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2001-12-29 - 8:33 a.m.

SHAME

Someone once suggested that functional families are all alike but dysfunctional families are all dysfunctional in their own way. The families that keep secrets often are strange. The families that pretend they keep secrets are even stranger. Describing the oddity that results when the secrets are fully known but not to be discussed is difficult. It is as though a portrait of the family at the gathering has been painted by Salvador Dali.

At some point such secrets go from being secrets to being fictions, fantasies, or shared delusions. Fantasies, however, involve fun and if these secrets were fun they would not be secrets. Delusions require belief and fear, rather than belief, drives these secrets. No one believes the false picture. Fear�of confrontation, of conflict, of shame�provides the brush work for this Picture of Dorien Grey. No, these secrets are fiction, bad fiction. They swallow up both literal and symbolic truths and isolate us all.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain�or the bottle behind the couch. Pay no attention to the breath mints that cover �nothing.� Lie about physical ailments and cluck your tongue about the toughness of life for the poor dear. Protect dignity at all costs, including the loss of closeness.

Alcoholism can kill. Sadly, it kills many an alcoholic physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But it can kill those around the alcoholic too. The shame, the frustration, the anger, and the fear create the secrets and those secrets, those noxious, well-known secrets, crush fun, intimacy, and hope. They kill communication and, ultimately, they kill relationships.

I long ago accepted the likely loss of the family alcoholic. What I did not anticipate was the concomitant loss of relationship with the one who has dubbed herself �Keeper of the Secret.� That loss has come from shame�and it�s a real shame.

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