S2 EP262 – Will You Lose Your Freedom if you are a Loving Adult?

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. I often have clients who are very resistant to showing up for themselves, as well as in the world, as a loving adult.

I was working with my client, Diana, about her resistance to being a loving adult and I asked her to go inside and tune into why she didn’t want to be a loving adult. We all have good reasons for our choices, so I asked her about her good reasons for not wanting to be a loving adult. 

She said, “I don’t want to be a loving adult because I will lose my freedom. Having to be a loving adult will limit my freedom.”

This was the main false belief of her wounded self that was stopping her from wanting to be a loving adult. 

I was surprised by this because for me, when I started to practice Inner Bonding and finally understood that I had the right to be a loving adult and take loving care of myself, I felt a new and tremendous sense of freedom.

“Diana,” I asked her, “what are the good reasons your wounded self believes that being a loving adult means limiting your freedom?”

“If I’m a loving adult,” she said, “then I have to say the right thing and do the right thing. I can’t say what I think, or people won’t like me.”

“But Diana, isn’t that what you are currently doing – always trying to have control over getting others’ approval?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” she answered.

“Well,” I said, “where’s the freedom in that? The Tao de Ching states that if you care about peoples’ approval, you will be their prisoner. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me.”

“If I’m a loving adult,” she said, “then I will have to do what I ‘should’ do.”

“Diana,” I said, “it seems to me that you are always ‘shoulding’ and judging yourself from your wounded self. It’s the wounded self who ‘shoulds” and judges as forms of control, and where’s the freedom in that?” The loving adult never ‘shoulds’ or judges.” 

“Well,” she asked, “what if I want marshmallows for breakfast? Isn’t a loving adult going to be restrictive and say ‘No, you can’t’”?

“No,” I answered. “The loving adult would be open to learning and would say to the wounded self, ‘There must be a very good reason you want marshmallows for breakfast. Are there feelings you are trying to avoid? Are there ways I’m abandoning you? Are you feeling empty and unloved by me, and you want the marshmallows because of this?’ The loving adult would be caring about the inner child’s feelings and health and not just indulge the wounded self in trying to avoid painful feelings. As a loving adult, you would have the freedom to explore your fears and false beliefs and do what’s loving to you rather than coming from fear, control, and avoidance.”

“Well,” Diana said, “I know I should go to sleep early so that I can get enough sleep, but I don’t want to because it’s the only alone downtime I have. But wouldn’t a loving adult make me go to bed early?”

“No,” I said. “a loving adult wouldn’t never say you have to go to bed early. A loving adult would understand that you need some downtime and would say, ‘We didn’t have any downtime today, so let’s take some time to ourselves now. I really understand you need downtime, so let’s do it, even if we are tired tomorrow.’ That’s freedom!”

“But” she said, “if my wounded self tells me what to do and I resist, isn’t that freedom?”

“So you believe that resisting the control of the wounded self is freedom? I think freedom is tuning into what you want to do and what is loving to you to do and doing it. Where’s the freedom in resisting control rather than in doing what you want to do? If your inner child wants love and your wounded self gives her junk food instead, which has been a big problem for you regarding your weight, where’s the freedom in that? Where is the freedom in trying to control what people think? Where’s the freedom in your inner power struggle between the controlling part of you and the resistant part of you? Where’s the freedom in eating marshmallows instead of giving your inner child the love she wants and needs? To me, being able to take action on what’s loving to me is freedom.

“As a loving adult, I get to tune into who I am and value who I am, which enables me to give up even thinking about what other people are thinking of me, and I get to let go of the false belief that I control what others think and just let myself be myself. That’s freedom! Freedom is honoring what I want rather than controlling and resisting.”

Diana was very thoughtful over this. Finally she quietly said, “I can see that it’s my wounded self who thinks I will lose my freedom if I’m a loving adult. My wounded self doesn’t want me to be a loving adult because then she no longer has control over me, which she doesn’t have anyway because I just go into resistance. I don’t feel free at all, and I can see that it’s because I’ve resisted being a loving adult. I think I’m ready to open to learning with my guidance about what it means to be a loving adult.”

It took time and practice, but Diana did learn to be loving to herself and found this to be a great freedom!

We all want both physical and emotional freedom, some of which means:

• Freedom from having to use addictions to avoid our feelings.
  
• Freedom from being a victim of others’ choices.
  
• Freedom to express who we are.
  
• Freedom from anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and fear.

There is an important key to both physical and emotional freedom. The key is learning how to manage the deeper existential feelings of life that we all learned to avoid as children.

