The Type of Questions to Ask to Get Better From Chronic Pain and Other Mind Mind Symptoms

When trying to get better from mind body symptoms, the key is having the right information and feeling clear on what is happening in your mind that is helping you or harming you. In this episode of our How To Series, I distinguish between two types of questions — ones that come from a genuine desire to understand more and find advancement in the work and ones that, unbeknownst to the asker are driven by fear and doubt and are designed to get you even deeper in trouble with symptom life.

I name these A and B questions so that we can start discussing this concept and how it may be affecting your ability to get better. A questions are the ones that come from a motivation to understand things better. You might think that all of your questions are like this, but this is one of the ways that doubt finds a way to bite you — by hiding in a question that really doesn’t have an answer and is only designed to create confusion, fear, and a dead end. These types of questions are B questions.

We all ask both kinds of questions, but it is vital that we learn to recognize when our questions are serving doubt and not ourselves. What we end up doing with these questions is also totally divergent, so the distinction is crucial. B questions are not to be taken seriously, because they actually have no good answers (by design, in fact…the more baffling they are, the happier doubt is with having this question on your mind), and aren’t even questions, really. What they are is worries, fears, and doubts. Learn to ask the A questions and you will always make headway in your understanding, because that is their goal.