The Secrets Behind Our Screens: Inside THIS IS A SAFE SPACE by Lucinda Berry
We live in an unprecedented world where our phones have become so much more than a simple tool for communication. Smartphones are an extension of ourselves. They’ve become our photo albums, our entertainment, confessional booths, personal assistants, and in so many ways, our most trusted companions because they’re with us nearly 24/7. In a way, our phones know us better than anyone else.
There are so many things people do hidden behind the privacy of a screen that they’d never otherwise do or even admit to out loud. They curate images. Save searches they’d be too embarrassed to share. Carry on conversations they may never speak of outside of text bubbles. Some people even go so far as to reinvent themselves completely or pretend to be somebody else, using the anonymity of the digital sphere as a mask. But for most of us, our phone contains the truest version of who we are. Not the face we present to the outside world, but the raw, unedited self that we reveal only in private.
That’s what makes the act of snooping in someone else’s phone so powerful and compelling. We can’t resist the temptation to look because we know what we’ll find there—the unfiltered truth. The most intimate of diaries. When a partner violates our trust, the phone is usually where it’s revealed. In a suspicious message. A hidden photo. A search history that tells an unsettling story. And once that betrayal is discovered, it doesn’t just rupture the relationship in the present. It ripples outward and shapes how we see every future relationship. Psychologists have a term for this: betrayal trauma.
Betrayal trauma destabilizes our sense of safety in the world. A partner is meant to be our refuge, and when that trust is violated, it feels like the ground has disappeared beneath us. Suspicion becomes second nature. Intimacy feels dangerous, and even small acts of secrecy can trigger enormous fear. In fiction, this makes for compelling storytelling because it taps into something nearly everyone has felt—the disorientation of realizing that someone you love is not who you thought they were.
Phones heighten this experience because they are the perfect vessels for secrecy. Unlike handwritten diaries hidden in drawers, our phones are always in our hands, containing more than anyone could ever say out loud. They capture both the banal and the extraordinary. Directions to a new restaurant alongside secret late-night conversation. That tension between the ordinary and the forbidden makes them irresistible as storytelling devices.
When I wrote This Is a Safe Space, I wanted to explore this modern form of voyeurism that some find so irresistible. My main character, Jenna, can’t help but look through her husband’s phone, and in doing so, she finds far more than she bargained for. Her discovery doesn’t just threaten her marriage—it reopens old wounds about trust she’s struggled with since childhood, and it blurs the line between personal and professional boundaries.
Phones complicate relationships in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. They make boundary violations easier, both in committing them and in uncovering them. But they also amplify the stakes. That’s why the secret lives of our phones make such fertile ground for psychological thrillers. They hold our most intimate selves, and when those secrets come to light, they can destroy everything in just a few taps. For readers and listeners, it’s impossible to look away, because we all know how much of our own truth is hidden behind a password only we know.
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