Openness healthy
When attempting to explain inexplicable actions – such as the gentle man next door who turns out to be a serial murderer – FBI profilers, therapists and journalists will sometimes explain it through the “three-life” theory. This theory says that every person has a public life, a private life and a secret life.
The public life is the one lived at work and in the community.
The private life is the one lived at home, among spouses, children and extended family.
The secret life is the one that dwells deep inside the person. Dreams and demons reside there.
Adults make big and small decisions every day that allow their three lives to either integrate or disconnect.
Scandal comes from the disconnects. The news in recent weeks has been filled with revelations of secrets from secret lives. Some of the secrets are decades old. Two Catholic priests – John P. Leary and Michael Toulouse – lived very public lives. Leary was president of Gonzaga University throughout the 1960s. Toulouse taught high school in Spokane in the 1930s and ‘40s and college in Seattle after that.
Both men, now dead, molested boys. For those who interacted with the public lives of these men, revelations about their secret lives evoked disbelief, followed by a sense of betrayal.
The three-life theory also helps explain less shocking, but still disturbing, disconnects. This week, for instance, a Washington state trooper was suspended amid allegations that during a traffic stop he coerced women into exposing themselves.
The media are often criticized for sensationalizing cases in which a secret life, or an errant private life, is revealed to the public. But some of the cases deserve media scrutiny, especially when men and women in positions of public trust violate that trust through their private actions.
Society holds law enforcement officers, ministers, teachers, coaches, elected officials and even journalists to a higher standard, and they should be held there, because when they falter, they can harm individuals and disrupt the social order.
But all adults who act one way in public, and the opposite way in private, have potential to do great harm, especially to children. Therapists’ offices are filled with clients reconciling the message sent by parents who charmed at the office but abused at home.
Leary and Toulouse did their dirty deeds in a time before Miss Americas wrote books about molesting fathers, before presidents’ wives and movie stars confessed to secret drinking. Now, fewer people are willing to keep the dangerous secrets of others. Abusing clergy, teachers and coaches aren’t as easily pawned off on other churches and schools.
The shift in society to more openness – and the media’s ability to report that openness – doesn’t make any of the three lives any easier. But it does hold people more accountable, and ultimately, this benefits all.