S2 EP257 – Embracing Vulnerability: The Key to Authentic Connection

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. As I’ve often spoken about, most of us deeply want to feel emotionally connected with the important people in our life, but often this isn’t the case. So I want to talk about what it takes to deeply connect. One of the qualities that’s essential for connection is the willingness to be vulnerable.

Often people think of vulnerability as being weak, exposed, or helpless, but this isn’t at all what vulnerability means in terms of connection in relationships. In relationships, it means being open-hearted, open to learning about yourself and each other – open to learning about your true soul essence, and about your programmed wounded self and its false beliefs, and about what it means to be a loving adult for your inner child and with others. 

When two or more people have this level of openness – of vulnerability – they experience authentic emotional connection.

The challenge comes in between the part of us that wants to feel safe, and the part that wants to be open and vulnerable. The wounded self believes that being open and vulnerable isn’t safe, because this is when you can get hurt. So in order to be open and vulnerable, you need to learn how to make yourself feel safe even when you are open.

Growing up, many of us didn’t feel at all safe in our households. Many of us had parents or other caregivers who were physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abusive or neglectful. We had to find ways to manage this lack of safety, so we learned to numb out, eat or use other substances, be good, be bad, try to be perfect, or project the fear on something other than our parents, because acknowledging that it was our parents causing our fear caused more fear.

Even as adults, we might still use the protections we developed as children, except now, instead of making us feel safe, our own self-abandoning controlling behavior causes us to feel unsafe.

For example, my client Stacey grew up with a mother who constantly screamed at her. By the time she was 8 years old, she had a great deal of difficulty sleeping. She couldn’t sleep with her back to the door for fear that someone would sneak into her bedroom and hurt her. This went on until she was an adolescent and could get out of her house more often.

Stacey married a man much like her mother – a man who was constantly angry at her. Instead of facing the situation head on – which she couldn’t do because she had no idea how to take responsibility for her own safety in the face of her husband’s anger – she focused her fears on her young children, sometimes becoming immobilized by her fears of something bad happening to them.

Whenever she and her husband had a particularly bad fight, Stacey would externalize her fear, finding something to focus her fears on, worrying herself sick. She never made the connection between her obsessive worrying and feeling unsafe in her environment, until sometime after starting to practice Inner Bonding.

Stacey told me that, in one of her Inner Bonding dialogues, when she was in the midst of worrying about her teenage son, her guidance told her that it wasn’t about her son. It was about not having taken care of herself in her last fight with her husband. Her inner child felt very unsafe because Stacey was not taking responsibility for her own safety in her relationship with her husband.  

“When I don’t feel safe,” she told me, “I still externalize it, just as I did as a kid. I was doing really great for a while, and then Bob and I had a bad fight. Instead of disengaging as you’ve suggested, I got so scared that I did anything I could to fix the problem so he would stop being angry. I totally abandoned my inner child, and then I started obsessing about my son. I was so worried about his grades and his getting into drugs that I could hardly think of anything else.”

“Then, in my latest dialogue, I saw that it isn’t about him at all. This is what I do when I don’t feel safe because I’m not showing up as a loving adult. To make things worse, when I focus on externals, I start to lose my faith, and then I really feel unsafe! I seem to have faith only as long as I am making myself feel safe with loving actions. When I do this, I am able to stay connected with God, and when I don’t, I can’t stay connected.”

Once Stacey became aware of how unsafe she felt due to not showing up for herself as a loving adult, and how this spiraled her down into deep anxiety, depression, and disconnection with her guidance, she became VERY motivated to learn to create inner safety!

Learning to show up as a loving adult in conflict with her husband, eventually led to her being able to stay open and vulnerable in conflict, which gradually changed the system between them and led to more emotional connection.

Do you love it when you feel deeply emotionally connected with someone? When you feel seen, understood, valued, and cherished? This is what initially draws two people together and leads to falling in love.

Then what happens? Why does the connection go away?

When most people first meet, they allow each other to see only certain parts of themselves, but they often hide the deeper parts of themselves because they fear being rejected for who they really are.

