S1 EP58 – Inner Bonding Podcast: Healing From Childhood Abuse

Transcript

Hi everyone. This is Dr. Margaret Paul with the inner bonding Podcast. And today I want to talk about healing From childhood abuse. If you had an abusive childhood, do you believe that you’re always going to suffer from it? This is the question that Andrea asked me about. She said I had a terrifying childhood. I’ve had counseling motion, light therapy, and been hypnotized, and they’ve done wonders for me yet. I still long for completion in my mind over these things.

My question is, is there ever an end, your struggle in dealing with such things? So my answer Is yes, you can heal. There is an end to the struggle, but there are many challenges along the way, much healing occurs. When you practice inner bonding and learn to give yourself the love that you didn’t receive as a child, you need to learn to be the loving inner parent that your inner child needs. This is what will create the inner safety and the self-worth that are necessary for healing, but a terrifying childhood leaves, wounds and scars, and those wounds and scars can show up in many different ways.

One of the main ways that I’ve seen over and over is that due to ongoing and intense stress from dealing with various forms of abuse, the immune system often gets compromised. Being subjected to a terrifying childhood can very sadly lead to various illnesses, much supportive work, including making sure that your gut is healthy and balanced will need to be done to build up the immune system. Terror causes PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder and can result in being angry or feeling frozen when you can’t fight or flee as you couldn’t during childhood abuse and some adult abuse or trauma.

The body often goes into a frozen state. Here’s where therapies such as EFT, which is the emotional freedom technique, Tre, which is the trauma release exercises EMDR, which is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and S E, which is somatic experiencing can be extremely helpful. Along with inner bonding. There are often raw places inside may frequently get triggered. The good news is that these raw places can be addressed with inner bonding. And with the above therapies, I have personally used EFT emotional freedom technique with much success, but the thing that is healed my own raw places, the most is learning to show up as a deeply compassionate, loving adult.

For me, learning to lovingly and compassionately embrace my existential painful feelings of loneliness, heartbreak, and helplessness over others. Each time they arise has been deeply healing. This is what’s enabled me to regulate my feelings so that I don’t so easily get triggered into the protections of my wound itself. Your spiritual connection is perhaps the most important aspect of healing. The more you learn to stay connected with your guidance throughout the day, the safer and more loved you will feel on the inner level.

So I encourage Andrea who asked the question about never being able to end the struggle to heal, to let go of the concept of struggle and replace it with learning and healing. To me, struggle has a negative connotation while the idea of learning and healing throughout my life feels like an exciting journey. Also, it might be useful for Andrea to gently let go of the notion of completion, even with profound healing. There’s always more to learn. I think life would be very doll. If there wasn’t always more to learn, instead of looking at your healing process, as a struggle with a completion point, why not look at it as a sacred journey of evolving your soul in your ability to love and to fully manifest yourself?

It’s my experience that when someone has had a terrifying childhood, they often develop much more depth and strength and resilience than people who had an easy, you needed those qualities in order to survive. The fact that Andrea survived her terrifying, abusive childhood with her sanity intact indicates that she found the strength within to deal with it. Instead of seeing this as a liability, I suggest honoring it. It’s my experience that only very old souls present themselves with an extremely difficult childhood in order to challenge themselves in maintaining their ability to love the fact that Andrea chose to heal herself rather than being like her parents says much about who she is in her soul.

When she fully values this about herself, she will have done much in her work in defining the beauty of her soul, defining who we are in our soul is a major aspect of healing. And we need our spiritual connection to see who we are through the eyes of love. Deep healing occurs. As we develop our spiritually connected, loving adult, define the beauty of our soul and learn to take loving action on our own behalf. An important aspect of healing is learning how to manage abuse memories.

When children are severely physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, they often cope with the abuse through some form of dissociation. Dissociation is on a continuum from temporarily leaving the body to fragmentation into different parts. As in did, which is dissociative dissociative identity disorder association allows the child to separate out from the experience in order to tolerate it. Dissociation may cause the abusive event to become repressed, which means that it becomes unconscious.

It will likely remain repressed until the child aspect who has the memory feels safe enough to bring it to consciousness. This often happens when people are in a safe therapeutic environment or starts to practice in or, or, or they start to practice in her bonding and begin to create a loving adult. At some point in the healing process, the memory or memories may emerge as in dreams and drawings or in body feelings called body memories. Occasionally there may be what’s called an AB reaction, which is when the person relives the abusive event.

As if it’s happening in the moment, the person might swell up from bruises or have intense internal or external physical pain. The person in the AB reactive state may or may not remember having been in this state after returning to normal consciousness. Often the app reaction is a way that the inner child who experienced the abuse lets the therapist or facilitator know what happened. If you’re starting to remember severe abuse as a result of your inner work, here are some suggestions that might be of help to you. First, I highly recommend that you seek therapeutic help.

