You never know what goes on inside someone else’s house. Maybe you think you know, but you don’t. Nowhere is this a more evident truth that working as a mental health professional. Even those of us who don’t make literal house calls are invited into the private lives, the secrets, into the hidden shameful corners of people’s lives.
Those beautiful, well-dressed, smiling people may go home and close out the world, and inside suffer unthinkable abuse, addiction, or illness. Those neatly groomed children may be sleeping on bare mattresses on the floor, hardly scraping together the resources to put forth an acceptable level of personal grooming to hide their poverty and slip under the radar of watchful others who might realize the truth.
People are hiding their secrets
Hiding depression and paralyzing panic
Hiding an eating disorder
Hiding poverty
Hiding physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
Hiding alcoholism and prescription pill addiction
Hiding pain.
In those dark corners people are sad and scared and real and raw. Sometimes I wish I could live in a world where all those dark corners could be brought into the light, and we could all be honest and open. If we dared to tell the truth (and hear the truth), how different would the world be?