I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that are kept from us, secrets that we keep from others, and secrets we keep from ourselves. As a toddler, he was the shadowy figure. He was just the smell of cigarettes and gold and cash, and and that's who my father was, this kind of gravelly voice figure in my house. That's an upcoming guest from season two looking back on a childhood with her father, who, along with her mother,
suffered from addiction. It wasn't until she was older that she began to put together the pieces of their addiction and the secrets that surrounded them. Sometimes the impressions from our childhoods, the smells, the sights, the sounds, remain fingerprints on the windows of our memories. But when we get older, when we obtain a vital piece of information, these impressions
come flooding back in. Every thing we experienced as a child is rearranged in our minds and finally settles into a pattern we can understand, and naturally we want to know more. When a kid, I think, is denied stories and answers, it just makes them more curious. That's the power of sharing our secrets. It allows us to untether ourselves from what feels like invisible forces holding us back. It allows us to see one another clearly, to become curious about why things happened the way they did, or
why we are who we are. In Season two of Family Secrets, you'll hear from courageous people who confronted the secrets surrounding them. Some of these people grew up with a secret kept from them by someone else. What I didn't know was that evening would mark the beginning of just an epic extramarital love affair that my mother brought me along on. Some of these people were secret keepers, hiding their set sruality or concealing a medical condition, all
in the hopes of sparing their loved ones. Marl and I called it the loving decision and loving choice to provide them enough information that they knew what was going on and not every detail. And though each secret is as unique as the person holding it, all my guests took the extraordinary step of walking into the light to tell their story, to know their story, and in so doing help all of us to confront the secrets in our own lives. It turns dark. She's standing at the door,
pacing upset. Everyone's in their bed. He comes home and the same two person play plays out from ten to midnight like it was the first day, like I never left. It starts to come together for my mother that he is literally forgetting to lie, and my father sort of realizes that his brain has betrayed him and he's admitted to this thing, and he said, as oh, oh, I did a bad thing. Join us for Season two of
Family Secrets, premiering on Monday August. Listen and subscribe to Family Secrets at Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts.