I always have this urge to be sneaky and hide things from the people I'm close to, and can't seem to stop?

Question

As a teen my parents were EXTREMELY strict and controlling, so I was always doing things behind their back (they wouldnt even let me date, but I always did secretly anyway, I didn't cover my hair like they wanted me to, things like that) Now I am an adult and have my own life and am in a wonderful relationship, and yet I still feel like I need to do things behind people's backs in order to feel sane, what the h**l is wrong with me?

Answer 1

Childhood experiences are really the crucible, the mainframe, the core computer code hardwired into our beings. The patterns and beliefs we develop then carry over into our adult life, until something later on in life causes us to leave those patterns behind.

Since you didn't trust your parents to respect your ability to make decisions and lead your own life the way you wanted, you felt you had to do it in secret. Of course, if later on in life you feel other people are not respecting the kinds of decisions you are making, that old memory is going to reassert itself, saying 'oh boy, here we go again. Gotta go all ninja now.'

Some of it could be that you still have alot of interactions with your parents. When a child leaves home to become an adult, its not unusual for that adult to feel, or be made to feel, like a child again when they go back to their parent's house, or are in their parent's company. Of course, being back in that environment means all those patterns aren't going to be able to be laid to rest because everything is still reinforcing the old 'its the parents, orange alert mode.' I wouldn't be surprised if you feel the urge the strongest after talking with or meeting your parents, since the memory will be the freshest. And if your partner is making you feel at all like how your parent's felt, that is also going to keep the memory alive.

There is nothing wrong with an adult needing some privacy in their life, in order to feel like they exist independently, like their independent self is worth preserving. It only really becomes a problem when the person shuts down all communication between themselves and others, going the end-around on problems instead of trying to openly confront them. If your husband is, for example, leaving his dirty socks on the floor, and you particularly hate that habit of his but never confront him about it, preferring to take his socks and put them through a shredder so that he has to keep buying new ones, then the whole privacy thing is interferring with your need to be able to say 'this is bugging me, and you better listen.'

People have the right to expect their partner to take their feelings seriously in a relationship, no matter what it is. If you are afraid your husband isn't going to take those feelings seriously, then you need to examine how that is affecting your relationship now and will continue to affect it in the future, since the problem isn't going to go away by itself. Its not about doing things behind people's back, its about why you do them.