Coming Clean

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Growing up, I attended a Jesuit high school. I noticed that every weekend my Catholic classmates and their families would line up and confess their sins to a priest. Some of those priests were also our teachers. They taught us history and geography and economics.

I found myself wondering why in the world my classmates would fess up about the bad things they had done to the very teachers who held us to such strict account in the classroom. Nearly every religious and spiritual tradition has some version of the Catholic confessional. Everyone keeps secrets. but nearly everyone wants to share their secrets too. Turns out, we don't just want to be admired and loved, we also want to be seen.

In our episode last week, we explored the costs of self concealment. People who keep secrets have poorer physical and mental health. They are less likely to elicit help from others. If you missed that episode, you can find it in this podcast feed. It's titled Keeping Secrets.

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