In case number 2 above, the young woman finally felt enough trust in the therapist to summon up her courage and reveal the fact that she had been raped when she was in her very early twenties. For ten years she harbored this secret, feeling like she was damaged, believing she was at fault for the rape, fearful of telling her boyfriend for fear she would be judged promiscuous and rejected, and living with an enormous amount of rejection. Once she started to discuss the rape in therapy, including all of her beliefs and fears about its occurrence, and once she felt fully accepted by the therapist, she started to feel enormous relief and her depression started to lift.

Intimacy Made Difficult:

Family secrets have consequences beyond what the secret keepers ever imagined. For example, in case number 2, the young woman who had been raped avoided forming a permanent relationship with a man for fear that when he learned about her rape she would be rejected. However, her trust in her therapist and the safety of the therapy office allowed her to take the risk of revealing the secret. The therapist's sympathetic, warm, and assuring response was such that she found the courage to tell her boyfriend. His compassion, warmth, and total acceptance of her were the source of even more relief. Then, she decided to tell her mother about it and learned information that was enormously helpful to her in her recovery from depression.

When this young woman told her mother about the rape she was once again met with warmth, acceptance, and deep feelings of regret that her daughter had kept this secret for so many years. The question was why had the young woman elected to maintain secrecy?

The answer to the above question was that the young woman was raised in a family culture of secrecy. After she and her mom talked about the rape (a very emotional discussion) her mother revealed all types of family secrets that had been kept from the children for years. The most important secret was that there was a long history of schizophrenia running through both sides of the family for many past generations. Keeping secrets became the norm of family functioning. Thus, it was natural for the young woman to hold a personal secret for so many years. Family members, extremely ashamed of mental illness running in the family, developed a culture of non communication and secrecy to protect themselves from the truth and to prevent any embarrassing information from becoming available to outsiders. The young woman's reaction to all of this was huge relief at no longer having to live with secrets, even though she did not know many of these pieces of information.

The relationship between this young woman and her boyfriend has grown deeper and closer as a result of her having divulged the awful truth of what happened to her many years ago.

Distrust and Anger:

Maintaining family secrets provides an opportunity for some family members to form a bond between one another. However, the involvement in maintaining a secret means that other family members are excluded. For example, two relatives may join together to keep a secret that may not involve a third member except to guard the secret from him/her. Therefore, this third individual is excluded. In order to continue to keep the secret, lies often have to be told and truth distorted. If the excluded member makes an observation that is perceived as coming too close to the secret, then the observation has to be refuted. In case number one, I was the younger child who, upon entering elementary school, was coached by the family to state that my father was dead. I was so young that the “untruth” became “true” in my mind. I simply came to assume he was dead. Decades later, when the truth emerged and I had the opportunity to meet my father, I felt alienated from my older brother who knew the truth and kept it from me.

Children and Learning Problems:

Learning and education are made possible by human curiosity. However, there is plentiful evidence that maintaining family secrets deeply affects children's ability to learn. The nature of secrets is that no one knows about their existence. However, children are intuitive and are quick to sense changes in tone of voice, facial expressions, and other non verbal communications indicating that there is a secret. If they have reason to fear asking for information because of parental anger, it has a dampening effect on their education. There are simply too many case studies in the literature that illustrate the fact that once a therapist helps a family to disclose and discuss a secret, the learning difficulties of the child vanish. Peggy Papp, family psychotherapist, writes about a case in which a ten-year-old girl has math problems until she is helped by her therapist to understand something in her parent's wedding picture that made no sense to her. Together, they added the months between her parents wedding and when she was born and she discovered that she was 15 months-old by the time they married. Her parents then admitted that she was adopted. Her math problems in school vanished.

Somatic Symptoms, the Body Speaks:

We human beings are metaphorical in nature. It has been my experience that after suffering a "broken heart" over a tragedy, a person has a heart attack. Some examples of the relationship between physical or somatic symptoms and secrecy are:

1) Bulimia Nervosa: The bulimic person keeps their binging and purging a strict secret out of feelings of shame and self disgust.

2) Anorexia Nervosa: The anorectic patient keeps self starvation a secret from herself. This is referred to as denial. I have seen families in which parents, as well as the anorectic individual, are in denial about the illness.

Conclusion:

I have also known of many cases where children are raised in an atmosphere of dark secrecy about both the matriarchal and patriarchal parts of their families. They grow up with a sense that something must be wrong but fear discussing this with their parents. In this type of family, once secrecy becomes the norm, there is no end to the ways in which information is blocked from flowing. In these situations, children keep secrets from parents, and parents keep secrets from children and from one another. This carries over into generations as the children marry and keep secrets from their spouses. None of this is benign since the individuals from these families who become patients, experience depression and physical or somatic symptoms.

There are studies that show that secrecy results in feelings of powerlessness. One study demonstrated that in families where secrecy was a major issue, especially with regard to sexual offenses, vulnerable youth were at greater risk of becoming sexual offenders themselves. When they committed the act of rape, they ordered their victims to behave in certain ways. The research concluded that the rape was a way to overcome the helpless and victimized feelings they had experienced in the family. Of course, the rape itself had to be kept secret, perpetuating the cycle of maintaining secrets. The study concluded that for these young people, family secrecy and deception established and maintained a disregard for the truth and for the customs of society. However, this does not mean that family secrets of and by themselves create sex offenders. Rather, it is the situations in which youth may have conduct disorders and other anti social features to their personalities, combined with family secrecy, and deception that can lead to acts of sexual abuse and rape.

I have always maintained that there are few secrets that are so dangerous that they cannot stand being brought out into the open, where they suddenly lose the evil and dark air that once surrounded them. What was once said in reference to war is true about secrets and the decision to reveal them: "There is nothing to fear but fear itself."

Additional Resources

As advocates of mental health and wellness, we take great pride in educating our readers on the various online therapy providers available. MentalHelp has partnered with several thought leaders in the mental health and wellness space, so we can help you make informed decisions on your wellness journey. MentalHelp may receive marketing compensation from these companies should you choose to use their services.

BetterHelp Online Therapy - BetterHelp offers online therapy services from licensed professionals through an easy-to-use website and app. To get matched with a virtual therapist, complete a brief questionnaire online or start get started with a 20% off your first month today .

Talkspace Online Therapy & Psychiatry - Licensed therapists and psychiatrists are available for virtual sessions via Talkspace . From virtual counseling to medication management services, Talkspace online therapy may be covered by your insurance provider. Simply fill out a brief assessment online to save $100 and match with a licensed therapist today .

MentalHelp may receive marketing compensation from the above-listed companies should you choose to use their services.

• A Family, Relationship, and human Communication Problem: Splitting
• Communication Approaches in Relationships
• Dating Relationships Change Over Time
• Divorce and Family Geometry, A Case Study
• Does Marriage Counseling Work?
• Family & Relationship Issues
• Infidelity, To Divorce or Not?
• Is It Love or Codependency? Let’s Have a Dialogue
• Making Peace with Guilt — How to Clean Up Harm
• Making Peace With Our Elderly Parents
• Marital therapy concepts
• Marital therapy process
• Of Marriage, Communication and Sex
• Predictable Patterns of Marriage Breakdown
• Relationship Problems
• Relationship Problems: Ambivalence
• Relationship Strengthening Approaches and Intervention Sequences
• Relationships and the Silent Treatment
• Relationships, Former Lovers, and Trust
• Resilience: Relationships
• Soothing Approaches in Relationships
• Stigmatized: How Some People Become Judged
• Teens and Family Relationships: Siblings
• Teens and Peer Relationships
• Teens and Romantic Relationships and With Other Adults
• The Challenge of Mixed or Blended Families
• The Fine Art of Listening Can Transform the Quality of Your Communication and Relationships
• The formal divorce process
• The Great Equalizers of Life: The Human Experience Reveals We Are Far More Alike Than Different
• The New Extended Family
• The Perfect Family
• The Relationship Dance
• Time-Starved Relationships
• What makes for a happy marriage?
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Mens Health
• What Is Addiction?
• Signs, Symptoms, & Effects Of Addiction
• What Causes Addiction?
• Mental Health, Dual-Diagnosis, & Behavioral Addictions
• Addiction Treatment
• Addiction Recovery
• Information On Specific Drugs
• Homosexuality And Bisexuality
• Internet Addiction
• Childhood Mental Disorders
• ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
• Anxiety Disorders
• Bipolar Disorder
• Depression: Major Depression & Unipolar Varieties
• Eating Disorders
• Childhood Mental Disorders And Illnesses
• Dissociative Disorders
• Impulse Control Disorders
• Internet Addiction And Media Issues
• Intellectual Disabilities
• Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Somatic Symptom And Related Disorders
• Tourettes And Other Tic Disorders
• Physical Mental Illness Flipbook
• Suicide Rates Vector Map
• Alzheimers Disease And Other Cognitive Disorders
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
• Colds And Flu
• Crohns Disease / Irritable Bowel
• Heart Disease
• High Blood Pressure
• Memory Problems
• Men's Health
• Sexually Transmitted Diseases
• Sleep Disorders
• Women's Health
• Anger Management
• Mindfulness
• Stress Reduction And Management
• Weight Loss
• Disabilities
• Domestic Violence And Rape
• Family & Relationship Issues
• Grief & Bereavement Issues
• Pain Management
• Self Esteem
• Terrorism & War
• Health Insurance
• Health Policy & Advocacy
• Health Sciences
• Mental Health Professions
• Alternative Mental Health Medicine
• Medications
• Psychological Testing
• Psychotherapy
• Virtual Outpatient Eating Disorder Treatment
• Child Development And Parenting: Infants
• Child Development And Parenting: Early Childhood
• Sexuality & Sexual Problems
• Homosexuality & Bisexuality
• Aging & Geriatrics
• Death & Dying
• Physical Development: Motor Development
• Vygotsky's Social Developmental Emphasis
• Bullying & Peer Abuse
• Family And Relationship Issues
• Grief And Bereavement

[Family Secret]

Sometimes grandmas tell you things they shouldn't

I learned [family secret] from one grandmother, then the other.

