Signs of a Secret Life We think we know those
who are close to us, and we want to believe that what we see
is what we get. But we can never know for certain because
what goes on inside another's head and heart is essentially
a secret. How do we know if that secret is something that
will hurt us? There are signs, and we don't always want to
recognize them. The following behaviors might be cause for
concern:
Exhibiting a moody, nervous,
hair-trigger temper over small things
Acting
beleaguered for no reason
Complaining about physical
problems with no medical explanation--headache, stomachache,
back pain, intestinal trouble
Spending
unaccounted-for time on the phone, or making calls from an
unusual room in the house--like the bathroom
Gail
Saltz takes us into the mind of the secret keeper to show
readers how it starts, where it goes wrong, and how (and
why) the secret will always come out.
What do these
people have in common?
The traveling businessman
who brings prostitutes back to his hotel room
The
wealthy woman who is arrested for shoplifting
The
seemingly happily married man who cruises gay
clubs
They are all--despite differences in degree,
gender, and age--living a double life, one of our most deeply
ingrained, but poorly understood psychological drives. Now,
Dr. Gail Saltz steps into the breach to explore --in detail
and based on the latest research--our impulse to create and
nurture alter egos. Saltz reveals how assuming a
different identity can be healthy and tremendously
liberating. For proof, we need look no further than the
innumerable people who reinvent themselves by moving to the
big city, or the countless pseudonymous bloggers. But, as
she also makes clear, leading a secret life comes with
potentially serious psychological risks. She shows that, in
more extreme cases, leading a secret life can have
devastating emotional, social and familial consequences--both
for the person leading the secret life, and for those close
to him or her. The definitive popular work on how a
secret life is formed, lived, justified, and exposed,
Saltz's Anatomy includes contemporary case studies
and historical examples (Lindbergh, T. E. Lawrence,
Tchaikovsky, et cetera) of people who have risked it all for
a taste of forbidden fruit.
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