There's often a great fear of exposure - it taps into how we were treated by our parents and other guardians when we were young. Is it safe to express? Is there punishment associated with revealing our inner world - either its energy or its content? Our guardians are our lifeline in early life. Will we be rejected? Deserted? Will we die as a result of our revealing what's going on inside? How did they respond to our laughing? Our crying? Our screaming? Our talking? Did we have a parent who was so invasive, so desperate to penetrate and own for themselves our soft and developing inner world so that they might control our direction in life, that we just couldn't help develop the habit of clamming right up as a default? It's no wonder that withholding and secret keeping are so rife. Self-defensive privacy ends up inevitably as secrecy and from there, habitual dishonesty. When one is dishonest with others, it's only a matter of time before one begins to delude one's self about the nature of things.

I'm sure that all of this is at the root of dementia and Alzheimer's in the elderly. I'd love to do a study.