S2 EP233 – Rock Bottom: Rise or Fall, The Choice is Yours

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I want to address your motivation to heal, as well as what it takes to heal. Sometimes people don’t become motivated to heal until they hit bottom, but you don’t need to hit bottom to find the motivation to heal. And I want to talk about this today. But sometimes even hitting bottom isn’t enough, and there is a concept that I want to share with you that was actually presented in Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” and that is if you commit suicide, you take your suffering with you. Would you ever think of suicide if you knew that you take your suffering with you? 

My client Marian often thought of suicide. In my first session with her, she said, “I just want to go home. I’m tired of being here on this planet. I want to go home to God, to love, to peace. I don’t think I really belong here anyway. It’s too hard to be here. I want to go home.”

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I would ever really do it, but I think about it a lot,” she said.

“Marian, would you be thinking of going home so much if you knew that when you die you take yourself with you?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“I mean that you are here on a soul’s journey – a journey to evolve your soul in your ability to love yourself and others and to fully manifest your gifts on the planet. Your soul chose to come here to learn and evolve. When you leave the planet, you take with you your present state of soul evolution. That means that if you feel unhappy, unworthy, and insecure here, you will still feel these painful feelings on the other side. You came here to heal, and you take with you whatever is unhealed.

“You seem to believe that when you go home to God, everything is easy, but from what people who have had near-death experiences tell us, we experience the same feelings on the other side as we do here – only it is worse because there we don’t have the same opportunities to heal and evolve as we do here. We come here because of the opportunities this planet offers us to learn, and when we leave prematurely, we cut off that learning process. While going home stops physical pain, suicide accomplishes nothing regarding stopping emotional suffering. There really is no way out of emotional suffering except to take responsibility for it and heal it, which we need to do here, because here is where the challenges and opportunities are.” 

I asked Marian to watch “A Christmas Carol,” with Alistair Sim. He does a fantastic job of portraying moving out of meanness and misery and into love, peace and joy, and he is shown, by his previous business partner who died, that you take your suffering with you.

Some of the people I’ve worked with in the past 54 years have felt just as Marian feels – that they don’t belong here. However, since they are here, it is not actually possible that they don’t belong here.

It is easy to feel that you want out of this life when you had a traumatic childhood or feel that you never fit in anywhere. It is easy to feel this way when things here are really hard, even though it is the hard stuff that gives us the opportunity to step up to the plate. It is especially easy to feel this way when you have abandoned yourself, because this is ultimately the cause of much current suffering – other than the trauma and suffering caused by others hurting you through various forms of violence.

But as long as you are abandoning yourself – by focusing on the past or future rather than being present, by judging yourself and telling yourself lies from your wounded self, and then by ignoring your resulting painful feelings by numbing out with addictions or making others responsible for your feelings – you will suffer. But it is this suffering that you take with you – since you came here to move beyond self-judgment and into deeply loving and valuing yourself and taking responsibility for your joy.

Rather than focusing on leaving this life and operating out of the false belief that going home will relieve your suffering, why not devote yourself to relieving it now? Why not devote yourself to the moment-by-moment practice of Inner Bonding and heal the part of the suffering that you are currently causing yourself?

Perhaps the first place to start is with your false beliefs that you don’t belong here and that it will be better on the other side. As long as you are telling yourself these lies, you will not be able to discover the sacred privilege of evolving your soul here, now, on this planet.

Do you believe that you need to feel really bad in order to eventually find the motivation to feel better?

Author Joyce Shafer said, “How bad do you need to feel in order to feel better? How creative, open to next steps, and pro-active are you when you feel really, really bad?” 

“How bad do you need to feel in order to feel better?” What an interesting question! Have you ever thought of feeling bad as a way to feel better? Do we sometimes need to feel bad to find the motivation to feel better?

Sometimes we do. At least we need to be willing to feel bad. If you are not willing, then you will immediately go into your various forms of protective, controlling behavior in order to avoid your painful feelings, and this might lead to hitting bottom, such as what sometimes happens with alcoholics or drug addicts.

How long do you need to feel bad? Sometimes, not long at all!

Let’s look at two kinds of feeling bad and see how long we actually need to feel bad.

Someone you loved deeply has died. Your grief and sense of loss is huge. How long do you need to feel this grief?

