Maybe I Can® with Debbie Weiss

Ep. 117: The Cost of Secrets

• Debbie Weiss

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In this episode, we explore the hidden cost of keeping secrets—especially those fueled by shame and embarrassment. When we refuse to acknowledge a problem, we often dig ourselves into a deeper hole, creating more stress, anxiety, and even self-sabotage. Through personal stories and real-life examples, we’ll unpack why we hide the truth, how it impacts our relationships and well-being, and most importantly, how to break free. Whether it’s financial struggles, health issues, or personal fears, this episode will challenge you to release the weight of secrecy and embrace the power of honesty—because true freedom starts when we stop hiding from ourselves. Tune in and take the first step toward living more authentically!

Debbie Weiss
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 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/maybe-i-can-with-debbie-weiss/id1676123222

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Maybe I Can, exploring possibilities, one sprinkle at a time. If you've ever found yourself asking is this all there is to life, then you're in the right place. I'm Debbie author, speaker, entrepreneur and coach, and every Tuesday, I'm here to share a sprinkle of hope and inspiration. Together, we'll uncover the more More joy, more fulfillment, more prosperity, more fun. We'll share stories of transformation, actionable tips and that little nudge you need to take the next step. So let's embark on this journey of discovery and say maybe I can to a life filled with more, ready to find out. Let's get started. The Maybe I Can Show starts now.

Speaker 1:

Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the Maybe I Can Podcast. I'm your host, debbie Weiss, and thank you so much for joining me today on this beautiful sunny afternoon here in New Jersey. Hopefully, it's sunny where you are too, or when you're listening. It feels like spring big time here, and it's only Tuesday and already I feel like I've ridden a roller coaster of emotions over the last 24 hours and I think, for like the second or third week in a row, I changed what I was going to talk about hours before I'm getting on here speaking to you, and because you know I want this to be genuine. I don't want to just I don't know make up a script. Obviously, if you listen to me, I don't make up a script because I'm a rambling fool sometimes, but I, you know, want to talk about what's top of mind and share with you what I'm experiencing so that hopefully, it will resonate with you on some level. So yesterday my brother, who's four years younger than I am, was in the hospital. He lives about seven hours away from me and before I go on, let me just say, thankfully that he's okay and he was released today. He only stayed over 24 hours.

Speaker 1:

But you know that, that tense feeling, that whirl of emotions that's inside you, where you let your brain wander off to worst case scenarios that was going on, and then something else happened that totally separate it really got me angry, angry at some people, angry at a situation, kind of angry at myself, because I was the one who did this to myself, put myself in this situation where I should have known better, and I think I was so uptight yesterday and just it was like that. You know, when you feel, you physically feel the effect of those emotions and you, if you take a second to just breathe, you realize that you're clenching your jaw or your fists or your shoulders, or you know you're all scrunched up, your shoulders are up to your ears and, like you know, your stomach feels like it's in your chest or vice versa. And somehow later in the day I don't remember how I it's been since I felt that way. I also realized that I didn't know it at the time and you wouldn't have known it from meeting me, but that's how I always felt On the inside. I always was so uptight and high strung and waiting for the next shoe to drop and trying to anticipate what was going to come next, so maybe I could prevent it or figure out a solution before it even happened. And I really realized wow, what a way to live, what a way to live. Wow, what a way to live. What a way to live. It also made me think about something that I've told this story before. So if you've heard it sorry, if you've read about it in my book or one of my books, I think I might've written about it twice. Sorry, but you're going to hear it again and you know what. That's okay, because sometimes I know firsthand. You could hear something many, many times and just one day, because of whatever's going on in your life, it hits you differently. So let me tell you what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1:

The whole premise of this show is about secrets and the cost of keeping secrets, and in my case, yeah, I'm talking about secrets Secrets, not secrets about other people. So it's not like, oh, I know something about Johnny and I'm not going to tell you because it's a secret, not something like that. It's really your own personal secret that you're also trying to keep from yourself a backstory. I'm trying to think how far back to go and I'm like almost ready to jump in with the excuses, which I do not want to do because I have to take responsibility for my decisions. But over time this is years ago over time, I got myself well, my husband and I to keep everyone happy and I just kept telling myself it'll work out, don't worry about it, as I continued to spend money on things that we shouldn't have been spending money on. Instead of paying, not my bills I was current on my bills but what I was really doing, since I'm self-employed.

