S2 EP115 – Getting Unstuck – Inner Bonding Hub

Episode Summary

Are you stuck in some aspect of your life, or stuck with depression and a lack of motivation to take the loving actions for yourself? Discover some of the false beliefs that may be keeping you stuck and what to do about it.

Transcript

Hi everyone. This is Dr. Margaret Paul with the Inner Bonding podcast, and today I want to talk about getting unstuck in various aspects of your life. Are you stuck in some aspect of your health or your weight? Are you stuck in your work or your manifestation? Are you stuck with a relationship issue?

Many people seek my help with the issue of being stuck in one or more areas of their life because it’s causing them a lot of pain and often depression. They may even know exactly what they need to do to take loving care of themselves, yet they are not doing what they know to do, and they don’t know why.

Take Megan, for example. Megan is a highly intelligent and well-educated accountant, who hasn’t worked in four years. She has also taken many classes over the years in health, nutrition, yoga, and meditation, yet she is very over-weight and physically unhealthy. Financially, she is fine because her husband does well in his work, but now that her three children are all in school, she’s feeling useless. Yet she is doing nothing to lose weight, regain her health, or get back into her work, which she says she likes. She sought my help because she is stuck.

“I know exactly how to eat right, but I continue to eat junk, and I have no idea why. I have friends who have invited me to join their accounting firm, but I’ve yet to say yes. I’m miserable, but I have no idea why I’m so stuck doing nothing about any of this.”

As we explored, it become apparent that Megan had a major false belief that she wasn’t allowed to be happy. Her narcissistic single mother had made sure that Megan wasn’t allowed to shine in any way. She wasn’t allowed to be thinner than her mother, who had always been overweight. She wasn’t allowed to do better than her mother in any area. Her mother’s attention toward her was conditional on Megan catering to her mother and doing nothing to make herself happy. Now, unconsciously, she was limiting herself – limiting her aliveness, her passion, and her physical wellbeing to not bypass her mother.

But now, it wasn’t just her mother she was fear of bypassing. She had projected her mother’s jealousy and rejection of her onto others and was fearful that if she was thinner or more successful than her friends or her husband, they would reject her, and she would end up alone. Her fear of being alone was deep in her wounded self, coming from knowing as a small child that she would die if her mother completely rejected her.

Her ego wounded self had no idea that she wasn’t a small child anymore, because she had rarely shown up for herself as a loving adult. As a child, she was allowed to learn skills, but she wasn’t allowed to use them without her fears of rejection and ending up alone surfacing. She was still operating as this wounded child.

We get stuck when we are operating from our fearful wounded self, rather than being guided by the love and truth of our inner and higher guidance.

Obviously, Megan is resistant to loving herself because of the false beliefs and resulting fears in her wounded self.

Are you resistant to loving yourself and stuck because of this? Are you operating from numerous false beliefs that are keeping you stuck?

One of the major false beliefs that most of us grow up with is that if you get present in your body and open to your feelings, which is Step One of Inner Bonding – the first step in learning to love yourself, you’re going to be in pain and that you can’t handle pain. It’s true that you might experience pain, and often the most pain is the current pain of self-abandonment. This, of course, is a vicious circle – the more you abandon yourself by not being present in your body and wanting to learn about what your painful wounded feelings are telling you about how you are abandoning yourself, the more you are abandoning yourself and causing your painful wounded feelings.

Sometimes we’re in the existential pain of life because of things that are going on with others, with events, and in the world. People being mean, losing people, losing a job you love, job insecurity, food insecurity, fear of COVID, the economy. You might be avoiding these painful feelings because you’ve never learned how to be a spiritually connected loving adult and compassionately manage these feeling, so you avoid them with your various forms of self-abandonment, which are then causing your wounded feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness, jealousy, and so on. You might be afraid to start learning to love yourself by learning to be present in your body with your feelings, and this is keeping you stuck in abandoning yourself.

When you don’t know that you can handle your pain, then of course you want to avoid it, and avoiding loving yourself is what keeps you stuck.

If fear of pain is keeping you stuck, you can get unstuck by shifting your intent to learning to love yourself and start to practice Inner Bonding.