At the beginning, each time you feel it, you might feel it for an hour or more. Grief is like a wave – it comes in and goes out. If, each time you feel it, you fully acknowledge it, embrace it, honor it, and nurture it with your love and compassion, the natural process of healing will be unhindered. Some losses will continue to come up as grief your whole life, such as the loss of a beautiful child. But as time goes on and you nurture yourself each time, the amount of time you feel it gets shorter and shorter. You won’t need to continue to feel bad for long periods of time. And you won’t hit bottom when you don’t avoid these feelings. 

Then there is the other kind of feeling bad, such as feeling hurt or angry, alone or abandoned, based on things you are telling yourself, not on actual events happening in the present moment. This is the kind of feeling bad that you don’t need to feel for long at all. If, when you experience these feelings – the wounded feelings that you are causing (as opposed to the existential feelings that are caused by life, such as grief) – you immediately attend to them with a desire to learn about how you are causing them, such as the ways you might be abandoning yourself emotionally, physically, or spiritually, or that you ignore the inner work you need to do about old or current trauma – and you go through the inner work you need to do, they don’t need to last a long time each time they come up.

Yet these are the feelings that many people allow to take them deeper into depression until they feel that they no longer want to live.

It’s not a matter of just feeling your feelings. The more you “just feel” these feelings, without learning about how you may be causing them, the worse you feel. Until you do your inner work and discover the lies you are telling yourself and how you are treating yourself that is causing your pain, and where you learned to abandon yourself, and learn to take loving action on your own behalf, you will continue to be in pain. Just feeling really bad without learning from your pain only leads to more pain.

To move from feeling bad to feeling good, learn to nurture and care for your existential feelings of sorrow, heartbreak, grief, loneliness, and helplessness over others. When it comes to your wounded feelings of anger, fear (other than fear of real and present danger), anxiety, depression, hurt, guilt, shame, aloneness, emptiness, jealousy, and so on, you can choose to move into learning the truth about how you may be causing some of this pain. Doing the healing work you need to do will stop you from hitting bottom.

If, growing up, you learned to abandon yourself rather than love yourself, then learning to love yourself is the work you need to do. Hitting bottom, regardless of past trauma, is primarily about current emotional and physical self-abandonment.

Much of the self-abandonment that leads to hitting bottom comes from the fear of our deeper existential pain of life. For example, how often do you get angry at a driver cutting you off rather than compassionately feel the authentic pain of helplessness over the driver? How often do you stay up late watching TV rather than get into bed alone and experience loneliness? How often do you use food or other substances to avoid the grief of loss or the grief of your childhood? And how often do you realize that avoiding your existential authentic pain of life with your various forms of self-abandonment may be leading to even more pain?

Many people spend their lives avoiding their authentic pain of life because of their false beliefs about it. 

At an Inner Bonding Weekend Workshop, a lady shared that she tragically lost her beloved son in an accident a few years ago.

“I didn’t think I could survive the pain until I read that love never leaves – that I need to keep my heart open so that I can continue to feel his love for me and share my love for him. Doing this has made his loss manageable for me, and, in fact, I’m doing great! I have new passions in my life and am fully enjoying my life while continuing to love my son. I feel him right here, in my heart, all the time, and that gives me peace.”

This woman discovered that she could manage a very deep level of loss by keeping her heart compassionately open to her feelings, which enabled her to stay connected with the soul of her son. 

Because we all had much existential pain as children, much loneliness, heartbreak, helplessness, or grief, and we had no way of managing these extremely painful feelings, we grew up with some false beliefs about this pain of life, such as:

• If I lose someone I love, or if I open to the depth of past pain, I will die or go crazy.
• If I open to the depth of my pain, it will be unending.
• If I open to my pain, I will not be able to function.

While these beliefs may have been true when we were children, they are not true now, as we learn to manage our pain as a loving adult.

The loss of a beloved child is one of the most painful experiences in life. Yet this woman is doing well, living her life with joy and inner peace. I was so pleased that she shared this with the group, as it is a wonderful testament to the power of love and the power of our spiritual connection. 

There is only one way that existential pain is manageable, and that is with love. Love does not go away just because someone dies. Love is the essence of who we are, and while it is very painful to no longer be able to physically see our loved ones and hug them, their love is not gone, and our ability to express our love to them is not gone.

