A family secret assigns work to people who never agreed to keep it.

A secret in a family becomes work distributed to people who never agreed to do it. Someone has to remember what cannot be said, in front of whom, and steer conversations away from it for years. The keeping is exhausting and it is usually carried by the people with the least say in the original decision.

If you are holding something like this, notice what it costs you and consider who else is carrying it. Not every secret should be opened, and it is worth being honest about whom the silence is actually protecting, since the answer is often not the person named.