• A university professor of religious studies who is found with more than 4,200 Internet photos of child porn on his work computer
  
• A hard-working mother with three children who hides bottles of vodka in the laundry room, then binges when the kids are at school. 
  
• An elected legislator who files for bankruptcy from gambling debts and the public learns of his taking off hours from work weekly to visit casinos, wearing clever disguises.
  
• A homeowner who allows 400 cats to overrun her entire household until the stench from years of undisposed urine and feces prompts neighbors to report her residence to public health authorities.
  
• A PTA chairperson who arrives late to important meetings because she can’t  leave the house until checking to make sure her stove is turned off dozens of times and who even turns off the water taps extra tightly so her pets won’t go crazy listening to a constant dripping sound.

Each of these troubled people lives a double life because their unhealthy secrets overpower them. Now think of the 80 million similar Secret Keepers worldwide* who steal hours away from their public lives to act out their secret behaviors or passions, sometimes for decades, but who never get found out. You will meet:                       

• Tracy, a bulimic
• Brad, a pathological gambler
• Kevin, a cross-dresser
• Lila, a shoplifter
• Shelly, wife of an exhibitionist
• Earl, an incest perpetrator
• Mitch, executive in credit card debt
• Caroline, captive to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• And myself, a once-secret drinker and….

Secret Keeping is a guide to self-awareness that assists readers to rid themselves of double lives, those unhealthy and disabling habits of double-mindedness that plague so many—and, instead, to live liberated lives of whole-mindedness. Its healing messages provide practical stepping stones to wholeness and emotional recovery for anyone living a double life of secret activities.

This book is intended for:

• People who have secrets that make them unhealthy or unhappy.
• Practicing Secret Keepers looking for solutions to the suffering caused by the double-minded choices of their secret lives.
• Persons living with a Secret Keeper, frequently suspicious and weary, who are seeking encouragement and effective coping skills.
• Professionals in the counseling, social work, and pastoral fields who deal with secret-keeping behaviors and who will use this book’s ideas, theories, and practical advice to help their clients.

Table of Contents

PART 1
The Self Divided
Problems & Consequences

Introduction:           Confessions of a Liberated Secret Keeper
Chapter 1:                Who Are Secret Keepers?
Chapter 2:                What Are Unhealthy Secret Habits?
Chapter 3:                How Secret Habits Seduce Us
Chapter 4:                Where the Actions We Hide Stay Hidden
Chapter 5:                When Nobody is Looking, Who Are You?
Chapter 6:                Maximizing Pleasure, Minimizing Pain
Chapter 7:                The Quest for Authenticity
Chapter 8:                When Secret Keeping Goes Too Far

PART 2
The Journey Toward Wholeness
Solutions & Rewards

Introduction:            The Freedom of Recovery
Chapter 9:                 I Give Up, Help
Chapter 10:               Where Is My Inspiration?
Chapter 11:               Discovering Who I Genuinely Am
Chapter 12:               Here's the Real Me
Chapter 13:               The World and My Place in It
Chapter 14:               My Authenticity in a Messy World
Chapter 15:               Transformation From Deep Within
Chapter 16:               My Recovery From Today On

If interested contact John Prin

Introduction

Everyone keeps secrets.

Some people who keep secrets do not feel guilty, others do.

It's the second kind of people who keep secrets, those who feel guilt or shame, that Secret Keeping is written for. In my career as a therapist and counselor, I've come to call these clients Secret Keepers®. Secret Keepers can be anyone from a housewife hiding vodka bottles from her family to compulsive gamblers, food addicts, cyber sex fanatics, or anyone else who is secretly hiding behind the mask of a double life.

Sometimes people just daydream about a taboo fantasy world, not acting on their thoughts. This is secret-keeping® in its mildest form. If this describes you, relax. It's static, benign—not a problem. This book will help you but you're not in any major trouble. Think of yourself as a human being like everybody else, and that you have your life together and under control.

Other Secret Keepers go beyond thinking about their fantasies to living them out. They willingly take risks and consciously push boundaries that move them in a negative direction towards something that is, or will become, a problem for themselves and others. This is secret-keeping in its active form. It's dynamic, volatile—and highly problematic. Individuals like these stretch ethical, moral, and relational boundaries in search of something missing in their lives, often to escape some pain or hurt. If you find yourself in this category, Secret Keeping will help you understand why you need to rethink your secret-keeping strategy(ies) and how to examine your options, including seeking outside help. It will open the door to hope—the hope of living freely without deception, lies, alibis, guilt or shame.

Still other kinds of people act outside accepted ethical, moral, and relational limits; they break the law. They willingly take illegal risks and commit crimes that endanger or damage themselves, others, and society. This is secret-keeping in its criminal or psychotic form. It's malignant, destructive—and highly injurious. In this category are two types of individual: the decent, regular sort of person whose secrecy makes them cross the line into crime or psychosis, and the hardened, antisocial sort of career criminal such as a serial rapist or murderer. This book will deal only marginally with the latter level of sex offender and killer. What's essential to realize is that secret-keeping, in all of its forms, involves some degree of criminal thinking along with risks, thrills, and multiple kinds of harm. The likelihood of slipping down the slippery slope for any Secret Keeper—from static to dynamic to malignant—always exists.

As you read Secret Keeping, you will see that it describes people with good hearts and curious minds who are seeking, many times inappropriately, wholeness and fulfillment. It features everyday working adults with families, homes, jobs, and responsibilities. They may be in the static or active stages of "stealing hours" from their public lives headed toward the malignant stage. By participating secretly in hidden habits they realize are shameful or stigmatizing, they risk stepping outside their public lives fully aware that, if anybody knew, their good standing and reputation in the community would diminish or be destroyed.

Confessions of a Liberated Secret Keeper

I speak from both my personal and professional encounters with secret-keeping. From age eleven to 51, I lived two parallel lives. Based solely on outward appearances, I looked normal, made a good impression, and was a high-functioning teenager as well as adult. The volcanic drama of my hidden addictive life, however, and the ways it gained control over me, were another story altogether.

My decades as an active Secret Keeper certainly made me ill. Gradually the ways I kept secrets and the resulting pattern of living a double life of lies, cover-ups, and addictions (what I later came to call “secret keeping”) subverted any hope of living a fulfilling life. But I’ve discovered I was hardly alone. In time I learned the simple truth:

We are as sick as our secrets.

This inner story that I alone experienced—and how everybody was fooled—is only half of the story, though. The even bigger story is that my life mirrors the experience of thousands of other people, a number of whom you will meet in these pages.

In Secret Keeping, you will see how my own and others' double lives remained hidden behind the masks that everyone around us observed. In my case, the forty years that I lived in two worlds, ricocheting between public respectability and private temptations, were years I would never choose to repeat. By my thirties, I was addicted to drugs, plagued by an ulcer, in bondage to philandering and pornography, and living in a parallel universe haunted by suicidal and homicidal urges. On a chilly, windswept November afternoon in 1977, my wayward life collapsed and I faced the gut-wrenching moment of almost ending my life.

Ultimately, these "stolen" years taught me invaluable lessons that eventually led to the rewards of whole-mindedness. Others reached similar low points in their lives: hospitalizations for eating disorders, financial ruin from credit card debt, jail time for shoplifting, arrests for sexual crimes, and career crashes from compulsive gambling and extra-marital affairs.

In my current professional role as a counselor, I’ve heard numerous stories of secret-keeping from clients who told me about their double lives. I've unearthed numerous ways people keep secrets and become sick from their destructive habits. The clients I counsel often feel sabotaged by their self-defeating habits and end up hating their split reality. They are among the more than 20,000,000 Americans** who get trapped in hidden double lives yet still function in their jobs, in their homes, and with their families—and they walk among us every day.

My counseling work has centered on developing effective therapies to help people struggling with the tensions of a secret life. In short, my journey to wholeness has served to not only unlock the secrets that made me sick, but the secrets that make others sick as well. Eventually I discovered one of the underlying problems that had disabled so many and prevented them from fulfilling their life’s destiny: a history of wounded, negative emotions lived out unconsciously in their adult lives. Today I devote my waking efforts to assisting troubled individuals to free themselves from the detours, deceptions, and dead ends of secret-keeping, so they too can live their best lives. Secret Keeping: From Living Double Lives to Freedom is meant to make this motivating knowledge available to thousands more than I can serve personally.

The simple truth? We are as sick as our secrets … but there’s hope!

If interested contact John Prin

Emotional health for Secret Keepers means living in a balanced state of being where two worlds merge and become one-double-mindedness ceases and becomes whole-mindedness. The book presents the reader with eight traits, or splintered mindsets, of a Secret Keeper: