The Cowboy Philosopher

25:25Those things were flying out. Not the Encyclopedia of Folk Music, but my clothes and what few things. By the late 1970s, the family had settled in Porterville, California, a town on the western edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Riley spent his days working on his encyclopedia, and to Stascha's mind, swindling everyone he could. It all ended when Stascha was 18. That year, 1983, Riley Shepard did what he had done many times before. He disappeared. He told my mother, who he had been with for whatever, 23 years, that he was taking a short trip to Los Angeles. But when she woke up in the morning, she realized that he had taken way more than what you would need for a short trip.

26:14And he did not come back. For more than a year, Stasha had no idea where he was. Eventually, she found him living about an hour away in Fresno. They reconnected, but everything had changed. She now saw him for exactly who he was. He glamorized the life of being a grifter. He glamorized the life of being a con man. That's what I understand now, that he was a con man. It's even hard to say that out loud. He was, though.

26:57For years, Stasha felt torn between her distaste for Riley's behavior and her love for the dad who made her smoke rings and took her to the Brown Derby.

27:09By the mid-80s, Stasha had left Porterville. A few years later, Riley returned to the town and played the role of the old cowboy musician. Stasha mainly stayed in touch by phone as the years passed. One day in 2008, she got a call. Her dad had taken a fall in his home. And he ended up in the hospital after being alone on the floor for days. And I called him and he goes, Honey, I know I'm going to die. But he was so sweet. I can't talk about that, but he said he loved me. and that he was proud of me. It was, like, beautiful. Riley rallied and moved to a nursing home. When Stasha visited, he seemed agitated.

28:00And he goes, you don't know what it's like in here. I thought he meant the nursing home, because three beds, the guy had the TV on, it was loud. I go, what, the nursing home? He goes, no, you don't know what it's like in here, in here. And he was pointing to his head. And I go, what? What are you talking about? He goes, I'm flashing back on all the things I did. And I did some bad things. Stasha tried to comfort him. But in retrospect, she wishes she'd asked a question. What bad things? Tell me about those. What were the bad things? Maybe if you tell me about them, you'll feel better. because I'm wondering what all he would have told me.

28:51But he lived for a little bit in the nursing home. That was the last time that I visited him.

29:01After Riley died, Stasha wanted the world to remember her father correctly. So she made sure his obituary included not just his real name, but all the pseudonyms he was known to use.

29:30After Riley died, Stasha had his body cremated. For a long time, she carried his ashes around with her. She'd scatter a handful here or there, which seemed fitting for a drifter.

29:53There wasn't much in the Riley Shepard estate. Stasha packed up some of his letters, a cookbook he'd written for her, and various other papers. But his life's work, the encyclopedia he'd been toiling over all those years, he'd left that to someone else.

30:14Still in every memory, as it all comes back to me, I was never near a heaven in my life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Thank you. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage, or experience, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. So you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

31:18Support for Hidden Brain comes from BetterHelp. Summer can be a mix of things. For some, it's about travel, adventure, and making memories. For others, juggling everything can feel overwhelming. Kids at home, packed schedules, shifting routines. It's easy to slip into survival mode and wonder where the days are going. Taking time for yourself can make a difference, and therapy can support that, helping you feel more confident setting boundaries and making space to recharge so that summer feels more balanced and enjoyable. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist online. You'll be matched based on your needs and can switch anytime if it's not the right fit.

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32:21This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. And in here, we find row upon row of collection boxes on the shelves. By the time I got to the basement of the Library of Congress, I figured I knew everything I needed to know about Riley Shepard. He was a crook, a conman, a bad husband, an unreliable father. So as folklorist Steve Winnick pulls out the Richard Riley Shepard collection from the stacks, I'm not holding my breath. Nobody's really used this collection very much, so it's simply, you know, been there waiting for you, really. Up in his office, Hagrid, a.k.a. folklorist Steve Winnick, spreads out the papers from the Richard Riley Shepard collection on a table.

33:09He picks up a letter. The date of this letter is September 7, 1976. More than four decades ago, Riley wrote this letter to the Registrar of Copyrights. Stasha was 11 years old. So he was working on things. He was working on, I didn't know what. In the letter, Riley asks for the forms he'll need to copyright an encyclopedia. He adds a long postscript. He says, perhaps someone in the Library of Congress would be interested in the following. Over the past 16 years, I alphabetically indexed more than 43 ,000 titles of songs, including published versions and variants in English, French, Spanish, etc., all of which have enjoyed a folk-type tradition within the borders of the United States and Canada.

33:57All the titles, he continues, have been alphabetically cross-indexed and cross-referenced with the titles of books they appeared in, along with the editors and publishers. Each reference is clearly coded so that practically every folk song relative to the United States, plus all its known versions and variants, can be easily located. You may be interested to learn that the 43 ,000 titles are clearly the outgrowth of only 4 ,000 songs, texts, and tunes. He ends the letter this way. I know only one thing. I am the only person in the world with this amount of cross-indexed, cross-referenced musical material.

34:33Unfortunately, I do not own or have access to a computer in which to feed the information. Perhaps the Library of Congress can offer suggestions.

34:45Riley wanted to get his encyclopedia to a wider audience. The chief archivist at the time wrote back and offered the names of potential publishers. He also said he'd like to see some of Riley's work. So Riley sent in the samples that the library now holds. In a follow-up letter, Riley explained how his indexing system worked. Each title is followed by the first line or lines of the song and or versions thereof, and this by the source. Example, Goose Hangs High, the Civil War Ballad. It deals with Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania and the Battle of Gettysburg. As Steve Winnick sifts through the materials, he slowly grasps the enormity of the project.