First, it was Millie, my father’s mother, in the house in Pennsylvania, which smelled of smoke and deodorizer, in the living room decorated with small crocheted blankets of coarse rainbow yarn.

My grandmother’s third husband, Grandpa Floyd, was watching pro wrestling on the television as Millie told me stories about our family, her shrill voice competing with the TV and rising in crescendo when she tumbled into something new.

“You didn’t know that!” she exclaimed as she let slip a secret about Uncle Phil.

I was such an all-knowing little girl. By the time I was nine, I knew about Uncle Jack, the used car salesman, and his gigolo ways. I knew about how Aunt Jeanie went nutty when my granddaddy chased away her one true love. I knew about my great grandfather’s penchant for South Mountain moonshine that made him see snakes slithering on the ceiling, which he begged his youngest daughter, my grandmother, to chase away.

I knew all these stories because Millie told me: in long soliloquies in the kitchen as we made sweet tea; at the honey-oak table as we sucked on hard candies, shaped like strawberries, which we pried from a sticky hunk in a green crystal dish; and in the living room as Grandpa Floyd rooted for “Macho Man” Randy Savage in the ring or Cal Ripken, Jr. on the diamond and the smoke of my grandparents’ unfiltered Pall Malls rose and swirled into the air purifier and came out spritzed with medicinal-smelling mint.

Her gray eyes sparkled. She had more. “Well, you know your daddy [family secret], too.”

Not long after, I heard the same story from my mother’s mother, Betty, in the old yellow and brick Victorian in downtown Hagerstown, which smelled of fried chicken livers and coffee cake, in the sunroom where Pap Pap, as silent as the little dog under his arm, watched westerns and ate peanuts.

Betty wore silk scarves around her neck when she went out and pointy-toe shoes, which showed off her tiny feet. She had a closet filled with wigs she thought might one day come back in style.

I was nine going on ninety, an “old soul,” she told me. She took my side when I complained about my father—about how he made me eat meatloaf and threatened to send me to finishing school when my elbows rested on the table. “It’s always do this, do that, ‘do as I say.’”

“You know [family secret] made him that way,” she said that afternoon.

For several years, I carried my knowledge alone. I looked for evidence of [family secret] in old boxes in the basement; in photo albums that went back to black and white; in a shoebox of love notes between my parents, which I secretly read by flashlight; and in the dusty jewelry boxes of dead relatives, whose last remains were mother-of-pearl buttons, costume jewelry, and grotesque chunks of wax.

I searched for [family secret] in my father’s eyes, in his voice, in the drawers of his nightstand, in his jars of pennies, and in the back of his closet, where the baby-blue tuxedo from his wedding to my mother in ’72 was stuffed in a dry cleaning bag.

I thought I detected traces of [family secret] in moments, in habits, in absences. I blamed [family secret] when Dad picked fights with Mom about her housekeeping. I suspected the weight of [family secret] in those silent moments when my mother seemed to drift away, lost in thought, her left hand plucking thin the black hair of her eyebrows.

I romanticized [family secret], turned it hyperbolic and Shakespearean. [Family secret] defined the way we were, made what we were somehow counterfeit, a substitute for the way things were supposed to be.

Once, I almost stumbled into [family secret] directly.

Dad and I were out getting hot dogs—at least, that is why we stopped. But I was a “difficult” girl, who didn’t “eat hamburgers and hot dogs like a normal kid,” so I asked him for a pretzel instead.

We were in a booth in a tiny A-frame restaurant lined with wood paneling when a man approached familiarly.

“Jerry!” he exclaimed as he strolled our way.

I wondered if this was another great uncle; there seemed to be so many of them when I was out with Dad. Usually, in this situation, I was supposed to stand and wait to be introduced. Instead, Dad handed me money and pushed me toward the counter for a pretzel.

“I haven’t seen you since [family secret],” I heard the man say as I walked away.

Then they were out of earshot and out the door of the restaurant. By the time I got back with my pretzel, Dad was sitting in our booth alone.

“Who was that?” I asked, preparing to disclose, finally, that I knew [family secret].

“Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

My sister is seven years younger than I am, but when she grew old enough, the grandmothers told her [family secret], too.

By then, I had lived with [family secret] for years. For a while, I had looked for traces of it in my prepubescent features—worried [family secret] meant I wasn’t who I thought I was at all. Then I developed an uncanny resemblance to Betty and figured out the math.

It was soothing to have [family secret] together, away from the old ladies who didn’t understand the impact a family secret could have on the young. My sister and I worked together on the puzzle, shared evidence and identified patterns of behavior with roots stretching back before our births.

Conjectures became truths: [family secret] was why our father didn’t like music and wouldn’t let us listen to the radio in the car.

It wasn’t until I was grown that I told my mother I knew [family secret].

I was nineteen and in love, and I had come home to beg my father to come to my wedding. He was incensed that his oldest daughter, the first in his family to go to college, would make such a mistake. “You have a chance to finish college debt-free,” he told me. “You don’t know what you are getting into.”

Then he turned to me with gritted teeth and asked: “What would you do if he died?”

For sure, this was about [family secret].

“I’d be happy for every day I had,” I told him.

In my childhood bedroom later that night, my mother found me in tears. [Family secret] was why Dad wasn’t coming to my wedding. [Family secret] meant Dad didn’t believe in love, I wailed.

“I don’t think your father was talking about [family secret] at all. He’s not still hurt about that. He’s over [family secret].”

I saw how I had disregarded my mother: [family secret] had always been there, as one of the worry lines around her eyes.

Before she died, Millie told me the story of [family secret] again. This time, she dug through a shoebox to prove it, producing a faded black-and-white photograph of my father and [family secret].

When Millie passed a year or so later, I wondered what happened to that photo. Did my mother slip it into the trash? Did my father see it and sink onto his mother’s too-soft bed to cry? Did one of my aunts discard it with Millie’s old greeting cards or tuck this remnant of her brother’s past into a faux-leather purse?

I thought about what would happen to [family secret] when my father died. As a young newspaper reporter, I had revealed another man’s family secret to the world. He was Baltimore’s first black fire lieutenant. For his obituary, I interviewed his brother, an octogenarian whose memory went back further than the captain’s second third wife wanted it to. “His kids didn’t know!” the woman yelled.

As I grew older, though, my perspective on [family secret] changed. My first marriage lasted a decade, but after it ended in divorce, I sometimes caught myself wondering if the emotions I had felt were real and marveling that the relationship had ever even happened. Would it feel any less surreal if the end had been marked with a gravestone instead of a decree?

I’ve also had the privilege of watching my parents fall in love again. Instead of growing apart, they’ve settled into retirement on adjacent bar stools, enjoying the same soap operas and the same fried foods, with more than forty years of family secrets behind them.

• About Project
• Testimonials

Business Management Ideas

Essay on My Family

List of essays on my family, essay on my family – short essay for kids in english (essay 1 – 250 words), essay on my family – for children (essay 2 – 300 words), essay on my family – paragraph (essay 3 – 400 words), essay on my family –topics (essay 4 – 500 words), essay on my family (essay 5 – 500 words), essay on my family – why i love my family (essay 6 – 500 words), essay on my family – for school students (class 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 standard) (essay 7 – 500 words), essay on my family (essay 8 – 750 words), essay on my family – long essay (essay 9 – 1000 words).

A family is one of the greatest gift god has given to all living creatures on the earth including humans. It is a privilege to have a happy family as not everyone in the world has it.

The joy of living with your parents, fighting with your siblings over petty can just make you smile the moment you think of it. In order to inculcate the values of a family in the students, we have composed some short essays for students.

These essays are suited for students of all ages and classes. Not only these essays shall give an insight on how a family should be but shall also enrich the students with the moral values of a family.

Audience: The below given essays are exclusively written for kids, children and school students.

Family is important to every one of us and we all love our family. Wherever we go in this world and whatever we may achieve, our heart and soul will always be in our home because it is where our beautiful family is. Nothing in this world can be stronger than the bonding of the blood . The members of the same family may have differences of opinions, may quarrel often for silly things but in spite of all these it is our family that supports us during our ups and downs.

As the saying goes, “ Family is the best thing you could ever wish for. They are there for you during the ups and downs and love you no matter what”.

Contrary to this saying, we cannot choose our family as we choose our friends. But I can say that I’m blessed with a wonderful family. My family is very small with four members – my mother, my father, my elder sister and me. My family is a middle class family and my father is officially the bread winner of our family. My mother supports him financially by taking tuitions for school children.

We do not have much money or wealth but what my family has in abundance is love for each other which cannot be replaced by anything else in this world. My father and my mother are the role models to my sister and me. They struggle a lot to give us a better life. More than anything they have taught us discipline and morals of life which is helping us to lead our lives in a righteous path even today.

