Secrets From Past Could Damage Trust

“When the landlord came pounding on our door, demanding the rent - not just for this month, but for the last three months - I thought I would die,” says newlywed Mimi, 28.

“I have no idea what Rich did with that money. He’s supposed to pay the rent, while I pay for everything else on my paltry salary from a city social services agency.”

Rich has never told her exactly what he earns. “Rich hedges and insists it’s just too complicated for me to understand,” she says.

Mimi’s six-month marriage is 180 degrees different from the life she envisioned. “I remember how mature and focused Rich seemed when we met eight years ago at a college party,” she says. “He told me he planned to be his own boss - unlike his father, who slaved for years in a big company that exploited him. He also said he dreamed of making some woman extremely happy. I wanted to curl up in his arms and stay there.”

But their passionate college romance has turned into a real-life disappointment. “We have no life now,” she laments. “I want to have a baby - but how can we possibly afford one if we can barely afford to keep our cat?”

Rich, a 29-year-old, feels besieged by his wife’s complaints and lack of faith - and tired of what he sees as her hypocrisy. “How come it’s OK for Mimi not to earn a lot of money, but not OK for me?” he asked.

It’s Mimi, he says, who wants to live in a fancy apartment in a better neighborhood, but who then complains that the hours he puts in for a new client are too long.

“She reminds me of my mother, who, I’m sure, hounded my father about moving from the house he loved to a cramped city apartment,” Rich says. “He was a sweet guy who let everyone push him around - and he died of a heart attack at 42.”

Rich vowed to make a different life for himself. “Being my own boss is the only way I feel I can be happy, but Mimi doesn’t understand. How could I tell her that I used the rent money to get my business going?”

The painful legacy of family secrets

“Rich and Mimi were destined for trouble,” says Marjorie Slavin, a family therapist in Riverdale, N.Y. “Married only a few months, they’re playing house but not being totally honest with each other.”

Deeply afraid of failure, Rich has kept Mimi in the dark about their finances as well as his work prospects. But a relationship built on lies cannot last. The only way to solve problems in a marriage is to talk about them.

In counseling, when Rich began to piece together snatches of conversation he’d overheard his parents having late at night, the resulting picture of his childhood was very different from the one he had carried with him. His belief that his domineering mother forced his father to move to a cramped apartment and forsake the life he loved was not correct. In truth, his father had lost his job and had devised that story to save face.

“Children who come from a family where secrets abound learn to be evasive,” adds Slavin. “But life is actually easier when you face the truth.”

Together, Rich and Mimi have begun to rebuild trust. After drafting a resume, Rich began an intensive job hunt and, after nine months of searching, was hired by a small manufacturing firm. Mimi recently found an administrative assistant’s post at a nonprofit agency, which pays more than her city job.

In many cases, keeping secrets can hurt the ones you love the most. If family secrets haunt you, keep the following in mind:

Some secrets are harmless - even necessary and helpful. You don’t, for example, need to go into excruciating detail with your children about the drugs you took in college or your sexual escapades in order to teach them the obstacles and dangers they may face.

While it’s natural to wish to withhold certain information to protect those you love, such secrecy can backfire by placing an even greater stigma on the secret.

As Rich later came to understand, children are acutely sensitive to the emotional climate at home. Though children may be unaware of or too young to understand the specifics of a problem, they do know that something is wrong.

Most experts agree there is no magic age at which children can handle sensitive information. Children may hear what you say, tune it out and start to play, then come back later with more questions. Always be honest - but proceed slowly, and answer only the questions asked, addressing anxieties as they arise.