35:30So he's got 43 ,000 individual sheets or two sheets of paper, however long it takes, that he's got to then sort into 4 ,000 categories. And then in addition to that, he has to cross-reference each of those with all of the places that they've been published. So there's an enormous number of cross-references within this book that he had to do by hand without the ability to electronically associate one item with another. What Riley Shepard had been working on since 1960 was a monumental accounting of some 200 years of American folk music. It involved a search of nearly every available documentary source.

36:16Riley had obtained rare books at great expense, including many that were out of print. He had collated thousands of songs and organized them according to their provenance, discovering common roots and pathways that linked different musical traditions together. Since he did not have a computer, almost no one did at the time, he did everything by hand, cross-referencing song lyrics and musical notations and historical footnotes. Crazy as it sounds, the entire system lived largely inside his own head. By the point he wrote to the Library of Congress, he had spent nearly two decades trying to put down on paper what was in his head, even as his life fell apart around him and many of his closest friends and relatives came to think of him as a crook.

37:05At the time, as far as I know, no one had attempted something this ambitious in terms of indexing all the songs in America. Riley Shepard, a man with a fifth-grade education, an occasional writer of porn, a con man and hustler, had attempted to create something that would require years of effort by a team of Ph.D. archivists and a small army of researchers. The fact of the attempt, I think, is actually a significant fact in the history of folk song scholarship in the United States. and it's actually something almost nobody knows about. I wouldn't know about it if you hadn't brought it to my attention.

37:48And, you know, I've studied this for quite a number of years. I asked Steve to choose a song and explain how Riley had classified it. So he opened volume three, ran his finger down pages filled with typewritten entries. This is Holloway Joe, which is a sea shanty. and it says, this is a short drag or short haul shanty. It was taken from British sailors and Americanized, which means political references were eliminated from the text. American sailors preferred to concentrate on girls. For example, the British sailors sang, Louis was the king of France before the revolution, but Louis got his head cut off, which spoiled his constitution.

38:32American sailors had more important things to sing about and changed the words to, Once I had a German girl, but she was fat and lazy. Then I had an Irish girl. She damn near drove me crazy. The shanty dates back to around the second half of the 18th century. Though only in England, in the USA, it dates back to the years following the War of 1812. For other English and American versions, see the works listed below. And then he gives a long list of books in which this song appears. And he actually gives you the music for the song as well? For many of the songs he does, yes. Yes, he does have music for Hall Away Joe as well.

39:08How does the tune of this song go? Do you remember it? When I was a little boy, it's so my mother told me, way, Hall Away, Hall Away Joe, that if I didn't kiss the girls, my lips would all grow moldy, way, Hall Away, Hall Away Joe. I have to say, the impressive thing is you closed the book and you did that. This was all in your head, too. It was. In 1979, three years after his first letter, Riley got in touch again with the Library of Congress. He said he'd been unable to find a publisher. And so he writes, Dear Mr. Hickerson, in case you don't remember, I have enclosed a photocopy of your letter to me dated July 8, 1977.

39:52First, I want to thank you for your suggestions and the addresses of possible publishers. I followed up. No funds are available for a work such as mine, though they are interested in what I have done and would appreciate a copy of the Folk Song Finder and Index. It is a voluminous work, so I can understand the reluctance of a publisher to undertake the expense of its publication. So here I am, back to you again. It was an act of desperation. If you were, are serious about the library reaching some agreement with me, I am ready to proceed. My problem is this. I don't know what to ask for in terms of financial remuneration to myself.

40:29I do know that I cannot ask as much as I have spent in terms of time, work, and money, but I would like to recoup at least some of my own expenditures, if not payment for my work and time. In fact, I must recoup some of what I have spent because I have already signed a lease on a small farm and house in Porterville, California, and expect to move there in approximately six weeks. as I am, as they say in the country music field, flat busted.

41:01Riley never got what he was seeking. What he was asking was a significant outlay of money that I just think the library couldn't afford at the time or couldn't, you know, apportion to that project because, as he says in the correspondence, in addition to these volumes, there are 54 other volumes of this book. 54 other volumes. After nearly two decades of painstaking work came the final indignity, rejection. Yeah, I think he was an early casualty, you might say, of the switch from published books, that is paper books, to computer documentation. And he's aware of this, I mean, because he talks about how it would be great if he could put this into a computer.

41:56Would you say that Riley Shepard was a genius? He was a genius, I think. I mean, it's very impressive to see the amount of work that he did on this. And he also had that sort of crazy perseverance that you have to have. So, you know, that's a whole other kind of genius. Here is a really amazing part. Riley continued to work on the encyclopedia for the next 25 years. I mean, it is the case that since he would have sent this to the library in 1979, a lot more versions of traditional songs were published. So if he were trying to keep this book complete, he would have to continue to update it year after year.

42:41One of the interesting things is I'm not sure his family actually fully understands what he has done. when I spoke with his daughter, Stasha, she just thought her dad was sort of obsessed with this project that never seemed to go anywhere, that never seemed to end, that just grew infinitely. And, you know, over the years, she in fact heard from people whom he had borrowed money from and taken money from. And, you know, her impression of her dad is not a very positive impression. And in some ways, speaking with you, I get a different picture of this man. Well, I think that all scholars, and particularly folk song scholars, have something of the Riley Shepard in them.

43:23We would like to spend all our time and all our life immersed in the texts and tunes of folk songs. We just can't manage it because we have lives. And so the amount of yourself that you're willing to give to that might vary for different people, but we certainly have sympathy for someone who gave so much of himself to it. I don't know if you're familiar with the anthropologist Arnold von Hennep. He's the person who popularized the term rites of passage. And von Hennep wrote a piece called The Research Project, or Folklore Without End. And it was about a person who decided to write the definitive work on the evil eye.

44:03And he went to his carol in the library and he began getting all the books about the evil eye and he compiled all of the references that he could find and he took it to his advisor and his advisor says this is a great start but there's still other cultures and there's you know ancient Greek and Roman sources that you should look at and so he goes back and he works on those and this continues for years and years and eventually this man dies at his carol in the library and nobody quite remembers what he was doing there And that's kind of the impression that you get of Riley Shepard.

44:40But it turned out there was someone next to Riley in his final days as he labored away in his carol. Before he collapsed and was sent to the hospital, Riley was living in a small house. On D Street in Porterville. He was in rough shape. I thought, you know, he's a little bit disheveled. But Steve Enslin, a Porterville native, says once you got to know Riley, he grew on you. It was Steve's father, Ted, who really knew Riley. Ted was a retired insurance agent and former Porterville mayor. Steve says his dad and Riley bonded over a shared love of music. They would just sit and listen to country western music, the old country Western music, not the new stuff.

45:28They were friends. They were also business partners. They wrote songs together. They recorded a few songs together. Mainly, though, they worked on Riley's encyclopedia. Ted saw the genius in it. They spent hours and hours and hours just collecting all the material and then categorizing it. Steve says Riley was still consumed by the project. Well, he had music spread all over. I mean, he had tables and chairs and floor and everything, and he'd have this music spread out, and he was trying to get it in some sort of a chronological order by the artist. He was trying to get the artist with the song, and he would have the song, and then he would have the artist.

46:21And so he would try to cross-reference all of those. So it was a labor of love, I'll tell you that. But he was, he just, no, I haven't got time for that. I don't want to eat. I just, I got to get this done. This is important. And so he would just, he was funny. Steve and his father both felt they were in the presence of an extraordinary human being. Riley Shepard was a master. He did a lot of things, but he was quite a master. Steve's father willingly gave his time to the project, and he gave money, plenty of it. Steve says after Riley died, Stasha got in touch. She was concerned that her dad had conned his dad.

47:11But Steve says the money wasn't important. The money doesn't mean anything as far as... I saw the enjoyment that it brought to my dad. Riley left his life's work, the Encyclopedia of Folk Music, to his friend, Ted Inslin. There were 40 boxes. Ted stored them in his old insurance office. And that's where they sat for years. I kept asking Dad, you know, what are you going to do with these, Dad? What are you going to do with these? And he says, they're worth a lot of money. And I said, well, I know, but what are you going to do with them? Ted never did anything with them. He was old and suffering from dementia.

47:54Instead, he just relived his friendship with Riley. After Riley died, my dad had a little record player in his office, and he would put on a lot of Riley's country western music.

48:22And he just enjoyed Riley. He enjoyed his friendship. But darling, I still believe in you Won't you please come back You know I'll love you to the end When Ted Enslin died, Steve gave the encyclopedia to another man in town who happened to be a country music songwriter. Other copies are also floating around. Not long ago, Stasha says a couple who'd invested in Riley's encyclopedia got in touch. They were willing to sell their copy to her for$500. She bought it. She says it's huge. Well, it's weird to see the whole thing and how much work he actually put into it. Because after I realized how much my father fabricated on various things from, you know, he just was a compulsive liar.

49:18Sometimes he would make things up and I couldn't figure out why. Why did you lie about that? Why didn't you brag about the songs you actually wrote? Why did you say you wrote Blue Christmas or whatever? And so I became kind of jaded, and I began to think that maybe the whole project, the encyclopedia, was not even worth thinking about at all. I loved my dad, but I kind of rolled my eyes whenever I thought about these projects, because so much smoke and mirrors around it. Won't you please come back? You know I'll love you to the end If you don't come back, my broken heart will never mend It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last for long You left me for somebody new

50:12In the conversation near the end of his life, Raleigh Shepard doesn't sound bitter or frustrated. He sounds like a man still doing what he loves, honoring the music he had learned as a boy, trying to preserve it. In fact, he told Kevin, there were still plenty of songs and music that were left in him. I'm writing one now. Called The Older You Get. The more it's going to cost to do the things it did when you were young. When an old man's in love, he just thinks he's in clover. He's not cooking with gas, he's just warming it over. It'll go on like that.

51:04Songs and novels are filled with stories about people with great obsessions. We have strong opinions about such people. When they succeed, when they produce the Taj Mahal, or Hamlet, or the iPhone, we hail the obsessions that built the monuments of this world. When we count the collateral damage that people with obsessions leave in their wake, especially when those obsessions only produce the unreadable tome on the evil eye or an unpublishable encyclopedia on folk music, obsessions start to look like folly. Trouble is, you usually do not know whether an obsession is a great quest or a great folly until it's over.