I cannot ask anything more to God since he has already showered me with my family which I treasure the most every second and will safeguard even in the future.

The family is a valuable god gift which plays a most crucial role in every individual’s life. I love my family very much because all of my family members stand in my good as well as bad times. From moral teachings to love and support, my family has always helped me without any demand. There is no doubt that we experience our biggest triumphs when we really connect to them.

My family is like a strong pillar for me, on which I can rely blindly anytime I require support. From my family, I have learned the social graces of loyalty & cooperation.

My family consists of my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, my father, two young sisters and myself. My grandparents are the pillars of my family and my grandfather is the head of my family. He is the one whose decision relating to any matter is final and all of us do respect it.

Right from my childhood, my family members have prepared me for the challenges that I’ll face in the years ahead. In addition to this, all of my family members help and serve each other at times of need. These qualities that I have learnt from my family has helped me to shape my adult life in a right manner.

I am really very attached to my grandfather. He holds an excellent life experience because he has already faced so many ups and downs. My Grandfather has helped me to build my perception & vision towards society.

My family has always been there to motivate and encourage me to overcome all difficulties in life and achieve success. The role of every member in my family is unique and important in their own way. I thank God that I have grown up in a family full of love and discipline. My family values will definitely help me in becoming a better person.

A person without family and its love never becomes completely happy in his/her life. I am complete and happy with my family that includes five members. My family is a group of five including me, father, mother, brother, and sister. Family bonding is a unique type of love that gives you every lesson needed to live a harmonious life.

Growing under the supervision of a caring and loving family will increase our social values and overall well-being. Each member of my family carries out equal responsibility in sculpting the strong bonding needed for a better future and develop moral importance in each other.

My father owns a successful business of office stationery store. He uses the money to cover all our expenses and give a better lifestyle to the family. He works hard day and night to get us better education, food, home, etc. He hides all his tiredness when he comes home after a long day to spend quality time with us.

My mother is a talented homemaker who also does a part-time tailoring at home. She does all her duties with at most interest, from taking care of us to all the household chores and finds time to pursue her passion as well. She is a multi-tasker and does all the tasks from helping us in our studies to preparing delicious healthy foods to sculpt us into a better human being.

My brother is an engineering graduate and does a job in a well-known company. He is my best well-wisher and helps me in all ups and downs. My sister is also an engineering graduate and an employee in an IT company. She always finds time to help me with all my difficulties and she is my secret keeper too.

My family is a lifeline to whom I can run to, whatever may be the situation I am facing. My family guides me to be a good person and help me in nurturing good values. We, humans, are animals that live together spreading love and care for each other, and this togetherness is called family. The absence of such a divine bonding make us equal to animals.

Family value and growing in such a caring surrounding helps me to pass all the struggles and hardships that I face in my daily life. Whatever be the situation we are facing, our family will never leave us alone. My family is a blessing for me and I value everyone in my family with equal respect and love.

Most of the people in the world are blessed with having a family. A family, with whom you can share all your joys and sorrows, who is there to guide you through your growing years, who stands by you in the toughest of the situations. I too am blessed to have such a family.

My family is one the most bizarre family in the world. We are four people, my mother, my father, my younger brother and me. While my father is the one who does work for a living, it is my mother who is the boss of the house. My father is a humble person. He is an officer in a government department. My mother is a housewife. It is our mother who takes care of our studies as our father is often busy with his official assignments and even travels for days together. We just miss him when he is not at home.

He never scolds us. But, our mother is just the opposite. She wants us to remain disciplined and we often get scolded by her. However, our father comes to our rescue most of the times. My brother, still in school is the one with whom I love to spend my time the most. Not because I love to play with him, but because, being the elder sister, I enjoy instructing him and showing him who is more powerful at home. He, at a time, seems so helpless when our mother says to obey his sister. I just love that moment. But not all days are the same. I hate having to study all along while he gets to play more than me.

The Atmosphere in my Family:

We largely have a peaceful atmosphere at home. After school, our time is spent on studying, playing and watching television, which of course our mother does not like. Unlike other couples, my mother and father seldom have a fight. In fact, as soon we see an argument brewing up, one of them just withdraws and it is just rare to see a heated conversation between them. This is what I like the most about them as I feel that my parents are so cool. It is only me and brother who love to fight with each other.

However, we know that behind those fights, it is actually our love for each other which binds us together. I just enjoy being at home spending time with my parents and my brother. I just feel how bad it would be when tomorrow I and my brother shall move on for our professional lives and we shall not be able to spend much time together. However, it is the memories of today which shall be with me forever and will bring a smile on my face anytime when I feel low.

The Importance of a Family:

A family is said to be the first school of a child. It is from here you start to learn how to speak, walk and interact with the world. It is important to value the importance of a family in one’s life. At times, people feel that they are grown-ups and that their parent’s advice does not matter anymore, but that is not true. It is the elders of the family who at any given of time would know the world better than us and we should all respect our family members and love our siblings as well. It is the family who builds our character and we should feel fortunate to have a family around us.

Introduction

My family values are what I take so dear to my heart because they have made me what I am today and I plan on passing these great values to my children in future. Every family has those things, acts and values that they hold in high esteem and they cherish so much. These vales have become a part of them: most times, it is what distinguishes the traits in each family and in some ways it makes or mars the future of the family members. Same applies to my family, we have some set values that has become a part of us and it has made my life a lot better because I have become a better person who is not only valuable to himself but also to the society at large. I will be sharing some of these values with you.

My Family Values:

Some of my family values include:

1. Honesty:

This is a principle that is highly protected in my family. My dad has this saying that, “honesty is the best policy.” Ever since I was little, my family has taught me how to be honest and the benefits that lie within. Sometimes, my parents even test us in ways we were not expecting and a reward is given to the person that comes out honest. This is one of my family values that I cherish so much and I am proud that it is what my family hold in high esteem.

2. Kindness to Others:

This is not a common trait to all. My mom has this belief that if the world and everybody in it shows love and kindness to one another, there will be no hatred and wars will be eradicated. This is a family value that we cherish so much. I learnt to show love to everybody. Even when we did not have much, my parents will still give to those who are needy. My dad says that the world is like a river, we would eventually flow into one another later and you do not know the future, the person you helped today might eventually be of help to you tomorrow.

3. Education:

This is a value that has been passed from generation to generation in my family. My dad would say that education is the best legacy you can give to a child. My family does everything in their capacity for you to get a sound and benefitting education. The acquisition of knowledge is also quite important. All of us try to gain more and more knowledge because we all have a family slogan that says “knowledge is power and that power makes me a hero.”

4. Dress and Appearance:

This is a religious value we cherish in my family. My dad would say that you are addressed the way you dress. I do not want to be address wrongly and give out a wrong impression. So, our appearance really matter a lot to us and the way we dress.

Conclusion:

Every family has one thing or the other that they hold in high esteem and tend to pass on from generation to generation. This is what makes a family a united sect not because we are related by blood but because of we share the same values.

Introduction:

Why I love my family is a question that has been floating through my mind for a very long time because no matter how hard I try to pin out a reason why I love them, I just can’t find one. This can be due to fact that they mean the whole world to me and I will do anything for them. I love my family a lot and I would like to share some of the reasons why I love my family and will never trade them for anything.

Why I Love My Family:

I have a family that consists of 6 people: my father, my mother and four children which includes me. For you to understand why I love my family I will tell you a little about each of them and why I love them so much.

My father is the best father in the world: well, that’s what I say. He is a business manager. I look up to my father a lot because I will like to take a lot of his behaviours and make it mine. He taught me to be contented with whatever I have. We did not have much when I was growing up; my dad lost his job and still did not allow anything of the pressure change how he behaved to us at home. He is caring, gentle, accommodating and disciplined.

My mum is the best cook in the world. I do not know where I would be today without my mum. I owe her a lot. She is a teacher by profession and this fascinates me a lot because not only is she inculcating knowledge in the young minds of tomorrow, she is also building the future of our society at large. I want to be like my mum. I remember those times when she had to sacrifice when the most precious of her things just to make me happy. She is loving, caring, understanding, accommodating. In fact, she is everything you can ever wish for in a mother.

My elder sisters are the best. Although they can be frustrating sometimes but that is mostly because of my stubbornness. They pretend they do not really care but deep inside they do. The things they do even subconsciously say otherwise. I remember a day in elementary school, I was being bullied a boy in class. On this particular day, he hit me. Unknowing to me, my sister heard about it and she beat the boy and made him apologise to me, I felt so happy that day because I had someone who had my back.

My brother is one of the best gifts I have received. He is the last child and this gives him an opportunity to be annoying if you know what I mean. He is joyful and always ready to heed correction. There was this day, I heard him bragging to his friends about how awesome I am, and I was the happiest that day.

We all have one reason or the other on why we love our family. I love mine because they are the best gift I could ever ask for and the fact that they have been there for me through the good, bad and funny times.

Importance of family is something that is greatly overlooked and underrated in the world we live in today. The definition that the family had about one hundred years before now was very clear. Back then, a family was believed to be a unit that consisted of the father that was in charge of the finances of the family, a mother whose primary duty was to look after the home and take care of the children and then there were the children. Largely based on the region you are from, a family can also include members of the extended family like aunts, uncles and grandparents. This type of family system is referred to as joint family.