They fear being rejected for who they really are because they think there is something wrong with them. Believing there is something wrong with you is called core shame – the belief that there is something inherently wrong, bad, or flawed about you.

Core shame may be governing much of what you do and how you respond in your relationships. It certainly governed much of my life until I learned how to heal it.

I learned to heal it when I learned how to connect with my spiritual guidance – my higher mind that can see the truth of who I am. As long as I was defining myself from my limited ego wounded, programmed mind, I was operating from the false belief that I was somehow not good enough.

Developing your spiritual connection is not hard. Whenever you move into a deep desire to learn about love and truth, and you are not cluttering your body with toxins from processed food, drugs, alcohol, and so on, you raise your frequency high enough to access the wisdom that is always here for you. But in order to do this, you have to be very open and really want to know the truth.  As long as you are afraid of what you will learn, you will stay stuck with your core shame. I assure you that what you will learn about your true self is how incredible you are!
 
In order to emotionally connect with another, you have to be vulnerable and authentic about your feelings, which you can’t do if you think there is something wrong with you. So before you can sustain emotional connection and intimacy, you need to heal your core shame. You will not be able to take the risk of experiencing the pain of rejection unless you are not rejecting yourself with your various forms of self-abandonment.

It takes courage to be open, vulnerable, and authentic. You cannot be authentic without the willingness to be vulnerable to being hurt, and you can’t connect on a deep heart level without vulnerability and authenticity. The willingness to be hurt comes from developing your loving adult and from knowing the beauty of your true soul essence.

It is only when you deeply value who you are that you have the courage to reveal yourself authentically and risk being hurt. This is what creates deeply connected relationships. What it takes is two people who have done the work of healing their core shame so that they can share their heart and soul with each other.

So being able to be vulnerable starts with healing your core shame, and here is how you do that:

• Start with noticing how judgmental you are of yourself, and that judging yourself is a form of control to get yourself to do things “right” so that others will like you and approve of you.  Every time you notice yourself judging yourself, stop and say to yourself, “I’m not going there.” And do not judge yourself for judging yourself! Just keep noticing and stopping each time. You will find yourself judging yourself less and less and feeling better and better. Anxiety, depression, guilt, and shame are ways your inner child is letting you know you are judging yourself.
  
• Make the connection between your core shame and wanting to control others. The wounded self wants to believe that if others reject you, it’s your fault because you are not good enough. As long as you believe you are not good enough, then you believe if only you change and do things right, then you can control how others feel about you. So part of healing core shame is accepting your lack of control over others
  
• Once you become aware of judging yourself and accept your lack of control over others, then practice opening to learning with your higher self. Keep asking your guidance with a sincere desire to learn, “Please show me what is wonderful about who I really am.” Over time, you will learn to love and cherish your true self – your essence – for qualities such as kindness, lovingness, compassion, generosity, curiosity, creativity, humor, playfulness, gentleness, inner knowing, determination, loyalty, integrity, honesty, and so on.

The more you value your true self, the easier it will be for you to be vulnerable and authentic with the important people in your life and opens the door to creating the emotional connection most of us long for.

Learning to love your true soul self and developing your loving adult are essential for being able to stay open and vulnerable without allowing fears of rejection and engulfment to hijack you.  

I might have shared this story before, and I’m going to share it here again. This is a wonderful tale about a king who went into a downtrodden village, a village with no schools, no libraries and no joy. He told the people of the village that he had just replaced one of their newborn babies with a royal child. He said that he was going to come back at some point to see how they were raising this royal child and warned them that they had better do a good job. Since no one knew who the royal child was, each parent said to themselves, “Maybe it’s my child. I’d better be very loving with this child so the king will be happy.”

Years later the King came back to the village. Now the village was flourishing, with schools, a library, and much peace and joy on the faces of the people. He met an old woman who said to him, “King, tell me – it’s my daughter who is the royal child, right?” And the king said, “They all are.” This always brings tears to my eyes.

Treating the children with much love changed everything.

