S2 EP245 – Addiction Recovery: A Journey Back to Self

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m addressing the issue of addiction, a major issue in our current society. I want to you know that you can heal your addictions, and this is what I’m speaking about today.

My client Kenneth consulted with me because he was scared. In his mid 50s, he was looking at the rest of his life, knowing that he didn’t want to live it the way he had for the past 56 years. With two failed marriages, he was very lonely and afraid of ending up alone the rest of his life.

Kenneth was a successful businessman, but nothing else in his life was successful. He had lived his life intent on avoiding pain – with his many addictions. He was addicted to alcohol, sex, attention, busyness, anger, and blame. Along with his two failed marriages, he had many other failed relationships due to the anger and blame that inevitably surfaced when a woman failed to fill the empty, scared, abandoned place within him. He went from woman to woman trying to find the “right” one, who could take away his fear and fill his emptiness.

While Kenneth was raised with religion and believed in God, he did not have a personal connection with a higher power. He had long ago stopped praying. As a result of having no spiritual connection, he had no loving adult and no way of seeing his true essence, his soul self. He thought he was his ego wounded self and felt deeply inadequate. Since he had been using women for so long, he believed he was a bad person

Kenneth’s various addictions were the only ways he knew to survive. 

Without a spiritually connected loving inner adult, his wounded self was doing the best it could.

Instead of focusing on abstinence regarding his addictions, our work was focused on developing his loving adult. Kenneth was able to imagine an older, wiser part of himself – his higher self. He was also able to tune in to the very wounded part of himself – a six-year-old whose father had died in an accident and whose alcoholic mother had abandoned him to his aunt. This six-year-old little boy was always terrified of being abandoned and alone, and had learned to use various addictions to ameliorate the pain of abandonment.

Kenneth would continue to feel this terror of abandonment until he developed a loving adult and started to learn to love himself rather than continue to abandon himself as his mother had abandoned him.

Due to being in so much pain, Kenneth was highly motivated. He read all the Inner Bonding books, attended an Intensive, and had weekly sessions

Within the first few weeks of doing Inner Bonding, he decided to stop drinking, and was surprised at how easy it was.

In the past, he had not been able to sleep unless he was fairly drunk, but now he found that if he held his inner little boy with loving kindness, he became calm enough to sleep. He discovered that sex was not what this abandoned little boy needed. When Kenneth started to attend to his own feelings and to the many ways he had been abandoning himself, his need for constant sex and attention went away. When he was no longer making women responsible for making his little boy feel safe and loved, he found his anger at women disappearing.

His compulsive busyness was also disappearing, due to his emerging inner peace. As he practiced being a loving adult, he started to be able to see his beautiful essence – his caring, curious, creative, and spontaneous true self – his beautiful inner child. No longer believing that he was a bad person, he no longer had to avoid his feelings with his various addictions. He was able to separate out his programmed and frightened wounded self from his true self, and he now knew that he was not his wounded self.

Kenneth’s addictions naturally and gradually disappeared as he learned to take loving action on his own behalf through his practice of Inner Bonding.

There is a wonderful acronym for fear that many of you may know:

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

Much of the fear in our lives is based on false evidence.

Our bodies are designed to respond with the fight or flight mechanism to real and present danger – such as being physically attacked. In the face of real and present danger, the adrenaline flows and the blood drains out of our organs and into our limbs to prepare us for fight or flight.

Yet many people spend much of their time in the anxiety and stress of fight or flight when there is no real and present danger. This is because the body responds the same way to imagined danger as it does to real danger. The body thinks that the false evidence coming from our thoughts is real.

This constant state of fear and anxiety often leads to various addictions, as it did with Kenneth, in the hope of numbing out the painful feelings. Food, alcohol, drugs, nicotine, gambling, sex, porn, TV, Internet, video games, shopping, approval, attention, work, anger, rage, violence to self and others, or even meditation if the intent of meditating is to avoid pain – all can be used in attempts to block out painful feelings.

However, the addictions themselves are self-abandoning, in that they are not a healthy and loving way of dealing with painful feelings. And it is self-abandonment that causes the most fear, anxiety, and depression.

Many people are caught in a very negative circle based on self-abandonment. Thinking negative thoughts about the future – about rejection, failure, loss of others, loss of self, loss of money – creates fear in the body and is an abandonment of self, leading to addictions. 

We are abandoning ourselves when we allow ourselves to make up thoughts about the future that scare us. This would be like saying to a child, “You are going to end up alone. No one will ever love you. You will be out on the streets with no food and no help.” Saying this to a child would be considered child abuse, yet many people tell these same things to themselves over and over when there is no objective truth to these statements.

Once we have created fear with our negative thinking, we try to avoid the fear with our various addictions. Avoiding responsibility for creating our fear by turning to addictions is another form of self-abandonment. This is like offering a frightened child a cookie instead of addressing the source of the fear. The self-abandonment creates deep inner emptiness and aloneness, which perpetuates the addictive behavior. It also creates neediness, leading to pulling on others for love, approval and attention.

