Twenty Inner Secret Discovery Questions

Part 6: Twenty Inner Secret Discovery Questions 1-9

What follows are questions which can help determine if you have secrets from yourself. Inner secrets play a powerful role in beginning and maintaining many eating disorders.

Question 1:
How well do you remember your childhood?

• Do you keep remembering the same experiences and gloss over major absences of memory?
• Do you think you remember events because others have described them to you? Are your memories yours or are they images and stories given to you by others?
• Do you remember details from some years and little from others?
• Are even clear memories spotty? An example of this is when a person can remember the yard around their childhood home well, but has trouble remembering specific rooms or parts of rooms in the house.

Question 2:
Do you lose track of conversation?

• Do you often get bored or distracted during conversation?
• Do you go blank for a moment or two?
• Do you find yourself trying to pick up what's going on, as if you had been ‘gone' for a moment?
• Are these familiar experiences that you consider just part of your nature?

Question 3:
Do you lose track while watching a movie or hearing a lecture?

• Are there simple paragraphs or sentences in books which you have to reread and yet still have difficulty registering in your mind?
• Did that happen while you were reading this cyberguide, Triumphant Journey? If it did, go back and see if you can find those sections and hold them in your mind. If you can find them but still can't hold them, write them down. Sometimes, even writing them down doesn't work. It's as if the words go through your eyes to your hands, fingers and pen, typewriter or keyboard, completely bypassing your mind. That's okay. Just record them and keep them in the notebook you'll find out about in the Secret Discovering Exercises.
• Do you miss small sections of a film's continuity and have to fill in the meaning from your imagination?
• Are you certain that your small misses while watching films are okay because you are skilled in making sense out of the parts you have seen?
• Have you ever watched a video of a film you've seen before and been surprised at whole sections of events and meanings that you didn't know existed from your first viewing?

Question 4:
Are there small, mundane events which can reliably arouse your anger or fear?

• Examples of such events include:
  • You or someone else spills something.
  • Someone moves an object out of its usual place.
  • A simple food is unavailable.
  • You are to go up stairs or through a doorway first, immediately ahead of one or more people.
  • A household item or appliance breaks down and requires repair or replacement.

Question 5:
Do you feel you have to pretend to be someone better than you are?

• Do you feel that if people knew who you really were they would turn away from you?
• Do you feel that if people knew who you really were they would laugh at you, belittle you, or punish you in some way?

Question 6:
Do you feel nervous when you feel someone sees who you really are?

• Can you tell from a moment's glance when someone is seeing your real self?
• Do you keep away from such people?

Question 7:
Do you often feel you have to leave situations because you feel too nervous or confined to stay?

• Examples of such situations include:
  • meetings
  • relationships
  • brief encounters in social gatherings
  • classrooms
  • waiting rooms
• If you remain do you feel resentful and angry or afraid?