self disclosure

Having Problems with Self-Disclosure

Shy, awkward people are sometimes overly guarded and secretive. When everyone is talking about more personal subjects, they’re good at hanging back and not contributing, changing the topic, taking the attention off themselves, giving vague, evasive answers, or deciding now’s the right time to get up and see what everyone else at the party is doing. There are topics they’re uncomfortable with, and they’re always a little on edge when they’re socializing because they never know when they’ll come up.

They may dread situations where their feared subjects are more likely to arise, like when their friends are all sitting around and drinking. They can become touchy and defensive when certain people try to ask about their lives, like a lonely teenager may feel grilled and interrogated if his parents good-naturedly ask him about his friends, when he doesn’t have any.

There Are Two Broad Ways the Problem Can Show Up:

First, overly guarded people can be reluctant to make the kinds of personal self-disclosures that help deepen relationships. Usually as people get to know each other they move past safe, surface-level topics and start opening up to each other and sharing more and more of their vulnerabilities and true selves.

Reasons People Can Become Overly Guarded

They’re embarrassed about their secrets and flaws and are trying to save face by hiding them. This can be a side effect of a lack of social success. They don’t want to talk about their weekend because they unwillingly stayed in and played on their computer for the sixth week in a row. They don’t want to talk about their dating history because they’re 22 and have never been in a relationship. They shy away from telling stories of painful experiences of the past in fear of exposure. 

They’re shy and socially anxious and see social situations as more high stakes than they are. They view other people as judgmental, choosy, and mean-spirited. They think sharing their vulnerabilities, or even their taste in music, is a high-risk move and they’ll get rejected if they say the wrong thing.

They’ve been picked on in the past and had their secrets and weaknesses used against them. Maybe they’ve had the experience of bullies pretending to start a friendly conversation, when they really wanted to mess with them and dig for material they could use as ammunition later on.

As teenagers, they had nosey, distrustful parents who always grilled them about their lives. They learned to be secretive and deceptive to protect their privacy or avoid getting in trouble over nothing. When a co-worker or friends ask how their weekend was, they instinctively feel like dad is interrogating them and become tight lipped.

They had a rougher childhood and picked up closed-off habits they have trouble breaking as adults. Things may have gone on at home they were legitimately wary of anyone finding out about. They may have gotten good at covering up their family’s problems and making it seem like everything was perfect on the surface. When they tried making self-disclosures as kids their parents may have harshly shot them down.

How to Become Less Guarded and Open to People

However, the reason that someone’s too guarded and self-protective is a self-defeating strategy. It’s stressful to carry around a bunch of supposedly shameful secrets and worry about what will happen if someone finds out about them. Ironically, secretiveness can sometimes bring on more scrutiny and judgment than it helps avoid. If you have a secret, no one may think it’s a big deal if they found out what it was, but they’ll form a poor impression of you if you’re always closed-off and cagey. Their imagination may run wild, and they’ll assume something worse about you than what you’re actually hiding. Here’s some advice for breaking the secretiveness habit:

Change your attitude about what it means to reveal your weakness.

People who are guarded and secretive believe other would reject them if they learned about their weaknesses. Similarly, they think that the way to be liked is to come across as flawless and impressive. The opposite is true. When we reveal our vulnerabilities and rough edges, we seem endearingly human. When we try to act like there’s nothing wrong with us, we become distant and unrelatable, or bland and unmemorable. Have you ever met someone who totally had it together and came across as a little too perfect? People like that are often seen as mildly annoying.

2 Corinthians 12:10

“That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”