S2 EP221 – Do You Forget to Love Yourself?

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m speaking about a common issue, which is forgetting to be loving to yourself. Most of us have been so programmed to abandon ourselves that it’s often hard to remember to love yourself, especially when you are upset and triggered.

For example, my client Barbara had been doing Inner Bonding for several years, but still forgot to do it when she was stressed or hurting. In our Zoom sessions, I would help her move through her painful feelings with Inner Bonding and she would invariably feel much better. Yet over and over she would forget to do Inner Bonding on her own, forgetting to open to learning about loving herself.

“It’s hard to do Inner Bonding,” Barbara stated to me.

“Are you sure that is a true statement?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It seems hard, yet when I do it with you it seems easy,” she said.

“Barbara, doing Inner Bonding is generally not hard. What is hard is remembering to do it.”

“Yes!” she said. “That is what is so hard! Why is that so hard?”

“From the time we were born,” I told her, “we began practicing giving the ego wounded self dominion over our choices. This was necessary for the survival of the body. In the process of growing up, the programmed part of the mind absorbed many false, limiting beliefs, and became very attached to these beliefs as a form of control. Since the programmed aspect of our mind believes it can and must control us, as well as control others and the outcome of things, it wants to stay in charge. At some point, some of us realize that this system isn’t working, and we choose to move onto a growth path. This means that we strive to shift dominion from the mind to the heart, soul, and higher guidance. Making this shift is what the Inner Bonding process is all about. Yet the programmed wounded aspect of the mind does not easily give up control, which is what leads to forgetting. The wounded self wants you to forget so that it can stay in charge.”

“Then how do we ever remember to do Inner Bonding so that we can make this shift, if we keep forgetting?” she asked. 

“It’s hard to remember without daily support. This is where community comes in. None of us does this alone. We all need support in remembering to love ourselves, and we need that support daily. We need to have that support built into our lives in various ways. For example, you are getting this support weekly through our sessions, and you are making progress. However, if you received daily support, you would be progressing much faster,” I said to her.

Daily support can be achieved in several ways:

• One way is speaking every day with an Inner Bonding buddy – a friend with whom you share your Inner Bonding process, and with whom you give and receive encouragement.
• Another way is going on to the Inner Bonding website daily and reading an article each day.
• Another way is reading personal growth and spiritual literature each day. If time is limited, then just reading a page or two a day can be supportive and help you remember to do Inner Bonding.
• Another way is building into your life a specific time for a formal Inner Bonding practice. Putting it on your calendar and doing it as part of your daily routine, making it just as much a part of your life as eating and sleeping. If you practice it daily, you will be much more likely to remember to do it when you are stressed.
• Also, introducing your friends to Inner Bonding so that you have some people with whom to share your learning and get help with stuck places.
• And if you have a partner, you can receive support by sharing your learning each day with your partner, especially if you are fortunate enough to have a partner who also does Inner Bonding.
• It may also help to set the alarm on your phone to remind you to check in with your feelings. 

It is challenging to remember to choose to open to your guidance and to choose a compassionate intent to learn, especially when stressed.

Few people can remember to love themselves on their own. Most of us need some support to help us with remembering to love ourselves. Some people live in spiritual communities that provide built-in reminders, but most of us need to find ways to create this support in our everyday lives.

Does your inner child trust you to remember to be loving to him or her?

How often have you felt anxious about having to face a challenging situation? Do you tell yourself that your anxiety is about how someone will respond or what will happen in the situation? Are you convinced that your anxiety is about what’s going to happen externally rather than internally?

More often than not, the anxiety is because your inner child doesn’t trust you as a loving adult to take loving care of yourself. The anxiety is about your inner child fearing that you will abandon yourself rather than take personal responsibility for yourself.