Because of the false beliefs about the pain of loss, many people spend their lives finding endless ways of avoiding their existential pain. Unfortunately, the things we do to try to avoid our authentic pain actually cause our wounded pain. Ignoring your feelings by staying in your mind rather than your body, using substance and process addictions, handing to others responsibility for your feelings and for defining your worth, judging yourself – all these are forms of self-abandonment and all lead to the wounded pain of anxiety, depression, anger, emptiness, aloneness, guilt and shame.

The wounded pain goes away only when you embrace your authentic existential pain with love. Your everyday pain – the heartache of others’ unloving behavior, the sorrow of seeing the tragedies of life, the grief of various kinds of losses – CAN be managed, with love. 

Love is God and God is Love. When we open to learning with our spiritual guidance about loving ourselves, we are automatically inviting the present of love into our hearts. It is love that heals, love that enables us to manage our existential pain, love that enables us to move on with life when tragedy strikes. Without love, we can go crazy, or not be able to function, and the pain will be unending. Without love, life seems too hard without our various addictions. Without love, we might hit bottom and see no way out.

Love is everywhere. We live in a sea of love. It is who we are in our soul, and what we are in our spirit. We just need to open to learning with our guidance about loving ourselves to feel the love that is always here for us.

Divine love is what allows us to move through existential pain and into the joy of life. Love is what allows us to let go of addictions and our many ways of controlling. Love is what this life journey is all about. And it starts with learning how to love yourself, and a major aspect of loving yourself is learning how to manage your painful existential feelings of life, so that you don’t turn to self-abandoning behaviors to avoid them.

When we were little, painful feelings were too big for our little bodies. We might have died if we felt them fully, especially if there was abuse involved. For many people, their painful feeling were unending. They couldn’t leave the situation causing the pain, and there may have been no one to turn to for help with the pain if the pain was being caused by parents, or if their parents discounted their feelings if the abuse was coming from others. For most children, there is no point in feeling their pain, since there is little they can do about the cause of the pain. They can’t leave or call a friend or a therapist for help. They are stuck in painful situations and need to find ways to survive. Our protective behaviors, now programmed into our wounded self, are the ways we learned to survive.

As a result, we grow up with many false beliefs about feeling our pain – beliefs that were true as children but are no longer true now. If we continue to believe that we will die from our pain, that it is unending, and that there is no reason to feel it since there is nothing we can do about it, we will continue to avoid feeling and learning from our painful feelings. 

What do you do when you feel lonely, heartbroken, hurt, angry, anxious, frightened, depressed, jealous, guilty, shamed? Do you act out, dumping your feelings on others? Do you ignore your feelings, turning to your various addictions instead? Do you shove them down until they make you sick? Do you rely on medications to not feel your feelings too intensely?

We often turn to unhealthy ways of handling our feelings when we don’t know what else to do and are operating from our false beliefs about pain.

What does your wounded self believe about pain?

• I can’t handle my pain, especially the pain of disapproval, rejection, abandonment, the pain of being shut out – the pain of isolation, loneliness, and heartbreak.
  
• If I open to my pain, I will fall apart. I will go crazy or die.
  
• If I open to my pain, it will be unending.
  
• Once I start to cry, I’ll never stop.
  
• Showing pain is a sign of weakness.
  
• People will think less of me if they see me cry. If I cry, I will be rejected, or people will think I’m crazy.
  
• No one really wants to hear about my pain.
  
• No one can handle the depth of my pain.
  
• My problems are so trivial compared to other people’s that I have no right to be in pain.
  
• Why should I have to feel this pain? I don’t deserve it.
  
• There’s no point in opening to pain. It doesn’t make anything better. “Why cry over spilt milk?”

As long as you operate from these beliefs, you will likely turn to your substance and process addictions to avoid feeling your painful emotions.

As I’ve said here and in some of my previous podcasts, we have two kinds of painful feelings:

Our wounded feelings are the feelings that we cause by our own thoughts – our false beliefs. These are the feelings of anger, rage, hurt, anxiety, depression, fear when there is nothing fearful happening, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, resentment, aloneness, and emptiness, and so on. These feelings are often the result of thinking thoughts that are not true.

Our painful existential feelings are the feelings that result from being on the planet – loneliness when we have no one to connect to, or the people around us are closed off; helplessness over others and events; grief when we lose someone we love; sorrow over our own and others’ pain; heartache and heartbreak over others’ unloving behavior toward themselves and us, fear of real and present danger, and outrage over injustice.

