Family secrets and unfinished stories: where a genogram finds them

In every family there is some subject around which the air thickens. A question the adults answer too quickly and too smoothly. A name at which grandmother gets up to go and put the coffee on. A photograph with someone cut out of it. As a child you cannot name it — but you sense it exactly: here is something that is not to be asked about.

Family secrets are a special part of a family inheritance: they are passed on not by telling but by silence. And that is precisely why they are so tenacious — you can push back against a story, but it is hard to fight a silence, because you cannot even see it. In this piece I explain what becomes a secret in families, how a secret affects even those who do not know it, where a genogram gives it away — and when it is worth revealing and when it is better left to rest.

What ends up under lock and key

Secrets in families gather around subjects that were unbearable in their time — because of shame, fear or pain. When I look at what is most often hidden in family stories, I meet similar motifs:

• Suicides and suicide attempts — perhaps the strictest taboo; the death is renamed an “accident” or a “weak heart”.
• Children born out of wedlock and “too soon” — children born before or outside marriage, adoptions that were never spoken of, paternities that were not what the documents say.
• Mental illness and addiction — the aunt who was “nervous”; the grandfather who was “difficult”; treatments that went unmentioned.
• Bankruptcies, lost property, debts — financial collapses that humiliated the family and forced it to move.
• War stories — which side someone was on, what they did or went through, who betrayed whom; in Slovenian families this layer is often particularly deep and still raw.
• Violence and abuse — what went on behind closed doors and was not to be seen.

The common denominator is not the content but the function: a secret is an attempt to protect the family from shame or collapse. In its time it was often understandable, sometimes even necessary. The trouble is that silence has no expiry date — it goes on protecting long after the danger has passed, and starts to cost more than it guards.

A secret is not the same as privacy

The American family therapist Evan Imber-Black, who devoted the central part of her work to secrets in families, draws a distinction I consider one of the most useful in all of family therapy: privacy and secrecy are not the same. Private is what is simply nobody else’s business — your intimate life, your thoughts, your medical history if you choose it so. A secret, on the other hand, is information that directly concerns another person’s life and is deliberately withheld from them: a child does not know they were adopted; a wife does not know about her husband’s debts; the family does not know why the uncle “moved away”.

Imber-Black points out that not all secrets are alike. Some are sweet and short-lived — a birthday surprise. Some are essential for safety — hiding from an abuser. But the ones that eat away at families are toxic secrets: long-lasting, laden with shame, and of a kind that shapes relationships. Their cost lies not only in the information itself but in the structure it creates: a secret always draws a line between those who know and those who do not. Coalitions and exclusions form in the family — some members are bound together by shared knowledge, while others walk around a house with a locked room that nobody will admit exists.

How a secret nobody knows still works

And now the strangest part: a secret has effects even on those who do not know about it. Not by magic — by entirely explicable routes.

First, a secret lives as behaviour. Those who know avoid the subjects that might lead to it: the conversation breaks at the same points, questions about a particular period get short, smoothed-over answers, at certain names the subject changes. A child growing up alongside this learns the map of the minefields without ever seeing a single mine. The family communication researcher Anita Vangelisti has shown that family secrets are associated with exactly such communication patterns — and that members often sense precisely which subjects are “closed”, even when they do not know what lies behind them.

Second, a secret lives as a feeling without a story. The shame, fear or sadness that accompany what has been withheld do not disappear — they are transmitted along the same channels as all family patterns: through moods, tension in the body, sudden withdrawals. So someone can carry anxiety around very particular subjects — money, death, sexuality, authority — without finding a single reason for it in their own life. The reason exists; it simply lies a generation or two further up. How such burdens travel exactly, I have described in my piece on intergenerational transmission.

And third: a secret is a burden for the one keeping it too. Psychological research of recent decades — from Pennebaker’s studies on the relieving effect of writing about what has been withheld to Slepian’s work on how secrets weigh mostly because the mind keeps returning to them — consistently shows that carrying significant secrets has a cost: attention, energy, closeness. Silence is not passive; silence is work.

In the adult lives of descendants, this most often shows up in three forms. The first is a sense that “something is wrong with me”: a person carries a diffuse guilt or shame that their own biography does not explain. The second is an outsized reaction to particular subjects — someone meets a partner’s lie not with ordinary anger but with an existential shock, because in their family, unknown to them, everything once collapsed over precisely a lie. The third is an unusual drive towards the truth or its opposite: some become family detectives, digging through archives without being able to say what they are actually looking for; others give any past a wide berth, their own included. All three are the same phenomenon in different clothes: the psyche senses that the map does not match the terrain.

Unfinished grief: the secret nobody wanted

A particular kind of the unspoken is not deeds but losses. In many families, the deaths of children, wartime losses, disappearances or deaths in contested circumstances went unmourned — because there was no time, because it was not allowed, because survival came first. But grieving is not an indulgence that can be skipped; it is a process that works a loss through and gives it a place. When it stops, something unfinished remains in the family — a dead person who may not be spoken of, but from whom it is also impossible to take one’s leave.

In practice I often meet this in a milder form: families where any mention of the dead is quickly met with “let’s not bring that up” and the conversation moves on. The next generations then inherit two things at once — an indistinct sadness and a prohibition on grieving it. Sometimes a child even unconsciously takes on the role of a “replacement” for the one who was lost, which is especially likely with children born soon after a death in the family. If you recognise yourself in this — if you carry a sadness inside you that is larger than your own losses — I recommend reading the piece on sadness as a process: inherited grieving can also be completed, it just has to be started.

With unfinished grief, rituals have a particular power — an area to which Imber-Black devoted much of her work. Decades after a loss, a family can still do what it was not allowed or not able to do at the time: visit the grave that was never mentioned; light a candle for a child who was never given a name; gather on the anniversary for the first time and tell the stories. Such a ritual does not change the past, but it does change its status: it turns a silenced wound into an acknowledged loss. And an acknowledged loss is the only kind that can be mourned all the way through.

Where the genogram gives away that something is missing

The genogram — a map of three generations of a family — is irreplaceable in the search for secrets for a simple reason: on it, secrets show up as holes. The story a family tells may be smooth; the paper, though, shows mercilessly where it slips:

• Missing years: periods nobody knows anything about — where was grandfather between 1948 and 1953?
• Erased people: siblings mentioned once and never again; first marriages that “don’t count”; children with no story.
• Dates that do not add up: a wedding in November, a child in February; deaths with no cause; “accidents” with no circumstances.
• Cut-offs with no explanation: branches of the family who are not spoken to, and nobody can say why.
• Answers that are too smooth: stories everyone tells in the same words, as if learned by heart — real stories have rough edges.

When reading a genogram, such holes are as eloquent as the data. They do not say what happened — but they do say where something happened that had to be hidden. Everything else such a map reveals, from anniversaries to triangles, I have set out in the piece What a genogram reveals.

And how do you ask, when you come upon a hole? Gently and obliquely. A direct question (“What really happened to grandfather?”) often closes older relatives down, because it sets off exactly the alarm that has guarded the secret for decades. Open, warm questions asked over photographs and objects work better: “What was grandfather like as a young man? What did he enjoy? How do you remember him from those years?” People find it easiest to speak about what has been withheld when they sense that the person asking has not come for a sensation but for a story — and that they will treat it with respect. Sometimes honesty about yourself helps too: “I’m asking because I carry something in me that I don’t understand, and I suspect it is older than I am.” And this always holds: everyone has the right not to tell. That, too, is an answer we have to be able to accept.

To reveal or not? The ethics of opening up

Here I have to be very clear: the fact that a secret exists does not yet mean it has to be revealed. Opening a secret is an intervention into the living tissue of a family and deserves careful thought, not a burst of courage. Imber-Black suggests questions that I use as a compass myself:

• Whom does the information directly concern? A person as a rule has a right to know the truth about their own life — about their origins, paternity, adoption, health risks. But we do not have a right to know everything about other people’s lives; there, their peace of mind weighs too.
• What would the disclosure serve? Relief and more truthful relationships — or revenge, off-loading a burden, a dramatic catharsis at others’ expense?
• When and how? Secrets are not disclosed at weddings, funerals and holidays, not in passing and not through third parties. Disclosure needs a calm space, time for reactions, and a willingness to stay in the conversation afterwards.
• What can the recipient carry? Children are told the truth in an age-appropriate way; an elderly person close to the end of life may not need to hear everything that would satisfy our own need for order.

Sometimes the answer is also this: the secret can no longer be revealed, because everyone who knew it has died. But even then not all is lost — a hole can be worked with, even if it cannot be filled. A family can acknowledge: “There is something here that we do not know and will not find out.” Simply saying that out loud often brings relief, because the silence finally has a name.

When the unspoken finds words

What happens when a secret — thoughtfully, at the right time — comes out into the open? In my experience, rarely what families fear most. Yes, there is shock, anger, sadness; sometimes a period is needed for relationships to find their balance again. But underneath it, something liberating almost always happens: things finally add up. People often say: “Now I understand. I felt all along that something was there — now I know I wasn’t making it up.” A child’s perception, invalidated for decades, is confirmed; and with it comes back a trust in oneself.

Something else often happens alongside: compassion for one’s ancestors. As long as a story is hidden, judgements stand in for it in the family memory — the hard father, the cold mother, the odd uncle. When the truth comes out, the judgements acquire a context: the hard father becomes an eight-year-old boy who lost his home overnight; the cold mother becomes a young woman who buried her first child and was not allowed to grieve. None of this excuses the pain they may have passed on. But understanding what it grew out of means ceasing to take it personally — and for descendants, that is often the beginning of real freedom.

If you suspect that your family carries something unspoken — and if you feel that silence in your own life as anxiety with no address, as a closed door in your own story — you do not have to open it alone. As part of the service A Look into the Past, in a 90-minute session we draw your family’s genogram and look together at where the story goes quiet: what the holes are saying, what a disclosure would bring and take away, and how to move on — with or without opening it. You will find more on the Services page, and you can write to me via the contact page.

Secrets came into being to protect a family. The finest thing you can do for it — and for yourself — is to judge which of them still protects today and which only keeps a door shut. The key is in your hands.