How Keeping Secrets About Your Parent’s Infidelity Stresses Your Brain

In two recent research posts (here and here), I wrote about the emotional toll that knowledge of an affair can take on family members, particularly children. This post will take a closer look at the dilemmas that children face when they find out about parent infidelity, and then have to decide whether or not to share what they know. Secrets are tricky things, and both keeping family infidelity a secret, and sharing it with others, come with difficult consequences. 

Often, how a child finds out about the affair puts pressure on the child to either keep the secret or find out more information. Consider these common scenarios:

I saw my mom holding hands with another man in the mall the other day. When I walked up to them, Mom confessed to having a relationship with the guy, but begged me not to tell my dad and to keep it a secret. I can’t tell anyone. She will hate me if I do. 

My dad’s phone is lighting up with pictures of naked men all the time. It’s hard to miss, when he leaves his phone on the kitchen table all the time. Do I confront him or not?

Mom is pregnant again. I know she is still seeing that guy. Whose baby is it?

Now that I am older, I realize that all of those times that Dad took me to his friend’s house and went into the bedroom while I got to watch cartoons and eat ice cream, he was probably having an affair. Do I ask him about it?

Sometimes, the child wants to share the information, and runs into different issues: 

I really need help with this, but how can I tell my sister right now, she is so stressed out in college already. I don’t want to burden her. 

I finally got up the courage to ask my dad about the photos on his phone, and he denied it! He told me that he was doing research for some project at work. Does he really think I am that stupid?

I told my favorite aunt the other day that I thought my mom might be on Tinder. She told me that stuff like that is none of my business and I should just forget about it. 

Maybe worst of all, are the endless internal questions that the child asks themselves:

What if I tell?

Will they get a divorce?

What if mom leaves?

What if my friends think that I am ok with my dad cheating?

Or the question I get asked the most often: Could I stop the affair if I tell?

So clearly, the decision to share the secret is fraught with potholes. With all of these hard questions, it is understandable that many kids would rather just keep their mouths shut. But before you decide to take the secret to your grave, there is another side of the story. What kind of emotional toll does keeping this kind of secret take?

It is no secret that keeping secrets can feel stressful. Recent research has helped to explain why this is, and offers hints at how to ease the stress of these secrets when indeed, it feels like sharing the secret may cause more trouble that it is worth.

The current wisdom from neuroscientists is that keeping secrets literally puts our brain in an awkward position. More specifically, our cingulate cortex (outline in red below). This is the part of our brain that is literally wired to tell the truth, and pushes the rest of the brain to share information so that it can move onto more important matters, like learning new skills. 

When you choose not to share a secret, this causes your prefrontal cortex (outline in blue above) to come up with all of the reasons that sharing your secret would be bad for you. In this case, things like, Mom will hate me, my parents will divorce, etc.

So essentially, your brain is at war with itself, and the result is a feeling of emotional burden. This is of course, in addition to the vigilance you need to keep a secret, making sure to evade certain conversations or being afraid that you might slip up. Keeping secrets is connected to all sorts of mental health problems that you are surely trying to avoid, like depression, anxiety, and even the increased progression of disease. In addition, the more that your secret overlaps into your different social networks, the more stressful it is to keep. Perhaps most prominently for children of infidelity, keeping secrets exacerbates our sense of isolation. This isolation itself can lead to greater fatigue. 

So what is a child of infidelity to do? Depending on your age and your family, there may be very good reasons to keep your knowledge of your parent’s affair to yourself. How do you manage the stress of holding on to that secret?

Michael Slepian gives us a clue. He is a researcher at the Columbia Business School, of all places, who has studied the effects of secrets on the brain. What is compelling is the size of his sample. Over 10,000 adults across the US of all ages, races and genders. You can check out his website here. 

(An interesting side note, Slepians research found that the secret most often kept is about infidelity. Either emotional or sexual. I wonder what the results would be if he asked about parent infidelity?)

Essentially, what he learned is that yes, keeping secrets can be exhausting. But actually, the most exhausting part is having to live with the secret inside of yourself, and ruminating about it. Just thinking about a secret can make you feel more alone. 

So maybe the trick is, think about your parents’ affair less. No small feat, right? In future posts I will offer more detailed ideas for how to accomplish this. In the meantime, Slepian and other secret researchers agree that finding even one person to confide in is helpful in alleviating the emotional toll of secrets. It can help you to feel less alone, less burdened, and your confidante may even have some ideas that you have not thought of. All of which may help you close some of those open tabs in your brain.