Another common false belief that may be keeping you stuck is that if you take care of yourself, you’re going to end up alone. That you have to give yourself up or be needy for somebody to want you. But the truth is that if you want a loving relationship, the only way to attract that is to learn to take loving care of yourself, because we attract at our common level of self-love or our common level of self-abandonment. The people who are going to be attracted to you if you give yourself up and you’re needy, are the people who are also needy. And that creates an unloving and codependent relationship. Getting unstuck by taking loving care of yourself frequently leads to the opposite of ending up alone. You have a much better chance of attracting a loving partner if you’re taking loving care of yourself than if you’re resisting loving yourself and keeping yourself stuck and miserable.

Another common false belief that may be keeping you stuck is that you can’t love yourself, that you’re not capable, that you don’t know how, so you’re going to fail at it. And your young, wounded self can’t. Your wounded self may be two or four, or 10 or 14 and that part of you can’t do it. But as an adult, you’re not that age. You’re not a child, and you’re not an adolescent.

But of course, you don’t know how, because most of us had no role models for how. That why, in Step 4 of Inner Bonding, we open to learning with our higher guidance for the how. This is what Inner Bonding’s all about – the how. While we don’t have a whole lot of good role models in our society for loving ourselves, when you practice inner bonding, you learn to have that connection with your spiritual guidance. And that becomes a role model, so if you learn and practice Inner Bonding, there’s no such thing as failure. Everybody can learn to love themselves if it’s important enough to them.

Another false belief of the wounded self that may be keeping you stuck is that somebody else can do it better than you. And that getting love feels better when we get it from somebody else. I used to have that false belief. I thought, oh, the only love that really matters, the only love that feels good is if somebody else gives it to me and then I know I’m okay. Of course, that doesn’t work because I’m the only one who’s with my feelings, 24 7.

One of the things that I had to accept is that nobody in the world, as an adult, wants the responsibility for being the one to love me when I was abandoning myself. Nobody wanted that job. Our parents may have wanted this responsibility when we were little, or they might not have. But now, as adults, nobody comes onto the planet and says, okay, I’m going to be the one to take care of you. So if we don’t do it, nobody does it. And one of the things I found is that once I started loving myself is how great I felt. I realized, wow, this feels fantastic. This is amazing! This is empowering! This is freedom! Nobody else’s love ever felt like that. And then I found out that loving myself enabled me to share love, and really the greatest experience in the world is the sharing love, not getting love.But you’re not going to know that until you try it. It’s amazing what happens when we start to love ourselves, amazing how we end up feeling when we do that, but you’re not going to know it until you do it.

Another false belief that keeps people stuck is that it’s not your job – that other people have or are causing your pain, so they are responsible. Of course, sometimes people have, or currently do, cause your pain, but they’re likely not going to do anything about it. So once again, it is our job to learn how to take care of our own feelings and make ourselves whole.

A big issue that stuck people often run into is when I call a tribal issue. If you’re in a family and everybody is abandoning themselves in various ways – blaming others, drinking or drugging a lot, staying at jobs they hate, being addicted to TV or computer games, and generally trying to control each other and seeing themselves as victims, and you start to love yourself and move away from these various addictions and activities, and you get unstuck and start to feel happier, you might not continue to feel connected to your family. And you might have the false belief that if you don’t feel connected with your family of origin, or with your partner, you’re going to feel even more miserable than you are now, then you might be staying stuck to stay as a member of your tribe rather than risk feeling disconnected from them.

But I’ve seen over and over that when you start loving yourself, even if you don’t feel connected to the people in your family or friends who are abandoning themselves, you’re going to find other people who you do connect with in a much more loving and deeper way than you have with people who are abandoning themselves.

Another false belief of the wounded self that might be keeping you stuck is that it’s too hard to learn to love yourself and take responsibility for your own wellbeing. But the reality is that it’s a lot easier to learn to take care of yourself than it is to try and get somebody else to do it. Trying to get others to do it is exhausting. It’s a lot easier to learn to see and value and cherish yourself and take loving actions for yourself than to keep waiting for somebody else to do it, or to keep trying to have control over getting others to do it, or to keep treating yourself badly and feeling miserable as a result of abandoning yourself.

You might stay stuck because your wounded self believes that it takes up too much time, but one of the things I found when I started loving myself is I had more time because I wasn’t spending all my energy trying to have control over getting somebody else’s love. That takes a lot of time and a lot of energy.

