Sexuality, Secrecy—and Sewing with Mum

This article explores the author’s experience of navigating relational ethics. It details the aftermath of a reflexive discussion with the author’s parents, which focused on autoethnographic episodes about family experience, within a wider autoethnographic exploration of the author’s experience as a trainee counselor. The work, which had originally examined what it feels like for counselors to disclose erotic countertransference within clinical supervision, grew to encompass the author’s parallel experiences of (dis)honesty around sexuality, specifically regarding disclosures to the author’s parents and church: his original “moral supervisors.” As he and his mother spend time together sewing, recovering from the previous reflexive conversation and looking ahead to the next, the author considers the emotional impact of sharing an autoethnography with intimate others who are alive. Through evocative autoethnography, the article aims to use narrative analysis (as opposed to analysis of narrative) to capture an embodied and emotional response to the sharing of an autoethnography. It asks: what is it like to be honest?