Our feelings, or emotions, should be e-motion – energy in motion. They are supposed to move through the body and be released. Children naturally do this. Think about a child coming to you crying with a skinned knee. You hold the child, acknowledge the hurt, and within minutes the child is off playing again. The feeling has been released.

However, many of us never had someone hold us and acknowledge our pain so we could release it and move on. Much of our pain got stuck in our bodies and is still there, constantly triggered by present situations that may unconsciously remind us of past trauma. These stuck emotions can cause anxiety, depression and illness.

As adults, we need to learn to acknowledge and release our emotions.

Inner Bonding is a powerful process for learning about the false beliefs and resulting behaviors that cause our wounded feelings. You can be on the healing journey by tuning into your feelings and wanting responsibility for them, which is Step 1; moving into an intent to learn about what you are thinking and doing that is causing the wounded feelings, compassionately nurturing the existential feelings, and connecting with your higher guidance to help you be a loving adult ,which is Step 2; dialoguing to discover the false beliefs and resulting thoughts and behaviors that are causing the wounded feelings, and what is occurring that is causing the existential feelings, which is Step 3; going to your higher guidance for the truth about the beliefs and for the loving action, which is Step 4; taking the loving action, which is Step 5; and evaluating the action to see how you are feeling as a result of the loving action, which is Step 6. By learning and practicing these steps, you can move out of the painful feelings and into inner peace.

If you get stuck in not being able to open to learning in Step 2, then you can do the Inner Bonding Anger Process.

It is a powerful way to release anger that may be in the way of being open to learning. It is a three-part process:

Releasing your anger will work only when your intent in releasing it is to learn about what you currently do that causes your angry feelings. If you just want to use your anger to blame, control and justify your position, you will stay stuck with a closed heart. This three-part anger process moves you out of victim-mode and into open-heartedness.

I’ve explained this process in another podcast, but it bears repeating here. Step 1 is imagining that the person you are currently angry at is sitting in front of you. Let your inner child yell at him or her, saying in detail everything you wish you could say. Unleash your anger, pain and resentment until you have nothing more to say. You can scream and cry, pound a pillow, roll up a towel and beat the bed. The reason you don’t tell the person directly is because this kind of cathartic, no-holds-barred “anger dump” would be abusive to them.

Step 2 is to ask yourself who this person reminds you of in your past – your mother or father, a grandparent, a sibling. It may be the same person. That is, you may be mad at your father now, and he is acting just like he did when you were little. Now let your inner child yell at the person from the past just as you did in step one.

Step 3 is to come back into the present and let your inner child do the same thing with you, expressing your child’s anger, pain and resentment toward you for your part in the situation or for treating yourself the way the people in parts one and two treated you. This brings the problem home to personal responsibility, opening the door to exploring your own behavior.

Anger at another person is often a projection of your inner child’s anger at you for your self-abandonment. Recognizing your anger at others as a projection can move you into an intent to learn.

Sometimes it’s important to scream and cry to release feelings.

Have you ever been on a roller coaster and felt the intense G-force in your stomach? The thing that releases this and makes it tolerable is screaming. Screaming moves the energy through your body so it doesn’t stay stuck. The same is true of emotions. Allowing yourself to scream and cry when there is intense fear, anger, heartbreak, and grief can help to move these feelings through your body.

Sometimes you feel like you want to cry and scream but you just can’t get there. When this is the case, lying down and doing deep breathing can help open you to your feelings. Breathe into both your chest and stomach, taking in as much air as you can, and then let all the air out, using long slow breaths. Imagine that you are breathing in a circle where you don’t stop the breath at the top or the bottom of the circle – a continuous breath. A few minutes of this kind of breathing will often open you to deep pain, which you can then release through crying and screaming. You might also want to pound your fists and kick your legs but be sure you are on a bed, so you won’t get hurt.

As with the Anger Process, this is part of Step 2 of Inner Bonding – Opening to Learning. Once you release your feelings, you can move to Step 3 and explore what you might be thinking or doing that is causing your feelings. If these are the existential painful feelings of life, holding and rocking a doll or stuffed animal that represents your inner child can be very self-soothing and self-nurturing.

As I’ve said, we are here on the planet to evolve in our ability to love and to manifest our gifts on the planet. If this is your guiding light, then you won’t need to hit bottom to be motivated to do your inner healing work. And if you do hit bottom, know that there is a way out other than leaving the planet – which is learning to love yourself rather than continue to abandon yourself. There is a way out of the pain and into inner peace and joy.

I invite you to 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.