What if you believed that your inner child was a royal child, a sacred being? What if you believed that you were the guardian of this sacred being within you? If you believed this, how would you treat yourself differently than you do now?

Our essence – our true self, our inner child – is a sacred being, the aspect of us that is created in the image of God-that-is-love. Our essence is the pure energy of love, peace, joy, and creativity. Our essence is an individualized manifestation of spirit. Each of us has been given special gifts to offer each other as we journey together on this planet. In order for our gifts to fully manifest, to express the fullness of our beings, our sacred selves need to be loved.

If you begin to think of your inner child as a sacred being who needs your love to flourish, it might be easier to remember to take loving care of yourself. After all, if you had an actual child whom you really believed was a sacred being, you would probably do all you could to be a loving parent to that child. The challenge is to see your own essence, your own true self, your beautiful inner child, as a sacred being and embrace the guardianship of your inner child.

Your sacred being is your emotional self – your feeling self. If you accepted the guardianship of your sacred self, would you ever ignore your own feelings? Would you ever tell yourself things that cause you to feel anxious, scared, angry, or depressed? Would you keep trying to get someone else to take responsibility of your feelings? Would you try to put a lid on your feelings with food, alcohol, drugs, TV, busyness, blaming others, and so on?

Until you actually embrace the guardianship of your sacred being, you will not be treating yourself in loving ways. Once you accept this responsibility, you will be on your way to developing your loving adult – through your connection with spirit – who is capable of taking loving care of your sacred being.

Our society has done a very poor job of being loving guardians of our actual children and of Mother Earth. Perhaps we will not embrace the guardianship of our children and our land until we accept the guardianship of ourselves. Many indigenous peoples knew about their sacred selves. They knew that they were eternal beings on an earthly journey, and that it was their responsibility to honor their sacred being and the sacred being in others. They also knew that this planet is a sacred being that needs tender loving care.

As we accept the honor of being guardians of our own sacred being, we will naturally treat others and the planet with the same love we treat ourselves. Healing needs to start within each of us. The inner strength to be open and vulnerable in a relationship and experience true connection starts with practicing Inner Bonding until you feel the strength of your loving adult and you know how to love your inner child.

I work with many clients who say they want a loving relationship, and don’t realize that they are emotionally unavailable because they haven’t done this inner work to no longer be afraid of being open and vulnerable.

Do you believe that you are fully available for a relationship and that you have just not met the right person? Or do you find yourself in love with someone who is emotionally unavailable or isn’t in love with you, and you’re convinced you are available for the relationship?

Yvette, who is in that situation, wrote the following to me in one of my events:

“I am in love with a man, who is my friend, and who is not attracted to me in a sexual way. His rejection in this respect causes me great pain and sadness. It is very difficult for me to let go of the expectations and hopes that he might love me and want me in this particular way. I am afraid that these expectations and my pain might ruin this friendship. I would like to get rid of the expectations that he might fall in love with me, but I don’t know how. I would like to accept this situation as it is. I am also horribly jealous if he shows interest in other girls.”

While I’m certain that Yvette believes she is available for a relationship, it’s very likely that she is emotionally unavailable. If she were emotionally available, she wouldn’t continue to hold the expectation that this man, who isn’t sexually attracted to her, will fall in love with her. As long as he is sexually unavailable, it’s easy for her to believe she is in love with him. But it’s highly likely that if he were available, she would not be ‘in love’ with him. The fact that she is ‘horribly jealous if he shows interest in other girls’” indicates that it is her wounded self who believes she is in love, but the wounded self is incapable of love. 

When you are truly available, you don’t continue a relationship with someone who is emotionally or sexually unavailable. However, if you have fears of commitment and intimacy, then to protect yourself from your fears, you might attach to someone who is unavailable. If you find yourself, over and over, attracting unavailable people, then you might want to question your own availability. You might want to deeply explore your fears of connection, vulnerability, intimacy, and commitment.