Sometimes the wounded self says, “Well, it’s not going to work. I’ve tried a lot of things and it hasn’t worked.” And it’s interesting that the people who I’ve worked with who say that there’s no point in loving themself because it’s not going to work, and when I’ve said, “Have you tried it?” the answer is always no. “Well then,” I ask, “how do you know it’s not going to work?” “Well,” they say, “nothing else has worked so why bother?” That’s very sad to me, because learning to love yourself through the Inner Bonding pathway always works if you do it. Inner Bonding is one of those processes that when you practice it, it always works. There is no such thing as loving yourself not working and not getting you unstuck.

But you’re not going to know this unless you do it.

Another false belief might be that it’s not safe – that maybe you think that if you love yourself, you’re going to get too powerful or too successful and people are going to envy you, they will be jealous. That people are going to be mad at you. People are going to hurt you. Some of your family or friends might be jealous, but is that a reason to keep yourself limited? I personally haven’t found it to be true that I’m not safe. The more I love myself, the better and safer I feel and the happier I am. I’ve been doing this for many years, and I have not experienced that it’s not safe.

And then sometimes people think they will be weak and easily used, hurt or trolled. But when you love yourself and you develop the loving adult, you get a tremendous amount of strength. That’s the strong part of us, the part of us that’s connected to the power of spirit. And because our frequency is higher, we don’t tend to attract darkness into our life.

When you resist, you’re being controlled by your resistance, which keeps you stuck. You might be resisting because you’re afraid of being controlled, afraid of being weak and of losing yourself. And that puts you in a position of being easily controlled because you’re not tuning into what you really want. You’re just resisting – and staying stuck.

Sometimes people believe that if they open to their feelings and learn to love themselves, they’re going to find out that they have this very demanding and needy inner child, but that’s not who the inner child is. Our soul is a beautiful spark of God, a divine being, and is not at all demanding or needy. But again, you don’t know these things unless you practice Inner Bonding and get to know who you are in your soul, and start loving yourself and see what happens.

One of the fears that people have is that they’re going to outgrow their relationship and then be more miserable than they are now. Well, you might outgrow your relationship, but I assure you, if you’re loving yourself, you’re not going to be more miserable than you are. If you’re in a relationship and you’re learning and growing and your partner isn’t, you might outgrow the relationship, but keeping a lid on yourself and staying stuck and not loving yourself to not lose the relationship creates a lot of misery. I had to go through that in my 30-year marriage. After I started loving myself and my ex wasn’t interested in learning to love himself, and was not supportive of me loving myself instead of caretaking everyone, there was just no way to come together. But I was very unhappy before that. And once I started loving myself, that’s when I started to experience not only joy, but creativity and aliveness and health.

So many things come as a result of loving yourself, such as the ability to manifest what you want. You can’t do that from self-abandonment.

Another common false belief is that there’s no higher power to turn to, or that even if there is, I will never be able to access that. I’m not going to know how to take care of myself. So why bother trying? Once again, you’re not going to know whether a higher power is there for you unless you’re willing to try. I assure you that we all have guidance. Every single being on the planet has spiritual guidance. As you practice Inner Bonding you learn how to access that.

Another false belief is that you can’t heal if you had a problem childhood or an abusive childhood. One of my clients asked, “How can I heal when I never bonded with my mother and my father died when I was very young?”

Now, of course, it’s very, very sad when we go through this, but I work with people all the time who had no loving parenting. I came from a very dysfunctional family. I did not get the love I needed, like so many of my clients. But when I learned Inner Bonding, I learned to connect with my guidance and that becomes my source of love. It’s your higher guidance that teaches you how to love yourself. Anybody, no matter how bad your childhood was, can learn to love yourself. I work with people who have huge huge trauma, not just a lack of love, but violent abuse, who learn to love themselves when that’s their intention. You’re not going to learn this if your intention is to control. If you’re resistant to learning to love yourself, you’re not going to do it. You’re not going to do it if you think that it’s not your job because you didn’t get love or that you don’t want the responsibility for your feelings. But if you do decide to learn and practice Inner Bonding, you can learn to love yourself no matter what you went through. You can learn to give yourself what you’ve always wanted. You can learn to be the ideal mom and dad to your inner child. That’s what gets you unstuck and that is what heals.

These are just a few of the false beliefs that may be keeping you stuck. I want to encourage you to go inside and take a look at what the false beliefs are that are keeping you limited and stuck.