Family Importance:

A family that is important is one that is very strong. If a family is going to be very strong, there is a need for the bond between them to be very strong. Bonds that help in keeping the members of a family with each other are relationships. If there are very strong relationships among all the members of a family, there is going to be stronger commitment between all of them and the family as a unit will be very important.

Better communication is also a result of family relationships that are very strong. If all the family members can take time out to talk and know each other well, the bond between them is bound to be very strong. Even if the conversations are about big things or small things, it does not really matter. The most important thing is that all family members stay connected to one another. It is very important that they all list to each other and understand every member.

How to make Family Bonds Very Strong:

We have various things that can help our family bond to improve.

A few of them include:

1. Love: love is the most important thing we need for our bonds as a family to improve. When we love the members in our family, we will also be able to know all about privacy, intimacy, caring, belonging and sharing. When there is love in a family, the family will prosper.

2. Loyalty: loyalty is something that comes as a result of love. Family members should stay devoted to each other. It is important that we are able to count on our family to have our back anytime we are facing problems.

The importance of family can never be overstated even though we live in a different time now and our attitudes to relationships, marriage and what a family should be has changed. The family is something that we need to help share our problems and be there for us anytime we have issues. A lot of the things that were not acceptable in the past and we now see as normal. Even with all the changes that the society has effected on our family system, the family still remains the major foundation of our society and this will remain the same.

My family is the best gift I have got. A family can be simply said to mean a social group of different people in our society that includes one or more parents and also their children. In a family, every member of the family commits to other members of the family in a mutual relationship. A family is a very important unit and the smallest unit in the society. A family whether a big one or a small one is of very great importance and use to all of its members and is believed to be the unit of our society that is strongest because the society is formed from the coming together and culmination of various families.

In many cultures, the family serves a child’s first school where the child learns all about their traditions and cultures more importantly learn about all the rudimentary values in life. A family is very essential in the teaching of healthy habits and good manners to all the members of the family. It gives the members of the family the opportunity to become people with better character in our society. I feel very lucky to be born into a small and lovely family; I learnt a lot of things from my family.

I am from a middle class and average family with six members (my father, my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, my younger brother and me). My grandfather is the head of the family and we all respect and listen to him. He is really wise and tries to advise each and every one of us using his many life experiences. He has been involved in many interesting and adventurous activities that he tells me about all the time. Most of the time, he has the final say on all of our family issues and he does his best to make all his decisions impartial.

Any time we are eating today as a family, he sits at the top of the table; we all have designated seats at the dining table. When my brother and I are available, my grandfather teaches us about our traditions and cultures. My grandfather is very friendly and has a cool and great personality and tries to talk nicely and calmly to everyone passing across his message without being rude. He helps my brother and sometimes me with our assignments. He majorly teaches us about all of the tools we need to be successful in life including punctuality, discipline, moral, cleanliness, continuity, honesty, hard work and trustworthiness.

My lovely grandmother is one of the nicest people I know, she tells my brother and I lovely stories every night. My father is a civil engineer and he is very hardworking, sincere and punctual. He is the breadwinner of the family and does his best to provide for every member of the family even if that means he has to work extra hours. My mother is very sweet and takes care of every member of the family even though she works as an accountant at a firm. She wakes up very early in the morning to make preparations for the day. My brother is a funny and jovial person that enjoys sporting activities and I love him so much.

Sometimes I wish my cousins, uncles and aunts lived with us, I love having them around. There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages of having everyone around. I have highlighted some below.

Some advantages are:

1. It gives a better routine of living that can contribute to a proper growth.

2. Having a joint family helps in following the numerous principles of an equitable economy and helps teach discipline and respect. It also teaches us how to share the burden of other family members.

3. There is the understanding of having to adjust to the needs of other family members.

4. The children in a large family get to grow up in a happy environment because they have children of their age around that they can play with.

5. All the members of a joint family are usually very disciplined and responsible as everyone has to follow the instructions of the family head.

Some of the disadvantages include:

1. There is always the chance of a rift or fight between the family members because of the possible imbalance of feelings of oneness, brotherly love and feeling of generosity.

2. There is a chance of the members of the family that earn very high looking down on members of the family that do not.

The concept of family is important in India for every individual. Family defines an individual background in terms of social relations and growth. Families influence the lives of individuals from childhood to adulthood especially in decisions concerning life milestones like marriage and career paths. Indian families live together for up to four generations under one roof and they manage to maintain lose family relations compared to other families across the globe. Indian families tend to stick to their cultural practices as a family and they maintain religious practices that cut across the family. Elders in Indian families are respected by the members of the family and their opinions are considered during decision making.

What Family Really Means :

Basic knowledge defines a family as a group of people who share genetic and legal bonds. However, the concept of family means a lot more for other people than just the bond and it incorporates the concepts of culture and religion. In India, the concept of family differs from what the rest of the world perceives as family.

Families in India go beyond nuclear and extend to wider circles, whereby the extended family lives together and are closely related. The relationships in the family are strong such that cousins are considered siblings and aunts and uncles are considered parents. Family also means the unconditional love among the members of the family whereby there is support in terms of finances and emotions.

Why the Family is so important:

The family plays a central role in lives of individuals in teaching of moral values. Parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents have been known to teach the children on morality and disciplinary issue s in most cultures. Both spiritual and moral values are instilled through family. Family give a sense of belonging to individuals because they are over by the family and supported at all times.

A family will always support its members with needs including financial and emotional needs. In a family, there has been established levels of satisfaction and happiness from the joy of being together. Families also helping community development through contributions and participating in activities in the community. The family is important in the society in maintaining order, discipline and peace.

I come from a big family. My family has not moved to an urban area and so we still live as a wider circle together with the extended family. In my nuclear family, I am the first born of four children. I have one sister and two brothers who are still at school. I have three aunts and two uncles. My cousins are twelve in number and most of them are at school except for the youngest ones.

My grandparents are very old and they do not get out of the house much and are being taken care by my parents and aunts. Most of the children are always at school and the house gets quiet but during holiday, we all unite together as a full house. My family is of the middle class in terms of wealth. Our religion is Hindu and we all practice the Indian cultures and traditions. What I love about my family is that everyone is a good cook and the food is always amazing. Members of my family are kind and respectful and that is why we rarely have disputes. The family support is strong and we all love each other.

Why I love My Family:

Having a big family is interesting because the house always feels warm. As I had earlier mentioned, my family is made of good cooks, which makes me love them. There is always teamwork within the family and good relationships are maintained. I like the adventurous nature of my family because we always have fun whenever we go for holiday vacations or have a family event.

Moral cultural and spiritual values are highly cared for in the society. My family is oriented in good moral values and believe we make a good role model for the society. Despite the influence of education, the family has been able to maintain the culture and traditions of Indian people. The love that exists in my family is precious and that is the most important value of all times because what family without love?

Our Weekend Outings and House Parties:

We do not have many of these in our family because of the different schedules among the members. We only have weekend outings and house parties during holidays. Birthday parties are and weddings are the parties that we frequently have as a family. I love parties at home because the food is usually exceptionally good. Also, the dancing and happy faces. Weekend outings are usually in form of picnics and they are usually full of games.

Cousins Visit during Summer:

My family is young and only three of my cousins are in college. The rest are in high school or elementary schools. Whenever my cousins come home from school, it is a happy moment for the whole family and we host parties to welcome them home. Whenever my older cousins are at home, I enjoy their company and I love to hear stories about college because that is where I will be in a few years’ time.

In the spirit of holidays, we have a vacation or two in a year. During these vacations, plans begin early and when the time comes, it is enjoyable and relaxing. Vacations for us as children tend to be more enjoyable because we have an environment away from home and with minimal parental supervision and we tend to explore and talk among ourselves. Team building during vacations strengthens the bond in families.

Family is a blessing to individuals because that is where they belong and it is what defines them. A good family is built through moral values and team effort. Having family events and parties or vacations re important is strengthening the relationships within a family. A happy individual is definitely from a happy family.

Family , My Family , Relationships

Get FREE Work-at-Home Job Leads Delivered Weekly!

Join more than 50,000 subscribers receiving regular updates! Plus, get a FREE copy of How to Make Money Blogging!

Message from Sophia!

Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!

Here are a few recommended articles for you to read next:

• Essay on My School
• Essay on Solar Energy
• Essay on Biodiversity
• Essay on Globalisation

No comments yet.

Leave a reply click here to cancel reply..

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Billionaires

• Donald Trump
• Warren Buffett
• Email Address
• Free Stock Photos
• Keyword Research Tools
• URL Shortener Tools
• WordPress Theme

Book Summaries

• How To Win Friends
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• The Code of the Extraordinary Mind
• The Luck Factor
• The Millionaire Fastlane
• The ONE Thing
• Think and Grow Rich
• 100 Million Dollar Business
• Business Ideas

Digital Marketing

• Mobile Addiction
• Social Media Addiction
• Computer Addiction
• Drug Addiction
• Internet Addiction
• TV Addiction
• Healthy Habits
• Morning Rituals
• Wake up Early
• Cholesterol
• Reducing Cholesterol
• Fat Loss Diet Plan
• Reducing Hair Fall
• Sleep Apnea
• Weight Loss

Internet Marketing

• Email Marketing

Law of Attraction

• Subconscious Mind
• Vision Board
• Visualization

Law of Vibration

• Professional Life

Motivational Speakers

• Bob Proctor
• Robert Kiyosaki
• Vivek Bindra
• Inner Peace

Productivity

• Not To-do List
• Project Management Software
• Negative Energies

Relationship

• Getting Back Your Ex

Self-help 21 and 14 Days Course

Self-improvement.

