HEALTH PLUS:THE CONFESSIONAL age is a curious age. Self-disclosure is rampant. The boundaries between public and private information have been blurred to the point of erasure, writes MARIE MURRAY
Admissions, descriptions and details of every intimate kind are now given in public. It is as if anyone will tell anything to everyone, regardless of how private and personal those revelations may be.
But other people can get hurt in the process: the wives, husbands, children, parents or associates of the people who decide to tell their story. This is the danger in public declarations. Confessional narratives, while they may be cathartic for the storyteller, can collaterally harm family members, because the personal disclosure breaches their right to privacy.
This is not a trivial matter. The problem with the confessional genre is that information does not just belong to the person who tells his or her life story, but may include family members who were equally hurt by the past, who suffered similarly to the raconteur, and who wish to move on with their own lives away from public observation of their personal history.
The scrutiny that befalls one family member befalls all family members. Privacy is infringed by the confessional tale.
There is, of course, a media- generated public hunger for intimate information. There is an assumed sense of entitlement to know every detail about people whom the public do not personally know, simply because they are public figures. Information that has nothing to do with their public role is accessed. Private lives are intruded upon. Ethics are breached by unwarranted exposé, when what’s private becomes available to all.
Nor is it appropriate for people to succumb to the inquisitiveness of media. There are times when reserve, discernment, diplomacy and discretion are appropriate responses to media inquisitions. One often wonders how an interviewer dares to ask the questions asked of a guest on radio, on television or in newspaper interviews.
One wonders even more, why the interviewee answers, rather than rejecting the question as inappropriate to the subject under discussion, when that is the case. It is not compulsory to tell one’s life story as a quid pro quo for media exposure, when promoting a product, a book or upon admission to public office. A little reserve would not go astray in the world today.
Of course, self-disclosure does have some positive psychological functions, in the right situation. In these circumstances disclosure can allow self-expression and self-clarification whereby having to structure one’s story to tell it coherently to another person, can often clarify the narrator’s understanding of their own emotions about it, almost regardless of the listener’s response.
Self-disclosure can also provide social validation, when a narrator discovers that other people think the same way, have experienced the same feelings and frustrations or have encountered similar life events. This is reassuring. Some sharing is necessary. To understand oneself, one needs the understanding of others.
The closer a relationship, the more people feel safe to admit their vulnerabilities to another person. Living is social, sharing is helpful, but where, when, with whom and to what extent people share the details of their personal lives, is worth considering. The integrity of the recipient is important. Trust is broken when confidences are betrayed.
Adolescents, in the intensity of relationships, are often seduced into saying more about themselves than is wise. Information given cannot be withdrawn and many young people suffer the experience that what was shared “in confidence” with their “best friend” appears on a social networking site for the consumption of all. Parents can help adolescents appreciate the delicate balance between connection and confession.
Caution in self-disclosure is preferable to the confessional. There is nothing pathological, repressed, defensive or anally retentive about not wishing to share personal information with people one does not know. It is not psychologically unhealthy to retain for oneself the details of one’s own life. It is appropriate.
There is, however, one intriguing exception to the rule. Known as “the stranger on the train” phenomenon, it has been found that when people feel they have nobody to confide in, they often choose a stranger on a journey to talk to, perhaps because they know that when the journey ends they will not see the person again.
The power of therapy and of anonymous helplines also lies in this “stranger” role.
- Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is the director of the student services in UCD