Why Secrecy is Linked to Problems

Abstract

Just as Jeffrey Dahmer represents an extreme version of the high self-concealer (not to mention a sociopath), Katherine Power seems to epitomize the problems associated with keeping an important, troubling secret (see Burger, 1997; Polivy, 1998). She was a Brandeis University student who drove the getaway car in 1970 for a revolutionary group who performed a bank robbery in Boston that went terribly wrong. A police officer was killed. After the robbery, Power went underground, eventually settling near Corvallis, Oregon. She married and bore a son and was teaching and working as a chef under the alias Alice Metzinger. However, in September 1993, Power finally turned herself in to Massachusetts police, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was sentenced to 8 to 12 years in prison. What is intriguing about this case is that her name was removed from the FBI′s most wanted list after 14 years, and it seemed as though she had gotten away with the crime. Yet in 1992, she had become anxious and depressed and sought therapy, telling her psychotherapist about the crime in the second session (Burger, 1997). ″Power was so desperate to talk about her crime that she had become seriously depressed″ (Polivy, 1998, p. 188).