• Body Language
• Complainers
• Emotional Intelligence
• Personality

Social Media

• Project Management
• Anik Singal
• Baba Ramdev
• Dwayne Johnson
• Jackie Chan
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Narendra Modi
• Nikola Tesla
• Sachin Tendulkar
• Sandeep Maheshwari
• Shaqir Hussyin

Website Development

Wisdom post, worlds most.

• Expensive Cars

Our Portals: Gulf Canada USA Italy Gulf UK

Privacy Overview

• lol Badge Feed
• win Badge Feed
• trending Badge Feed

Browse links

• © 2024 BuzzFeed, Inc
• Consent Preferences
• Accessibility Statement

28 Spilled Family Secrets That Changed Lives, Broke Hearts, And Rewrote History

"I was the family secret. My birth father didn't know about me. He does now, and it has hurt his relationship with his wife. I feel terrible."

BuzzFeed Staff

Reddit user u/kaushman2 asked the community, "What family secret was finally spilled in your family?" The thread quickly filled with many shocking revelations that altered some families forever. Here's what people shared:

1. "one of my uncles might have been a serial killer. after he died, my cousins found a journal in his remote cabin in northern minnesota with a bunch of dates and what seemed like descriptions of people. he was known for picking up hitchhikers. they turned stuff over to the fbi, but the boundary waters area is huge and remote, so it'll never be fully investigated unless someone stumbles across something. i was only 11 when he killed himself. so i don't remember much about him. this all came out during a drunken night at a bonfire.", 2. "my aunt didn't lose her teaching job due to budget cuts like she'd always claimed. turns out she never had a valid teaching license to begin with, regularly had affairs with the dads, and embezzled pta money".

— u/itsjustmo_

3. "My grandpa was a drag queen. When he returned from the war, he would take 'trips to the city' on weekends with his military friends. My aunt found his drag costumes (wigs, heels, etc.) in his closet, and my grandma scolded her and told her never to discuss it again. It slowly came out that he was actually taking all this stuff to perform in the city on weekends."

— u/plzadyse

4. "When I was a kid, we had a huge, surprise 50th wedding anniversary party for my grandparents on my dad's side. Everyone wanted my grandpa to give a speech when it came time for cake/dessert. The surprise was on all of us because they weren't actually celebrating 50 years of marriage. They secretly divorced and then got back together, but no one knew. Everyone was shocked, to say the least. I don't remember all the details, but they got remarried at some point in secret and just carried on life as normal."

— u/Prestigious_Pop_230

5. "After 25 years of marriage, my dad announced his divorce to my mom, then married her sister two months later. So, my aunt is now my stepmom and my cousins are now my stepsisters. I guess they’ve had a thing going since before my parents even started dating."

— u/Skeeze_Kneez

6. "My dad cheated on my mom and almost missed my mom giving birth to me because he was with his affair partner when she went into labor. And, he was trying to get my mom to meet the person he cheated on her with."

— u/Minute-Aioli-5054

7. "My great-aunt was a nurse supervisor at a mental hospital in the 1920s. She fell in love with a guy who was being evaluated for a murder trial. She helped him escape, and they went to Florida, where the police caught up with them. My aunt got off easy, but he got the electric chair. I found all this in a newspaper archives while working on family history. I showed it to my mom, who admitted it was all true."

— u/p38-lightning

8. "I was conceived using a sperm donor. I found out that my dad was not my biological father when I was 38, and that (at the time) I had 18 half-siblings! We are up to 32 and counting because they keep rolling in. It actually created a cool new social group."

— u/mynuname

9. "The story was always that my two cousins were adopted and not related to each other even. People sometimes would ask them if they were twins. They would say, 'Nope, we're adopted.' Somehow, it got out that their bio mom was their younger aunt. The older sister adopted and raised both girls as her own. The younger aunt/mom got married and started a family before all this came out, too. It was a wild journey. I have heard this is common in Catholic families. They hide the illegitimate pregnancy, and someone in the family adopts the child or pretends it is an older married family member's child. This was in the early '80s, so I guess it was possible to get away with it."

— u/thrax_mador

10. "My parents got divorced in secret, yet we all lived miserably under the same roof my whole life. Eventually, they remarried…also in secret. I found their re-marriage license."

— u/buffythebudslayer

11. "I found out I was adopted when I was 32 years old. My mom's cousin is my real dad. They tried to take me back when I was 3, but my mom refused. Now, my birth parents are both doctors, live in a mansion, and have six more kids. I grew up in poverty."

— u/ReallyGlycon

12. "I was always told that my mother's father had died in the war. After my mother died, my cousins found out that our grandfather was alive and had divorced my grandmother when my mom was young. My grandmother, being a good Irish Catholic, told the nuns at the school that she was a widow because the church wouldn't let a divorced woman's kids go to Catholic school. My grandfather had remarried and had a whole other set of kids and grandchildren. My cousins tried to meet him, but he wasn't interested."

— u/Johnny_B_Asshole

13. "My father wasn't my bio dad. My bio dad, his father, etc., were in organized crime. I made my siblings get tested. Three of the seven of us tested, and we all had DIFFERENT fathers — not the one who raised us. It ruined my entire identity. Wild."

— u/Aggravating-Pea193

14. "My grandfather was not a struggling immigrant who toiled away in a dress factory upon arrival in America. He was, in fact, a high-ranking member of a powerful crime family."

— u/Express_Hotel2682

15. "I found out a couple of years ago that when I was 3, my father divorced my mother and picked me up from kindergarten. He told the caretakers I wouldn’t return to the kindergarten again, then drove off with me. The caretakers called my mother, who of course knew nothing about this. She then realized my father was taking me to another area in my country (three hours away). My mother was at home with my baby sister (my father's daughter), and he split us from each other."

"The most messed up thing is that when my parents went to court, the judge let me stay with my father and let my sister stay with my mother because I had already gotten used to being without my mother. They officially split my sister and me apart. I had 'only' been away from my sister and mother for three months. I love my father; he's a good man and raised me well, but I can never forgive him for this act alone. Because of this, my mother has never had another husband/boyfriend, and I have only visited my mother and sister on holidays for my entire childhood."

— u/Practical-Region-138

16. "I, by mistake, found out that my mother had an affair and got pregnant with me. Neither my dad nor I had any clue about this. I figured this out when I was 37 years old. My dad and I did a DNA test, and it came back that there was a 0% chance he was my biological father. This caused my parents to get a divorce after 47 years. My entire life was turned upside down. I went through a very dark time. I now know my entire biological family; we all have much in common. I am thankful that I found out since I always had questions about why I didn't look like my dad's family and why we didn't have similar interests. My biological family and I spend time together, and I feel like the missing piece of me was finally found."

— u/hotrodstew

17. "My 65-year-old dad found out his mother wasn't actually his mother. She was his grandmother, and his sister was his birth mother. She had him when she was 15; it was extremely frowned upon back then. They sent her away while pregnant, and she returned when he was born. He was raised as if he was another sibling. His entire family knew but kept it a secret, even after the 'mother' and 'grandmother' all died. He only found out by chance when he got a passport and needed his birth certificate. He doesn’t even know who his birth father is. It's so sad."

— u/Happy-Grapefruit-007

18. "My dad was previously engaged and called off the wedding the day before because his fiancée's parents bought them a house next door to them. My mom found out for the first time (as did I) in family therapy after 25 years of marriage."

— u/sogedking

19. "My grandpa had a quarter that was warped from a bullet hitting it. He showed it to me when I was a kid and said it was in his pocket and could have saved his life. It wasn't until way later in life that I found out it was my grandma who shot him."

— u/burntreynolds33

20. "My parents were married for 28 years. Each had an affair very early in the marriage, then things settled down. A few years after my father died, my mother met and married a man. But, my father's aunt recognized him as the man she had an affair with many years prior. The aunt spilled the beans and fractured the entire family. Drama, drama, drama."

— u/tiger5765

21. "We found out after my grandfather died that none of his seven children with my grandmother were his. They all likely had different fathers."

— u/ProudMedusa71

22. "At age 43, I learned I had a half-sister. My father had an affair, and she was conceived after my brother was born, but before I was. She reached out to me and is a lovely person. We have been in contact ever since, have traveled together, and I have visited her several times."

— u/greekmom2005

23. "When my dad's mom died, we learned she was actually 10 years older than anyone thought she was. She was embarrassed to marry a man younger than her, so she lied for like 80 years."

— u/LeastCleverNameEver

24. "My mother-in-law was once engaged to a high-up mafia guy, and personally hung around with some of the most notorious mobsters in Europe. Eventually, things got quite dangerous. They ended things and she moved back home. No one would expect this from a simple grandma in Florida, but she just revealed the whole thing to my husband in case when she dies, he finds the wedding dress photos, letters, and other things in her belongings."

— u/HuckleberryLou

25. "My dad's little sister wasn't really his little sister. It was his sister's baby, raised by his mom. The girl didn't know until she was 21."

— u/Ok-Thing-2222

26. "My mother is kid #7 out of 10. My aunt (kid #4), who was born in 1945, did her DNA and found out that she has a different father from everyone else. She was devastated. There was always a rumor that there was an affair, but nobody talked about it. She has so many questions, but nobody's alive to answer them."

— u/bossykrissyCC

27. "On my father's death bed, I learned he had a second wife, and children, and the worst part was dad was taking his little secret to his grave. The secret kind of slipped out."

— u/Rich-Appearance-7145

28. And: "I was the family secret. My birth father didn't know about me. He does now, and it has hurt his relationship with his wife. I feel terrible."

— u/xprovince

Sheeeesh. Have you ever learned about a wild family secret? Tell us in the comments!

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Share This Article

Carolyn Hax: Family requests that sibling’s crime stay a secret

Hi, Carolyn: My only sibling recently pleaded guilty to a crime that will land them in prison for the better part of a decade. My mother, our only remaining parent, lives near my sibling, while I live across the country with my two kids.

I will be visiting my family with the kids this spring, and in preparation, I shared with my mom that I will be telling my kids, in developmentally appropriate terms, what is going on with my sibling.

My mom got very angry with me and told me she disagreed. Several days later, my aunt emailed me “on behalf of” herself, her two adult kids (my first cousins) and her brother to tell me they all feel very strongly that I do not share any details about my sibling with our extended family members when I visit them next month. She even specifically included a lie I could tell instead.

They are concerned about their reputation, their “good name” (which they don’t share with my sibling, though I do) and their ability to be respected in their hometown. There was no mention of care for me, or recognition of the challenge I am going through grieving my only sibling and their choices.

I am deeply uncomfortable and offended by this. Keeping secrets is not how I operate and is also what led my sibling to ruin their life. Not to mention other instances where keeping secrets has resulted in irreparable damage to family bonds. These family members and I rarely speak, and they have never visited me or my kids where we live. Even if I did feel a strong sense of duty to them, I find lying about something like this to be morally reprehensible.

What may I say to my aunt regarding her email? I hadn’t even decided what I was going to tell my extended family about my sibling, but now I am just so angry with these family members for trying to strong-arm me into lying that it’s hard to think straight about the situation.

— Emotional

Emotional: This all sounds so difficult, I’m sorry.

About Carolyn Hax

You communicated with your mom as a courtesy, information only, about choices you are fully entitled to make for yourself. That is the baseline fact here.

When she and the others (mis)took it as an invitation to weigh in on your business — and encouraged you to lie — they piled distractions onto the basic fact.

Now you have new stress on top of the original stress, all of which will take some time and attention to manage, but it, too, is a distraction. The basic fact is still this: You communicated with your mom as a courtesy, information only.

So clear the distractions and embrace the fact. Then your response becomes simple: that you will speak of this as you see fit. Right? Because that was true all along, no matter what anyone said. You were always the last word on your own approach to this mess.

Once you’re centered on this point, the only issue left is how to present to others your commitment to self-determination.

I suggest calm, polite, succinct, honest and utterly disengaged from any discussions you don’t intend to have. For example, reply to your aunt’s email: “No doubt this is hard for all of us. To be clear, I won’t lie to anyone. It is helpful, though, to know how you all feel. See you soon, [Your Name].” Not up for negotiation? Then don’t negotiate.

You can deflect all strong-arming, no matter the source — calmly, firmly. That, too, is a baseline fact, even as you tinker with how you’ll phrase your “no.”

More from Carolyn Hax

From the archive:

Dad struggles with wedding toast to ‘selfish’ son

A DNA test and a long-kept family secret

Honey, I’d like you to meet bill, a lifelong acquaintance

A step-parent acknowledges a past betrayal

Unemployed spouse puts chores, hobbies above job search

Sign up for Carolyn’s email newsletter to get her column delivered to your inbox each morning.

Carolyn has a Q&A with readers on Fridays. Read the most recent live chat here . The next chat is April 19 at 12 p.m .

Resources for getting help. Frequently asked questions about the column. Chat glossary

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

My Husband Doesn’t Know About My Secret Bank Account. It Has a Dark Origin.

I was in a very low place..

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column.  Have a question for Care and Feeding?  Submit it here .

Dear Care and Feeding,

When my husband and I were first married, I was sexually assaulted at a party and, as a result, became pregnant. I decided to keep the pregnancy, and while it was probably not the decision my husband would have made, he said he would stand by me and that any child I had would be our child.

At the time I was in a very low place. I didn’t ever share this with him, but I didn’t believe him. I was obsessed with the idea that he was going to leave us, that we would be left with nothing. I eventually confided this to my brother, and he helped me set up an emergency savings fund in my name only, as a failsafe if things did go poorly. My brother started it off with a pretty sizable amount of money and I added to it whenever I could, squirreling money away for about three years, until I got in a better head space and could see that my husband is very much a devoted father to our daughter, and that even if we were to end up divorced he would still be there for her. My issue now is that I have this pool of money my husband is unaware of. I’ve offered it back to my brother, but he’s said to just put it toward our kid’s education “or something.”  I don’t know how to tell my husband that we have this money without sharing the whole story about how little faith I had in him. Especially considering that money that could have been spent on dinners out or vacations was going into this fund behind his back. I just feel sick over the whole thing. I don’t want to make him feel bad, but he would certainly notice if our kid’s college fund suddenly increased by this much.

—Secret Keeper

Dear Secret,

I think you need to come clean, for the sake of your marriage (and its long-term health) and for your own sake, because holding on to a big secret is hazardous to your health . For at least the last decade, neuroscientists have been aware that the stress of keeping big secrets causes cortisol and other stress hormones to surge, which affects your blood pressure, GI tract, metabolism, memory, and more. More recent research has zeroed in on why secret-keeping is so stressful: It isn’t so much the not-telling that harms you; it’s the thinking and worrying about what the result of disclosing your secret will be.

So while I emphatically do not think that the secret you’re keeping is a “bad one” (indeed, it seems to me that it’s a perfectly understandable one), I think you need to get it off your chest. The sooner, the better. And context is everything. Don’t lead with, “So, I’ve got this secret bank account.” Take your husband back with you to those early dark days. You didn’t tell him then how harrowing they were; that doesn’t mean that you can’t tell him now. Because that’s the real secret—not the money. This won’t be an easy conversation, but a strong and loving marriage—which it certainly sounds like you have—will be able to withstand it.

Want Advice on Parenting, Kids, or Family Life?

Submit your questions to Care and Feeding here . It’s anonymous! (Questions may be edited for publication.)

My mom remarried 24 years ago after surviving a marriage to my father that was marked by domestic abuse. She lives in a beach home that is co-owned by my stepfather and me. I financially support them both. This past January, my otherwise healthy mother came down with a severe bout of colitis. She was hospitalized at a small hospital near her home. My sister and I live a distance away and expressed concerns about the quality of care at this hospital—concerns my stepdad didn’t share. We accepted this (uneasily). As things progressed, however, it became clear to my sister and me that our mom needed more and better care than could be provided at the small beachside hospital. We tried hard to get my stepdad to move her to a major university hospital. That did not happen. She continued to fail, and eventually had to have surgery to remove her colon. Fast-forward to March, when she was hospitalized again, and again failing. This time, over the objections of my stepdad, I had her moved to a major medical center, where she was found to have an infection and continued disease that had not been diagnosed. She was discharged yesterday and is now much better, but her disease will require management in a university setting. My sister and I want to move our parents to an independent care community near me so I can assist with appointments, as I live near a university medical center that has doctors who specialize in my mom’s disease. Living near me will also allow me to help care for my mom and be available to help my stepfather. He is dead set against this. He says we are manipulating our mom into accepting this move.

Our mom suffered a great deal during this medical scare and it’s clear the whole thing could have gone differently. I know this has been traumatic for the whole family, so I’m trying to be sensitive to my stepdad’s viewpoint, without pulling the trump card of “I pay for everything.”  But it seems like he’s putting his preference to live at the beach over our mom’s health. How can we handle this situation without dividing our family?

—Faithful Daughter

Dear Faithful,

I’m so sorry your mother has gone through this. I feel for all of you, I do. And without knowing more about the dynamic between you and your stepfather over the last quarter-century and why you are supporting them, it’s hard for me to fully assess what’s going on here. But I will say this: I think it’s unfair to jump to the conclusion that your stepfather is prioritizing his desire to live on the beach over his wife’s health. There are other reasons that someone his age would be reluctant to move to an independent care facility; there are other reasons someone his age would dread leaving a familiar, comfortable place (where presumably he and your mother have friends and other ties to the community) for a new, unfamiliar one; there are even reasons he might not be thrilled about living so close to you, given how much power you already have over their lives.

I am not suggesting that this means your idea is terrible. It might be the right one. But I must tell you that this is not your decision to make. It’s your mother’s. She gets to decide whether access to reliable, expert medical care and the ongoing help of her daughter are her top priorities. They may not be, and as hard as that would be for you to hear, if that’s the case, you don’t get to overrule her.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be very clear to your mom about what you fear and how strongly you feel about the importance of this move. But tell her . Don’t talk about all this with your stepfather as if your mother were incapable of deciding for herself.

Now, if you believe that your stepfather is a bully, if your sense of their marriage is that he is too controlling and that your mother has no free will, that’s a horse of a different color. But you don’t say that. What you do seem to be saying is that the battle for control of the rest of your mother’s life is one that’s being waged between her husband and her adult child. And I’m sorry, but that’s not fair to her. When people age, they don’t lose their agency.

Catch Up on Care and Feeding

·  Missed earlier columns this week?  Read them here . ·  Discuss this column in the  Slate Parenting Facebook group !