This is the situation that Robyn found herself in:

(Quote) “How can I trust myself to take care of myself when I have such deeply ingrained habits of self-abandonment? Even though I hate to admit it, I’m still not sure I really want personal responsibility for my feelings. I think I waffle on wanting the responsibility because I don’t trust myself to follow through. I want to change this, but so far, I can do pretty good for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks and then something happens, and I find myself back in the abandonment pattern. I think it’s at least partly a trust issue. How can I change this pattern?” (Unquote)

Moving from self-abandonment to self-love may be the biggest journey we will ever take. As Robyn stated, the patterns of self-abandonment are so deeply engrained that, unless we are very conscious of our ability to make a choice to love ourselves, we will continue to fall back into old patterns.

Robyn asked, ‘How can I change this pattern?”

This is what the consistent practice of Inner Bonding is all about. Anything worth learning takes a lot of practice, and Inner Bonding is no exception.

The practice starts with Step One of Inner Bonding – learning to stay present in your body with your feelings. You can’t love yourself and take personal responsibility for learning from and lovingly managing your feelings if you are not aware of your feelings. So here are two suggestions for practicing Step One – one for people who like a moving meditation, and the other for people who like a sitting meditation.

For those of you who are not sitters and enjoy a walking meditation, try taking a walk first thing in the morning, and practice using your breath to take you inside your body, getting present with any physical sensations you are aware of. Emotions are often felt as physical sensations. Move toward all feelings with compassion, and if you feel anything other than peace and fullness inside, do an out-loud Inner Bonding process. If everything is peaceful inside, then open to learning with your guidance about anything your guidance wants to tell you about loving yourself.

For those of you who enjoy a sitting meditation, take some time each morning to do the same thing in your sitting meditation.

You don’t need to structure the time or force yourself to do it for a particular amount of time. Sometimes it might be five minutes and other times it might be 30 minutes. It’s best not to try to exert control over how long you do this. But if you take some time each morning to practice being present in your body, you will find it gets easier and easier to stay present throughout the day, and to do a brief Inner Bonding process whenever you feel anything other than peace and fullness inside.

The more you do this internal loving action, the easier it becomes to take external loving actions as well. Eventually, your inner child will come to trust that you will take loving care of yourself.

Do you forget about your guidance and forget to ask your guidance what is loving to you?

My client Gerald was raised in a family whose god was money and success. There was no religion practiced and neither of his parents had any spiritual connection. Gerald grew up focused on externals only – looks, performance and material possessions.

Gerald started counseling with me because his second marriage was falling apart and his work as a corporate attorney was unsatisfying to him. He felt empty and anxious much of the time and was wondering what life was supposed to be all about.

While Gerald was unable to visualize a source of guidance, whenever I asked him to ask his guidance about the truth and the loving action, Gerald always came up with profound answers. The moment he opened to learning about truth and loving action, information flowed through to him. He was amazed at how easily he was able to access information from spirit.

Yet whenever Gerald became stressed, whether over work or a relationship situation, instead of remembering to open to his guidance for help, he would become stuck in a downward spiral of rumination and anxiety. He would often stay in an anxious state until our session. In our session I would always help him reconnect with his guidance. He would get the answers he needed and always felt so much better by the end of the session. Yet by the next session, he was again disconnected and in stress.

“Did you go to your guidance?” I always asked.

Gerald is not the only one who consistently forgot to go to guidance. I hear this over and over with many of my clients. As I spoke about earlier, many people either forget to tune into their feelings in Step One or forget to open to learning with their guidance in Step Four – or forget both – much of the time. In other words, they forget to practice Inner Bonding. They stay in anxiety and stress instead of practicing Inner Bonding and moving through their difficult feelings.

As I previously said, the bottom line of why this happens has to do with control being more important than learning about loving yourself and others. Because Gerald grew up with looks, performance, and material possessions as his focus, he was deeply addicted to having control over the outcome of things regarding money and approval. He got stuck in anxiety because his attention was consistently on how he could control the outcome of things rather than on what is loving to himself and to others. As long as control was more important than loving, Gerald continued to forget to do Inner Bonding.

