Lots of people are quite private, and that’s fair enough. No one has to discuss their personal life with their colleagues, or their deepest emotions with their family. Plenty of people are very open, while plenty choose to keep more of the details to themselves. Maybe they’re shy, or vulnerable, or anxious about being judged in some way. Or maybe they’re quite simply private people. Whichever is the case, I wouldn’t include them here because this section is about difficult people.

So who are the difficult secretive people? Well, they’re the ones who deliberately withhold information from you. Generally speaking, this isn’t information that you know they have, so you can’t be sure they’re doing it. Maybe you know there’s something they’re not telling you but you have no idea what it is. However, they know perfectly well that they have information you want, and they’re choosing not to pass it on.

Why do they do this? Because it gives them power. If they let you know they have the information, you will be complicit in this power they hold over you. If they don’t tell you, they’re still excited by it. And it may give them valuable knowledge that they can use. For example, a controlling partner might learn that you’ve done something they can hold against you (rightly or wrongly), but hang on to their secret knowledge until they can deploy it to their best advantage. Or a colleague might know that a new role is coming up that you’ll want to apply for, but not tell you in order to give themselves or someone else an advantage. Or even just to disadvantage you.

One obvious example of this is people who have affairs. An affair – for them – is a huge delicious secret. Knowing something no one else does can be intoxicatingly exciting. Just having information someone else would want feels powerful. They can do anything and get away with it, because no one knows it’s happening.

Of course, as in all these examples, secretive people undermine your trust in them. That can be difficult in itself because you want to be able to trust your friends, family, colleagues, boss. So what can you do?

What you can’t do is prise the secrets out of these people. As soon as you try, you acknowledge their power and thereby increase it. You play into their hands, and if they divulge the thing, they’ve immediately given up their power. They’re not going to do that in a hurry.

However, their power comes from having information you want. So don’t ever let them see that you want it. Once you’ve identified a regular secret-keeper, don’t trust them, and exclude them from your calculations. Get your information elsewhere. Ignore any clues they drop. If you can make them feel their power is illusory, and actually they have nothing you want, you’ve removed their motivation. And, crucially, you’ll stop caring what they might know. You might not change their inherently secretive nature, but you’ll remove its power to trouble you.