S2 EP235 – Perilous Hope: Avoiding the Quicksand of Illusions
Episode Summary
Letting go of unrealistic hope and trying to control what you can’t control, and instead being present and accepting reality, opens the door to true emotional freedom and personal power. Life is so much more peaceful and joyful when you let go of control and trust that you are being guided in your highest good at all times.
Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about acceptance and what it really means to fully accept something that you have no control over, and what I’ve experienced is that there are layers of acceptance. There are things I think I’ve accepted, but then something happens, and I experience another level, a deeper level, of acceptance, and a deeper level of letting go – of allowing myself to be guided by inner and higher guidance.
This happened recently with a relative who is very important to me. It was easy for me to think and hope that if only we could listen to each other with a true empathic intent to learn and come to understand each other, we could heal the division in our relationship.
In the past, I believed this for 30 years in my marriage until I finally came to accept that we were in two different worlds, and that he would never, or couldn’t, understand my world, nor I his. As much as I tried to hear and understand and care about him, I rarely felt seen or understood and cared about by him, and I finally had to let go of unrealistic hope and accept that the level of connection I wanted would never happen. Once I accepted and grieved this, it freed me to move on, and likely saved my life. The dissonance in our relationship was very hard on my immune system, and by about 20 years into our marriage, I was quite ill. I had to fully accept that my health could not stand up to the lack of authentic connection and the crazymaking gaslighting that went with it. From being extremely ill, I quickly recovered my health when I fully accepted my complete powerlessness over ever being able to connect with him on a deep level of empathic understanding. It wasn’t easy to fully accept that nothing could or would ever change between us, and to let go of my deep desire to connect with him and have an intact family.
The same thing occurred for me in a more recent and important relationship with an immediate family member. As much as I tried over the years to empathically hear and understand her feelings and point of view, and as much as I compassionately active listened and acknowledged her experience with me, she could never reciprocate. I finally had to let go of hope and accept her unwillingness or inability to empathically meet me with an intent to learn. I finally had to accept, as I had to do with my ex-husband, that we live in two different worlds and two different intentions regarding what it means to be a truly loving, empathic, and compassionate adult, and that there will be no coming together.
It’s not easy to give up hope. This level of acceptance and letting go has been hard for me. I had to deny my whole growing up years that while I could empathically feel and deeply care about my parents’ feelings, they were incapable of empathy. Born as a very sensitive and empathic child, I could not fathom that many others could not feel empathy for others or for animals. I could not comprehend kids bullying others and not feeling the pain they were causing. I could not fathom kids hurting animals and not feeling the animals’ pain.
Just as with my parents, in my marriage I could not fathom that my husband could be mean and angry and withdrawn and not feel or care about the effect his behavior had on me or on our children. It took me many years to accept that many people are not capable of true empathy, and to accept that there was nothing I could say or do that would change the situation between us, other than to acquiesce, which is what I did for many years.
This recent experience brought this home more deeply. I had to accept that a person I deeply love is not capable of true empathy – at least not with me.
I’m very fortunate that my best friend, Golden Girl and co-creator of Inner Bonding, Dr. Erika Chopich, is capable of empathy and compassion, with both people and with animals. It’s interesting that both of us came from homes that completely lacked empathy, yet both of us are deeply empathic and compassionate people. In our friendship, we have had to accept that when one or both of us is in our ego wounded self, we are not capable of empathy and compassion, and we’ve both learned how to recognize and shift our intention in the rare times that this currently occurs in our friendship.
The challenge I’ve had to face in the important relationship I’m referring to is that this person, as well as my ex-husband and my parents, often appeared empathic, but the more I’ve done my Inner Bonding work and learned to trust my feelings, the more I’ve been able to accept that acting empathic and compassionate and feeling it are two entirely different things. Someone feigning empathy and compassion knows all the right words and actions and facial expressions and voice tonality to convince me that they are empathic, when in fact none of this is true and now feels crazymaking, manipulative, and gaslighting to me. My inner child is so relieved that I trust her in this. I’ve also learned the big difference between kindness and true empathy. While I deeply value true kindness coming from the heart, often, when I experience someone being kind, it feels like there is an agenda attached to their kindness, so again, it feels manipulative. True kindness, like true empathy and compassion, has no expectations or agenda attached. It is a gift that is freely given.
