Secrets: 3 stages

Secrets are extremely important in our development as persons.

A small book entitled Secrets, written by Christian doctor and counsellor Paul Tournier (1898–1986) and published in 1963, describes the role of secrets in three stages.

In the first, there is the need of secrecy. Children begin to resist telling their parents everything; they discover they want to have some choice about what they share, or with whom. “To have secrets, to know how to keep them to one’s self, to give them up only willingly,” Tournier says, “constitutes the first action in the formation of the individual.”

(It should be noted that Tournier speaks of secrets as that which adheres to the self, be it dark, wonderful, or even mystical; the coercive secrecy a child faces in an abusive situation is another matter.)

And no one, he writes, “reaches maturity without secret anguishes, secret searches, and secret remorses . . .”

The next stage is sharing one’s secrets. If keeping a secret is “an early assertion of freedom,” choosing to tell it to someone else is “a later assertion of freedom, of even greater value.”

The double action of refusal/withdrawal and surrender/communication is a “delicate and significant game,” says Tournier, “one of secrecy and of openness, of silence and of speech.”

When personal disclosures are made, in a counselling situation perhaps, or in a marriage or friendship, something “essential” and liberating can take place for both the revealer and the recipient.

There are secrets “especially burdensome,” however, which bind us in shame, but which we must risk telling. In marriage, Tournier writes, “the couple must strive for [transparency] at the cost of confessions which are always new and sometimes very hard.”

The third, most powerful, stage is telling our secrets to God.

But why tell Someone who already knows everything about us? The answer also concerns freedom and relationship. “God respects our person. . . . He is waiting for us to choose him as confidant.” God speaks too; the essence of the biblical message is God’s self-revelation.

To enter a dialogue with God, Tournier reminds his readers, is “no small affair,” for God speaks but also keeps silent, reveals but also hides. The apostle Paul told the Athenians that God, though “not far from any one of us” also determined we should “reach out for him and find him” (Acts 17:27). This seeking also involves waiting, and secrecy (Matthew 6:6).

—DD