S2 EP263 – Nurturing Your Inner Child by Becoming a Loving Adult

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding podcast. Some years back, I had the moving experience of working with Kevin (not his real name), a thirty-seven year old very talented branding artist we had hired to work on our website. From the moment I met Kevin, I knew he was a person I wanted to hire and work with. His demeanor was open, honest, caring, and attentive. I had seen some of his work before speaking with him, and I was blown away by his creativity.

One evening, as we were having dinner, after working together for four solid days, I asked him how he had met his girlfriend. I had spent some time with Lila and Kevin, and I was impressed with how loving they were with each other. They had been together for three and a half years.

“Well,’ said Kevin. “I wish I had met you six years ago. At that time I had fallen head over heels in love with a woman, and after three months she dumped me. I was devastated. I realized I needed help, so I started reading self-help books and worked with a therapist. At the time, I didn’t understand the terms you use in Inner Bonding, but what was happening was that I had no loving adult at all. I had abandoned my inner child and given him to the woman, so when she dumped me, I felt alone and abandoned. I did some really good inner work at that time, and a year later, met another woman. I wasn’t in love with her, but I liked her a lot.

“One night, again, three months after we met, I was lying in bed with the flu when she came over, sat on the edge of my bed, and started to cry. ‘I’ve met someone else,’ she said, ‘and I’m so afraid of hurting you.’”

“That night was a turning point in my life. I lay there in bed with a huge battle going on inside. Half of me was saying, ‘She can’t do this to me. How dare she! I need to be very angry and punish her so that she feels even worse than she feels right now.’ The other half of me was saying, ‘It’s okay. I care about her, and I want her to be happy. She doesn’t need to be afraid of hurting me – I will be fine.’

“These two parts – my wounded self and my loving adult – battled with each other. They kept going back and forth, back and forth – 49%-51%, then 51%-49%. Finally, my loving adult won out and I said to her, ‘Honey, it’s okay. You don’t need to be afraid. I care about you, and I want you to be happy. I’m your friend, and you have the freedom to pursue whatever you feel is right for you. You can even call me for help whenever you want.’

“Rather than feeling like a devastated wimp, I felt on top of the world. I felt so empowered! I had never experienced how empowering it is to be loving to others. It’s what has enabled me to have a strong spiritual connection and fully access my creativity. Soon after that, I met Lila and we have been together ever since.”

“Kevin,” I said, “thank you for sharing this with me. This is what I saw in you from the moment I met you – your power, your connection, your creativity, and your caring. Now I understand why you had such an immediate grasp of Inner Bonding.”

I’m certain that we have all experienced that internal battle in the face of challenges. I found it very inspiring to hear about Kevin’s inner battle and how he chose to be a loving adult.

It’s always a choice of intention – to be controlling or loving. If Kevin had decided to be controlling, he would have been an angry victim, and would have felt awful about himself, likely believing that his awful feeling came from his girlfriend leaving him, rather than from his own self-abandonment. Fortunately, Kevin made the choice to be a loving adult, and this choice gave him instant feedback regarding feeling empowered rather than feeling like a devastated wimp.

Yet many people resist doing the inner work necessary to become a strong loving adult. Do you talk about Inner Bonding and think about it but don’t actually practice it due to a fear of failure at being a loving adult? This is a very common fear. 

I was having a session with Bill. As usual, Bill was in his head, talking about loving himself but not actually loving himself.

“Bill,” I said, “there must be a good reason that you spend so much time in your head, talking about Inner Bonding but not actually doing it. Please open to learning about what you are afraid of in actually doing Inner Bonding.”

“I know what I’m afraid of,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t do it. I’m afraid I will fail at being a loving adult.”

Bill is married with 3 young children. He adores his children and is a very devoted father.

“Does the fear of failing at being a loving father stop you from loving your children?” I asked him.

“No! Of course not!” he answered somewhat indignantly. “I want to be a really good father, and sometimes I worry that I’m not, but I think I’m mostly loving with my kids.”

“So your wounded self is not in charge when it comes to your children, but it is in charge when it comes to your inner child, is that right?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I think that’s right,” he answered.

“So with your children it’s more important to you to be loving, even if you make mistakes, but with yourself, it seems it’s more important to protect against failure than to be loving – is that right?” I asked him.

“I haven’t thought about it like that,” he answered, “but I think that’s right. This must be what’s keeping me stuck in my head rather than being present in my body. I’m always present with my children and their feelings, but not with my own feelings.”

“Right,” I said. “With your children, because you WANT to be loving to them, you are present as a loving adult. But with yourself, because you WANT to avoid failure, you stay in your head to protect yourself from doing it wrong. What if, right now, you decided that it is more important to you to be loving to yourself than to protect against failure? What if you make it okay to make mistakes and make it okay to fail?”

“You know, that’s a big one for me,” he said. “I’ve always defined myself by my success and accomplishments. Failure has always been something to make sure never happens.”