As painful as it is to Yvette to want someone who doesn’t want her, this is a ‘safe’ relationship, in that she doesn’t have to face her deeper fears. Perhaps she has a fear of engulfment – of losing herself in a relationship – and attaching to a man who doesn’t want her sexually is a way of protecting against this fear. Perhaps she has a fear of rejection, and she would rather deal with a rejection she knows rather than risk a rejection that isn’t predictable. By being ‘in love’ with someone who is unavailable and already sexually rejecting her, she doesn’t need to deal with the uncertainty that she might fear. Perhaps the pain she knows is preferable to her than the pain she fears, should she be rejected by an available man.

If you believe that you have just not met the right person, perhaps you need to explore whether YOU are the right person! I’ve seen over and over that when a person does their Inner Bonding work to develop their loving adult, define their soul essence, and heal their fears of rejection and engulfment, they begin to attract more available people.

As the Law of Attraction states, “Like attracts like,” so when you are emotionally available, you are far more likely to attract available people, and you become uninterested in unavailable people. As I previously stated, an available person does not hang around, waiting for an unavailable person to become available.

Many of us would love to feel a loving emotional connection with our family of origin, yet this is often not the case. As Michael E. Angier said, “Being related hardly insures relatability.”  

Are you happy with your family of origin? Can you emotionally connect with your family? If you can, you are fortunate indeed. Many people feel that if their family wasn’t their family, they wouldn’t spend time with them, because they feel no emotional connection with them.

Do you believe that you chose your family? I once had a powerful between-life hypnosis session where I remembered choosing my family. I was given a choice of a few different families to be born into, but I was strongly encouraged to choose the family I chose because of the soul challenges that this family offered.

As a child, I often wondered if I was adopted because I had so little emotional connection with my parents. Because I always felt like an alien in my family, I assumed that there was something wrong with me. After Dr. Erika Chopich and I created Inner Bonding and spirit helped us put it together and I started to practice it, I was finally able to deeply know that there’s nothing wrong with me and that my parents were just not available for emotional connection.

So why did I choose that family? What were my soul challenges? There were many:

• Learning to claim, value and maintain my high sensitivity and compassion in a family that lacked sensitivity and compassion.
  
• Learning to be independent with an over-controlling, angry, and critical mother.
  
• Learning to create abundance in a family that was poor throughout my childhood.
  
• Learning to shine with a mother who was threatened by my shining.
  
• Learning to move beyond caretaking and love myself with a family that demanded caretaking.
  
• Learning to connect with and trust my guidance in an atheist family.
  
• Learning that it’s okay to not feel emotionally connected with my family and to seek emotional connection with people who are open, vulnerable, and loving.
  
• Learning to heal the wounds from my rejecting family that created my fear of rejection.
  
• Being motivated to help others who also come from difficult families.
  
• Being open to receiving much about the Inner Bonding process from spirit to help myself and others find the emotional connection with ourselves, others, and spirit that we seek.

Looking back, I’m grateful that I chose my family. Had I been in an easy, accepting, and loving family, I might never have been motivated to learn, grow, and become the grateful and joyful person that I am now.

If you feel angry and blaming toward your parents, imagine what might happen if you decide to believe that you chose your parents for your soul’s journey of learning to evolve in love and learning, and to fully manifest your gifts? Anger and blame toward your family of origin are not only a waste of energy, but they also keep you stuck in being a victim rather taking responsibility for learning to love yourself enough so you can have deep and meaningful emotional connections with others.

Perhaps you don’t believe that your soul is immortal and that we keep coming back here until we learn our soul lessons. That’s okay. But if you can entertain the idea, even a little, that you chose your family of origin, you might be able to move out of being a victim and into taking personal responsibility for your feelings.

Even though I never could emotionally connect with my family of origin, I still loved them while they were alive, and I chose to spend time with them. I’m grateful to them for the many soul lessons I learned. I miss them. I pray for their souls and communicate with them in spirit. I know they did the best they could.

Even though I couldn’t have the emotional connection I wanted with them, I’m so grateful for Inner Bonding that has enabled me to have the joyful emotional connections I now have with loved ones. There is nothing more important to me than being able to emotionally connect with others who are willing to be authentic, open, and vulnerable with me.

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 heal your relationships with my 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

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.