Black Secrets

Sometimes coincidences feel a lot more like direct messages from the Universe. Earlier today I commented on a post and expressed the importance of proper understanding of the effects of sex addiction on the partner. I talked about, in particular, the toxicity to my soul of keeping his secrets. You'll notice I've not talked even here of specifics. 

(For anyone's imagination that might go there, no it doesn't involve minors or violence.) 

Later I picked up Women Who Run with the Wolves again and opened to the page with the heading, "Secrets as Slayers". Yeah. 

Here's an excerpt:

This problem of secret stories surrounded by shame is that they cut a woman off from her instinctive nature, which is n the main, joyous and free. When there is a black secret in the psyche, a woman can go nowhere near it, and in fact protects herself from coming into contact with anything that will remind her of it or cause her already chronic pain to crest to an even more intense level. 

This defensive maneuver is common, and, as in the aftereffects of trauma, secretly influences women's choices in what she will or will not undertake in the outer world: which books, films, or events she will or will not involve herself with; what she will or won't laugh about; and what interests she gives herself to. In this sense, there is entrapment of the wild nature, which should be free to do, be, look into whatever it likes.

And then:

The keeping of secrets cuts a woman off from those who would give her love, succor, and protection. It causes her to carry the burden of grief and fear all by herself, and sometimes for an entire group, whether family or culture. Further, as Jung said, keeping secrets cuts us off from the unconscious. Where there is a shaming secret, there is always a dead zone in the woman's psyche, a place that does not feel or respond properly to her continuing emotional life events or to the emotional life events of others.

The dead zone is greatly protected. It is a place of endless doors and walls, each locked with twenty locks, and the homunculi, the little creatures in women's dreams, are always busy building more doors, more dams, more security, lest the secret escape.

The secret always finds its way out, if not in direct words, then somatically, and most often not in a way that it can be dealt with and helped in a straightforward manner. So what does the woman do when she finds the secret leaking out? She runs after it with great expenditure of energy. She beats, bundles, and burrows it back down into the dead zone again, and calls her homunculi -- the inner guardians and ego defenders -- to build more doors, more walls. The woman leans against her latest psychic tomb, sweating blood and breathing like a locomotive. A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman. 

I am breathless.