Speaker 1:

When you're self-employed, the government does not take out taxes. In my case, for my insurance business. I am a sole proprietor for my insurance business. I am a sole proprietor, which means that each quarter, four times a year, I have to pay my estimated taxes into the IRS and if I don't pay them in a timely fashion then they charge me interest and penalties. And for years I paid it timely.

Speaker 1:

And then all of a sudden something happened and I thought, oh well, we really need to do this or we really need to buy that or whatever it was. It really wasn't anything extravagant. It came from a lot of different places and reasons and whatnot. And it started as oh, maybe I'm not going to be able to make this estimate on April 15th when it's due, but I'll make a little more in June, or maybe I'll not be able to make it up and I'll pay it next April when I file my tax returns. And then that was like oh, I can't make April and June's estimate. I can't make April, june, september estimate. I can't make April and June's estimate. I can't make April, june, september estimate. Oh, I'll make them all in January, when I used to get this one-time kind of bonus thing, and that's what I did for a long time, and then the bonus stopped and then I wasn't making any estimates and the amount that I owed. I was then having to make installment payments to try and well, I wasn't keeping current to kind of pay the back taxes, and then, in addition to that, had to pay the current, and that just was not working and eventually it erupted.

Speaker 1:

But before it erupted, well, let me just say, all that time I didn't share with my husband. He had some kind of idea, but honestly he wanted to stick his head in the sand because, as you might know, he suffered from depression and anxiety, which was one of the reasons that I didn't really share with him why I made these excuses in my head. When I knew that maybe we should downsize where we live, that we needed to change some of our spending habits, I convinced myself. I couldn't tell him, because then he would go into a depression and I couldn't stand when he just would sleep or not speak to me or whatever it was. And so I just kept not thinking about it, or shall I say trying not to think about it, just trying to stuff the secret down. And whenever something came up about money or taxes or some other person mentioned something, and it would of course pop into my mind and my insides would start turning, and I just tell myself don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it, and I could just literally like picture pushing, pushing that down with my hand, like back down into my stomach, out of my head, trying to get it out of my mind. And I guess this is. Let me think about this. I know what it was.

Speaker 1:

It was February of 2020, because it was one month before COVID and my cousin and I went to see Oprah Winfrey in person. She was doing back then in like 2019, the country, and she was in Brooklyn, and so my cousin and I went to Brooklyn. It was a whole day event. It was great, it was wonderful, and at the end of the day, oprah comes out by herself. You know, it's in a big arena, there's like 19,000 people there, but she comes out and, just as Oprah, can, they turn down the lights and she starts sharing some personal story. I don't recall what it was and through whatever she was saying and these are not her words, but this was the gist, or this is what the gist that I heard Was that we all carry secrets, was that we all carry secrets, but the thing with secrets is that they don't usually stay a secret.

Speaker 1:

And if you have something that you consider a secret that you're not sharing with anyone maybe it's because you're ashamed or embarrassed and I was I mean I wasn't sharing, sharing with anyone. Maybe it's because you're ashamed or embarrassed, and I was I mean I wasn't sharing this with anyone not my closest, closest friends and family. I was not sharing it because I was ashamed and I was embarrassed that if you don't do something about it, if you don't address whatever that problem is, whatever that secret is, you're not sharing it then eventually it's going to basically erupt like a volcano and you'll have zero control over the fallout. Whereas if you owned up to that secret, you faced whatever that was, whatever that shame, that embarrassment, that thing that you are ignoring, and you know it was festering, it festers. At least you're going to have some kind of control over it.

Speaker 1:

And I sat there. It was like the other 19,000 people in the stadium weren't there. It was, you know, oprah and I, locking eyes and she was speaking to me and tears started streaming down my face and my cousin didn't really know why I was crying, because she didn't know anything about it and I didn't tell her. But I knew, I knew that was what I needed to hear. That was what I needed to hear and from that moment on, I did just that. I, you know, I said I am going to attack this one step at a time. It's not like I went and blasted it all over the world telling people oh okay, what's the solution and what are my options. And I started to explore different options and I talked to a tax attorney and I spoke to a bankruptcy attorney and I spoke to my accountant and I spoke to a lot of different people to try and piece together where I'm going to go and at least figure out what's possible, and just taking those steps, those small actions. It didn't lead to a quick solution by any means. It took several years, but I was doing something and now I was being proactive.