Yet even when Gerald achieved the outcomes he wanted – the relationship he wanted, the money he wanted, the approval he wanted – nothing changed internally. He still felt empty inside. Anxiety and emptiness are the inevitable results of staying in the wounded self and focusing on controlling the outcome of things. Gerald had been trying to control for so long that he had completely lost touch with his soul essence. As a result, he believed that there is nothing inside, that he was empty, that he had no soul. This deep false belief that he really had no essence perpetuated his desire to control. The thinking of the wounded self was that, “I am a fraud. Since there is no wonderful essence and I really am empty inside, I must cover that up with my looks and performance in order to get the attention and approval I need.” The more Gerald tried to control, the emptier he felt, and the emptier he felt, the more he tried to control.

Finally, Gerald was willing to take the risk, the “leap of faith,” to find out whether or not he had a soul essence and whether or not his guidance really was here for him, and then life dramatically changed for him. But until becoming a loving person was more important than controlling his feelings, others, and outcomes, Gerald stayed stuck in anxiety.

The wounded self in all of us is so addicted to control that the idea of opening to feelings and to spirit is terrifying to this part of us. Our wounded self believes that things will fall apart if we don’t attempt to maintain control. Until you are willing to risk having things fall apart, and risk finding out whether or not you are empty or whatever else you fear, you will not open to learning with your feelings and your guidance.

When loving becomes more important than controlling, you will no longer forget to practice Inner Bonding. You will remember to connect with yourself and with your guidance whenever loving is your highest priority. Then you will discover, as Gerald did, that not only do things not fall apart and you are not empty, but that things actually get a lot better! Then you will discover the fullness of being that comes from connection with yourself and with spirit.

Still with all of the benefits of practicing Inner Bonding and learning to love yourself, there will likely still be times when you forget.

When my children were small, I used to have nightmares that I would forget them somewhere, or forget to feed them, and I would wake up in a panic. Of course, I never did forget them! But there have certainly been times I’ve forgotten my own inner child, especially in the early years of practicing Inner Bonding.

What do you find yourself forgetting the most?

• Do you forget to tune into your feelings, and forget to choose to be responsible for your feelings – forgetting to do Step 1 of Inner Bonding?
• Do you forget to move into an intent to learn – forgetting to do Step 2 of Inner Bonding?
• Do you forget to explore what your feelings are telling you and open to discovering your false beliefs – forgetting to do Step 3 of Inner Bonding?
• Do you forget to ask your guidance about truth and about loving yourself – forgetting to do Step 4 of Inner Bonding?
• Do you forget to take loving action on your own behalf – forgetting about Step 5 of Inner Bonding?
• Do you forget to tune in again to your feelings – forgetting Step 6 of Inner Bonding? 

We all forget at times.

I had a session recently with a new client, who was very motivated to do his healing work. Near the end of the session, when I asked him how he was feeling, he told me he was feeling anxious.

“Please ask yourself what you just told yourself that made you feel anxious,” I said to him.

“I told myself that I might not be able to do Inner Bonding – that I might forget,” he said.

“And what did you tell yourself about yourself if you forget?” I asked him.

“I told myself that this means that I am dumb and stupid,” he said.

Of course his inner child felt anxious. This was his inner guidance informing him that he was telling himself a lie. I helped him to accept that forgetting was going to happen over and over, and to be compassionate about this rather than judgmental.

Remembering is challenging, especially at the beginning of practicing Inner Bonding.

Imagine that you have been walking one way your whole life and a doctor tells you that you need to start to walk in a completely different way, as the way you are walking is causing problems in your body. You can change your walk while you are thinking about it, but over and over you forget to think about it and go right back to your automatic walk. It would likely take years to consistently remember to walk the new way.

Inner Bonding is like that. We have all been practicing being in our wounded selves our whole lives, and this is the default, automatic choice. In order to do Inner Bonding, we have to make a conscious choice to do it. But, like changing your walk, it is hard to always focus on this new choice. We get distracted by many other things that life presents to us, and before we know it, we are on autopilot again.