Addictive behavior perpetuates the original fears – an endless vicious circle of self-abandonment.

There really is a way out of this! While the Inner Bonding process for moving beyond fear and addiction is simple, it is not easy. It takes deep commitment and devotion to your peace and joy. Practicing it will move you beyond fear, addictions and self-abandonment, because learning to love yourself is a powerful path to healing addictions.

My client, Charles, is caught in a self-destructive cycle that causes him much pain and immobilization. It is a cycle that many people are stuck in.

The negative cycle starts with some form of self-judgment:

“I’m a failure. I will never really amount to anything.”

“I’ve made so many mistakes that I will never be able to get my life back on track.”

“I’ve blown it again – I will never be able to stop drinking.”

Self-judgment is the opposite of loving yourself. It is the opposite of being a kind and trustworthy loving adult with yourself. Self-judgment is a form of control: the wounded self hopes that by judging yourself you can get yourself to change and do things “right.”

But the real result of self-judgment is pain. Your inner child is in pain from being emotionally beat-up by judging yourself.

For Charles, as for many other people, this pain from a lack of loving himself leads him to act out with addictive behavior – overeating, drinking too much, and smoking. Charles uses these addictions to numb out the pain from his self-abusive thoughts. Then, when he wakes up the next day feeling hung over and having gained another pound, he beats himself up again:

“I’m such a jerk. I have no self-discipline. I had resolved to stop drinking and I really blew it. I’m just a useless blob. No wonder my wife divorced me. I shouldn’t even be on the planet.” 

Charles continues to cause the very pain that leads to the addictive behavior, continuing the self-destructive cycle: self-judgment, leading to pain, leading to addictive behavior, leading to self-judgment, leading to more pain, and continuing to lead to addictive behavior, and so on. Charles originally started his overeating, drinking, and smoking at a young age to avoid feeling alone and lonely, but now he continues to re-traumatize himself by treating himself in some of the same ways his father treated him.

This cycle will not change until the behavior that triggers it – self-judgment and other forms of self-abandonment, changes. Yet Charles is deeply addicted to the self-judgment as well as to his substance addictions. We all tend to get addicted to whatever gives us a sense of control over our feelings, our actions, and the outcome of things. Charles believes that judging himself – rather than loving himself – will ultimately give him the control he wants. Yet the real result is powerlessness and despair.

How can Charles change this? In order to shift this cycle, Charles needs to change his intent. He needs to shift his focus from controlling to kindness toward himself. He needs to become a trustworthy loving adult with himself – an adult who is reliably kind to himself. He needs to accept, with deep compassion, his judgmental, addictive, wounded self. Instead of judging himself for judging himself and for his eating, drinking, and smoking, Charles needs to get himself off the hook. He needs to learn to accept and love himself.

He needs to recognize that the part of him who judges, drinks too much, eats too much, and smokes, is a scared, hurt, wounded child and adolescent who learned early how to avoid pain. The original pain came from his judgmental and abusive father, but now the pain is coming from treating himself just as his father treated him. As long as his wounded self is in charge, Charles will continue this painful cycle.

When Charles moves into acceptance of his wounded self, he will start to treat himself in the way he always wished his father would treat him. His wounded self is starving for kindness, compassion and understanding.

In a session with Charles, I advised him to focus on loving himself by focusing on kindness toward his wounded self. Most of us know what kindness looks like. We know how to be kind to others when we want to be. Charles had spent much of his life being kind to others and trying to get others to be kind to him, rather than focusing on being kind to himself.

No matter how kind others are to Charles, if he is beating himself up with his self-judgments, he will continue to be in pain and act out addictively to avoid the pain. All the kindness in the world from others cannot ameliorate the pain that Charles causes from his own self-judgments and other forms of self-abandonment – his own lack of self-love.

Loving yourself by being kind toward yourself is a moment-by-moment choice. Anytime you feel anything other than inner peace and fullness, it is because you are not thinking and behaving in ways that are kind and caring to yourself.

You might be surprised at how rapidly addictions can heal when you learn to love yourself.

Sometimes the part of us that needs our love is our inner baby.

Were you left to cry it out as a baby? Do you have an inner baby who desperately needs to be held and loved? Do you turn to addictions instead? 

Leah discovered that whenever she felt like binge eating, it was because she felt desperately alone inside, and eating was the only way she had learned to fill the emptiness. Through her Inner Bonding work, she connected with her inner infant who had been left to cry as a baby. She realized that her inner baby desperately wanted to be held and loved, and that food was a poor substitute for the holding and loving she really wanted. She discovered that her inner emptiness and aloneness gradually went away after she bought a doll that represented her inner infant and began picking her up and holding her and asking her guidance to hold her.

Michael was sexually addicted. Whenever he felt alone or empty inside, he would turn to masturbation using Internet porn, or he would become sexually needy and demanding with his girlfriend. While the sex worked for the moment, it always left Michael feeling shamed. He would then judge himself, further abandoning himself, which led to more aloneness and emptiness, and more acting out addictively. Michael was caught in a vicious circle of self-abandonment, emptiness, and sexual addiction.

Through his Inner Bonding work, Michael discovered an abandoned inner baby who desperately wanted to be held and loved. Like Leah, Michael had been left alone as an infant, crying out his fear and pain. Whenever Michael judged his inner child, he reinforced his deep belief that he was not good enough, a belief he had established when he didn’t get the love he needed as a baby. Sex was the only way that his wounded self knew to feel adequate for the moment.

Fortunately, Michael had a strong spiritual connection. It was not hard for him to ask God to hold him while he held his inner infant. He found that the moment he asked God to hold him, his feelings of desperation, aloneness, and emptiness dissolved, as well as his compulsive desire for sex.

Was your need for love met as a baby and small child? Were you lovingly held whenever you wanted to be held, or were you left alone to cry it out? Did you feel seen and cherished as a baby and toddler, or did you feel unloved and neglected? Do you have an inner baby or toddler that needs to be lovingly held? Are you sexualizing this need, or trying to fill it with food or other substance and process addictions?

What do you do when you feel alone, empty, anxious, or depressed?

Take a moment now to think about what you do when you are feeling alone, anxious, depressed, empty, or lonely. The chances are that you have discovered addictive ways of filling up the emptiness and avoiding responsibility for your feelings – perhaps because you just haven’t known what else to do.

Next time you feel that inner aloneness, pick up a doll or stuffed animal, or pick up your inner baby in your imagination. Ask your higher self or your spiritual guidance – whatever that is for you – to join you in holding and loving your inner baby. Imagine showering your inner baby with love – the love that comes through your heart when you are open to learning about loving yourself.

If every time you feel any painful feelings, you take a few minutes to pick up and lovingly hold your inner baby, you may find your painful feelings being soothed and replaced by inner peace. You CAN re-parent your inner baby. You CAN give yourself what you didn’t get as a baby or as a toddler, or as a school age child, or as an adolescent.

You will find your various addictions gradually falling away as you consciously hold and love yourself – along with letting go of your self-judgments and taking other loving actions on your own behalf.

As we all know, many people, especially in the U.S., are suffering from obesity and major health issues. It’s interesting to explore this in terms of intent.

When a person eats too much or eats junk, the intent is to control. The person is using food to suppress pain – to have control over not feeling painful emotions.

While most people would say that their health is important to them, and they might even say that without their health they have nothing, often something else is even more important – having control over avoiding emotional pain.

Health problems can certainly come from a variety of causes other than substance abuse, such as heredity, extreme childhood abuse, polluted air or accidents. But the chronic and degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and autoimmune diseases, are often the result of addictions to food, nicotine, drugs, or alcohol.

If a person says he or she wants to be healthy, but continues to eat badly, drink too much, smoke, or take dangerous drugs, then obviously the part of this person who is in charge of their choices is more interested in avoiding feelings than in being healthy.

Our wounded self is always more interested in avoiding pain than in loving self-care. This is who the wounded self is – the part of us that wants to have control over feeling safe from pain. One of the reasons that we have such a high rate of obesity and chronic health problems is because, in most people, the wounded self is in charge.

As many of you know, I was a sickly child, and I hated being sick. In my early twenties, I discovered the subject of nutrition and began to attempt to eat in a very healthy way. But because I didn’t have a loving adult in charge of my eating, eating well was a huge challenge. I would write down everything I ate in the hopes of gaining control over my sugar and carbohydrate addiction. I would go from one diet to another in the hopes of losing weight and staying thin. I went from weight doctor to weight doctor to find the magic pill that would give me control over my weight and health. I would eat well for a while, and then suddenly I would binge on sugar and junk. I just couldn’t seem to find the will power to consistently eat well.

 
This went on for years, until spirit brought us Inner Bonding and I began to develop my loving adult. Now I know that a consistent and devoted practice of Inner Bonding will eventually develop enough of a loving adult to truly care more about health than about avoiding pain with various addictions. Now I know that learning how to manage and learn from painful feelings is the key to healing addictions and to excellent health.

It is not about will power. The wounded self tries hard to have control by exerting will power, but always eventually fails. It IS about true power – the power of your higher self that comes through when you have a deep intent to learn about what truly creates your health and wellbeing.

Each of us needs to decide which is more important – avoiding pain through our various addictions, or striving for excellent physical, emotional, and spiritual health. When you make the deep decision that creating a healthy body for your beautiful essence to live in is vitally important to you, you will discover the power that comes from spirit, the power that enables you to let go of substance addictions and process addictions. 

Ask yourself now which is more important to you – avoiding pain or creating excellent physical, emotional, and spiritual health? If you find yourself continuing your addictions, then you might want to explore why avoiding pain is more important than health, 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 home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest 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.