52:09Shortly after this episode first aired in 2019, Stasha shared a version of her father's encyclopedia with the Internet Archive in San Francisco. It's now available online. We have a link to it in the show notes. More recently, we reached back out to Stasia, and she said she remained skeptical of the idea that her father was a genius. What she does know is that he was a man of many secrets. She's discovered even more pseudonyms that he used over the years and many more details about his relationships with women. But it's likely none of those revelations were as shocking to her as that first phone call she received all those years ago.

52:50Your father is a crook. Across that crackly phone line, those words, your father is a crook, must have landed like a thunderclap. Learning that your parent is the villain of someone else's story is painful. Secrets like this can cause deep ruptures in families. Now, the secrets that most of us hold are not this weighty, but even small secrets can be a heavy burden. Not long ago, we heard from a listener named John who's been carrying a secret like this. When he was in college, John studied abroad in Ethiopia. He lived in a small town teaching English to high schoolers. One of John's brightest students would hang around him a lot.

53:34This student was fascinated by the United States and hungry to learn what it would be like to live there. And ultimately, I realized he wanted to go to America. And he wanted me to be his conduit and maybe sponsor to going to America. And so this, as a, you know, 18, 19 year old, put me in a precarious situation because I felt like I was in no position to sponsor somebody and wouldn't even know where to start. I told him that I would look around. I'd ask around for opportunities or other people that could help him. But it put me in a position where I didn't know what to do. And it made me uncomfortable that he had sort of thrust this responsibility on me.

54:29I kind of started to prefer hanging out with other students and other people when I could. John felt bad about avoiding his student, but he didn't know what else to do. This came to a head when John and a few friends decided to take a weekend vacation. I made sure not to tell him this because I just didn't want him tagging along. I knew that he would be sort of in my ear the whole time and sort of ramping up this responsibility that he had placed on me. So when he asked me when we were leaving from the bus station, I lied.

55:15I told him that we would be leaving at 6.30 in the evening, when in fact we were going to be leaving at 5.30. So I kind of figured this is the best way to get out of this. The problem is that he was pretty keen and asked around and found out that we were in fact leaving at 5.30. So when I got there to meet with my friends and get on the bus, sure enough, there he was. He came along and we had a good time. There was a little bit of that uneasiness about the whole situation. Obviously, I felt horrible about lying to him. But it was a secret that I kind of kept to myself from the others. Obviously, my friends wondered why he was there, but they didn't know that I had tried to keep him away from it by lying to him.

56:16And I felt really, really bad that I had done that.

56:24John has ruminated on the lie for years. He's sharing it for the first time with the Hidden Brain audience. From the outside looking in, his secret might seem trivial. Sure, maybe he could have been kinder or more forthcoming with the student. He could have said that he wasn't in a position to help. Why has this secret weighed on him so heavily and for so long?

56:51After the break, stories and questions about the secrets we keep and the harm they can cause.

57:01You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

57:16Thank you.

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59:30This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Recently, I heard a shocking statistic. 80 % of people lie to their doctors. 80%. Doctors promote our well-being. They bear witness to our tales of pain. They heal us when we are sick. You would think we would be fully transparent with the people trying to help us. I learned that statistic from Leslie John. She's a psychologist at Harvard University and the author of Revealing, The Underrated Power of Oversharing. We talked with her on two recent episodes of the show. They were titled Keeping Secrets and Coming Clean. Today, Leslie returns to the show to respond to listener comments and stories about the costs of keeping secrets.

1:00:29Leslie John, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me. Leslie, in our interactions with other people, we spend a lot of time weighing how much of ourselves to share with them. Why is it that so many of us avoid revealing ourselves to others? That's the million-dollar question, right? So there are many elements to this answer. The number one, I think the most obvious answer is that we're scared for good reasons. So our minds immediately go into what would go wrong if I said the thing. And we worry about rejection and embarrassment and conflict and loss of status. And these are all valid concerns.

1:01:10But there's a problem here because if you think about how to make a good decision, you don't want to just think of the risks of doing the thing, right? You want to also think of the risks of not doing the thing among other considerations. But again and again, when I give people different what I call disclosure dilemmas, the first thing they go, they very naturally come up with the risks of revealing. And those risks are valid. But the problem is people don't go further unless you prompt them to, unless you say, okay, what about the risks of not revealing? But the other thing that you said that was really key in this question is this word, the default.

1:01:52Why do we default? We default to silence so naturally, we don't even realize we're doing it. Right. In your research, Leslie, you found that keeping a secret can negatively impact our physical and mental health. Describe for me very briefly some of these costs. Yeah. So many studies have shown that holding secrets is associated with all kinds of negative health outcomes. It's associated with depression and anxiety. It's associated with physiological stress markers. It's associated with greater rumination, with poorer relationships. So lots and lots of negative consequences. Many secrets that we keep often center on regrets that we have, maybe a time that we lied or stole or cheated someone.

1:02:44Here's a message we received from a listener named Claire. So about nine years ago, I was alone on a close family friend's property, and I really had an urge I had to pee. so I popped a squat and uh mid-pee I look up and I see a security camera on their property pointed right at me and I was so concerned you know what would they think when they saw the video they didn't even know I was in the property um it was just super embarrassing and so for nine years I couldn't look the um this was my friend's parents either of them in the eye because I just you know I wasn't sure if they saw the video and what they thought and what they were wondering so for nine years I kept this secret and I didn't tell anyone my family about it and then this last summer I finally came clean and told my parents about why I felt so uncomfortable around their friends and they just looked at me they couldn't understand why I was telling them this what they thought was a completely pointless story from nine years ago which had been haunting me for almost a decade.