We moved to a new town a few years ago and enrolled our kids in a local private school (the public schools, once well-regarded, stayed closed for a long time due to COVID and have not really recovered). Almost everything about this private school is great (the other kids are kind, the teachers are caring, athletics and arts programs are strong), except for core academics, which are unambitious. Our boys (9 and 11) have some specific strong academic interests and have asked us for more to do in those areas (math for both, computer science for one, a foreign language for the other), so we set them up with classes outside of school. They find most of the school’s academics pretty unchallenging, but tolerable in light of all the other positives of the place. In their areas of their specific interests, though, the kids are way ahead and bored to tears.

And while up to now they have had enough free time to do both all their schoolwork and their outside classes, a growing homework load (much of which seems like busywork) and more intense hobbies/extracurriculars mean that time is becoming an ever scarcer resource. My spouse has suggested we talk to the school and ask that our kids be excused from math class and allowed to use the class time to go to the library and do their outside math work. (Our older kid can already manage what this school will cover in 9 th grade, to give you a sense of the disparity between “outside” and school math.) But I’m a little apprehensive about how such a request will be received. My spouse counters that he went to a public school and his parents asked for enrichment, and that the school was happy to step up: He got to take his first high school class when he was in 5 th grade, was given distance-learning opportunities for classes not offered locally, and skipped a grade. Surely, he says, a private school should be willing to let kids spend one class in the library working independently. How do you think we should proceed?

—Study Hall Supplicant

Dear Supplicant,

You should ask. But you also shouldn’t get your hopes up.

Your husband’s experience as a child is heartwarming, but that doesn’t mean this school will proceed as his school did. As to his point about how a private school “surely” should be amenable to a smaller ask: I have my own anecdote about this, and it’s not pretty. For several years, my daughter went to a small private school that was also (to put it kindly) academically unambitious. (The reasons I enrolled her there, then kept her there for longer than I wished to despite its many shortcomings, are too complex to go into here.) I tried a variety of ways to deal with the mismatch between her schoolwork and her abilities—none of which required any extra work from her teachers or were any more onerous than what you plan to ask for—and the school refused every time. In the end, I took her out of the school and homeschooled her until she started high school (we have one very good public high school, a magnate alternative school in which—oh, the irony!—the “alternative” focus is “academically oriented”).

The school your kids attend sounds to me like a much better one than my daughter’s old school. This gives me hope. But I also want to note that you’re doing a great job getting your children the academic enrichment they crave, and if the school is rigid about their sitting through classes they are well beyond, and you (and your kids) really feel it’s unmanageable to keep on the way you have been, you have a big decision to make. So be prepared for that. Have a plan; don’t go into this without your next steps sketched out. Meanwhile, it will cost you nothing to ask (politely, respectfully, carefully, humbly) for their support in the way you mention. As long as you’re not arrogant about it, as long as you frame it in terms of your children’s specific needs (rather than the school’s unchallenging academics), there’s no reason for anyone at the school to get their back up. The worst they can do is say no, sorry, no exceptions to our rules. (Unless it isn’t the lovely place it seems to be, and there’s a hostile underbelly you haven’t yet seen. Because, trust me, you don’t want to keep your kids in a place like that. I am still deeply regretful I didn’t pull my child out sooner than I did.)

Good luck! And I would love to know how this works out. I’d be so glad to have an anecdote to report about such a request that has a happier outcome than my own.

My father and I have always had a difficult relationship. He and my mother split up when I was 5, and his anger towards her transferred to me. I left his house when I was a young teen and moved in with my mom full-time. We have been in and out of touch ever since. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s a narcissist, and he may have other, deeper, untreated mental health issues. But he’s getting older and very much wants to have a relationship with me (although I often feel he wants an audience more than a real connection with me).

The number one thing I have asked of him, if we are to be in contact, is not to speak ill of my mother. He just can’t seem to manage that. He’ll keep his thoughts to himself for a bit but then get in a jab so cutting it takes my breath away. My mother died about 18 months ago, so his nastiness about her hurts even more now than it did before. But still, I feel a lot of guilt about not speaking to him. Given his limitations, it seems unlikely he will ever be able to meet my request. My brother, who has a less strained (though not easy) relationship with him, agrees.

And yet, I’m torn up about it. I’d like to either be able to put on a thicker skin and have lunch with him and a chat on the phone every now and then, or else be able to let go of my guilt about not speaking to him. This middle path of not-speaking-and-feeling-bad isn’t serving me.

—Torn Up and Semi-Orphaned

Dear Torn Up,

This is a hard one, because either way of proceeding requires you to become someone you’re not. And in fact both paths require shedding the same self: the sensitive, loving, empathetic one. (People tell those of us who are sensitive to “put on a thicker skin,” but it’s not as easy as that, is it? You feel things deeply. How are you supposed to stop yourself from feeling what you feel?) You’re torn up about cutting your father out of your life entirely because, despite his many faults, you have empathy for him—because you are the sort of person who cares about how others feel. So being able to cut him off without guilt would also require “putting on a thicker skin.”

So let’s try to frame this differently. Since you have (mostly) accepted that he isn’t going to change—that he may try up to a point to abide by your request, but somehow can’t seem to help himself—the question is whether maintaining a (limited, occasional lunch or phone chat) connection with him is important to you. Set aside, just for a moment, your guilt. How much do you care about him? Does it matter to you to have an ongoing connection with him? And if so, why? (Please try a thought experiment, too: If you sever the connection altogether, how do you imagine you will feel upon the news of his death? If the answer to that is relief , that tells you a great deal. But if it’s regret , you may want to move forward differently, if cautiously.)

If you decide that you are going to remain in touch with him—and you are aware, going into it, that he will not reliably respect the boundary around badmouthing your mother—you will need to devise a strategy for your own mental health. Interrupt him and change the subject? Get up and walk away (or hang up on him)? Shift your internal gears and immediately, consciously, stop listening to him and train your mind on something else?

Then see what happens. If the pain of being around him, despite all your efforts, outweighs the pain of cutting ties with him, then tell him, honestly, that this is the case, and say goodbye. But don’t let anybody tell you that there’s an easy solution to what you are dealing with. In life (and especially in relationships), there are rarely circumstances that are as cut and dried as people make them out to be.

More Advice From Slate

I’m a 29-year-old straight cis woman. I have no kids, and in spite of all I read in this column, I’d still like to be a parent in the future. My question is about getting on the same page with my partner about this. He’s a 28-year-old straight cis man who says he’s neutral on having children. Honestly, I don’t think he ever thought about it until we started dating five years ago.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

What Sentencing Could Look Like if Trump Is Found Guilty

By Norman L. Eisen

Mr. Eisen is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

For all the attention to and debate over the unfolding trial of Donald Trump in Manhattan, there has been surprisingly little of it paid to a key element: its possible outcome and, specifically, the prospect that a former and potentially future president could be sentenced to prison time.

The case — brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, against Mr. Trump — represents the first time in our nation’s history that a former president is a defendant in a criminal trial. As such, it has generated lots of debate about the case’s legal strength and integrity, as well as its potential impact on Mr. Trump’s efforts to win back the White House.

A review of thousands of cases in New York that charged the same felony suggests something striking: If Mr. Trump is found guilty, incarceration is an actual possibility. It’s not certain, of course, but it is plausible.

Jury selection has begun, and it’s not too soon to talk about what the possibility of a sentence, including a prison sentence, would look like for Mr. Trump, for the election and for the country — including what would happen if he is re-elected.

The case focuses on alleged interference in the 2016 election, which consisted of a hush-money payment Michael Cohen, the former president’s fixer at the time, made in 2016 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg is arguing that the cover-up cheated voters of the chance to fully assess Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

This may be the first criminal trial of a former president in American history, but if convicted, Mr. Trump’s fate is likely to be determined by the same core factors that guide the sentencing of every criminal defendant in New York State Court.

Comparable cases. The first factor is the base line against which judges measure all sentences: how other defendants have been treated for similar offenses. My research encompassed almost 10,000 cases of felony falsifying business records that have been prosecuted across the state of New York since 2015. Over a similar period, the Manhattan D.A. has charged over 400 of these cases . In roughly the first year of Mr. Bragg’s tenure, his team alone filed 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 people or companies.

Contrary to claims that there will be no sentence of incarceration for falsifying business records, when a felony conviction involves serious misconduct, defendants can be sentenced to some prison time. My analysis of the most recent data indicates that approximately one in 10 cases in which the most serious charge at arraignment is falsifying business records in the first degree and in which the court ultimately imposes a sentence, results in a term of imprisonment.

To be clear, these cases generally differ from Mr. Trump’s case in one important respect: They typically involve additional charges besides just falsifying records. That clearly complicates what we might expect if Mr. Trump is convicted.

Nevertheless, there are many previous cases involving falsifying business records along with other charges where the conduct was less serious than is alleged against Mr. Trump and prison time was imposed. For instance, Richard Luthmann was accused of attempting to deceive voters — in his case, impersonating New York political figures on social media in an attempt to influence campaigns. He pleaded guilty to three counts of falsifying business records in the first degree (as well as to other charges). He received a sentence of incarceration on the felony falsification counts (although the sentence was not solely attributable to the plea).

A defendant in another case was accused of stealing in excess of $50,000 from her employer and, like in this case, falsifying one or more invoices as part of the scheme. She was indicted on a single grand larceny charge and ultimately pleaded guilty to one felony count of business record falsification for a false invoice of just under $10,000. She received 364 days in prison.

To be sure, for a typical first-time offender charged only with run-of-the-mill business record falsification, a prison sentence would be unlikely. On the other hand, Mr. Trump is being prosecuted for 34 counts of conduct that might have changed the course of American history.

Seriousness of the crime. Mr. Bragg alleges that Mr. Trump concealed critical information from voters (paying hush money to suppress an extramarital relationship) that could have harmed his campaign, particularly if it came to light after the revelation of another scandal — the “Access Hollywood” tape . If proved, that could be seen not just as unfortunate personal judgment but also, as Justice Juan Merchan has described it, an attempt “to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

History and character. To date, Mr. Trump has been unrepentant about the events alleged in this case. There is every reason to believe that will not change even if he is convicted, and lack of remorse is a negative at sentencing. Justice Merchan’s evaluation of Mr. Trump’s history and character may also be informed by the other judgments against him, including Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling that Mr. Trump engaged in repeated and persistent business fraud, a jury finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll and a related defamation verdict by a second jury.

Justice Merchan may also weigh the fact that Mr. Trump has been repeatedly held in contempt , warned , fined and gagged by state and federal judges. That includes for statements he made that exposed witnesses, individuals in the judicial system and their families to danger. More recently, Mr. Trump made personal attacks on Justice Merchan’s daughter, resulting in an extension of the gag order in the case. He now stands accused of violating it again by commenting on witnesses.

What this all suggests is that a term of imprisonment for Mr. Trump, while far from certain for a former president, is not off the table. If he receives a sentence of incarceration, perhaps the likeliest term is six months, although he could face up to four years, particularly if Mr. Trump chooses to testify, as he said he intends to do , and the judge believes he lied on the stand . Probation is also available, as are more flexible approaches like a sentence of spending every weekend in jail for a year.

We will probably know what the judge will do within 30 to 60 days of the end of the trial, which could run into mid-June. If there is a conviction, that would mean a late summer or early fall sentencing.

Justice Merchan would have to wrestle in the middle of an election year with the potential impact of sentencing a former president and current candidate.

If Mr. Trump is sentenced to a period of incarceration, the reaction of the American public will probably be as polarized as our divided electorate itself. Yet as some polls suggest — with the caveat that we should always be cautious of polls early in the race posing hypothetical questions — many key swing state voters said they would not vote for a felon.

If Mr. Trump is convicted and then loses the presidential election, he will probably be granted bail, pending an appeal, which will take about a year. That means if any appeals are unsuccessful, he will most likely have to serve any sentence starting sometime next year. He will be sequestered with his Secret Service protection; if it is less than a year, probably in Rikers Island. His protective detail will probably be his main company, since Mr. Trump will surely be isolated from other inmates for his safety.

If Mr. Trump wins the presidential election, he can’t pardon himself because it is a state case. He will be likely to order the Justice Department to challenge his sentence, and department opinions have concluded that a sitting president could not be imprisoned, since that would prevent the president from fulfilling the constitutional duties of the office. The courts have never had to address the question, but they could well agree with the Justice Department.

So if Mr. Trump is convicted and sentenced to a period of incarceration, its ultimate significance is probably this: When the American people go to the polls in November, they will be voting on whether Mr. Trump should be held accountable for his original election interference.

What questions do you have about Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial so far?

Please submit them below. Our trial experts will respond to a selection of readers in a future piece.

Norman L. Eisen investigated the 2016 voter deception allegations as counsel for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump and is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election Results
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• Auto Racing
• 2024 Paris Olympic Games
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Personal finance
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

A trial is underway for the Panama Papers, a case that changed the country’s financial rules

Trial underway for Panama Papers, a case that changed that country’s financial rules

The Supreme Court stands in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024 as the trial starts for those charged in connection with the worldwide “Panama Papers” money laundering case. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

• Copy Link copied

Juergen Mossack, partner of the law firm Mossack-Fonseca, leaves the Supreme Court during the trial of the “Panama Papers” money laundering case in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

Lawyers and court workers leave the Supreme Court during a recess for the trial of the “Panama Papers” money laundering case in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

PANAMA CITY (AP) — Eight years after 11 million leaked secret financial documents revealed how some of the world’s richest people hide their wealth, more than two dozen defendants are on trial in Panama for their alleged roles.

The repercussions of the leaks were far-ranging, prompting the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland and bringing scrutiny to the then-leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

But those on trial now for alleged money laundering are principally the leaders and associates of the now defunct Panamanian boutique law firm that helped set up the shell companies used to obscure those really behind them.

The leaders of that firm, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, are among those on trial.

WHAT IS THE PANAMA PAPERS CASE ABOUT?

Panamanian prosecutors allege that Mossack, Fonseca and their associates created a web of offshore companies that used complex transactions to hide money linked to illicit activities in the “car wash” corruption scandal of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

In December 2016, Odebrecht pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to a charge related to its use of shell companies to disguise hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes paid in countries around the world to win public contracts.

According to Panamanian prosecutors, the Mossack Fonseca firm created 44 shell companies, 31 of which opened accounts in Panama to hide money linked to the Brazilian scandal. The judge on the case, Baloisa Marquínez, last year decided to also merge the Odebrecht-related charges to prosecutors’ allegations about the firm’s work for German giant Siemens. Prosecutors allege a former executive with the company used entities created by Mossack Fonseca to transfer funds for bribes.

A Siemens spokesperson declined to comment, noting that it is not a party to the Panama case and that it involves former Siemens employees in their private capacity.

WHAT DO MOSSACK AND FONSECA SAY?

The 71-year-old Fonseca has not been present for the trial, because his lawyer said he is hospitalized. But he had previously said his firm did not control how their clients used the shell companies the firm created for them. Its role was simply the creation and sale of the companies.

Mossack, a 76-year-old lawyer originally from Germany, said in a statement to The Associated Press that “we categorically reject that we have committed any crime, not Mossack Fonseca nor the subsidiaries … and we hope that can be proved in the trial. If there is in fact justice in our case, they have to absolve us.”

Both men were arrested in 2017, but had awaited trial out on bond.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRM?

Mossack Fonseca helped create and sell around 240,000 shell companies across four decades in business. It announced its closure in March 2018, two years after the scandal erupted.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial siege and the irregular actions of some Panamanian authorities have caused irreparable damage, whose consequence is the complete cease of operations to the public,” the firm said in a statement at the time.

HOW DID THE SCANDAL AFFECT PANAMA?

Panama’s international reputation for financial services was tarnished by the scandal.

The European Union included Panama on a list of tax haven countries — low taxes or fiscal opacity — which led international financial institutions to demand the implementation of measures that would allow scrutiny of the banking and financial systems.

Consequently, the country’s business creating shell companies plummeted some 40% within a year of the scandal.

WHAT CHANGES DID PANAMA MAKE?

Panama’s government implemented changes to make it possible to identify the ultimate beneficiary behind limited liability companies and their assets.

Changes also sought to give greater responsibility to the registered agents — typically lawyers from Panamanian firms — listed for the shell companies.

The objective was to make it possible for Panamanian authorities to respond to requests to assist in investigations.

Julio Aguirre, an expert and financial specialist in Panama, said the government wants the registered agents to actually keep an eye on the companies. Before, “the law didn’t ask them to follow up, there wasn’t that legal obligation,” he said.

Banks had also previously been restricted in their ability to know who was really behind accounts. “They gave the bank the vehicle to obtain that information,” Aguirre said.

•   Weather

Search location by ZIP code

Leftover fish is secret ingredient for north shore fertilizer company’s amazing growth.

• Copy Link Copy {copyShortcut} to copy Link copied!

GET LOCAL BREAKING NEWS ALERTS

The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox.

It was the Pilgrims who learned from the Indigenous people of this region that if you placed fish heads in the ground before planting corn, it could help to ensure a bountiful harvest.

Many years later, a North Shore family is using basically the same ingredients to grow a successful modern-day fertilizer company called Neptune’s Harvest Organic Fertilizer .

Located on the Gloucester docks, Ann Molloy's family has owned for more than 100 years, Molloy is in charge of marketing for Neptune’s Harvest. She said not only did the first people have it right, but so did her Italian ancestors.

"The old Italian fisherman have been burying fish remains in their gardens for years, and they always had the best tomatoes," she said.

At Neptune’s Harvest, they repurpose thousands of pounds of leftover fish from the dock's daily catch. The product known as gurry is then turned into a liquid, stabilized and eventually becomes organic fertilizer.

"When you fillet a fish, only 30 to 40% is the fillet. So, 60 to 70% is left over. So, we were wasting a lot of the seafood by throwing it back into the ocean," Molloy said.

More than a century ago, Molloy’s grandfather first established a seafood company on the Gloucester docks. Her father would follow in the family's footsteps. By the early 1980s, Neptune was created as a natural offshoot.

"We started with the seaweed, then the seaweed blend. Then we added a turf formula, a lawn starter and then we went into the rose and flowering tomato and veg," Molloy said.

Neptune is processing close to 1,000 gallons of fertilizer a day. It’s being sold locally and as far away as the Far East.

"The fish has your macronutrients, micronutrients, trace elements, amino acids, vitamins, enzymes, minerals. You’re literally giving the plant and soil everything it needs in nature’s perfect balance," Molloy said.

Providing balance as well as jobs for Gloucester’s proud fishing history, is part of Molloy’s family history.

"We’re a fifth-generation family company. We take a lot of pride in what we do. And the products works amazing," Molloy said.