Secrecy and Openness in Psychotherapy

Abstract

In the previous two chapters, I described the benefits of revealing secrets in a journal or diary, and in these remaining chapters, I move into a more complex analysis of what happens when revealing secrets to another person, starting with one′s therapist. Psychotherapy clients could be expected to reveal their secrets completely to their therapists, no? Actually, even though they were paying a good deal of money for their treatment, 46% of a sample of clients in long-term therapy (Hill et al., 1993) and 60% of a sample of short-term therapy outpatients (Kelly, 1998) reported keeping some major secret from their therapists.