The Darker Side of Secrets -- Moving to the Unknown

Secrets go beyond food behavior. Overeaters often try to give themselves a sense of power, thrills or feelings of superiority. They may buy things beyond their resources. They may have secret sexual relationships. They may flee a relationship if they suspect the person sees through their eating pretenses or is aware of their buying or sexual binges.

If any of these secrets apply to you, then you know about the darker side of secret keeping. You get scared. You cry or shake in the dark. You occasionally isolate yourself until you feel there is not a soul who cares about you. You feel helpless and angry regularly.

You make private, wild promises about changing, but can't. You binge on food or other activities until you feel drugged. You may be hung over for days.

You won't tell anyone about this secret personal hell you're living. You make complaints of being ill. You may accept or expect caretaking and feel profoundly sad when it is not enough.

Now we are entering the vast areas of secrets you do not know about yourself. Here are major signals that you are entering a secret territory within yourself. You yell, cry, plead or become stone silent with someone while feeling self-righteous.

This may be a familiar and recurring scene, yet you may not wish to know how you contribute to create it. You may not wish to know how your troubled-eating practices and binge behaviors cause many problems in your life.

You can succeed in not knowing. You have for a long time.

To explore how you create some of your troubles would bring you uncomfortably close to your unknown inner secrets.

What are these secrets? What is the darkness from which they arise? Letting your curiosity come forth will help you tolerate your feelings as you explore the possible roots of your inner secrets.

Part 4: Roots of Inner Secrets

Secrets from yourself are usually based on inescapable stress situations in childhood. They often involve blatant physical, sexual and emotional abuse. However, roots of secrets can be found elsewhere as well.

Some examples are:

* To change homes, schools, friends and neighborhoods regularly or in a traumatic way.
* To face death or serious illness of crucial people in your life.
* War
* Riots
* Earthquakes
* Fire
* Refugee flight and resettlement

Too much unpredictable behavior and schedule changes can cause intolerable stress to a child. Sometimes the child discovers that food stops or at least dims the pain of that stress.

Part 4: More Subtle Causes of Inner Secrets

When a child's identity, worth in body, mind, soul and imagination, are disregarded or trampled, the bewildering emotional pain is too much for most children to bear. Because they are children, they have no criteria for behavior, no comparison, no frame of reference. They believe that this is the way the world is. And, of course, this is the way their world is. They will accept as true and valid the destructive messages pouring into them and struggle to find a way to survive their pain.

Some methods of destroying a child's worth are:

• To belittle a child's thinking.
• To disparage a child's natural desires and behaviors.
• To neglect or isolate a child.
• To break promises.
• To tell fantasies as if they were true.
• To tease unrelentingly.
• To not believe a child who says friends, teachers, neighbors or strangers are harassing her or him.
• To punish a child for telling his or her experience and/or telling the child his or her experience did not happen.

Today sensational, exaggerated language is often used in advertising, news and conversation to make an emotional point.

In the context of an assaulted child's experience, the roots of inner secrets are genuinely intolerable. Intolerable means truly unendurable. The child cannot stay alive and sane and experience what is intolerable.

When stress, pain, horror, confusion, bewilderment and fear are both intolerable and inescapable there are usually two choices. The situation must end or the child must die or go insane.

The creative child finds a third choice. The child who will survive blocks awareness. Intolerable information becomes a well-guarded secret.

The secret is guarded until the child is strong enough, mature enough, has enough support and information, to retrieve his lost experience and live a more full life.

If you are an overeater, the darkness and compulsive behaviors around your inner secrets are the devices that have saved your life. It takes a lot of trust and courage to know that you can survive without them. When you rally your trust and courage to begin to explore your own darkness you embark on the next phase of your triumphant journey.

end of part 4

next: Triumphant Journey Part 5