As hard as it’s been for me to accept all this, I felt a huge weight lift off me when I finally got it on the deepest level. Along with the grief, I felt the joy of being in truth with my inner and higher knowing, and I could not stop singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ even though I can’t carry a tune!
I frequently receive questions about what to do in situations where someone is behaving in an uncaring way, or in a way that’s painful for them. For example:
- My co-worker never answers emails, making it very hard for me to do my work, as I need his input
- My wife never wants to make love
- People often ask me intrusive questions that I don’t want to answer
- My husband is often late and never calls to let me know he is going to be late for dinner
- My friend got together with a bunch of our friends for lunch and didn’t invite me
- My parents are forever criticizing me
- I often feel invaded and demanded of by family and friends
- My husband sits at the table when we go out to dinner absorbed with his phone instead of talking with me
- My children are disrespectful toward me
- My wife has a male friend whom she talks with all the time and sometimes meets for lunch, even though I’ve told her I’m uncomfortable with their relationship
- My wife often wants to talk about what I’m doing wrong.
- My daughter has pulled away from me and doesn’t let me see my granddaughters.
It’s not always easy to remember that we have no control over others’ choices, but that we do have control over our own choices. Instead of hoping for change, your energy is better spent on focusing on what you can do to that is loving to yourself and to the other person.
If the other person is available, you can choose the intent to learn about yourself and about the other person to try to understand the dynamic between you and discover what you might doing that is contributing to the issue.
If the other person is not open to learning with you or they are not someone you are interested in learning with, then the only other loving action is to lovingly disengage from the situation. Then do your own Inner Bonding work to discover what the loving action is for yourself in face of the other’s choices. This is what you do have control over.
What you don’t have control over is getting the other person to change. This is where acceptance and letting go comes in about what you can control and what you can’t.
Opening to learning with the other person may bring about new learning that changes the situation between you, but this is not a given. You may still need to do your own Inner Bonding work to accept the reality of the situation and discover your own loving actions.
Here is where your guidance comes into the picture. By opening to learning with your guidance about what you need to do for yourself in the face of the other’s choices, you become empowered to control what you can control, which is your own loving actions on your own behalf and on behalf of others. This is what moves you out of feeling like a victim and into emotional freedom.
It is only when you fully accept your total lack of control over others and outcomes that you can fully access the wisdom of your guidance. As long as there is any intent to control, your frequency will remain too low to discover the loving actions for yourself.
People often tell me how hard it is for them to connect with their guidance. Actually, connecting with your guidance is not hard at all when your frequency is high enough, which naturally occurs when you are truly in an intent to learn about what is loving to you, and you are eating clean, nutrient-dense food. But it’s impossible to get your frequency high enough when you are blaming someone else, seeing yourself as a victim, trying to find a way to get the other person to change, abandoning yourself by ignoring your feelings, judging yourself, turning to addictions, eating junk food, and making someone else responsible for you.
What you can control is your own intent, your own frequency, your own responses, your own thoughts, and your own actions toward yourself and others.
Why waste energy trying to control what you can’t control? Why not accept the reality and focus on what you can control, which is you!
Part of accepting reality is accepting that you don’t have control over the outcome of things. The wounded self wants to believe that we can have control over outcomes. Letting go of attachment to outcomes is often a big challenge.
My client Marlene’s whole life was focused on attempting to control the outcome of things. A successful clothing designer, her thoughts were constantly occupied with fantasies of how she hoped her business would expand and what she could do to make sure things turned out the way she wanted. When she wasn’t preoccupied with her business, she was ruminating on the kind of man she wanted to meet and how she could impress him into liking her. Then she would go on to thinking about how much she wanted to have a baby and how time was passing her by.
Marlene rarely felt happy in the moment because she was so occupied with the future. She believed that when her business was going the way she wanted and she found the man she wanted, and had a baby, then she would be happy. Her happiness was attached to outcomes. Meanwhile, she often felt empty and depressed.
My client Ari also felt empty and depressed most of the time. A successful lawyer with a lovely wife and two children, Ari was rarely present in the moment. He was constantly occupied with thoughts of how he could control the outcome of his cases, how he could get his wife to be more turned on to him, how he could make sure his kids were healthy and successful in school, and how he could make sure that people liked him. He rarely enjoyed all that he had in the present because he was constantly attaching his happiness to future events.
