Why Some People Keep Secrets: Dismissive Avoidant Attachment and the Origins of Infidelity
By Duane Osterlind, LMFT, CSAT-S
If you're the partner who kept secrets — the one who lived a double life, who held an entire hidden world apart from your relationship — you may have spent a lot of time asking yourself: Why am I like this? Why was it so easy to compartmentalize? Why didn't I just tell the truth?
In Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Stan Tatkin, he traced the capacity for secret keeping back to its origins. And the answer might be the first time someone has explained your internal world back to you in a way that actually makes sense. This doesn't excuse the behavior — not even close. But it does help explain what you're working with, so you can actually change it. Because as Stan would put it: you can't change what you can't see.
The Attachment Style Underneath Secret Keeping
Stan identified a specific attachment pattern that shows up in many of the people who develop the capacity for sustained deception in their relationships: dismissive avoidant attachment. And he traced it all the way back to infancy.
Here's how it develops. A child reaches for connection — attention, comfort, attunement — and that reaching isn't met. Not because the parents are abusive, but because they're emotionally unavailable. Distant. Preoccupied. Maybe well-meaning, but not actually present in the way an infant's nervous system needs. The child learns something. They learn that reaching out doesn't work. So they stop reaching. They go underground.
Stan was clear about what “going underground” means at a developmental level. The child learns to auto-regulate. To keep things internal. To not bring their emotional life into relationship with anyone, because relationship has been proven — to their developing nervous system — to be an unreliable source of co-regulation.
It's not because they're choosing to deceive. It's because it's the only adaptation they've ever known.
— Dr. Stan Tatkin (paraphrased)
How This Pattern Shows Up in Adult Relationships
Fast forward thirty or forty years. The infant who learned to auto-regulate is now an adult in a committed relationship. And the pattern is still running. They struggle to bring their internal world into the relationship. They handle things alone. They don't tell their partner when they're struggling. They develop a robust internal life that operates separately from the shared life of the relationship.
And then — if other risk factors are present — that internal life can include things their partner doesn't know about. Affairs. Pornography use. Financial deception. Sexual acting out. The capacity for compartmentalization that protected them as a child becomes the architecture of a secret life as an adult. This isn't a moral failing. It's a developmental adaptation that was once useful and is now causing devastating harm. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
Why This Pattern Is Harder to Change
Here's what Stan said that I think is the most clinically important point in this section: people with dismissive avoidant attachment have a harder prognosis than people with other patterns — not because they're more damaged, but because they don't know what they've been missing.
Think about that for a second. If you grew up reaching for connection and getting hurt, you at least know connection exists — you're just afraid of it. But if you grew up never reaching at all, never expecting connection, never knowing what attuned co-regulation feels like — you don't know what's been absent from your life. You think the way you experience relationships is just how relationships work. That's the part that makes the work so hard. You can't fix what you don't recognize as broken.
What Can Actually Change This Pattern
Stan said something else in this part of our conversation that I keep coming back to: “It's over. As you thought this was. It's gotta be a complete rebuild.” The relationship the person had before discovery was built on the dismissive avoidant pattern. They could keep secrets because nothing in the system required them not to. Going forward, that's not an option anymore. The entire architecture has to be different.
That means the person who kept the secrets has to do something they've never done before in their life: bring their internal world into relationship. Consistently. Without curating it. Without holding back the parts that feel risky to share. Without going underground when things get hard.
This is the work. And it cannot be done alone. As Stan emphasized throughout our conversation, the only way to rewire dismissive avoidant attachment is through repeated experiences of safe, attuned, co-regulated connection — with a therapist, with safe friends, with a partner who is willing to do the work alongside them. You can't think your way out of an attachment pattern. You have to experience your way out of it.
What This Means for the Work Ahead
If you're the person who kept the secrets and you recognize yourself in this description, I want you to hold two things at once. Yes, this is an explanation of how you got here. No, it does not excuse the harm you caused. Both things have to stay true at the same time.
The good news — if there is good news here — is that attachment patterns can change. Not easily. Not quickly. But they can. And the change happens through exactly the thing your nervous system has been avoiding your whole life: showing up in relationship, telling the truth, staying connected when shame wants you to retreat.
This is the heart of what we work on in the Shame to Resilience workshop. Building the capacity to stay in relationship when every instinct says to go underground. Learning to bring your internal world to the surface, even when it feels dangerous.
In Part 4 — the final part of my conversation with Stan — we get into shame itself. The difference between guilt and shame, why leading with shame actually makes things worse for your partner, and what to do instead. That's where the practical tools are.
Watch the full series
Part 1: What Betrayal Does to the Brain
Part 2: Boundaries as Good Faith Effort
Part 3: Attachment and the Origins of Secret Keeping (this post)
Part 4: Shame, Guilt, and the Path Forward
About Dr. Stan Tatkin: Developer of PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy) and author of Wired for Love and In Each Other's Care. Learn more at thepactinstitute.com
