Public, Private & Secret Selves
Healthy people naturally portray both a public self and a private self to others:
Public self: “Information about the self, or an integrated view of the self, that is conveyed to others in actions, self-descriptions, appearance, and social interactions. An individual’s public self may vary depending on the target or audience of such impressions. The public self is often contrasted with the private self, which may be similar to or different from the self one reveals to others.”
- American Psychological Association
Private self: “The part of the self that is known mainly to oneself, such as one’s inner feelings and self-concept. It may be similar to or different from the public self one reveals to others.”
- American Psychological Association
In a healthy relationship, both people are privy to each other’s public and private selves. This is one of the many benefits of a close relationship. The better they know each other, the more they foster trust, understanding, collaboration, good communication, and support in the relationship.
On the other hand, when both people in the relationship live double lives and they compartmentalize, this includes segmenting their public and private selves. Doing so, automatically creates limitations in the relationship and can lead to many problems. For those who are aware and who care about sharing life with another safe, trustworthy person, living double-lives creates the on-going sense of being-in-the-dark and of missed opportunity.
The relationship can be broken down, segmented, even further when one or both people have a third ‘container’ which they also keep out of the relationship: a secret self.
A secret self includes whatever is not exposed by the person’s public and private selves. It’s like another whole life and world which is kept under lock-and-key and known only to that person.
It’s highly likely that large portion of the secret self involves important areas related to morality, ethics, and responsibility—all of which are crucial information in knowing who a person is and what they’re about. This information is normally used to determine interest in a relationship with them or not.
The person who has a secret self in a relationship severely limits what is available of themselves; and what is available for the other person to access, know, understand, relate to, interact with, connect with, and collaborate with. The secret-self person, after hiding away their public self and their secret self from the other person in the relationship, is whittled down to roughly 10 percent (or less) of a person with whom the other person is expected to have a relationship.
Additionally, the secret-self person has to keep straight, in their own mind, what they have going on in each compartment and to be careful not to reveal anything from the other compartments to the other person in the relationship. The energy and focus used just in doing this leaves even less energy and focus for the relationship.
This sort of relationship can work if both people in the relationship agree to what they will share together with the available 10 percent. If the secret-self person is so secretive that they don’t admit to having a secret-self, the other person will have to figure out alone. Here’s a blog post about doing that: “Automatic ‘Yes’s’ in Relationships.”
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