Speaker 1:

The next part two of this came when I was writing my memoir, and so that was in the actual writing was like the second half of 2022. And I'm writing the memoir and the whole point of the memoir is, you know, to share my challenges and my limiting beliefs and all of these things and, obviously, for people to be inspired that, despite their own circumstances, that you can always change your life. And I didn't write this money story in there, because I remember thinking this money story in there, because I remember thinking I am besides the fact that everybody now in my community is going to know what I've done or what I haven't done my family, my friends, and really I remember crying to one of my friends the one friend that I did then finally confide in and saying my kids are going to read this and they're just going to be so disappointed in me. You know I'm going to fall off Not that I think that they have me on a pedestal, probably not anymore. You know, I remember I was probably in my late mid to late teens when my parents started falling off that pedestal. But if I hadn't boy, this was going to be a deep plunge off that pedestal. But something in me said I am not being authentic by writing this book without putting this in there. And I wrote it.

Speaker 1:

And it was very, very scary, especially when people in my community are like, oh, I read your book, I read your book and they don't say something about it. You know, no one mentions it, but inside it was tough. It was tough, but you know what? In the end I know that it's what I needed to do for myself and it's what I needed to do to connect with other people. You know, we all screw up. We all screw up. We're human and your screw ups could be different than my screw ups and your secret.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you've got something like that now that you're not addressing, you don't want to deal with. It's too difficult, it's shameful. You know you're embarrassed, you know, whatever it is, why do we even keep these secrets? And you know, for me, I can definitely say I was petrified of being judged or rejected by my friends and my family and that all these people are going to view me differently and that all these people are going to view me differently. You know, I think I don't know how people view me, but I'm a businesswoman, I used to be a practicing CPA. I mean, come on, I should know better, I should know better. And then I think it was kind of like keeping this secret to myself was kind of like making me believe that I actually had control. Or maybe it's not real. If no one knows, it's not real, which, of course, is ridiculous. But you know how you can fool yourself, how we can fool ourselves with our own mind. Maybe it's something that your secret could involve confrontation. I don't know about you, I'm not a big fan of confrontation. I'm getting a little better at it when it's necessary, but usually I would back away from confrontation. Think about people who like.

Speaker 1:

This always amazes me a person who ignores symptoms of an illness because they don't want to face a diagnosis and then by the time they seek help, the condition has worsened and, if God forbid, now it's incurable. For the longest time my husband didn't go to the doctor. I mean, he wound up getting being diagnosed with MDS, a form of blood cancer. I don't think that it would have made any difference, and he actually had been seeing someone for a few years a hematologist, so but on so many other counts it was like, no, I'm not going to go, I'm not going to go. Or I'm thinking how many people don't get a colonoscopy or a mammogram? You know things that are like uncomfortable. Or I had a friend who was like oh, I just feel it. I think I have breast cancer, so I'm not going to have a mammogram. Oh, you know, I can't say anything because that's not me. I have other secrets that I had kept.

Speaker 1:

Or how about people being unhappy? I have a friend who had been in different toxic relationships with different men and after a while she stopped with a new man. She stopped sharing because and I'm just guessing that you know me, my other friends, we judged her. We did because it was like again you're in another relationship with a guy like this, what are you doing? Well, that's not really a great friend. Nobody wants to be judged, and so it feels like it's easier to keep to ourselves. But is it easier? It's like everything else. We think, oh, in the short term it's easier, but if you think about the emotional toll that that's taking on you mentally and physically, worrying about what if someone finds out, oh my gosh, what if someone finds out? Or why can't I fix this? I can't believe this. What is wrong with me? And I'm an imposter. I'm pretending to be someone I'm not, and when they find out, you know what's going to happen. I mean, you're walking around like you're, like a ticking time bomb. It's awful secrets. It makes it worse in the long run, just like Oprah says, it'll blow up like a volcano.