1:03:59No one seemed to care. I told, you know, my friend about it. Nobody cared at all after nine years of being so self-conscious. So Leslie, clearly this secret was a much bigger deal for Claire than it was for her parents and her friend. What's interesting is that the story echoed what we've heard from several other listeners, the distress that we feel about our secrets is often wildly disproportionate to the reactions of others, including, you know, our quote unquote victims. Why is it that our secrets have this outsized impact on us? Yeah. Oh, Claire, I feel for you. The word there, it was haunting her.

1:04:43Yes, it was haunting her. And then in the end, it was moot. Like it, I was hoping she'd say that they got a good laugh out of it at least. Or maybe they still had the footage and they could laugh about it. But it sounds like it was not even, she didn't even give it laughter. But she did get relief, I think, in the end. And I think one of the reasons why they often affect us more than it ends up being to the person we reveal them to is because, for one, we're so used to keeping things inside. And so we actually don't have the data that disproves this belief that it's a big deal, right? And this is why I really think of revealing as a skill, as a practice, right?

1:05:26If you do it more, then you realize that you get feedback. You're like, oh, that wasn't such a big deal. It's funny because I was thinking about a dear friend of mine. Recently, we've rekindled our friendship. We were roommates in college. And she said to me, I have a confession to make. when we lived together, I was the one that ate the Oreos. I was like, great. I didn't even remember this. But clearly, that was the second thing she said to me. One of my favorite psychology studies and findings, it's called the spotlight effect, where we think that people notice what we do and care what we think and do more than they actually do, which maybe sounds cynical, but I think it's liberating.

1:06:11One of my best friends, the way he assuages me. He's like, nobody cares. So in this case, like there literally was a spotlight on her. It was a videotape, but she went down this road of like, think about it. Okay. So there's, there's this tape that exists. It's as if for that to be true, for them to have seen her, they'd have to have like watched all of the footage, right? Like, um, and the study that, that it was a hilarious oldie, but a goodie social psych study where they got, one of them was they had people wear Barry Manilow t-shirts, like big blaring Barry Manilow t-shirts, which I love Barry Manilow, but maybe they were like uncool or something then.

1:06:46And they forced them to wear it for the day and asked them how many people they thought would notice. And of course, people wearing it think everybody's going to notice and they'll be a fool, but really nobody notices. So we're really kind of self-absorbed in that way. I'm wondering if the fact that Claire kept her secret for so long, in some ways amplified it in her mind. In other words, you know, the longer she kept it, the more she is thinking about it, the more she's ruminating about it and the bigger it gets in her mind. But of course, it's not getting bigger in anyone else's mind. Completely.

1:07:19Yeah. They kind of start to take, secrets start to take a life of their own and they compound each other. And one of the reasons is that they're in our head. When we're just thinking and cycling and ruminating in our head, we can make some really crazy logical leaps. But if we talk to a friend, then that friend can help us to realize, oh, wait, for that to happen, the person would have actually had to watch the video. And also, if they watched the video, would that have been so bad anyways? Maybe they would have laughed. Right, right. So there are secrets that have to do with what we've done, but there are also secrets that get at who we are.

1:07:56Here is listener Emma. I was born in 1956, assigned male at birth. When I was four or five, I realized that I wished I'd been born a girl. Through elementary school, I fantasized when I went to bed about what it might like to be a girl. But I was certain that it was the deepest secret anyone could have, and I would never reveal it to anyone. I saw therapists for depression throughout my adulthood, but never fully disclosed these feelings. This went on for almost 40 years, until early 2014, when my wife suggested that I return to therapy. This time, I knew I had to come clean. It was so scary, and it took weeks to let it all out into the open.

1:08:50I started my transition in 2017 and have absolutely no regrets now, living authentically as a woman. So one thing that strikes me about Emma's story, Leslie, is that this is not about something that she did, but about who she is. Talk about the difference between those two things when it comes to holding secrets. Yeah, I think that they point to kind of two motives to revealing, right? Something you did, the kind of feeling maybe shame and concern about what the other person thinks, if you reveal it, sort of interpersonal. But these kinds of secrets about your identity are more intrapersonal challenging, right?

1:09:33Because you make you kind of question, what do I reveal of myself and not, if I don't reveal this, am I being inauthentic? One way that I think about these things is if you have an identity that is core to who you are, but it can be stigmatizing, if it's really core to who you are, it's important that some people know, people close to you, because being known for who you are is incredibly important. But it also doesn't mean that you have to tell everyone. So you can be really selective about who you choose to share and not. And what Emma did here was beautiful in that Emma worked with her wife, she worked with a therapist.

1:10:13And it's also not, I also want to highlight that disclosure is often, especially with these very hard, fraught ones, it's a process. It's a campaign. It's not a one shot thing. And I think that also hopefully liberates people into thinking, well, if I didn't quite describe myself right this time, like I will have another conversation. It's an ongoing interactive dialogue. Sometimes the secrets that we keep are so at odds with the person who we want to be, it can be very difficult to bear. Here's a message we received from a listener named Dean. I had several affairs without my wife knowing for the past few years.

1:11:03and it was so shameful that I would compartmentalize it. It was like a different person and I kept that from her until she found out. Then I told her about everything. So right now I'm in sexual addiction recovery, trying to make things better for myself and for her. So Leslie, I can really hear the pain in Dean's voice. He used the word shameful to describe his secret. And this is a recurring theme that we heard and that you've explored. And a central reason, I think, that we try and keep things from others. We're worried about how they will judge us if we come clean. Yes, absolutely. And that's a completely valid concern.

1:11:57It's especially valid when just the people that you're really close to and you love them and you feel like you've wronged them. This is kind of one of the hardest types of disclosures to make. He also hit on this point. He said, it's like I'm a different person. And that's a kind of self-dissonance that is a really hard thing to deal with because we like to think of ourselves as faithful, kind to our spouses, but then there's this thing we did that is antithetical to that. And so then you're like, well, who am I? And he said compartmentalize, and that's kind of a coping mechanism is to compartmentalize that, but it's not the healthiest of coping mechanisms.

1:12:42One of the things that I think is interesting about secrets is why we're keeping them. Are we keeping them in our interest or are we keeping them in the interest of someone else? Yeah. Talk about that tension, Leslie. Oh, that's exactly where my mind was going as well. I think that this is a core thing. When thinking about whether to reveal a secret. What's your North Star? What's your purpose? Is your purpose? Because sometimes we reveal secrets because we just feel so guilty and ashamed. And it's more to make ourselves feel better to share the burden than it is to actually grow from it. And so, you know, think to yourself, is this something that I'm doing to alleviate burdens to myself.

1:13:26And if that's the case, is telling my spouse the right thing, or is that just going to impose the burden on her? Perhaps it's better to talk about it with a therapist than in that case, right? Whereas if your motive is to really understand your relationship better and what your goals are and how you relate to each other, well, then that might be an integral way of starting such conversations.

1:13:56When we come back, what happens when you learn that someone has been keeping a secret from you? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:15:55This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Keeping a secret can gnaw at you. Leslie John at Harvard University has found that it can harm our physical and mental health and damage our relationships.

1:16:14Leslie, I'd like to talk a bit about family secrets. Hanno is from Germany. the last time Hano saw his maternal grandfather alive, his grandfather hinted that he had a shocking secret, that he was an officer in the Nazi forced labor service during the Holocaust, and that he had witnessed or even joined in the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Probably had been at least a witness to one of those burnings of wooden synagogues in Poland where members of the local Jewish community had been forced into and the house then put on fire over their heads. And he had been a part of the chain of command. So Leslie Hanno went on to say how troubled he is by learning the secret.

1:17:01He now feels a terrible sense of responsibility for the actions of his family members, people who are long since deceased. Hanno is obviously not responsible for the actions of his grandfather. would he have been better off not learning this terrible secret? Oh, geez, that's such a hard question. I guess it depends how you define better off, you know? I think one of the things that makes this so hard is that Hanno does not have the opportunity to make more sense of it by speaking with his grandfather again. And I think that's really the challenging thing because when we have these hard truths in our history and we learn about them, the way that we can metabolize them is by talking about them with the people who went through it and understanding their perspective and what it was like and their motives and how they think about it.

1:17:58That gives us some closure, some sense-making, some sense of certainty. It's incredibly therapeutic. And I feel sad for Hanno that he didn't have that opportunity. And so often we think about these moments of revealing as a one shot, right? But we can go back to the person if they're alive and we can continue to engage in a conversation and ask them more questions because there will be a point where we're no longer able to do that. Hmm. In some ways, Hano's story reminds me that there are some secrets that are actually held not by just individuals and not just by families, but by entire groups of people.

1:18:41Yes, completely. And those are really interesting because they introduce this element of social pressure, right? It's like this unspoken thing that we all know, but we don't want to talk about. And then even if someone does want to say something, they feel like they can't because they assume that others also don't want to talk about it, right? This is this idea that like, if nobody is talking about it, we assume that nobody wants to talk about it. But what we can do in these situations is try testing the waters, broaching the topic. So here's an example, not of a dark family secret, but like a friend of mine was just telling me that she was at a, she was at a meeting at work and they were sitting around a table and it was super frustrating.

1:19:27They weren't getting anywhere. And normally, like, you don't say that. You don't say it's frustrating. Like, people were just kind of grin and bearing it. And she finally, she said, you know what? I'm going to say it. She said, I feel frustrated. And then as soon as she said that, everyone else said, oh, my gosh, thank you. I feel frustrated, too. Like, there was this collective relief and this collective bonding. And then they were able to move forward. I want to stay with Hano's story for a second. I'm struck by the fact that many Germans to this day still feel the shame of the Holocaust. Many keep secrets like Hano's family does.

1:20:02But it's also striking that many Jewish Holocaust survivors prefer not to discuss the horrors that they witnessed or that they experienced. They don't talk to their friends and family about what happened. I'm wondering what this tells you about the nature of secrets, Leslie. Yeah, I think that one reason we keep secrets is out of kindness and not wanting to burden people, right? Not wanting to burden people about the horrors one has experienced. And that's totally valid and fair and understandable. it's not always good to talk about the things that are bothering you. Sometimes if you talk about the things that are bothering you, you end up perseverating on them and thinking about them even more.

1:20:44So perhaps there's that reluctance too. There's been research on this. Holocaust survivors who have been able to make sense of what happened to them have much more positive outcomes. And I don't mean, you know, make it okay at all, But to kind of develop a deeper understanding of why this happened to them, all of the understand their feelings throughout it, the complexities of it, the people who are able to process that and tell their story, they do so much better at moving on to the future and growing. But if we just kind of vent about it all and the goal isn't kind of growth and narrative sense making, then that's not the good kind.