I worked online with Joyce in one of my webinars. Joyce said, “I’d love some help with being stuck. I’ve been doing some Inner Bonding work and I have come to the realization that while I understand how important it is not to self-abandon and to value my feelings and emotions deep down, I feel like there’s this wound, or belief, that my feelings don’t matter. I think ignoring my feelings is one of the things that’s keeping me stuck in my life.”

I asked Joyce how old she thought she was when she learned to believe that her feelings don’t matter. She told me she was four or five years old.

“So,” I said, “there’s a young, wounded part of you who learned, through your experiences, that your feelings don’t matter. And of course, many of us learn this. Most of us are not taught that our feelings have very important information for us – that all of our feelings are important and that we can learn a lot from them. If you had a little girl four or five years old, and she was upset about something or she was crying, would you think that her feelings didn’t matter?”

“No,” she said, “I would want to hug her and comfort her and make sure that she knows that her feelings matter to me. I would want to know why she was upset.”

“Yes,” I said, “if you had an actual child, her feelings would matter to you, and you would want to learn from them. That’s the same thing that you need to do for you on the inner level for this to heal. Instead of putting the four- or five-year-old in charge of your feelings, who learned to believe that your feelings don’t matter, you need to be operating as the loving adult that you would be with an actual four- or five-year-old. You would need to be in your heart, connected with your source of love. So when feelings come up, instead of letting the four or five year old say, “Oh, these feelings don’t matter,” you, as the adult would treat the feelings the exact same way you would treat a child of yours. And when you do that over time, when you start to move towards your feelings and welcome them and embrace them and hug them, and you open to them and want to understand them, eventually that false belief will heal because you will see that your feelings have much important information for you.”

Joyce told me that she could feel that if she does this for herself, she could imagine that she would get unstuck.

Another person on the webinar asked me about shame, feeling that she has a lot of shame and that it’s keeping her stuck in her life. Part of why she was stuck is that she didn’t know where the shame comes from.

I told her that most of the time shame comes from the wounded self, judging you for being. Shame is about falsely believing that you’re basically and essentially bad or wrong or flawed. Guilt is about doing something wrong, and shame is about believing you are essentially not good enough. The wounded self would rather feel shame that it causes, than feel a more authentic feeling of life. Like let’s say you were in a relationship, and somebody left you or somebody was mean to you, or you lost a job you loved. You would likely feel heartbroken, and helpless over the person or situation, and you would likely feel grief.

The wounded self wants to avoid these painful life feelings at all cost, and would rather judge you and cause the shame than to feel those deeper feelings. In fact, all of us learned to do that when we were growing up, because we couldn’t handle the big pain of life. There’s just no way being a little person that we can handle the big pain of life. So we learned to cover it over. It’s the wounded self that learned to do that. To heal shame, you need to become aware of the self-judgments that are causing it, and what you’re trying to control when you judge yourself. As you learn to see and value yourself rather than judge yourself, you will find yourself getting unstuck.

Many people, with the challenge of COVID and other planetary challenges, find themselves stuck, procrastinating, with no motivation to take loving care of themselves. My client, Joanne, said, “Why is it so difficult to get myself out of resistance and shift the lack of motivation to practice Inner Bonding and to care for myself? It feels like I’ve stopped living life and have zero interest or energy to push forward. How can I get the momentum back so I can care for myself again?”

As with shame, there’s likely some core painful feelings – some grief, loneliness, heartbreak, and helplessness over the current challenging situations on our planet. With so many economic and other challenges, people feel very helpless, and they don’t want to deal with these feelings because they’ve never learned to connect to their higher source of love and bring in comfort and compassion.

So what the wounded self does to avoid those deeper feelings is numb out and say, “I don’t care about anything. I don’t want to do anything.” This is a protection against the deeper pain that Joanne is unwilling to feel. I would guess that if she were willing to go a little deeper and touch the pain that she’s avoiding by not taking care of herself and by being resistance, that some of her energy would come back. Our energy tends to go away when the wounded self is in charge. Joanne is depressed, which means that she’s put a lid on her feelings because she’s not willing to feel them. I encouraged her to open to learning about what the deeper feelings are. Her inner child is depressed because she’s ignoring her. She’s abandoning her. She will heal the depression and get unstuck when she has the courage to lovingly embrace her core painful feelings and allow them to move through her. Stuck feelings can not only cause depression, they can also keep us stuck in our lives.

The practice of Inner Bonding and learning to love yourself is the pathway to getting unstuck.

I hope you join me for my 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my recent books: