Private posts not shown in recent posts widget

I was trying to show latest posts in the sidebar of my blog, but couldn’t get a single post shown. Thought it was a plugin problem and used the one that comes with twenty-ten theme. the same result, the recent posts plugin was not even showing up. Then I start looking into categories when I tried the Ultimate Post List plugin and noticed that I do not have any categories in the plugin settings drop=down menu.
I went back to my admin panel and start studying the categories I had and what stroke me was 0 posts for the count column in any of my categories listed in …/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category page.
To clear up my situation I have to say that all posts in my blog are private, available to subscriber role that is logged in. I have no problem displaying the latest comments to those private posts, but not the posts.
If this is an indexing problem, please guide me how to re-index my posts. Couldn’t find any tools for that.
Please keep in mind that I am a beginner in WP.
Thanks.
P.S. The provided link to my blog page will not show anything because all posts are private there. I can email you a log-in that will allow you to see the page.