<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cGod works in mysterious ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cartoon by Sam Gross<\/p>\n
Michael Slepian, a psychologist at Columbia University, researches the toll of keeping secrets. For his book, \u201cThe Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are,\u201d Slepian asked research participants\u2014half of whom were told to imagine themselves as having a \u201csmall\u201d secret, the other half a big one\u2014to estimate the height of a grassy hill. The latter group thought that the incline was sharper than the former did. Slepian deduced that people who say they feel \u201cweighed down\u201d by a secret do, in fact, feel burdened in other parts of their lives as well. The night after Slepian first presented his findings at Columbia, he got a frantic call from his father. He and his mother had realized that they, like his subjects, had been suffering under the weight of a secret. Slepian had been conceived through a sperm donor, his father confessed over the phone. \u201cMany people assume it was the other way around,\u201d Slepian told me, \u201cthat I research secrets because my family had been keeping one. But no\u2014my research helped them unburden themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slepian also studies the moral calculus of divulging a secret, like, for example, when and whether to reveal to a partner that you were unfaithful. He thinks that, in the context of N.P.E.s, technology has altered the question of disclosure: \u201cI know folks who wished they\u2019d learned this from their parents rather than a website.\u201d<\/p>\n
The treatment of N.P.E.s is a growth market within the therapy sector, giving rise to N.P.E.-trauma-recovery coaches and identity-reinvention facilitators. Some interventions can seem more improvised than others. Lily Wood mentioned that she had been using eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (E.M.D.R.) to help her reckon with her discovery. This method typically involves having patients focus on a specific traumatic event; I asked Wood whether hers was the day she got the results. No, she said. Her therapist had her doing \u201cpoint of conception\u201d E.M.D.R.: \u201cShe\u2019s, like, \u2018I don\u2019t do this very often, but we\u2019re going to go back to the moment you were in utero.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Babies feel everything, even as a fetus.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Wood was a little dubious herself. \u201cI\u2019m only on the third trimester, so I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s working yet,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Alexis Hourselt grew up in Tucson, Arizona, as the daughter of a Mexican American father and a white mother. Hourselt never felt a connection with her Mexican heritage, though. \u201cI wanted to, being in the Southwest,\u201d she told me. Rather, she was drawn to Issa Rae\u2019s \u201cInsecure\u201d and the later, more politically inflected music of Beyonc\u00e9. \u201cI loved \u2018Formation,\u2019 but I always thought, This isn\u2019t for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
At some point, Hourselt added an Ancestry test to her Amazon wish list, which her family members all follow. She hoped that the test would uncover more about her Indigenous roots, and help her feel more connected to her father\u2019s side. \u201cNobody ever bought it for me\u2014which now makes sense,\u201d she reflected. She purchased one for herself when it went on sale for Prime Day.<\/p>\n
One afternoon, while waiting for the results, Hourselt was folding laundry and suddenly had an intrusive thought. \u201cI was, like, Wouldn\u2019t that be crazy if your dad wasn\u2019t your dad? And then I was quickly, like, Stop it. You\u2019re so ridiculous.\u201d But, when the e-mail came and she clicked on her DNA map, the thought returned. Her DNA did not cluster with that of anyone in Mexico. Lit up instead was the western coast of Africa\u2014countries like Nigeria, Mali, and Cameroon\u2014and the African American population of North Carolina. \u201cI called my mom, and she acted surprised but in a way that very much let me know that she was not surprised,\u201d Hourselt told me.<\/p>\n
Hourselt, who, since 2022, has hosted the podcast \u201cDNA Surprises,\u201d invited me to Tucson for dinner with her family: her husband and kids; her sister Amanda; and her parents, meaning her mother, Carole, and Jaime, the father who raised her. A week before I was scheduled to come, Hourselt told me that Jaime had a conflict and wouldn\u2019t be joining us. I didn\u2019t probe. When I arrived, I was greeted by Hourselt, in a colorful Ankara-print baby-doll dress, and the smell of saut\u00e9ed onions; her husband, Josh, was preparing fajitas. Her mother sat on the living-room couch in a gray sweatshirt, holding a pink Stanley cup. She looked uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
We sat down for dinner, and together they took me back to July 22, 2021, Hourselt\u2019s rebirth day. After the phone call, Carole and Jaime went over to their daughter\u2019s house. Carole couldn\u2019t stop crying, so Jaime did all the talking. \u201cHe said, \u2018I met you when you were two months old,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Hourselt recalled. She was taken aback. \u201cI thought, Maybe Mom had an affair or something. It didn\u2019t register to me as a possibility that he would be in on it.\u201d The couple had been stationed together in the military, in Spain. Carole, then a new mother, told Jaime that her baby\u2019s biological father was her Puerto Rican ex-boyfriend; the end of their relationship, she said, had been rocky. But that didn\u2019t make sense to Hourselt. Her Ancestry matches had uncovered that her biological father was very likely an African American man. Carole swore that she didn\u2019t remember the encounter, but the revelation then created problems in her marriage. \u201cJaime said, \u2018I didn\u2019t realize I\u2019d married a floozy,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the nice term for what he said.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sigmund Freud, in \u201cFamily Romances,\u201d writes that all of us, once we realize as children the uncertainty of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[5823,643,254,61,5825,60,709,5824,82,5826],"class_list":["post-4962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-genetics","tag-annals-of-inquiry","tag-audio","tag-genetics","tag-ie","tag-inverted","tag-ireland","tag-magazine","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-science","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}