If that is at all possible, you were alone with no one to help you when the abuse occurred. And so it’s best to not be alone. When you remember it, it’s best to be with a warm, caring person who can help you to feel safe during the memory process. But if this isn’t possible and you need to deal with your memories alone, here’s some things you can do to help yourself through this process. I highly recommend that you learn the emotional freedom technique to help release both, both physical and emotional feelings from your body as well as old false beliefs.

In addition, I recommend you learn the trauma release exercises, which helped to release the trauma from your body. You can learn both these techniques online and learn to do them on your own. Okay? Also it’s important to learn and practice a process called revivification. This is a technique of watching the abuse on a screen. As if you’re watching a movie, instead of having to relive all the pain of the abuse, you can see what happened and what shame and beliefs you absorbed at the time of the abuse.

You can then visualize giving the darkness of the shame back to the abuser or to spirit and work with your higher guidance on letting go of the false beliefs. You don’t need need to relive the abuse reliving it is retraumatizing, learn and practice inner bonding, which I hope you now know is a powerful process for healing abuse. By continually going through the six steps of inner bonding. Whenever a memory comes up, you discover the false beliefs, move into truth from your guidance and bring love and nurturing to your hurt inner child or inner children.

It’s really important to trust the memories. Realize that dissociative memories will always appear dreamlike. It might feel as if you’re making them up, but if you do not trust your inner child or inner children who have the memories, you’re going to do more damage. These parts of you need to be heard and believed by you in order to heal because you may have repressed the memories. They will not be experienced in the same way conscious memories are, but this does not mean that they’re not real well. It’s not ideal to go through a big abuse memories alone.

It can successfully be done and has been accomplished by others who practice inner bonding By learning To be a loving adult for your very hurt inner child or children, you can heal from the past. It’s important to understand that learning to love yourself is vital in healing dramatic abuse. In my many years of counseling individuals, I often work with people who have suffered from severe physical, emotional and or sexual abuse in childhood. Many who have sought my help or suffering from fear and anxiety, depression, various addictions, relationship problems and sexual problems.

Many of these people had no memory of their childhood and had no idea why they were so unhappy. So unhappy and suffering so much, many had spent years in therapy yet had never remembered their abuse. The reason they could not remember the traumatic events of their childhood is because the child or children within who suffered the traumatic abuse did not feel safe in revealing the abuse. These unconscious inner parts were protecting themselves from reliving the horrible pain of the past. These inner children knew that there wasn’t a strong, inner, loving adult who could compassionately learn about and manage the pain in order to remember and healed traumatic events from the past, they’re affecting you today.

You need to learn to see value in love yourself, and you need to develop a strong, loving adult self who’s capable of managing extreme pain. Without this loving inner adult, you may get so flooded and overwhelmed with the feelings of the traumatic memories that you can’t function. The practice of the gentle transformational inner bonding process. Not only develops the strong, loving adult self, but it also develops new pathways in your higher brain for the loving adult learning and practicing, and her bonding develops your ability to connect with your spiritual source, your personal sources, spiritual guidance.

It’s your connection with your guidance that gives you the strength to manage the intensely painful feelings of, of childhood abuse. And that teaches you to see value and love yourself. Once the inner children who hold the memories feel safe, that there is a strong, loving adult self who’s capable of managing the pain. You will start to remember your past. As these memories come up, you begin to understand the conclusions you drew about yourself that are currently causing your pain.

Almost all children who are abused, draw erroneous conclusions about themselves as a result of the abuse, false beliefs, such as I have no worth. I’m just an object for others to use. I’m not lovable. I should never have been born. I would be better off dead. I don’t deserve love. I’m a bad person. It’s these beliefs that are currently causing your pain healing from childhood abuse is not just about remembering the past. It’s about remembering the very good reasons you had for drawing the conclusions that are now causing you such pain.

It’s about gently and lovingly acknowledging what happened that led to your present beliefs that are now hurting you and limiting you. It’s about learning how to access the truth from your spiritual source so that you can move out of the lies that you’re telling yourself about yourself that are keeping you stuck in the cycle of pain. We all learn to emotionally abandon ourselves rather than to emotionally love ourselves. Most of us learned to treat ourselves the ways that we were treated and the ways that our parents treated themselves or, or our caregivers treated themselves.

We learned to abandon ourselves in the ways we were abandoned in the ways our parents and caregivers abandoned themselves. When your parents or others abused you, they were off. They were also not taking loving care of themselves and were not role models for loving self care. As long as you treat yourself the way your parents or other caregivers treated you in themselves, you’re going to continue to suffer healing from childhood abuse is about developing your loving adult self so that you can learn to love yourself, love your inner child or inner or inner children.

The way you always wanted to be loved. You can heal from childhood abuse, through learning, to access and bring into your being the love, truth, wisdom, and strength of your spiritual guidance through learning and practicing inner bonding. You’re going to discover the incredibly beautiful and perfect essence within you, which is the part of you that was never damaged by the abuse, your true self that will emerge as you heal the false beliefs of your wound itself.

