When England footballer Kyle Walker recently admitted to making “idiot decisions” and fathering two children outside his relationship to Annie Kilner, many of us reeled at the audacity of anyone – especially someone in the public eye – believing they could sustain such a huge deceit. Walker essentially had a secret family in tandem with the one he shares with Kilner, and according to Lauryn Goodman, the model and influencer with whom he had the children, he was happy to keep the “secret family” arrangement going until she decided to end it.
It was a story that hit home for Beth*, 45, from Manchester. She had been with her then-partner Nick for 18 months when they had their first child together. After several miscarriages, Beth was firmly in the new baby bubble when she took her daughter for a stroll in her pram one day, and grabbed Nick’s coat to wear as she left the house.
“As we were walking, I found an envelope in his pocket from the Child Support Agency, as it was called then,” she recalls. “I’d recently registered the baby and mistook it for a letter from the Child Benefit Office so I opened it and had a look. But it was nothing to do with our daughter – it was a letter chasing Nick for unpaid child support for a child he’d never told me about. I read it and re-read it and I just couldn’t compute what it was saying.”
Beth says she walked home in a daze and left her baby asleep in the pram while she went upstairs to confront Nick.
“He looked at it and said, ‘This is none of your business. It has nothing to do with you’. In that moment, I felt like I was falling. My whole world collapsed. Everything I knew to be true – that we’d just had our first baby – wasn’t the case. His mum knew, his friends (who were my friends) knew… It sent me into a complete spiral, and made me question everything. I felt paranoid. The trust that we’d built our relationship on had been utterly obliterated.”
While Nick continued to duck questions and even dispute the truth, Beth had to navigate the disorientating early months of parenthood while feeling completely floored by Nick’s betrayal. “It felt like something from Jeremy Kyle,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it had happened.”
Beth ended the relationship and started again, but it left her with deep trust issues. And while she subsequently went on to marry and have more children, she says that for a long time, she had to check herself, and make sure she wasn’t projecting her past hurt onto her new relationship. “I could feel myself getting paranoid but I had to make myself stop and think, ‘Hang on, this is a different person’.”
Lies relating to children and secret families are often referred to as “high risk lies” on account of the stress and effort it takes to cover them up, and the seismic fallout that takes place if and when they come to light.
Grace*, 45, from Durham, had a father who wove an elaborate high-risk web of lies to cover up his multiple affairs. Grace explains: “My dad was an academic and as we grew up, my siblings and I came to suspect that the ‘special students’ he brought home were in fact his lovers. I think my mum’s view was, ‘If it isn’t spoken about then it isn’t happening.”
But then Grace’s father met a mature student who was more than just a fling, and he had a child with her.
“We knew her pretty well, and when she had this baby, he was vaguely explained away as belonging to someone else. I think my mum wanted to believe that was the case and so did we, although deep down, we all knew the truth. Dad still lived at home but he was often away for long periods, and it was only when my mother died that the full truth surfaced and we had to accept this half sibling.”
The legacy of growing up in a household mired with unspoken truths and deceits hiding in plain sight, was that Grace struggled to form healthy relationships in adulthood.
“The result for me and all my siblings was that we’re rubbish at relationships. If I got close to someone, I thought, ‘No, this is too good – you’re going to betray me’ so therefore I went for bastards. I thought if they’re going to turn out to be shitty then I might as well go for the fun shitty ones. So I went for very charming men – like my dad – who inevitably betrayed me or acted badly. The pattern was laid out for me, and I’ve spent a lot of money on therapists to reach that conclusion.”
As these experiences show, being in the orbit of a serial liar has huge, lasting effects. But what of the liars themselves? What makes someone weigh up the potential pain and upset of their betrayal, and decide to do it anyway?
Yasmin Shaheen-Zaffar is a relational trauma therapist (redkitetherapy.com), and she has worked with individuals and couples who have experienced both sides of betrayal.
“Behaviour like Kyle’s is often a coping mechanism – albeit a very unhelpful one – for some past or ongoing trauma,” says Shaheen-Zaffar. “Feeling ‘safe’ is a biological imperative – it underpins all of our actions. And when someone doesn’t feel safe, they’re unable to achieve true emotional intimacy. As a result, they may then make choices and behave in a way that can often be reckless and self-sabotaging. At the extreme end, they crash and burn their own lives, and take others down with them in the process.”
While not excusing the actions of serial cheats, Shaheen-Zaffar says we need to start looking at behaviours – however shocking – as signs of what’s going on at a deeper level. In her practice, she works on the basis that our nervous system is a threat detection system, constantly scanning for signs of safety and danger – think fight, flight or freeze. And while it’s hard to rustle up sympathy for Walker, she says he falls into the category of high-profile people whose lifestyles – intense fame, wealth and scrutiny – activate their nervous systems, meaning they perceive themselves to be unsafe.
“This affects your decisions. We often see stories about public figures harbouring major secrets and think, how did they not expect this to come out? But perhaps on some level, the secret provides safety. Perhaps having a pocket of their lives that nobody knows about makes them feel safe, perhaps it’s a place to escape to – a refuge from the rest of their public lives.”
As for the men that Grace and Beth were betrayed by, psychotherapist and counsellor Nicholas Rose (nicholas-rose.co.uk) says that you can’t underestimate the impact of other people’s “family systems” and generational trauma, which sees people repeat patterns of behaviour – whether that relates to having affairs, harbouring secrets or simply acting with utter disregard for another’s feelings.
“You get families where conversations just don’t happen, or aren’t understood as being necessary. You get others where certain things aren’t talked about because it’s deemed too painful to even try,” explains Rose. “This communication style is then modelled and repeated. Children and young people rarely get to see adults resolve difficult situations – it’s usually done behind closed doors – so many of us don’t see the deeper, honest conversations that we need to be having if we want healthy relationships.”
Now a mother, Grace says that growing up surrounded by dishonesty and deceit has made her vow to never inflict such heavy secrets on her children. “I’m absolutely utterly honest and open with mine,” she says. “There’s no more deep, dark family secrets. The pattern stops with me.”
*Names and details have been changed