WE all have secrets. Big, medium, small or bizarrely inconsequential – everyone has them. Then there are the family secrets whose skeletons hover in cupboards and under carpets like unwelcome guests that nobody quite knows how to handle or ask to leave. And so they just hang around, making cameo appearances at the best of times and the worst of times. (They just love weddings and funerals.)

A case in point is Randall Fowler, the estranged big brother of actor, Kevin Spacey. Fowler wasn’t just been hovering last week, he went public in the mother of all dirty laundry airings. He howled out claims of childhood sexual abuse by his (and Spacey’s) late father whom he calls "The Creature" and describes as a neo-Nazi. Fowler also says he tried to protect young Kevin Spacey from the father’s abuse by enduring most of it himself (in the hope that he’d stay away from his younger sibling). If true, it’s beyond tragic for both of them.

The most striking thing of all, though, is Fowler’s rationale for “reaching out” to Spacey through global media. As you’d expect from a family member allegedly as floridly dysfunctional as this one, Fowler is confused and contradictory in his proclamations. On the one hand he is angry and seeking revenge for supposedly being cast as the family scapegoat-black sheep (according to Fowler, Spacey has rejected all attempts by Fowler to make contact for 40 years). Judging by his TV interviews, Fowler clearly feels he’s been treated as a contaminant. But on the other hand, he cares about his younger brother’s awful predicament (rarely has Hollywood seen someone fall quite as far and fast as Spacey has) and wants to protect him. All this is overlaid with Fowler’s own desperate need for acknowledgement of the alleged sins visited upon him by his late father and for the consequences of those sins to be washed clean and hung out for all to see.

I doubt that Spacey will welcome his big brother’s offer of support, nor will he trust his stated intentions that he “just wants to get the family back together”. Spacey must really need a friend right now (there can’t be many of his tinsel-town pals left standing at this stage), but the sensationalist manner of Fowler’s disclosure has made the possibility of reconciliation even more remote. It was too public, too gory, too much. Big bro Randy has become yet another monster nail in Spacey’s Hollywood coffin. The tragedy is a neverending story, with shame upon shame compounding the narrative. Meanwhile, the number of allegations of sexual abuse and harassment of young men by Spacey seems to grow by the day.

Secrets are never a good idea, although it can sometimes seem so at the time when we consign them to the darkest recesses of our mind. Mainly, we bury stuff out of shame (or to save others from it). We may even manage to deceive ourselves into believing the "alternative facts" we invent to cover up the truth. Keeping shtum comes at a price as it uses up a lot of valuable mental space that could be put to much better use.

The bigger the secret, the more bytes it requires to keep it safely encrypted. In fact, as time goes by, the effort required to keep compartmentalising our sins of omission grows exponentially. That is why, in times of crisis and when we are already being squeezed by the pincer movement of life’s strains and stresses, secrets have a tendency to make a break for the border, scattering shock and hurt in their wake as they make landfall in the public domain.

Secrets – especially traumatic ones harboured across a lifetime – make us physically ill and emotionally contracted. Most of all though, they damage our relationships with others and limit our potential to live fully and freely. Disclosure can be truly difficult. Big lies that lives are built upon can be really hard to deconstruct because there is always the possibility that their fragile edifice will take us and those closest to us crashing down with them.

Rather than the demolition ball approach adopted by Randall Fowler, perhaps a more thoughtful, brick by brick approach is less likely to trigger the wholesale demolition of a relationship. Right time, right place kind of thing. Most of us can bear the truth if it is delivered with good intentions, in a considered way. The best safeguard of all is to restrict secret-keeping to an absolute minimum.