Marlene and Ari, like so many people, believe that their happiness is determined by outcomes and that they can control outcomes. This attachment to controlling the outcome keeps them from being present in the moment. They are missing out on their lives.
Letting go of attachment to outcomes and to attempting to control outcomes is a major challenge for many people – a spiritual challenge.
In order to let go of trying to control outcomes, you need to experience that there is a higher power that is always supporting your highest good. If you knew that you were always being supported in the highest good of your soul’s journey by your spiritual guidance – God, Goddess, your spirit guide, guardian angel, Master Teacher, or your own higher soul – it would be so much easier to “let go and let God,” and allow our guidance to guide us moment by moment.
It is only when we can let go of thinking about and attempting to control future outcomes that we can be fully present and with reality in the moment. Often, when someone is sad or anxious, it is because he or she is attaching to some future outcome and ruminating about it. When you accept that you are not in control of people and outcomes and consciously give the outcomes to your higher guidance, then there is no longer any need to obsess about them. Letting go of outcomes brings you into this present moment. By being present in the moment, you can be in Step One of Inner Bonding – tuning into your feelings. If you discover that you are not feeling peaceful and joyful, you can move through the Six Steps, discovering what you are thinking and doing that is unloving to yourself and the false beliefs that are limiting you, and then taking the loving action that can result in feeling peaceful and joyful.
When you are not present with your feelings, you don’t know when you are behaving in ways that are harmful to you.
This is what may be keeping you stuck in anxiety, depression, unhappiness, fear, anger and emptiness. If you feel stuck in these feelings, ask yourself, “What am I attaching my happiness to? What am I trying to control?” Asking yourself these questions without judgment, with a deep and compassionate intent to learn, will uncover the attachments that are keeping you from feeling the peace and joy of the moment.
Why waste any more of your life by trying to control others and the future, which you cannot possibly control anyway? Life is right now, in this very moment! Love, peace, joy, and happiness can be experienced right now, when you let go of trying to control and open your heart to learning in this present moment, allowing spirit to guide you.
Letting go and allowing yourself to be guided by your inner and higher knowing, rather than by your wounded self, can be a big challenge. My clients often say things like:
“I’m afraid if I open to my guidance, I will be told that I have to do something I don’t want to do.”
“When I think about opening to God, I feel terrified, like I will just vanish.”
“I’m afraid that if I stop my self-judgments and open to guidance, I will just sit around all day, doing nothing and accomplishing nothing. I will lose my motivation.”
“I’m afraid if I open to learning about love with my guidance, I will be weak and easily taken advantage of.”
“I’m afraid if I open to guidance, I will discover that there is nothing there – that I am truly alone.”
These are comments I often hear from my clients who are struggling with connecting with their guidance. Where does all this fear of letting go and allowing your guidance to guide you come from?
Our ego wounded self is naturally terrified of us letting go to guidance. Our wounded self is the part of us that we developed to try to have control over getting love, avoiding pain, and feeling safe. This part of us, which was our survival when we were young, is terrified that if we let go of control and open to being guided by our guidance, we will lose ourselves.
The reason the wounded self believes that we will lose ourselves is because it believes that it is who you are. But this is a major false belief, far from reality. The wounded self is our constructed, conditioned, false self. It is made up of the false beliefs that we absorbed as we were growing up. It is a fabrication that we created to try to feel safe and has nothing to do with who we really are as a soul. It is terrified of losing itself – of losing the control that it thinks it has and that it has tried so hard to develop all these years. The wounded self knows that if you open to your guidance as your source of information, it loses its illusion of control. Since this is the last thing it wants, it tells you lies to stop you from opening. The wounded self is incapable of being in reality.
But what really happens when you let go and allow yourself to be guided by a higher source of love and wisdom?
Far from losing yourself, you will gain yourself. You will discover who you really are – your essence, your true, soul self. Interestingly, the energy of the wounded self does not vanish. This energy, which has creatively managed to get you through your life so far, is now available for true creativity. The wounded self gets a new job!
Far from being told to do something you don’t want to do, you will become aware of what you do want to do – of what brings you joy.
Far from sitting around in bliss all day, you are filled with creativity and aliveness. You might be doing the same work, but now it is not from fear and the need for approval, but to express who you are. Rather than being less motivated, you become more motivated to fully express all that you are.
Far from being weak and easily taken advantage of, you move into your true power – the power to take loving care of yourself and to speak up for yourself. When you open to guidance and discover the incredible being that you are, you no longer need others’ approval to feel worthy and lovable. As a result, you no longer need to try to control others by giving yourself up.
Far from discovering that there is nothing there, you will discover that you are never alone. You will discover that your guidance is always here, always supporting you in your highest good, always letting you know each moment – through your feelings – when you are thinking and behaving in ways that support your highest good, and when you are off course.
When you choose to let go of control and open to your guidance, there is a loss – the loss of the illusion that you have control over the outcome of events and the way others think, feel, or act – which isn’t and never has been real. It is not loss of your true self. When you let go, you gain your self – your power, joy, peace, and ability to manifest your dreams. What you lose is your fear, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, judgmental-ness, and insecurity. Which would you prefer?
As I said earlier, many of us have heard the advice to “Let Go and Let God.” This advice is telling us to let go of our attempts to control and surrender the outcomes to our higher guidance. Yet few of us actually do this. Why is this so challenging?
We let go and let God only when we are in total trust that spiritual guidance exists and is here for us, supporting the highest good of our soul’s journey at all times. Life would feel so peaceful if we were in this total trust all the time!
However, our wounded self is incapable of having this trust. Our wounded self believes we have to control to be safe.
When we are not letting go and letting God, it is because our wounded self has taken over to attempt to protect against feelings of helplessness and fear. The wounded self hates feeling helpless and spends much time in the mind strategizing about how to have control over getting what it wants. Being in the mind and trying to control generally creates much tension in the body, so we feel anything but inner peace when control is the intention.
In a recent session with Daryl, he confessed to me that he had finally become aware of how little time he was present in the moment. “I’m so in my head most of the time trying to control things that the moment passes me by. I can’t believe how much of my life I’ve missed out on. Yet I’m not even clear what I’m supposed to be present for. When people are present, what is happening for them?” he asked me.
“When people are present,” I answered, “they are aware of their inner, outer, and spiritual experience of the moment. They are aware of their feelings – the inner experience of their body and emotions. They are aware of their surroundings – of people, energy, and nature – and of what is happening in the moment. And they are aware of the love and peace of spirit filling them, as well as of the guidance that may be coming to them at that moment. When you are in your mind trying to figure things out to control people and outcomes, you miss the fullness of the present moment. What do you think is in the way of being present?”
“I don’t trust that anything spiritual is here for me,” he said. “I guess I believe that I need to be in my mind thinking in order to be safe and get what I want. “
“Is it working?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I just feel tense and depressed a lot. And I still end up feeling afraid and helpless.”
“The paradox here,” I said to him, “is that when you let go and open to spirit while taking loving action on your own behalf, you become a co-creator with spirit. Your openness and intent to learn about loving yourself raises your frequency to the point where spirit can support you in achieving what you want. You will actually end up feeling safer and more powerful than when you are trying to control. The challenge is in trusting that this is the truth.”
“So how do I get to that trust?” he asked.
“It’s a matter of being willing to let go often enough to see what happens and to see how you feel,” I said. “You will always feel depressed or anxious when you are trying to control. The moment you let go of trying to control and open to the love, peace, and truth of spirit, you will feel relaxed, safe, and peaceful. While we can’t know the outcome of things, we can feel happy and peaceful in the moment. Even if you stay in your mind trying to figure things out, you still can’t know the outcome of things. And you actually have a much better chance of having the outcome you want when you are co-creating with spirit, which will only happen when you are in your heart, in connection with your guidance, and in the intent to learn about what is loving to you and to others. When you really get that the belief that you can control outcomes is an illusion and just causes a lot of stress, you might be willing to let go to your higher power and see what happens. Doing this over time will lead to trust.”
Daryl decided he was tired of the stress that he felt most of the time and tired of missing out on being in the present moment. He was ready to see what would happen if he practiced letting go and letting God. To do this, he needed to let go of the unrealistic hope of controlling what he can’t control and learn to accept the reality of the present moment.
For me, letting go of the unrealistic hope that an important relationship with someone I love deeply will heal, has freed me to be even more in this present moment. Instead of focusing on what I hope will happen, it’s now far easier to be here, now, in gratitude in this moment for all I have. This is where my inner peace and joy is. This is what fills me with amazing grace.
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.
I invite you to learn to connect with your spiritual guidance with my 30-Day video home-study course, Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom.
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.
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