Evan Imber-Black - The Secret Life of Families: Making Decisions About Secrets: When Keeping Secrets Can Harm You, When Keeping Secrets Can Heal You--And How to Know the Difference

So many caring and openhearted people helped me to bring forth this book. I want to thank Judith Stone, who served as midwife to my proposal. Our spirited conversations in coffee shops around New York, coupled with her thoughtful ideas and early editing, led me in the right direction. Thanks to Elizabeth Stone for our talks about secrets and the book proposal. And I thank Katy Butler, who collaborated with me on the 1993 article Ghosts in the Therapy Room, beginning my wish to translate my scholarly work on secrets for a lay readership.

My dear friend and colleague Janine Roberts supported this project through careful reading of and mindful responses to the proposal and the manuscript, and through her constant availability.

This book builds upon the academic book Secrets in Families and Family Therapy, which I edited in 1993. An outstanding group of colleagues contributed to that book and to my current thinking about secrets. I want to thank Marilyn Mason, Rosmarie Welter-Enderlin, Peggy Papp, Ann Hartman, Judith A. Schaffer, Ronny Diamond, Lorraine Wright, Jane Nagy, Jo-Ann Krestan, Claudia Bepko, Laura Roberto Forman, Dusty Miller, Gus Kaufman, Gary L. Sanders, Joan Laird, Sally Ann Roth, Alan Cooklin, Gill Gorell Barnes, Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Lascelles W. Black, Kathy Weingarten, and Janine Roberts for their early collaboration with me, opening the topic of secrets in the family therapy field.

This book took its original shape under the thoughtful guidance of my agent, Beth Vesel. Her enthusiasm for my ideas and her strong belief in the need for this book were an anchor throughout the process.

Toni Burbank was all I could possibly wish for as my editor. At our initial meeting she offered me her excitement about this work. Her probing questions, at once firm and gentle, helped me to clarify and expand my thoughts. In her outstanding editing, she addressed the lives of the people in these pages with care and compassion. I also want to thank Tonis assistant, Robin Michaelson, for attending to the many details connected to organizing this manuscript.

My loving friend Rosmarie Welter-Enderlin spent hours and hours reading the manuscript, sending me incisive comments, and helping me to reach more deeply into the meaning of secrets. Our transatlantic Sunday afternoon telephone talks, our train rides from one European city to the next, and the meals we cooked together in our kitchens in New York and Switzerland were all occasions to talk about secrets, professional and personal.

I have been blessed with a professional partnership and special friendship with Peggy Papp at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. When we began our work, I wanted to do a clinical project on secrets. Peggy astutely observed that we might have trouble getting families to come to a project called Family Secrets. Nonetheless, as we have worked together every Wednesday afternoon for the past seven years, weve seen many families struggling either to open secrets or to deal with the emotional aftermath once a secret is revealed. Our mutual consultations with each other, both in the therapy room and behind the one-way mirror, along with our many nights at the theater, have contributed powerfully to my ideas about secrets.

So many dear friends showered me with their interest in this project and their abiding support of my work. My deep appreciation goes to Pat Colucci, Ellen Landau, Gary Sanders, Betty Carter, Olga Silverstein, Vicki Dickerson, and Paul Browde.

During much of the writing of this book, I was the director of Family and Group Studies and director of the Urban Institute for Families and Family Therapy Training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. I was fortunate to have a loyal faculty whose belief in me and encouragement of my work made it a joy to do. I especially thank Maddy Abrams, Johnine Cummings, Judy Cobb, Barbara Iwler, Anne Shollar, Myrna Hernandez, Eliana Korin, and Linda Torres. I also thank Seth Aronson for sharing his ideas on children and HIV/AIDS.

There are not enough words of praise and appreciation for Marie Mele, my secretary, confidant, recipe swapper, and caring family friend for the past decade. Marie kept track of every task related to preparing this manuscript, never let me walk out of the office with the only copy of a chapter, and helped me deal with the mysterious and continual freezing of my computer every time I worked on . Her loving humor and bountiful hugs kept me going.

During the writing of this book I had many conversations with my mother, Dena Imber, about secrets. Some were funny, some were painful, most were moving, and all connected me to her and her eighty-four years of life. I thank her for her generous conversation and her unflagging support of my work.

For a quarter of a century, scores of individuals and families have opened their lives to me. Their stories and their courageous journeys, written here in highly disguised forms, have profoundly shaped the therapist and the writer that I am. I thank them all, with respect and humility.

This book was given the breath of life by my loving family. My son, Jason Black, my daughter-in-law, Frances Schroeder, my sweet granddaughter, Josephine Charity Black, my daughter, Jennifer Coppersmith, and my soon-to-be son-in-law, David Bukai, all give me constant love, support, and care. My special thanks to Jason for his technical help, thereby preventing my murdering the computer, and for his willing spur-of-the moment Internet searches.