Every family has material it doesn’t discuss. In families shaped by migration, war, poverty or political upheaval, the volume of it tends to be larger and the reasons for it more serious.
You may know the shape of something without ever having been told it. A relative who is never mentioned. A period of years that gets skipped. A photograph with someone cut out of it. A question that produced a silence once, so you learned not to ask.
Why families keep them
Not usually deceit. Usually one of these.
Protection. A parent who lived through something believes that not passing it on is a gift. That’s frequently the entire motive, and it’s well intentioned.
Shame, in the collective sense. Where a family’s standing is shared, a divorce, a bankruptcy, a mental illness, a suicide, an imprisonment or a child born outside a marriage isn’t one person’s private matter. The distinction between shame and guilt is doing a lot of work here.
Political risk that was once real. Families from countries where speaking produced consequences kept silences that were genuinely protective, and habits like that outlive their reasons by a generation or two.
There’s no language for it. Some things were never spoken about anywhere, by anyone, and a person has no available way to begin.
What the silence does anyway
Secrets are rarely as contained as families believe. Children detect the shape of an absence with considerable accuracy — a tension around a topic, a room going quiet — and, having no content, supply their own.
Frequently what they supply is worse than the truth, and frequently it’s about themselves: something is wrong, and I am somehow part of it.
The other effect is atmospheric. A household organised around not approaching something develops a general rule against approaching things, and children raised inside it learn a broad avoidance that has nothing to do with the original subject.
Whether to go looking
Worth thinking about honestly rather than assuming that knowing is always better.
Reasons to. It affects you directly — health history, a relative you would want to know. The not-knowing is actively distressing. You’re trying to understand something in yourself that the history would explain.
Reasons to leave it. The person who holds it’s frail and disclosure would cost them more than it gives you. You’re looking for a resolution the information won’t provide. Or you want it in order to hold someone accountable, which is a different project and usually doesn’t go well.
If you do ask
Ask sideways rather than directly, at least at first. Objects, photographs and food produce stories where questions produce silence. How to actually do it.
Expect fragments rather than an account, and expect the first telling to be incomplete. And accept a refusal without treating it as a rejection — some people can’t, and pressing turns a silence into a rupture.
The thing you can do regardless
You can decline to continue it. A great many people, unable to obtain the story, decide instead that their own children won’t inherit a house with a locked room in it. That’s available without anyone else’s cooperation.