1:21:27I do think, though, that I know this from data, that people think that they're going to be more of a burden than they actually are. And in fact, so often people are happy to hear your disclosures. I mean, you would be happy to hear a story like that, but you would feel you would feel very close to the person because one, you understand them better. But two, they chose to confide in you. Yeah. How special is that?

1:21:57When we come back, could keeping a secret ever be a good thing? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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1:23:07This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She studies the science of secrets and self-disclosure, how much we share of ourselves, and the benefits and costs of doing so.

1:23:24Her book is titled Revealing, the Underrated Power of Oversharing. So Leslie, we talked earlier about how families or even nations of people can carry collective secrets. And often this happens not through explicit discussion, but via the more subtle norms of a group. We heard from a listener named Philip. He grew up in an evangelical Christian community and would spend upwards of 70 hours per week knocking on doors to proselytize. But then one day when he was in his mid-twenties, Philip realized he was actually an agnostic. Now that was difficult enough, but on top of that, the group I was a part of maintained a very strict set of rules around apostasy, if someone broke with doctrine, and excommunication if someone broke the rules.

1:24:12So that is, I was at risk of losing my wife of four years, my family, my friends, my community, pretty much everything if I spoke out or acted on my beliefs. So I didn't for years. And I wound up suffering all of the side effects that Leslie John alluded to psychologically, physiologically, socially, you name it. But the desire for coming clean, so to speak, and having that sensation of it simply feels good just built up. I started confiding in a childhood friend about the problem. It felt really good to be able to express myself honestly without judgment. but because this friend was round my age and female, it also constituted a breach of trust and the emotional commitment with my wife.

1:25:09It hastened the demise of our already shattered marriage and we divorced in the summer of 2024. It was just a train wreck. Now that a little bit distance has gone by, though, I can point to the things that I did wrong and say, okay, I learned something from that. But the thing that I regret the most still is the continuing to conceal my beliefs for as long as I did out of fear. Leslie, what strikes me in Philip's story is that he was incentivized to keep his secret by his faith community. And this is true in a lot of settings, not just religious ones. Talk about the difficulty of fighting not just our own feelings of shame and remorse about a secret, but going against the norms and expectations of the communities to which we belong.

1:26:04Yeah, I mean, it takes so much courage. Philip, you are so courageous. I admire you so much. And thank you for sharing your story. One of the things that's so hard here is because it goes against the norm, It feels like you are wrong and which makes it hard to validate yourself. And this is already a really hard thing to come to terms with to really understand about yourself. So it kind of impedes self-learning. But the thing that really gives me hope is that Philip did find that ally, the woman he confided in. Now, he said he breached kind of a social contract of intimacy with his wife. But I think him saying that also, I could feel the realization that, well, your spouse is someone, in my view, we should be going for total emotional intimacy, right?

1:26:56That means you can tell them anything. And if you're not at that stage or you're not working toward it, then I think that's something to take note of and you can make a change. I mean, I believe his spouse was part of that same faith community. So in some ways, you know, talking about what was going on in his mind would have been a challenge to the faith community and to her. Right. And so that he's self-criticizing. He says he breached my wife. But in some ways, you could think of his non-telling her as an act of kindness, because as we talked about a little bit earlier, sometimes when you share something with someone, it then becomes a shared burden and it would have become a burden to her.

1:27:37So you can kind of play it both ways. These things usually are not black and white. I also thought it was interesting to me, the beautiful takeaway in the end of how he said, I regret having concealed it for so long. And I can't tell you the number of times I've heard this. Being able to be who you are and feel known for who you are and reveal it is deeply intrinsically rewarding. Right. I mean, he talks about this almost burning desire he had to come clean, to get the secret off his chest. And it's almost like we have these competing forces within us, Leslie, where a house divided when we have a secret because we have this desire to hide and this desire to reveal.

1:28:17Totally. And that's why I think like really trying to like take the temperature down a bit and thinking, what are the risks of revealing? That's natural. But what are the risks of not revealing? And what are the benefits? And like, if you can kind of start to put your finger on these things, then they become much more manageable. and you kind of embrace the duality and complexity instead of hiding from it. We also heard from some listeners who argued that it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Listener David writes, sometimes we need to recognize that we don't need to know everything about a person to enjoy their company.

1:28:54And sometimes we need to respect that not everyone is comfortable sharing their secrets with us. While your guests may feel that we should share more, I would argue that we should be more tolerant of each other and that tolerance will lead to more trust and that trust will lead to more disclosure. What do you think of David's point here, Leslie, that we should focus more on tolerance and building trust rather than feeling pressure to disclose our secrets or demand that others tell us their secrets? Oh, this is such an important point. Exactly. So the point isn't we should always share more. In fact, the people that reveal the most wisely, the best revealers, are the people that have the most disclosure flexibility.

1:29:33What that means is they have the widest range. They can go from total openness, maybe, with their spouse to complete guardedness in a high-stakes negotiation. So it really is about having the range. Now, that being said, yes, I think that I keep discovering more and more benefits of being a bit more open a lot of the time. I think that we should have more tolerance and trust and empathy for people 100%. And I also think that in a lot of situations, we should share more. In fact, one very powerful way of building trust is actually to share, to reveal sensitive information literally builds trust.

1:30:13A listener named Tracy called in to share that she thinks keeping a secret can be pleasurable. At the end of the day, I don't keep secrets, but I love secrets. I love listening to secrets. I love having secrets. When I got married, my husband said to me, you know, you love secrets. I just wonder, where does the love of secrets come from? And is that normal? Do other people feel this way? Thank you. So, Leslie, can you tell Tracy if she is normal? Tracy, you're normal. I bless you. I love this. It's such an important point. In fact, I asked people, I did a little survey and I asked the nationally representative sample of 300 Americans recently, have you ever enjoyed keeping a secret?

1:31:02And 49 % said yes. So about half of the people. And I love keeping secrets too, but there's a difference, right? There are different kinds of secrets. And the secret that comes to mind when I hear, listen to Tracy was these secrets of like, kind of these moments of shared understanding and mind meld. Like for example, when my work husband, my bestie at work, we should kind of share the same sense of taste in ideas. And so when someone's presenting something and we think it's boring, like we'll look at each other and we have this like lovely little delightful grin or, or my husband and I, when we have this shared understanding of something and we're at a dinner party and we just know this, that we're both thinking the same thing.

1:31:41Like that's a beautiful, beautiful moment. And it really enhances intimacy because it's, it's the specialness of that person and that relationship. There's a, one of my favorite psych studies, another oldie, but goodie is they got them to play footsie with each other underneath the table. And they were having, having a conversation with other people there. And half of the people that were playing footsie were supposed to keep it a secret. And then they measured at the end, like how enjoyable that task was. And it was the ones that played footsie that were tasked with keeping it a secret that had the most fun, right?

1:32:15So it's having this special thing together that can be very fun and bonding and beautiful. I mean, I think this is also true at an organizational level. There are things that sometimes an organization or a company is trying to do, and it might be a trade secret. They might be working on something that is a joint project that the rest of the world doesn't know. And clearly, those are the kinds of situations that draw people together. So even if it's not an intimate relationship, a shared secret can bring people together. Yes, I love that. I love that. It can be really motivating. And you can see even this, like at a group level, keeping secrets, positive secrets, like a surprise party.

1:32:55Isn't it so fun when you're in on the fact that your friend is having a surprise 40th for their spouse, and then you're at the soccer field and you see the spouse and you see their friends and you all have these furtive, lovely glances. It's just a really, really sparky, beautiful moment. Yeah. I've often thought that the people who are enjoying the surprise, enjoy the surprise more than the person getting the surprise. Oh, I completely agree. Like I would, I would not want a surprise party because I like the anticipation and the savoring and the, and I like to be able to control things, but yeah, that's so well put.

1:33:28It's interesting though, because when you, when you mentioned companies and trade secrets, so it also made me think of work that I've done with my colleague, Ryan Buell, on how when companies reveal things, not trade secrets, not everything, but when they reveal surprising things, some of the benefits we see when people reveal things, we also see when firms reveal things. We worked with this large credit card company in Australia where what they did was they decided to reveal the downsides of the credit cards. It's like anti-marketing, like, there's a high interest rate. So they did this for the credit cards.

1:34:07And what they found was that this actually didn't scare customers away. It enhanced trust and it increased customer lifetime because the customers trusted the bank more. Leslie says the same pattern often holds in our personal relationships as well. When we lean towards sharing our thoughts with others, it can increase the trust between us and the people we care about. The problem is often we don't even realize all that we're keeping to ourselves. Leslie wasn't fully aware of the extent to which she was holding back until she started paying attention and documenting this behavior in herself. She now keeps a list of the times she has revealed secrets and the times she has not.

1:34:48I'm doing some little data collection here because I'm a nerd. I've got a column here that says said and a column that says unsaid. And I'm going to tick off. This is really high tech. Okay. So I wake up in the morning. I roll over in bed. I say, hi, Collie. What I don't say is I slept really badly. And when I don't sleep well, I can't regulate my emotions. We go into the bathroom. We stand in front of the mirror. We're brushing our teeth. What I think to myself is, geez, I feel older than I thought I would at this age. and I'm 45. How come I still have acne? I think these things, but I don't say them.

1:35:31We're not even down in the kitchen yet. We're just in the bathroom and already my little tally here is four to one. I could go on, but I won't. And so my point isn't that we should say all of the things that are in our mind. You don't want that. I don't want that. But rather, I think we should consider saying the things more. And before I started doing this for myself, I didn't even consider saying, oh, you know, I thought I, the thoughts about my body or whatnot, when I, when I had these, when looking in the mirror and now, because I think about it more, I share more. And those, that's a perfect example of where sharing is really a good thing to do because, you know, it's, if I share how I feel about myself, then my partner knows me better.

1:36:15And that's fundamentally intimacy building. If I tell him the practical thing that I slept crappily, well, then he's going to know that the rest of the day, he's got to like kind of treat me with kid gloves because he knows me, but he can't read my mind.

1:36:35We can't read each other's minds. So should we follow Leslie's advice and share more of those bathroom mirror thoughts that we usually keep to ourselves? Next week, listeners share their stories of self-disclosure and how other people responded when they reveal more about themselves.

1:37:00Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She's the author of Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me.

1:37:16Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

1:37:38If you love Hidden Brain, please check out our new YouTube channel. We have episodes for you about courage, choking under pressure, an overlooked tool to simplify your life, and so much more. You can find us at youtube.com slash at hidden brain. Or just click the link in our show notes for today's episode. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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