Self-Disclosure and Privacy

The issues that we shall discuss here are not equally important in all relationships. For some formal relationships they would be irrelevant, but for close relationships the extent to which the participants reveal themselves—experiential, emotional, and physical aspects of the self, hopes, beliefs, fears, failures, successes—to each other is of great significance. Through such revelations each builds up a knowledge of the other as a total person—knowledge which extends far beyond the interactions between them and has the potential for affecting future interactions in fundamental ways. As noted in Chapter 4, self-disclosure is thus an important component of intimacy or closeness. Self-revelation by one partner in a relationship permits more effective incorporation of aspects of the relationship into the self-system of the other. Beyond that, self-revelation to another may contribute to self-realisation, helping one to understand oneself better—or at least to construct a new narrative better suited to current circumstances. Thus self-revelation can itself be an instrument of change. Dindia (1994) has suggested that we should think in terms of an intrapersonal-interpersonal dialectical process of self-disclosure. ¹