Leslie John

Is your purpose because sometimes we reveal secrets because we just feel so guilty and ashamed.

And it's more to make ourselves feel better to share the burden than it is to actually grow from it.

And so, you know, think to yourself, is this something that I'm doing to alleviate burdens to myself?

And if that's the case, is telling my spouse the right thing or is that just going to impose the burden on her?

Perhaps it's better to talk about it with a therapist than in that case, right?

Whereas if your motive is to really understand your relationship better and what your goals are and how you relate to each other, well, then that might be an integral way of starting such conversations.

Oh, geez, that's such a hard question.

I guess it depends how you define better off, you know?

I think one of the things that makes this so hard is that Heno does not have the opportunity to make more sense of it by speaking with his grandfather again.

And I think that's really the challenging thing because when we have these hard truths in our history and we learn about them,

The way that we can metabolize them is by talking about them with the people who went through it and understanding their perspective and what it was like and their motives and how they think about it.

That gives us some closure, some sense making, some sense of certainty.

It's incredibly therapeutic.

And I feel sad for Hanno that he didn't have that opportunity.

And so often we think about these moments of revealing as a one shot, right?

But like we can go back to the person and if they're alive and we can continue to engage in a conversation and ask them more questions because there will be a point where we're no longer able to do that.

Yes, completely.

And those are really interesting because they introduce this element of social pressure, right?

It's like this unspoken thing that we all know, but we don't want to talk about.

And then even if someone does want to say something, they feel like they can't because they