S2 EP259 – From Stress to Peace: Rethinking How We Manage Life’s Stress

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. As we all know, stress is endemic in our society. There’s the stress that we cause from the false beliefs and resulting self-abandonment of our wounded self, and then there is the stress that results from life’s challenges. The practice of Inner Bonding is a powerful way of healing the stress that we cause from our self-abandonment, but most of us have never learned how to manage the many stresses of life in a way that actually works for us. And when we don’t know how to manage the stresses of life, we then turn to our various forms of controlling, self-abandoning behavior, because the wounded self would rather deal with the stress that we cause than experience the stresses of life.

The existential stresses of life are many in our current society. Economic insecurity, which can lead to food insecurity and homelessness, has never been more evident than is it here in the US. According to HUD, in 2023, individual homelessness rose by 18%, and family homelessness rose by 16%, and the projections for 2025 are extremely alarming. There is the stress of mass shootings and other violence, especially in the US. There is the stress of racism, of misogyny, and of religious persecution. There is the stress of the fallout from the pandemic and the stress of another possible pandemic with illnesses like the bird flu now affecting humans. There is the stress of all the degenerative illness – heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, diabetes, autism, and so on, that have been greatly on the rise in our current society, primarily related to the toxins we now live in, from toxic foods and water to plastics and other environment toxins in the air, earth, and oceans. There are the devastating effects of climate change affecting our entire world. There’s the political turmoil, the wars, and the sociopathic dictators who have taken over so much of the world. There’s the more personal stress of parenting related to the major issues of technology on children, and of the domestic violence and failure of so many relationships. The existential stresses of life just seem to go on and on in today’s society. 

How do we manage all this stress in ways that don’t create more stress? This is the challenge I want to address today, because I see over and over that many people are deeply addicted to managing stress in very dysfunctional ways that result in more stress.      

For example, Ellie and Marvin consulted with me because their relationship was in deep trouble due to how they were managing the stresses of life. Both of them had been on a growth path for many years and were very distressed that all they had learned wasn’t working for them. 

Both of them had many life stressors. One of their adolescent son’s was on drugs and had been hospitalized last year for a drug overdose. Marvin had been diagnosed with heart disease. Ellie has a high-pressure job and was often under stress regarding time constraints. Marvin had his own business that had suffered during the pandemic, and he was still challenged in getting back on his feet economically. There were many daily external stressors that could trigger either of them into their learned, addictive ways of reacting to stress, and the main way that each of them reacted to external stressors were creating intense conflict and stress between them.

When Marvin got stressed, he tended to release his stress by raging at Ellie, blaming her for his stress. He would decompensate into his wounded self, treating Ellie the way he had been treated by his father as he was growing up, projecting onto her that she was just like his weak victim mother who didn’t protect him from his father. When Marvin raged at her, Ellie decompensated into acting like her hysterical mother, releasing her stress by throwing up her hands and sometimes getting angry back, and sometimes crying. Ellie also decompensated into her learned ways of releasing her stress when she was overwhelmed by life, and her victim behavior triggered Marvin’s rage. They were in a terrible destructive circle, each triggering the other into their learned dysfunctional ways of releasing their stress.

Neither Marvin nor Ellie had done the work of developing a loving adult who could manage and release the stress of life in ways that didn’t cause more stress. Neither had any idea what they could do differently when their stress felt overwhelming.

It seemed to them that their wounded ways of releasing stress were sudden and automatic, but the reality was that neither of them were aware of their more subtle indications that they were feeling stressed. This is part of Step One of Inner Bonding – being aware of your feelings, even subtle ones.

I worked with each of them in learning to notice their stress way before they acted out on each other, and to ask each other for help the moment one of them felt any stress. I encourage them to hold and just be with the partner who said they were feeling stressed or scared or anxious. This was the beginning of healing their system.

When they first consulted with me, they both were blaming each other for the problems, and I helped them to see that both of them were acting from their learned ways of releasing stress, and that they were equally responsible for the problems in their relationship. While it was easy for Ellie to blame Marvin because his behavior was so overt and scary, Ellie needed to see that her response to Marvin and to life’s challenges were just as hard for Marvin as his anger was for her. It was vitally important that no one was the bad one – that they both accepted responsibility for their end of their dysfunctional relationship system.

As both of them practiced tuning into their stress before it got too big to manage, and each of them learned to ask for help in the form of being lovingly held, their relationship slowly improved.

At this point, I began to work with them on a deeper level of managing the stresses of life – developing their spiritually connected loving adult. Love heals, and just as their love for each other was helping them manage their stress, now they needed to learn to bring love to themselves, which meant learning to connect with their spiritual source of love. 

We all need to be able to lovingly manage the many stresses of life, and not only does everyone not have a partner to help them, but even if you have a partner, he or she might not be available when you feel stressed. So we each need to learn to show up for our life stresses as a loving adult, bringing love and peace into our heart and down to our stressed inner child. 

It takes practice to remember to show up as a strong loving adult when you are stressed. Most of us have been practicing our whole lives our learned dysfunctional controlling reactions when we are stressed, so of course it takes practice to remember to open our heart to the love that is always here for us and bring it into our heart and soul. 

When you find yourself stressed about the challenges of life, consciously choose to think the next loving thought, and do the next right thing – what your guidance says is loving to you and to others. And it’s always loving to hold your inner child – holding a doll or stuffed animal that represents your hurting inner child – and let him or her know that they are not alone – that you are here as a loving adult and that your higher guidance is here bring love to you. 

When you don’t lovingly manage the stresses of life, then you will likely turn to your programmed addictive ways coming from the false beliefs of your wounded self, which then causes more stress.  

We tend to think of stress as something that occurs only because of external events, such as having financial problems, relationship problems, health problems, or from having too much to do and not enough time. As I’ve talked about, events such as these are challenging, but they are not the only cause of stressful feelings.

The stress that you cause with your self-abandonment is your inner guidance’s way of letting you know that you are thinking thoughts or taking actions that are out of alignment with what is in your highest good, or that you are trying to control something that you cannot control – such as how people feel about you or the outcome of things. Stress may also be letting you know that something in your body is out of whack – you are on medications or substances that are affecting your brain and causing the stress, or you have eaten foods such as sugar, processed or pesticide-laden food that is causing brain toxicity, leading to feeling stressed.  

When you are operating from your wounded self and trying to control something over which you have no control – such as others’ feelings and the outcome of things – your stress is letting you know that you are hitting your head against a wall and not accepting reality. The opposite of stress – inner peace – is the result of accepting what is, learning to take loving care of yourself in the face of what is, and practicing gratitude for the big and small blessings on this incredible journey of life – even in the face of all the challenges. And as many of us have experienced, gratitude offers us a stress-free way to manifest what we want and works far better than trying to control others and outcomes.

Wallace Wattles, the author of the 110-year old book, “The Science of Getting Rich,” states that (Quote) “Man [and woman] may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance [this is what he calls God] by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him [and her]. Gratitude unifies the mind of man [and woman] with the intelligence of Substance, so that man’s [and woman’s] thoughts are received by the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude.” (Unquote) He states that when you frequently contemplate the mental image of what you want, (Quote) “coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude,” (Unquote) you set in motion the creative forces of manifestation.

Your stress is letting you know that you are doing the opposite of this – you are using your thoughts to create what you don’t want and to try to control others and outcomes rather than to co-create with spirit.

The major challenge here is about being in faith that all of this is true. You might know that this is true from the perspective of your loving adult, but your wounded self likely doesn’t believe it. It is very easy for the wounded self to come in with thoughts of bad things happening, which moves you out of faith and gratitude and into stress. It is very easy for the wounded self to focus on how to try to have control over others and outcomes, which will always create stress. It is very easy for the wounded self to turn to junk food and other substances that bring the body out of balance and cause stress. It is even easy for the wounded self to try to use Inner Bonding and gratitude as a way of controlling others and God! It is so important, when opening to learning and moving into gratitude, to make sure that your intent is to be loving to yourself and others, with no other agenda, rather than using Inner Bonding as just another way to attempt to control others and outcomes.

The stress that is caused by your wounded self is actually your friend, in that it is instantly letting you know that you are off track in your thinking or behavior. Instead of ignoring your stress or pacifying it with various addictions, which will ultimately cause more stress, why not do Inner Bonding and attend to it with a deep desire to learn about how you are off track?

When you really think about it, it’s strange that our society tries so hard to get rid of stress with medications and addictions, instead of learning what it is trying to tell us. When you really get that stress is your guidance’s way of telling you that you are “off the mark,” – in the original Aramaic Bible, sin is translated as off the mark – in your thinking or behavior, you will attend to what you are doing to create it, rather than ignore it or try to get rid of it.

Certainly, it can be frustrating and sometimes overwhelming when unexpected things happen over which we have no control. This is the issue for Caroline, who asked me this question at one of my events:

(Quote)”I have intense feelings of frustration when things happen that are beyond my control. It seems to tap into prior frustration and feels so overwhelming. I just scream at the top of my lungs when I am alone. I then feel fed up with anything else that is remotely frustrating. How do I handle this?” (Unquote)

Like all feelings, frustration is letting you know that your inner child needs your loving attention with an intention to learn about the good reasons for feeling frustrated.

Frustration is often a feeling we go to when we want to avoid our feelings of helplessness.

Caroline stated that, “It seems to tap into prior frustration and feels so overwhelming.” This may indicate that there was much helplessness in her childhood, which is overwhelming for a child.

Caroline’s inner child needs her compassion for both the current helplessness and the past helplessness. Helplessness, and the resulting frustration, are not feelings you can manage without the help of your higher guidance. When you open to learning with your higher self about what is loving to you, and you invite in the love, kindness, tenderness, understanding, gentleness, and compassion of spirit, then you can bring this love to your inner child so that he or she doesn’t feel so alone and overwhelmed inside. 

It’s hard for all of us to accept that which we cannot control, but it’s especially hard if we were controlled and/or abused as children.

It’s vitally important to validate for yourself what went on for you as you were growing up.

When children are frustrated and feeling helpless and out of control, they need their parents to lovingly hold them, which is what helps them learn to self-regulate. But when parents don’t know how to self-regulate their own feelings, and when they are the ones exerting the control or abuse, the child is left with no way to manage their own very painful feelings. This is why Caroline screams at the top of her lungs when she is frustrated and alone. She not only didn’t learn how to manage her painful feelings from her parents, but they were likely the ones causing the pain.

But screaming at the top of her lungs is not what helps her inner child. In fact, this likely makes her inner child feel abandoned and alone inside, because there is no loving adult to be there with her with love and compassion. It’s all that her wounded self knows to do, and she is doing the best she can, but if she were to learn and practice Inner Bonding and develop her powerful spiritually connected loving adult, then she could bring genuine comfort to the little girl inside who is suffering. 

When you feel frustrated, agitated, overwhelmed, or impatient, take a breath, and then lovingly embrace your feelings.

Find the place in you that wants to take responsibility for learning about and managing these feelings. Move into your heart, inviting in the love and compassion of spirit and choosing the intention to learn. Ask your inner child to tell you about what is getting triggered by the current situation and let him or her tell you about what you went through as a child. Hold your inner child and bring much love within as you are healing the pain. While you allow yourself to be the child speaking, you also keep your connection to your guidance so that you can be a loving adult with yourself. Honor the intense feelings of helplessness with much kindness toward yourself. Stay with this until you feel some relief and then allow the feelings to move through you to spirit.

The more you practice this Inner Bonding process each time you feel stress, the easier it will become to manage the deeper feelings of helplessness.

I hope you can see how important it is to be able to turn to a spiritual source of love, wisdom, and comfort when having to manage both the stress of life and the stress that is caused by our wounded self. Just focusing on what is loving to you will help you connect with your guidance. 

Inner Bonding facilitator Emily Agnew wrote a wonderful article that is on our website, called Finding Peace in the Midst of Stress, and I’m going to quote some of this article because it is so relevant to this podcast. In this article, Emily writes, (Quote) “I worked intensely hard this past year, completing three major projects in addition to my usual work. Somewhere along the way, I lost my perspective and slipped into a state of chronic high stress and tension. I know lots of ways of centering and calming myself, but they weren’t working. I’d feel a little better after exercising, meditating or doing some yoga, but not for long.

“In the end, it took a complete break from work and a change of scene for me to calm down….My body began to let go, my mind slowed down, and I realized how much pressure I had been putting on myself. I asked myself, ‘Do I want to be happy? Or do I want to let life events stress me constantly?’ I saw that this decision is entirely up to me. As this realization sank in, I heard the blessing over and over in my mind: “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God…” 

“I understood for the first time the two meanings of “the knowledge and love of God.” First, it means remembering that there is this energy I am calling God, and that it is there to be felt at any time. (The word “God” is not the important thing; you can call it God, Buddha, Allah, the Universe, the divine, Gaia, the infinite unknown…whatever speaks to you.) Second, it means keeping my heart and mind open to this endless source, letting the wisdom of the divine flow through in order to access the vast universal knowledge and loving source that is God. To know God, and to allow the limitless, universal knowledge that is God to flow through me—this was the way to peace. 

“We all have to field stressful life events that are out of our control: illness, injury, loss of a job or financial worries, suffering or troubles of friends or family members, or worse yet, poverty, violence, war or starvation. We may also get stressed by useful, “good” projects we have chosen to take on, as I did. I chose to work on changing the focus of my business, to start upgrading my website, and to take over managing a complex transfer of family property. 

“But having slowed down during those six days away, I realized that I know people who seem to field both these kinds of these life stressors with striking calm and equanimity.  I realized that I got stressed because I allowed myself to get stressed. 

“This sounds deceptively simple. But it is the key to happiness. So let me say it again:  I got stressed because I allowed myself to get stressed. I will unpack this further to make the underlying truths as clear as I can. 

“I allowed myself to get stressed when I tried to live and strive by my own tiny personal knowledge.  I told myself what had to happen, and I tried hard to make that happen. The harder I tried to control all sorts of outcomes, the more stressed I got. The more stressed I got, the less peace I had, and the less access I had to “the knowledge and love of God.” The less I had access to that knowledge, the harder I tried to control it all. I even tried to control my stress level with yoga and meditation.  

“I was in a vicious cycle caused by my own striving. And this stressful striving included virtually everything I was doing, including visualizing, “positive thinking” (or as a new age guru might put it, trying not to “indulge in negativity”), planning, being coached, brainstorming, studying, researching, writing, praying, meditating, and yoga. It included all that because I was doing all that in an attempt to control the outcome of my efforts. 

“….I realized that for me, nothing is worth being so terribly stressed. No outcome, no accomplishment, no result is worth that kind of suffering. I resolved that … my priority would be to remember this. I committed myself to take whatever steps I needed to take to choose to be at peace in myself.

“I realized that when I’m at peace in myself, a positive cycle is set in motion. The “knowledge and love of God” expresses itself in an inner knowing. It sometimes defies external logic yet always takes me in a direction of more integrity and more peace. Experiencing this peace both motivates me to remain in the knowledge and love of God and enables me to do that. It creates a self-sustaining positive cycle.” (Unquote)

Emily has been an Inner Bonding Facilitator for a long time and if you want to work with her, you can find her on our website under “Facilitators 🡪 Find a Facilitator.”

What’s so interesting to me about Emily’s experience is that she tried so many things to deal with her stress – activities we are often encouraged to do, such as yoga and meditation. None of them worked due to her intent to get rid of her feelings rather than learn from them. When she finally slowed down, she was able to see how she was causing her own stress due to the pressure she was putting on herself, and she was then able to access her higher guidance, and that’s what was essential for her to find her peace.

Your guidance is always here for you, and you will be able to access it when you are fully open to learning about loving yourself, and you are keeping your body in a high frequency by eating as cleanly as you can. The intent to learn, which as you know is basic to the practice of Inner Bonding, is the key to being able to access your source of love, wisdom, truth, peace, and comfort. Other activities such as yoga and meditation are wonderful adjuncts to Inner Bonding, but without the openness to learning about loving yourself and accessing your higher guidance, these activities alone will not fully relieve stress, as Emily wrote about.

Learning to to access your higher source of love, wisdom, and comfort is vital for managing stress. You CAN learn this through a diligent practice of Inner Bonding.

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, 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.