This is what will happen as you develop your loving adult self through learning and practicing inner bonding, along with practicing the physical processes that release stored trauma out of your body, such as the trauma therapies that I’ve mentioned. But as I’ve said, please try to have help with this. Like I said, you were alone during your abuse and you might retraumatize yourself. If you try to heal alone, it’s best to be filled, to be facilitated through your healing by another loving presence. And you might need to be lovingly held by a loving other who can bring the love of spirit to you.

In my many years of counseling, I’ve worked with many people who were sexually abused as children. Some of them remember it all their lives while others repressed it. And remember it only as adults in either case the resulting harm exists on many levels, it can exist on a physical level. If a child was violently abused, the physical pain may have been so intense as to cause the person to not be able to function in a normal way, sexually as an adult, the fear of penetration or oral sex may cause the person to avoid sex entirely or to be too tense to enjoy sex.

But even if the abuse was not violent and physically harmful, the physical harm can be deep. A child’s body is not big enough to handle the intense feelings of sexual arousal. When a child is sexually activated at a young age, the child may be so overwhelmed with the sexual feelings that he or she ends up constantly masturbating to find some relief. Incessant masturbation as a child is one of the symptoms of sexual abuse. As an adult, this could translate into various forms of sexual addiction.

The harm done on the emotional level is extensive. Sexual abuse is a deep form of violation. And invariably leads to the child feeling objectified. The child comes to see herself or himself as an object to be used rather than as a person deserving of love and caring. This objectification of the self can lead to promiscuity at a young age or to other forms of being used and abused. One of the deepest levels of harm is as I previously said, that the child tends to absorb the darkness of the abuser, the child, not knowing that he or she is not causing the abuser to be abusive takes on the shame of the abuser.

It’s as if the darkness of the abuser, it goes right into the child. As a result, the abused person grows up with a feeling of being a very bad person with a huge ball of darkness. Inside. Most survivors of childhood sexual abuse need to go through a process of realizing that this darkness does not belong to them and learn to release it. Children who have been sexually abused, generally absorbed many false beliefs about themselves that can play them throughout their adult life. Beliefs, such as I’ve been damaged beyond repair. I can never heal and be whole I’m a bad person.

I cause people to abuse me because of my badness. All on good for is sex. The only way to be safe is to be invisible. These false beliefs can cause untold heartbreak for the survivor of sexual abuse, sexual abuse, not only causes physical and emotional harm. It also causes spiritual harm. It’s a form of spiritual abuse. Spiritual abuse is any abuse, also physical abuse or emotional abuse that contributes to a disconnection from a spiritual source of love and comfort.

When a child is being abused by a trusted person, a person who is supposed to protect the child, such as a parent, relative teacher, religious leader, doctor or friend, the trial learns that adults can’t be trusted. The deepest harm occurs when the abuser, as a parent, most children learn to protect onto God, their experience of their parents. Their parents are judgmental, and then they believe that God is judgmental. Their parents are too busy for them. Then they believe that God is too busy for them. Their parents do not protect them or harm them.

They might conclude that God does not exist. They might ask if God existed, then why didn’t God stop my father from raping me. As I said, some children leave their bodies when being severely abused, invariably, with therapeutic health that can remember that they were lovingly held by a spiritual being and told that the abuse was not their fault, much healing occurs with these memories. They can remember knowing that they were being held by a loving spirit, even though due to the law of freewill.

God could not stop the abuser from abusing them. As I’ve said, reconnecting on the spiritual level is a key to healing on the physical and emotional levels. Through connection with spirit abuse survivors learn that they’re not irrevocably damaged, that they’re not inherently bad and that they did not cause themselves to be abused and that they can share much more than sex. They can share their love and compassion and that they can create their own safety rather than be invisible as a way to be safe.

Their false beliefs are healed through the truth that comes through from their spiritual connection. Learning to be a loving and compassionate adult with oneself is the major challenge for an abuse survivor. Deep healing occurs when survivors practice inner bonding learn to see and value the beauty of their own soul and learn to treat themselves with respect, caring, and compassion, inner safety and deep worth are the results of practicing in her bonding and learning to treat oneself with love.

I hope you join me in my upcoming inner bonding weekly virtual eight week course starting very soon on June 3rd, called the power to joyfully. Love your life. The revolutionary inner bonding process for healing, freedom and vibrant love. You can access the information about this by scrolling down to recent offerings on our homepage@innerbonding.com or click on events and then on workshops and scroll down to the upcoming workshop. I hope I see you there, but if you can’t join the course, I want you to know that there’s many ways of learning inner bonding.

I encourage you to take advantage of the many ways on our website of learning inner bonding so that you can become the loving adult that your inner child needs you to be. I’m sending you my love and my blessing.