Speaker 1:

I can remember one other time that sticks out to me is years ago I was on the local school board and my older son had an IEP, which is an individualized education plan, which meant, you know, he had some special accommodations and special needs. And I was the only one on the school board maybe there was nine of us, I don't recall who had a child with special needs. So you know, I was kind of like self-tasked with being there to represent that population and I was sitting in a gosh I can't think of what the word is but basically a closed meeting that wasn't public, that was completely private, and I was shocked by specifically what one board member, what he was saying and reacting to a whole special needs thing. And afterwards I had this acquaintance who was very vocal in the special needs thing. And afterwards I had this acquaintance who was very vocal in the special needs community and I was talking to her and she was going to do this and she was going to do that. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, you are barking up the wrong tree. You don't know, you don't know. And I'm thinking this. And she just kept pushing and pushing and boom out of my mouth comes, well, thinking this. And she just kept pushing and pushing and boom out of my mouth comes, well, blah, blah, blah. John Doe said this, so it's not going to happen. And she was like what? And I went I said please, you cannot share this, please promise me. No, no, I won't say a word, no-transcript. And of course we go into closed session and everyone's like who said this? There's a leak. Who is the leak? Amongst us? You know, oh, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1:

I was furious at them for doing that and really betraying my confidence, furious at myself for opening up my big trap and not being able to keep it quiet. And I agonized, I cried, I walked around for weeks and they were like kind of investigating, trying to figure out. We would be in a meeting. I think it's this person, I think it's that person. And eventually I just I couldn't take it anymore and I called the president of the board, who was a wonderful man. I just was hysterical, hysterical, crying, and I was like resigning. And he was great. I don't know if he never shared publicly who it was, but he just kind of moved the board off of that topic. What a relief, what a relief we have to recognize.

Speaker 1:

You know, maybe you don't even realize what you're doing. Do you have that feeling about anything? That, oh no, that feeling of what if I'm exposed, what if someone finds out? Or maybe you feel like you're leading a double life, like who you really are in private is very different with how you present yourself to others. I mean, don't we see that all the time on social media? Of course we do. We're done with all of that. We don't like that. We like authenticity.

Speaker 1:

The secret is controlling your actions. It's like dictating who you spend time with because you want to avoid a conversation or you want to avoid a certain location, and the thought of telling the truth makes you more terrified than anything else. Is any of this resonating with you? I mean, think about to the extreme. Think about someone who's struggling with an eating disorder so they might avoid social situations, so that no one questions them about food. What is it that you're holding on to? Because you're afraid of what will happen if you admit it. I mean I really have to dig in and now see if there's something. I have to give this some thought and I'm actually going to journal on it because I don't think that I have anything like that anymore, because I've firsthand seen how it destroyed my health.

Speaker 1:

I developed like little ticks, you know, my eye twitching or my heart palpitating, and the first step was really being truthful with myself, acknowledging it right, being honest with myself, because I wasn't being honest with myself for the longest time. I told myself the excuses that I was actually ready to tell you and make it think that it was okay. If that's happening to you, first take responsibility that you can't fix this financial mess alone. You have a problem with I don't know, drinking, gambling, whatever it is. Talk to a therapist, a friend, a support group, I mean. When you start sharing with people and you see that they still are going to love you and not judge you and that it'll be okay, I'm telling you your life will change. So instead of thinking if I admit this, I'll be judged, shift that to if I admit this, I can finally start healing.

Speaker 1:

So I implore you, start with those little small steps, like I did. Just one step will be the key for you, unlocking that freedom to really be yourself. All right, that's what I got for you today. That's my message. Go out there, enjoy the spring, smile, remember what you're grateful for. I'm grateful for you, guys. I'll see you next week. Grateful for you guys. I'll see you next week. Thanks for spending part of your day with me here on.

Speaker 1:

Maybe I Can, exploring possibilities one sprinkle at a time. It's been great having you and I hope you're leaving with a spark to light up your journey to more. Remember every big change starts with a single maybe. If you're ready to kickstart that change but not sure where to begin, I've got just the thing for you. Head over to download my free guide the One Critical Step to Kickstart Change and take that all-important first step. Let's make those maybes into reality, one sprinkle at a time. Catch you next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern, 1 pm Pacific, with more stories, tips and that extra push you might need. I'm Debbie saying goodbye for now, but always remember maybe, just maybe, you can.

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Debbie Weiss

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