Children can tolerate a lot of emotional pain when they have a loving parent or other loving adult to be with them, to hold and comfort them, to not leave them alone, to reassure them that they will be okay, and to take whatever actions are needed to help them. But when children are left alone with unbearable loneliness, heartbreak, grief, or helplessness, they cannot survive it. Their little bodies are too small to tolerate all that intense emotional pain.

Many of us had traumatic things happen to us that caused us unbearable pain:

• Physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse or neglect within the home or outside of it.
  
• Loss of a parent, a sibling, or a close friend or relative.
  
• Severe rejection and bullying at school or other places outside of the home.
  
• Witnessing violence, racism, sexism, war.
  
• Poverty, hunger, living on the street, and so on.

If you didn’t have a loving person to help you through trauma, what did you do with unbearable feelings?

• Did you learn to disassociate, leaving your body to survive?
  
• Did you learn to be a very good child, giving yourself up and trying to be perfect?
  
• Did you learn to eat, drink, smoke, use drugs, or stay glued to a TV or computer?
  
• Did you learn to turn to sex or pornography?
  
• Did you become angry and self-destructive or destructive toward others?
  
• Did you retreat into fantasy?
  
• Did you get sick a lot?

What are you still doing today to avoid the painful feelings of life – the loneliness, heartbreak, and grief of loss and others’ unloving behavior?

All the protections you learned – all the ways of controlling, to not feel your painful core feelings – are now creating your lack of physical and emotional freedom. You achieve true freedom when you learn to manage your deeper painful feelings rather than avoid them.

It is totally different today than it was when you were a child, because today you can be the loving adult that your inner child needs to be okay. Today, you can learn to bring in the love, compassion, comfort, and wisdom your child needs from you. Today, you can take the loving action on your own behalf, not only bringing needed relief, but embracing your true soul self and manifesting your gifts in the world.

A while back, I asked on social media, ‘What is personal freedom?’ Here are some of the answers I received:

• Uninhibited opportunity to procure health, meaningful relationships, political voice, recreation & modest property
  
• Not seeing stress as a barrier
  
• Without limitations on my physical, emotional or spiritual abilities or expressions
  
• Freedom is autonomy, loving what I do everyday, and having enough resources to do the things I truly desire
  
• Freedom, to me, is an ability to express myself without fear of punishment or retaliation from government entities
  
• The freedom to express what I think and feel
  
• Listening to the birds, smelling the rain on the warm ground, looking at the blue sky, the white clouds, the taste of a fresh strawberry, thinking about the people I love. Being able to see my wounded self. Giving her my hand. Thank you for this question, freedom can be so easy…
  
• When it no longer matters to me what other people do/ say/ think, and I live true to my highest self
  
• Realizing a healthy body, healthy relationships, healthy environment through spirituality, and seeing it true for all. 

I also asked, ‘What is relationship freedom?’ Here are some of the answers.

• I can express my love without fear of rejection. My partner doesn’t take advantage of my love
  
• I can be honest without fear of punishment. We can talk about everything
  
• Not being blamed for the other person’s feelings. Not being made to feel that everything is my fault
  
• Knowing the other person wants what is best for me. I get to be myself and the other person gets to be themselves without trying to control each other
  
• Feeling supported in what I want to do and in how I feel. Feeling appreciated for who I am
  
• Knowing I can be completely myself and be fully accepted, even when I’m not being my best
  
• Trusting the love and kindness of the other person. 

It is my experience that the more I embrace and accept my wounded self and see and value my soul self – my inner child – the freer I feel. 

It’s always great when I receive this valuing and acceptance from others, but my inner sense of freedom starts with claiming my right to define my own worth and establish my own values. While I don’t have the freedom to determine others’ choices, I always have the freedom to choose my own thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and intention.

This choice is powerfully brought home in the classic book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankel. This incredibly courageous man managed to claim his freedom of thought and a little bit of freedom of action while in a concentration camp. He is such an inspiration to me, as I often think, “If he could feel an inner sense of freedom in the midst of imprisonment and torture, knowing that he would likely never see his wife and family again, then I can certainly find this within myself.” While he had very little physical freedom, he maintained his emotional freedom.

Emotional freedom is being free from feeling like a victim of and controlled by our emotions. We are emotionally free when we know how to learn from and manage our feelings so that we are not reactive to them, and they don’t control us.

Many of my clients, like Diana, come to me having been afraid to claim their freedom to be all they came to the planet to be – afraid of how others will react. 

They are limiting their own freedom, believing that it is others who are limiting them.

They are terrified of being all they can be for fear of making mistakes and failing. For me, part of freedom is having given myself permission to try, to make mistakes and to fail. Without giving ourselves this freedom, we can get stuck in fear, limiting ourselves without realizing that it is our own wounded self that is limiting us.

All over the world, people are realizing that even though their government might be limiting aspects of their freedom, no one can limit their freedom of thought. When they claim that, they are often able to begin to manifest freedom of action.

We take emotional responsibility when we are open to learning about how we are causing our wounded feelings and what loving actions we need to take on our own behalf. We take emotional responsibility when we compassionately embrace our painful existential feelings of life with deep kindness and gentleness toward ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel and release these painful feelings, and learning about what they may be telling us about others and events.

Emotional dependency is the opposite of emotional responsibility and emotional freedom. When we are emotionally dependent, we see ourselves as victims of others and circumstances. Rather than compassionately learning from our feelings, we do everything we can to avoid them – using addictions to substances, processes, people and controlling behaviors such as anger, blame, resistance, withdrawal, or compliance.

Avoiding responsibility for our feelings leads to the misery of our wounded feelings. We create great suffering when we avoid our feelings and responsibility for them rather than compassionately embracing them and opening to learning from them.

You will gradually experience the joy of emotional freedom when you decide that you want responsibility for your feelings. Inner Bonding is a powerful process for learning how to take emotional responsibility and attain emotional freedom.

My client Lydia consulted with me because her relationship with her husband, Andrew, was falling apart. Andrew had moved out, stating that he could no longer tolerate Lydia’s neediness and constant pull on him to make her feel loved and secure.

Now that they were separated, Lydia’s emotional dependency was getting even worse. She was deeply addicted to Andrew making her feel better, if only through a brief text message.

Lydia believed that her feelings of safety, worth, and lovability had to come from someone else. She took no emotional responsibility – no responsibility for what she was telling herself and how she was treating herself that were causing her pain and panic.

As we worked with Inner Bonding, it became clear to Lydia that her panic was being caused by her own self-abandonment, not by Andrew abandoning her. She was constantly abandoning her inner child by judging herself, ignoring the feelings resulting from her self-judgments, and then handing her inner child to Andrew to take care of. When she couldn’t reach Andrew, she would collapse into tears and sooth herself with TV and food. She constantly felt panicked, not because Andrew was not there for her, but because she had never developed an inner loving adult capable of taking loving care of herself.

As a result of her self-abandonment, Lydia was constantly emotionally needy and pulled on Andrew with her tears and anger. While she said she loved Andrew, her primary intent was to get love rather than to give and share love. Lydia was emotionally dependent.

We are emotionally free when:

1. We do not make others, the past, or circumstances responsible for our feelings – we do not see ourselves as victims. Instead, we take responsibility for causing our own suffering by noticing how we treat ourselves and what we tell ourselves, and we nurture ourselves through the grief, sorrow, and loneliness that come from painful life events, such as the loss or death of a loved one.
   
2. When we are not governed by our feelings. Our feelings guide us, but we are not led around by them. We recognize that our positive feelings of love, peace, and joy are letting us know that we are taking loving care of ourselves, and that our painful feelings of anger, fear, hurt, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and so on are letting us know that we are abandoning ourselves.
   
3. When we do not collapse into our feelings, becoming our feelings. Instead, we are a witness of our feelings, learning from them and nurturing the existential painful feelings of life.

We are emotionally free when we learn from our feelings and take loving action on our own behalf to take responsibility for our painful feelings, and for our feelings of worth, lovability, safety, and security.

Relationships flounder when one or both partners are emotionally dependent on the other partner for their feelings of worth, lovability, safety, and security. When you abandon yourself and make your partner responsible for your pain and your self-worth, then you are stuck trying to have control over your partner taking care of you – doing for you what you need to be doing for yourself.

When you are not loving and valuing yourself, you do not have love to share with your partner. You are constantly trying to get love rather than share love. Trying to have control over getting the love that you need to be giving to yourself is what creates most relationship problems, as well as what creates a lack of both physical and emotional freedom.

When each person in a relationship decides to learn how to take responsibility for their own feelings, they can then come together to learn, grow, play, and share love. This is much more fun than trying to get love!

We can do this and attain true freedom only when we do the inner work of creating a loving adult. Inner Bonding is the only process I know of that teaches not only the ‘what’ regarding what’s happening to cause both personal and relationship pain and lack of freedom, but also teaches the ‘how’ regarding how to heal the underlying causes of personal and relationship issues. It’s the only process that gives a clear choice between the intent to control and the intent to love, and a clear pathway of six steps to reach physical and emotional freedom. And it’s the only process that also includes learning how to have at-will spiritual connection to guide you in what is loving to you and to others. It’s a true mind, body, spirit process that always works when you do it.

I hope you can see that, rather than limiting your freedom, learning to be a loving adult is what creates both emotional and physical freedom.  

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.