Even if you manage to learn to stay inside your body and become aware of your feelings, it is very easy to forget that you are responsible for them. You might be deeply programmed to seeing yourself as a victim – of others, events, and even your own wounded self.

Remembering to learn about truth and loving yourself is hugely challenging, as the intent to protect, control and avoid is so deeply automatic. It is especially challenging when fear gets triggered.

It might help to remember by setting the tone for the day.

As I said earlier, I recommend that everyone set aside the same time every day to do your formal Inner Bonding process – like I do each morning on my walk. Doing 20-30 minutes of Inner Bonding each morning sets the tone for my day and helps me remember to do it the rest of the day.

When you forget to be loving to yourself, be very accepting and compassionate with yourself about forgetting. By being accepting and compassionate toward yourself, you are actually practicing Inner Bonding, whereas when you are judging yourself, you are reverting back into your wounded self.

After almost 40 years of practicing Inner Bonding, it’s now become much more automatic for me than protecting, avoiding, or controlling. I still sometimes have to consciously choose the intent to learn, but now I remember to choose it most of the time, due to having created the new neural pathways in my brain for the loving adult.

It’s sad to me that so many of us learned to be hard on ourselves rather than loving with ourselves.

Are you hard on yourself? Do you think this is a good thing? Do you believe this motivates you to do better? Think again. If you are doing well, it’s likely in spite of being hard on yourself, not because of it.

Many of us grew up with parents and teachers who believed that being hard on us was the way to motivate us. As children, we absorbed their judgments of us and became strict taskmasters with ourselves.

Are you aware of the negative consequences of being hard on yourself, and the many positives that result from loving yourself?

In my work with my clients, I find that much anxiety and depression comes directly from being hard on themselves. When you are hard on yourself with your self-judgments, your inner child feels rejected and abandoned by you, which often leads to anxiety and depression. It’s amazing how rapidly loving yourself can often quickly relieve anxiety and depression.

Are you aware that being hard on yourself may be leading to procrastination and resistance, and that loving yourself frees you to be productive? 

And creativity flows when you are open and connected with your higher guidance, which you cut yourself off from when you are harsh with yourself. You can learn to easily connect with your source of creativity when you are relaxed and open to learning, which doesn’t happen when you are hard on yourself.

Just as children need love to feel lovable, so does your inner child. While you might believe that your sense of security and self-worth are determined by your accomplishments and others’ approval, this isn’t true. Your sense of self-worth is directly related to how you treat yourself. The more loving you are with yourself, the better you feel about yourself. Conversely, the harder you are on yourself, the worse you feel about yourself, regardless of how much approval you get from others or how much you accomplish.

Anger is often another result of being hard on yourself or abandoning yourself in other ways. If you often find yourself angry at others, this may be a projection of your inner child’s anger at you for being so hard on yourself, or for ignoring your feelings, or for numbing out with addictions, or for making others responsible for your feelings, which means that you are giving your inner child, your feeling self, away to others for love and approval, rather than loving yourself.

In your relationships, being hard on yourself and others does not generate loving feelings between you. The more you learn to love and value yourself, the easier time you will have loving your partner. In addition, abandoning yourself might lead to you feeling empty and needy, causing you to pull on your partner for the love that you are not giving to yourself. Generally, others don’t want responsibility for making you feel okay about yourself, so the needier you are and the more you pull on others for love, the more they back off. This leads to much loneliness. What heals loneliness is the sharing of love, and you have love to share when you are loving yourself.

When you feel empty inside and you haven’t learned how to fill yourself with love, you might turn to substance and process addictions to try to fill the inner emptiness. These addictions are a poor substitute for loving yourself.

We all forget to love ourselves at times, and we know this by how we feel. We feel full and peaceful inside when we are loving ourselves – not when we are abandoning ourselves. Love fills us when our heart is open to learning about loving ourselves.

I invite you join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

And, I invite you to 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 new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.