SECRET LIVES Within each and every one of us, there is a secret, inner life. We live a life of pretend. Very few people know this part of us, for most of us are reluctant to share this inner life with even the closest of our friends or family. This secret inner life teams with our dreams, fantasies, desires, and also our fears, anger, unhappiness, inadequacies, helplessness and hopelessness.
By watching and listening to our parents or siblings or primary caregivers, we learn how to play the ‘game of survival’. We soon learn if we are ‘bad’ we will be punished. If we are ‘good’, we might get some attention, or approval or praise.
But sometimes, no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, nothing seems to please our parents. We will never be good enough, smart enough, fast enough or pretty enough. As young as two or three we subconsciously begin judging ourselves to be stupid, slow, ugly and inadequate, for if our parents and siblings reject and hurt us, it ‘must be our fault’, we must have created it, there must be something wrong with us, and we must be responsible for it.
This secret life is made up not only of our dreams of becoming a movie star or brain surgeon,or baseball player, it is also made up of our negative beliefs; the beliefs that were imprinted as children and are still running our lives as adults. These beliefs consistently and methodically destroy our chances of having many of the things we dream of.
We keep most of these negative thoughts and feelings to ourselves, under control, out of sight, for fear of being thought stupid, bad, insane, or fit to be locked up. But sometimes of us do lose control; abusing ourselves by taking prescription or illegal drugs, starving ourselves or eating too much food, drinking too much alcohol, abusing our families, or becoming aggressive and violent.
And sometimes, when we are sick and tired of pretending that we are OK, we take our own lives and those of others we believe to be the cause of our pain.
These negative thoughts become the bedrock of our lives and guide our behaviour and adult lives as surely as if they happened this past minute. However, most of them are hidden away because we believe that no-one wants to ‘listen to our problems’, that ‘what we have to say is not important’, and that if people found out ‘how bad’ we really are then ‘they would hate us’.
And so we learn to keep secrets and hide our true selves. And depending upon how small or large the secrets are, we start to disconnect from them by pretending ‘it never happened’ thus shutting down a part of ourselves. The bigger the secrets, the more we shut down, becoming a mere parody of ourselves.
The problem with keeping secrets is, that as children we may have blown the secret up out of all proportion until it becomes ‘the most awful thing to have happened in the whole world’ and because of that we are afraid of being ‘caught out’, ‘laid bare’ and ‘found guilty’.
Of course many bad things do happen to helpless children. Often they are coerced into keeping secrets by threat of death or injury to themselves or others. Sometimes they are too young to even understand what has happened to them and it is not until later when they hear or see something that reminds them of it, do they recall what happened to them.
Abused children are forced to keep the abuse secret because we might have talked ourselves into believing that the abuse didn’t happen and also believe as often happens, that no-one would believe us anyway. So our minds create ‘black holes’ so we forget to remember what happened to us. We come to loathe ourselves and our lives. Emotionally wounded and scarred, we live our lives in terror of being found out, of being exposed, and come to believe that we are worthless and nothing and that we don’t deserve to live.
By removing negative beliefs, we gradually become real. We become honest and genuine, we stop hiding and pretending, and we learn to care about and value ourselves. We learn to tell it as it is, no lies, no pretence. What a relief it is when we have no more secrets!
The survival game 
