Whether in a support group, therapy or church, people seek comfort in anonymous confession. But when there is no binding promise to keep your confidences, it might be wise to think twice before baring . . . : The Secrets of Your Soul

Alcoholics Anonymous. Gamblers Anonymous. Cocaine Anonymous. The very names suggest shelter from the harsh judgments of society, safe places to confess ugly secrets and release the darkest demons of the soul.

Whether they do it in a free-form support group, a therapist’s office, a church or some New Age talk center, people seek comfort--and perhaps sanctuary--in anonymous confession.

If only it were that simple.

For if those confessions involve a past crime or a future threat, and if the listener is not sworn by law or ethic to remain silent, the shield of anonymity can suddenly vanish.

It used to be easier. Doctors, clergy, psychoanalysts and family did most counseling and the rules were clear: They were bound in silence, particularly about dark truths of the past.

But now there are all sorts of places to vent and confide, and just about anybody can claim to be a qualified listener--no training or affiliation required. The rules of what may or must not be disclosed have become confusing. Even the Mafia’s code of silence seems forgotten--never mind the private lives of princes and presidents.

With aggressive prosecutors, insurance companies and computerized credit bureaus chasing personal data, it has never been more difficult to determine where is it safe to speak candidly.

For while confession might be good for the soul, it may be bad for a legal defense.

Paul Cox, now on trial for murder in a New York City suburb, found this out the hard way.

In 1989, Cox broke into his childhood home in affluent Larchmont and took a large kitchen knife into his parents’ former bedroom. He had never met the couple sleeping there--both doctors--but he stabbed them 26 times. Later he would say that in his drunken rage, he thought he was attacking his mother and father.

For almost five years the crime went unsolved despite vigorous investigation--police went so far as to consult a psychic about who might have done it. But the cops couldn’t crack the case.

Then Cox, 26, joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Among other things, the 12-step program required him to take a moral inventory and confess his alcohol-induced sins to God and to another human being. When he admitted committing the murders, one of several AA members present leaked the story to police. Cox was arrested and ultimately pleaded temporary insanity.

Initially, Cox’s lawyer tried to block AA members from testifying, saying Cox’s conversations with them were “privileged communications” like those between a lawyer and client, a cleric and penitent or a husband and wife. The judge disagreed.

Yet Cox had told his gruesome story to at least five fellow AA members who kept his confidence and who testified in court only after they were subpoenaed.

“The fear of getting caught was why (Cox) stopped his education and why he was doing carpentry now,” testified one, who identified himself only as Mr. A. “He said he didn’t want to go to jail about it, but he felt his secret was safe at AA.”

In fact, there are no legal requirements for members of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous--either to protect one another’s confidentiality or to disclose criminal intentions.

“There are no absolute rules,” says a 14-year veteran of AA in Los Angeles. “There are principles, and one is that what is said is confidential. But you can’t be excommunicated or anything for violating that rule. And people do.”

The promise of confidentiality, he explains, is meant to protect AA members from embarrassment, humiliation and public censure, and it is intended to liberate them to speak freely. But it’s not inviolate.

“It wasn’t put in there to protect people from the law,” he says, although he has heard numerous confessions to crimes from petty theft to burglary to drunken driving. “It’s always a matter of individual conscience what you ought to do when you hear such things.”

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During a formal, one-on-one session with a certified therapist there would be no choice: The therapist is required by law and ethical codes not to breach the confidence. California and most other states make exceptions only if the patient might physically harm a third party or if the patient reports child abuse or, starting in 1995, abuse of an elderly person.

(An exception was made by a judge in the case against Erik and Lyle Menendez. Tape-recorded notes of sessions in which the brothers allegedly admitted murdering their wealthy parents were introduced as evidence because the psychologist believed that they were threatening him and others during those sessions.)

“I’ve had patients tell me they’ve killed people and kept it to myself,” says Dr. James Beck, a Harvard psychiatry professor who wrote “Confidentiality vs. the Duty to Protect.” “I’ve heard it all.”

A mental patient once admitted to Beck that he had pushed an innocent bystander into the path of a subway train.

“I didn’t turn him in,” Beck says. “But whenever I’m in New York, you can bet I don’t stand very close to the tracks.”

In his book, Beck focuses on methods to help patients who are endangering others’ lives. For example, the book explains how a therapist should counsel patients with AIDS who refuse to tell their partners about the disease. Or, how a therapist might advise a colleague who confesses to having an affair with a patient.

“The main point is the therapist should try not to think first about his or her professional duty to warn the victim, but rather about the clinical questions like how to talk to the patient about it so that they will go to authorities on their own,” Beck says.

A member of Cocaine Anonymous in Los Angeles balked when he heard about privileges that are extended to psychotherapists but not to peer counselors such as members of CA.

“This just points out another middle-class hypocrisy--money buys privacy,” he says. “If you have the money, you can have the protection. A lot of people in CA can’t afford a fancy shrink.”

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In California, this “law of privilege” between therapist and patient extends beyond the patient’s life.

Yet, Susan Forward, a psychologist who counseled Nicole Brown Simpson prior to her divorce from O.J. Simpson, says she didn’t realize that those counseling sessions should have remained private. Forward told KCBS-TV that Nicole Simpson, who was murdered last week, said her ex-husband threatened to kill her if she tried to leave him for another man.

“He would say to her things like, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody can,’ ” Forward told the TV reporter.

Forward later apologized for revealing those conversations. “I was really totally convinced that the privilege ended with Nicole’s death,” she told a Times reporter last week after she was vilified by her colleagues. “My entire motivation for talking about this was to sound a wake-up call.”

Eventually, Forward talked about the violation on CNN: “The problem with the privilege is there are so many different aspects of it and so many different times that it can be changed and waived . . . that I’m sort of uncertain, at this moment.”

But a member of the American Psychological Assn. said the rules are quite simple: You don’t publicly talk about a person unless they explicitly give permission.

The therapist who treated poet Anne Sexton set off a bruising controversy after her death when he turned over 300 tapes of her therapy sessions to a biographer. The therapist and Sexton’s daughters argued that Sexton was a “confessional” poet who spent her whole life writing about her personal misery so people could learn from it. Sexton’s therapist apparently spent $100,000 successfully defending his decision to an outraged psychiatric Establishment.

One reason traditional therapists have long worried about the erosion of confidentiality is their fear that their profession is being mucked up by charlatans who call themselves “counselors.” (Although the problem of therapists talking patients’ problems around town is an old one: even Freud was known for gossiping about his patients.)

“You open the papers here and you see all these groups that are advertising all kinds of ‘counseling,’ ” says Dr. Renee Binder, a psychiatry professor at UC San Francisco. “You can take off your clothes together and confess sins and call it therapy. People remember coming out of the womb and try to undo this traumatic event and call it therapy. People get together and scream and call it therapy.

“People who are not a member of a profession do not adhere to professional standards,” Binder adds. “Let the buyer beware.”

Yet traditionalists like Binder, who chairs the American Psychiatric Assn.’s committee on confidentiality, say they have even more reason to worry these days about the privilege.

Ethical concerns around the cases of Cox and Sexton and even Nicole Brown Simpson are aberrant. Many more people are affected by the current trend of insurance companies trying to pry information out of therapists.

“Third parties are asking for access to all kinds of information about a patient as condition of paying bills,” Binder says.

A patient may be described as depressed, she says, and the insurers will ask to see the therapists’ notes to prove it.

“Do they need to know someone is homosexual? No. Do they need to know somebody is taking medication. Not really. (But) that may all be in the notes,” Binder says.

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An institution that has been most effective in keeping confidences has been the Catholic Church. While other denominations have developed individual guidelines about the privacy of confession, Catholics view it as a sacrament and therefore confidential.

No matter what is said, a priest must remain mum, according to Canons 889 and 890 of church law. In a few states secular law concurs and does not demand that priests turn in even child abusers.

But Dr. John Young, a priest and psychiatrist, says that doesn’t mean the confessor is off the hook.

“Before a priest can legitimately absolve you, he can be quite demanding and say ‘Go turn yourself in,’ ” says Young, a forensic psychiatrist at a maximum security mental hospital in New Haven, Conn. “There is no obligation to let a person get away with it. The penitent must show firm purpose to deal with what he or she did.”

Since the Second Vatican Council, most parishes have done away with anonymous confessional boxes and more frequently use “reconciliation rooms” for confession.

“It’s a vexing and troublesome problem for priests to hear confessions about laws being broken,” Young says. “But it’s important not to have knee-jerk reporting, but to be able to say, ‘We have to do something about this.’ Which is just what a good therapist says.”