In Hungary we have an expression: If you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half-assed.
If you’re living a double life, it’s going to catch up with you.
When you’re free, you’re able to live with authenticity, to stop straddling the gap between two chairs—your ideal self and your real self—and become congruent. You learn to sit fully in the chair of your own fulfillment.
Robin was struggling in the gap between two chairs when she came to see me, her marriage on the brink of collapse. She’d grown exhausted trying to live up to her husband’s exacting demands, and their marriage had become passionless and empty. She felt she needed an oxygen mask just to get through the day. In search of relief and joy, she began an affair.
Cheating is a dangerous game. Nothing is more exciting than a new lover. When you’re in a new bed, you’re not talking about who’s going to take out the garbage, whose turn it is to drive the carpool to soccer practice. It’s all pleasure, no responsibility. And it’s temporary. For a while after the affair began, Robin had felt alive to joy, more optimistic, more nourished, able to tolerate the status quo at home because her hunger for affection and intimacy was being fed elsewhere. But then her lover gave her an ultimatum. She had to choose: her husband, or him.
She booked her first session with me because she was stuck, unable to make up her mind. At her first appointment, she went around and around, detailing the pros and cons of two seemingly impossible choices. While a divorce would keep her lover from leaving, it would devastate her two children. But if she stayed in the marriage, she’d have to give up the one person who made her feel seen and cherished. It was either her kids’ happiness or her own fulfillment.
But the fundamental choice she needed to make wasn’t about which man to be with. Whatever she was doing with her husband—withdrawing, hiding, keeping secrets—she would continue to do with the lover, or in any romantic relationship, until she chose to change. Her freedom wasn’t about choosing the right man. It was about finding a way to express her desires, hopes, and fears in any relationship.
Sadly, this is a common problem. Even a marriage begun with passion and connection can grow to feel like a prison cell. It happens slowly over time, and it’s often difficult to see when and how the bars are built. There are the usual intrusions—stress over money or work or children or extended family or illness—and because the couple lacks the time or the tools to resolve these irritations, the worry and hurt and anger build up. After a while it’s even harder to express these feelings, because they lead to tension or arguments, and so it’s preferable to avoid the topics altogether. Before two people know it, they’re living separate lives. The door is open for someone else to come in and attempt to fill what’s been lost.
When a relationship is strained, it’s not one person’s fault. Both people are doing things to maintain the distance and disputes. Robin’s husband was a perfectionist. He criticized her and was judgmental and hard to please. At first, it was tough for her to recognize that she was also doing things to damage the relationship: pulling away, going to another room, disengaging, disappearing. Most of all, keeping her unhappiness a secret. The affair was a secondary secret. The primary secret was all that she had begun habitually concealing from her husband—her daily ups and downs, sorrows and pleasures, longing and grief.
Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.
I told Robin I would keep treating her if she liked, but only if she put the affair on hold as she worked to be in a more honest relationship with herself.
I gave her two exercises. The first I call Vital Signs. It’s a quick way of taking your own temperature, becoming aware of your inner climate and the emotional weather you’re putting into the world. We’re always communicating, even when we’re not saying a word. The only time we don’t communicate is when we’re in a coma. Several times a day, make a conscious effort to check in with your body, to ask yourself, “Do I feel soft and warm, or cold and stiff?”
Robin didn’t like discovering how often she was stiff, rigid, closed off. Over time, the act of taking her emotional temperature helped her soften. This is when I introduced the second exercise, Pattern Interruption—a way to consciously replace a habitual response with something else. When Robin felt herself wanting to withdraw or withhold from her husband, she would make a conscious effort not to disappear. She’d soften her gaze and look at her husband with loving eyes—something she hadn’t done for a long time. One evening at the dinner table, she gently reached for his hand.
It was a tiny step toward intimacy. They still had a lot of repairs to make if they were to rebuild their relationship. But they’d begun.
Healing can’t happen as long as we’re hiding or disowning parts of ourselves. The things we silence or cover up become like hostages in the basement, trying more and more desperately to get our attention.
I know because I tried to hide my past for years, to conceal what had happened to me, to hide my grief and rage. When Béla and I fled Communist Europe after the war and came to America with Marianne, I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want to be the shipwrecked person I was, a mother who was also a Holocaust survivor. I worked in a garment factory, cutting loose threads off the seams of little boys’ underwear, paid seven cents per dozen, too scared to say anything in English for fear others would hear my accent. I just wanted to fit in, to be accepted. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I didn’t want my scars to show.
It wasn’t until decades later, when I was finishing my training as a clinical psychologist, that I realized the cost of my double life. I was trying to heal others without healing myself. I was an impostor. On the outside, I was a doctor. On the inside, a terrified sixteen-year-old was quaking, cloaked in denial, overachievement, and perfectionism.
Until I could face the truth, I had my secret, and my secret had me.
My secret also had my children, in ways I’m still growing to understand. The childhood memories Marianne, Audrey, and John have shared—the fear and tension they sensed under the surface without knowing what it was about—are similar to what I’ve read in letters from readers around the world who are children of Holocaust survivors.
Ruth, whose parents were Hungarian survivors, told me about the impact her parents’ silence had on her growing up. On the one hand, she had a wonderful childhood. Her father and mother were outwardly joyful and relieved to have immigrated to Australia, happy to be able to offer their children a good education, to send them to ballet and piano classes, to raise them in a peaceful environment, to celebrate their accomplishments and friendships. “We’re lucky,” they’d often say. “Thank goodness.” There was no obvious stamp of trauma.
But there was a disconnect between Ruth’s inner and outer experience. Her parents’ positivity about the present in contrast with their silence about the past left her feeling anxious. A sense of foreboding threaded its way through many experiences, however pleasurable or mundane. Picking up on her parents’ unspoken trauma and fear, she, too, developed a belief that something was wrong, that something terrible was about to happen. She became a successful psychiatrist and a mother, but no matter how accomplished she was, she harbored a chronic sense of dread and asked, Why do I feel this way? Even her professional training in psychiatry didn’t give her the right lens to understand.
When he turned nineteen, Ruth’s youngest son asked her to take him and his brother to Hungary. He wanted to learn more about his grandparents, who were no longer alive. And with the rise of right-wing extremism around the globe, and an understanding that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, he felt especially committed to knowing more about the past. But Ruth balked. She’d been to Hungary as a young woman, during the height of Communism, and it had not been a pleasant experience. She had no desire to return.
Then a friend recommended a book to her—The Choice!—and reading it gave her new courage and a strong imperative to face her parents’ past. She agreed to the trip.
It turned out that retracing her parents’ past with her sons was an intensely transformative and healing experience. They visited a synagogue that houses an exhibition on the Budapest ghetto. For the first time, she saw pictures that detailed what her mother had lived through. It was painful and difficult to take in the truth. But it was also helpful and empowering. She gained insight and a new sense of connection to her parents—she understood why they’d been so reluctant to talk about the past, appreciating that they were trying to protect her, and themselves. But hiding or minimizing our truth doesn’t protect our loved ones. Protecting them means working to heal the past so we don’t inadvertently pass the trauma on to them. As Ruth confronted her family’s legacy, she was able to feel congruence within herself. To come to terms with the root of her anxiety and begin to release it.
My healing didn’t start until a fellow student at the University of Texas gave me a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and I finally worked up the courage to read it. I had so many excuses, so many reasons to resist: I don’t need to read someone else’s account of Auschwitz, I told myself. I was there! Why feel the pain all over again? Why open myself up to nightmares? Why revisit hell? But when I finally cracked the book open in the middle of the night while my family slept and the house was quiet, something unexpected happened: I felt seen. Frankl had been where I’d been. It felt like he was speaking directly to me. Our experiences weren’t identical. He was in his thirties when he was imprisoned, already an acclaimed psychiatrist; I was a sixteen-year-old gymnast and ballet student dreaming of my boyfriend. But the way he wrote about our shared past changed my life. I saw a new possibility for myself—a way to give up secrets and hiding, to stop fighting and running away from the past. His words—and later, his mentorship—gave me the courage and inspiration to face and express my truth, and in speaking my secret, reclaim my genuine self.
Reckoning and release are impossible when we keep secrets—when we operate under a code of denial, delusion, or minimization.
Sometimes the demand to keep a secret is unspoken or unconscious. Sometimes others buy our silence with threats or force. Either way, secrets are harmful because they create and sustain a climate for shame, and shame is the bottom line of any addiction. Freedom comes from facing and telling the truth—and, as I’ll explore in the next chapter, this is only possible when we create a climate of love and acceptance within ourselves.