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Speaker 1: I think that there was something always in the back

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Speaker 1: of my mind where I knew something was not quite

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Speaker 1: right with my family and my situation within that family.

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Speaker 1: I felt very exposed with this idea of this knowledge

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Speaker 1: that a lot of people knew something about me that

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Speaker 1: I didn't know myself. You know, it makes you feel

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Speaker 1: like you have a sign in your back or something.

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Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that

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Speaker 1: are kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and

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Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Two years ago, I made

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Speaker 1: the shocking and entirely accidental discovery that my beloved father,

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Speaker 1: a man I had written about my whole life in

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Speaker 1: an effort to better understand him, wasn't my father at all.

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Speaker 1: And when I dove deep down into the secret that

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Speaker 1: had been kept from me all my life and finally

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Speaker 1: revealed the secret to others, something amazing happened. People began

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Speaker 1: to tell me their secrets. When I heard her voice,

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Speaker 1: it's like myself started knitting back to other. It was

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Speaker 1: terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Sometimes secrets are

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Speaker 1: rooted in tragedy. What I'm thinking, maybe she didn't want

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Speaker 1: me to know when I was growing up, because it's

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Speaker 1: a scary story, right, little girls in this family die.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes secrets arise from shame. I remember the pants he wore.

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Speaker 1: He always worthy polyester pants which we had laugh at nowadays,

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Speaker 1: in blue shirts and a black tie. And he had

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Speaker 1: a certain smell. He was everywhere. Sometimes secrets are woven

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Speaker 1: into d n A. She pulled a obituary on a

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Speaker 1: newsletter on the table and she said, this man maybe

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Speaker 1: your father. We don't know. Only the principles don't and

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Speaker 1: they're all dead today. With the Internet and genetic testing

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Speaker 1: making information so easily available, secrets seldom make it to

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Speaker 1: the grave. And that's okay. I was so worried that

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Speaker 1: telling somebody the truth about the way I was treated

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Speaker 1: would signify that I was its story inferior or bad.

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Speaker 1: What in fact happened was the opposite. Because secrets fester

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Speaker 1: in the darkness, they grow larger and scarier, and they

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Speaker 1: have the power to shape our whole lives without our

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Speaker 1: even knowing it. But if we shine light on those secrets,

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Speaker 1: the most extraordinary thing happens. We realize that we're not alone.

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Speaker 1: And you feel it as waves in your body of

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Speaker 1: flinch and then it just calms itself, and it calms itself.

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Speaker 1: Family Secrets premieres on February. Listen and subscribe to Family

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Speaker 1: Secrets at Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio app,

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Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts,