Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm Danny Shapiro and welcome to a new bonus episode of Family Secrets. As my amazing producers and I are in the midst of creating our second season. Blown away by the response from millions of listeners from season one, we're delivering bonus content to you each week that I hope you'll enjoy and that you'll be a part of the continuing dialogue we've begun about family secrets in all forms, the ways that giving voices to those secrets frees us.
You might even say that we're in a moment, a movement in which secrecy will no longer be possible. I want to talk with you guys today about what I've been seeing out there as I've criss crossed the country over the past months while on book tour from my memoir Inheritance. For those of you just listening for the first time, Inheritance as a memoir about a discovery I made after taking a DNA test that my dad had
not been my biological father. It turns out that lots of people, hundreds of thousands of us each year, are making similar discoveries. At my events I've met people who have just discovered as adults that they were adopted, people who have just discovered they were conceived using a sperm donor or an egg donor. People have discovered half siblings or even full siblings they never knew existed. Fathers have
learned of children they hadn't known they had. Birth Parents who gave up children for adoption are being discovered by those children, and children also discovered by birth parents. The list goes on. Now there are no more secrets. Last month, I spoke at Harvard Medical School's Center for Bioethics. A woman in her sixties raised her hand during the Q and a. Her eyes were filled with tears. She had just discovered that the father who raised her had not
been her biological father. She was quaking literally, she trembled from head to toe as she spoke. She mentioned the name of a nearby Boston hospital where she had been born, and she wondered if there might be any one in the room who could help her solve the mystery. After the event, she was surrounded by people offering her insight, support and advice, and after a couple of weeks, she found her biological father in Portland, Oregon, A young woman
approached me on the book signing line. I could tell before she said even a single word, that she too, had just made a profound discovery. I found my biological father, she said. I wrote to him and I got two words back. Not interested. In Laguna Beach, a middle aged woman clutched the hand of her friend as she said, I realized, now I have to tell my thirty year
old daughter. I have to tell her that the father who raised her, who died when she was young, and who she worshiped, wasn't her biological father, because I know she's going to find out. A man spoke privately to me at a Boston bookstore. He and his wife had been among the legions of couples who chose not to disclose to their daughter that she had been conceived using a sperm donor. His daughter found out and now felt terribly betrayed. What can I tell her, he asked me.
How can I help heal her pain? Did it matter to you, I asked him. I suddenly felt choked up myself. Did it matter that she wasn't your biological child? Of course not, he said, of course it had never mattered. In ten books I've never had the experience before of my events becoming sort of like large scale support groups for those who were dealing with family secrets. It's a thing of such unex affected beauty. I'm thankful for it
and humbled by it. One of the side effects of learning a secret, or perhaps even of keeping a secret, is the feeling of being terribly alone. The shame surrounding secrets tells us that we're the only one that no one would understand. They were better off just staying quiet
and powering through. But what I'm seeing and experiencing again and again through my own journey and witnessing the journeys of others, is that when we tell our stories, when we own them, hold them up to the light and say this is what happened to me, suddenly all that shame,
that feeling of otherness, alienation, difference, vanishes. It disappears because shame and secrecy can't deal with all that light, with all that brightness and clarity, with a beautiful community of people all turning toward rather than away from each other and saying me too, Me too, I've been there too. Over the next couple of months, as we produce season two of Family Secrets. I'm also still on tour for Inheritance.
I'll be in New York City, Baltimore, Westchester, Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Atlanta, Sun Valley, Idaho, and more. If these are places anywhere near you, I hope you'll come, say hi and feel for yourself the shift that's happening right here, right now. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.