“Yes,” I said. “That has been the way your wounded self has defined your worth. But it’s not your wounded self who can ever be a loving adult. Your wounded self has no capacity to connect with spirit, and it is only when you are open to learning and connected with your spiritual guidance that you are a loving adult. And it is only through your guidance that you can learn how to be a loving adult. So, your wounded self can’t do it and will definitely fail at it, but your loving adult can develop and learn to take loving care of yourself.”

“So the fear of failure is coming from my wounded self?” he asked.

“Yes, always,” I answered. “The loving adult doesn’t think about success or failure – only about the journey of learning and loving. The loving adult defines you by your intrinsic qualities of caring, compassion, kindness, and so on – not by success or failure or accomplishments.”

“So until I make it okay to just learn about being a loving adult rather than worrying about whether or not I can do this, I will stay stuck in my head,” he said. “I think I’m ready to let go of worrying about failure and start really practicing Inner Bonding. I’m so tired of pontificating about Inner Bonding and knowing that I’m not really doing it.”

This was a life-changing decision for Bill. He started to diligently practice Inner Bonding and slowly developed his spiritually connected loving adult. Not surprisingly, he not only became an even better father, but his marriage greatly improved. And so did his social life. He had previously had problems making friends because his wounded self would pull on others for validation, but once he started to practice Inner Bonding and developed his loving adult, he suddenly found it easy to make friends. His wife is relieved because he was previously solely dependent on her to meet all his needs. She was very happy that he is not only learning to meet many of his own needs, but that she isn’t the only one who can meet his need for fun and connection. 

Bill will tell you that choosing to learn to become a loving adult was one of the best decisions that he has ever made. 

There is no better time than now to practice Inner Bonding and become a loving adult in numerous areas of your life.

During this tumultuous time economically and politically, it’s a good time to be very kind and gentle with yourself. It’s very important to not allow your wounded self to scare you, because your main line of defense against the chaos is to keep your frequency high, which will not only help your stress, it will also help keep you physically healthy, because stress erodes the immune system.

Start by acknowledging to yourself that this is a very challenging time. Imagine that your intention is to soothe a scared child, rather than further scaring the child. This is the time to stay open to your higher guidance and bring comfort and compassion to your inner child, especially if you feel anxious. It’s also a time to reach out to friends with whom you can connect. 

If you stay connected with your higher self, you can be guided regarding what is in your highest good. I’m reminded, once again, of one of my favorite books, which I’ve often mentioned: “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Dr. Viktor Frankl, who was able to stay alive in a concentration camp by listening to his inner knowing. This is a very important time to listen to your inner knowing regarding keeping your frequency high. Keeping your frequency high by practicing Inner Bonding and putting your spiritually connected loving adult in charge is one of the most important things you can do to balance out the darkness that is on our planet at this time. The more you can keep yourself open, loving, and compassionate, the more you affect the energy on our planet. Taking emotional responsibility is vital for the wellbeing of all of us.

As a loving adult, it’s also important to take physical responsibility. Getting some exercise and getting enough sleep is part of what a loving adult does, along with spending time outdoors. Nature and sunshine have healing qualities that can support your health.

The other vitally important part of being a loving adult is about what you put into your body. A strong immune system can fight off the many viruses that are now part of our environment, and a major underlying cause of a dysfunctional immune system is the food you eat. If you have been eating fast food, processed food, sugar, and factory-farmed food, please consider trying your best to eat real food – the food your great-great grandparents ate.

Just this morning I asked some of the people who help us on our ranch, “Why do you think indigenous people rarely get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and auto-immune disease?” None of them knew the answer.

The answer, of course, is that they continue to eat their traditional diet – food that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides and grown on devitalized soils, meats that haven’t been contaminated with hormones, and food that has not been altered with GMOs.

I recommend to all of you to read, “Food Fix,” by Mark Hyman, M.D.

In this book, you will see that our dysfunctional and contaminated food system is one of the greatest underlying causes of our current planetary problems – including climate change, the economic problems that come partly from the overwhelmed health care system and partly from the greed of big ag and big pharma, and the huge loss of both plants and animals that have gone extinct due to our food system and climate change. In fact, humanity itself could be in danger of becoming extinct if we don’t start to heal our food system.

The good news is that it is possible to improve your immune system, and it doesn’t have to take a long time. Why not start right now? Your gut is the seat of your immune system. Sugar, processed foods, industrial seed oils, such as safflower, sunflower, canola, soy, corn, and so on, processed dairy, and factory-farmed foods erode your immune system. If you keep in mind the way people ate a couple of hundred years ago, and eat accordingly, you will be showing up as a loving adult to physically take care of and nurture your inner child.

As a loving adult, we do all we can to nurture and create inner peace and joy for our inner child, regardless of all the problems and chaos on our planet. If we were all devoted to lovingly nurturing our inner child, I believe that our planet would heal, because the more we love ourselves, the more we will love others and love our planet. The more we desire to nurture our inner child, the more motivated we will be to learn to be a strong loving adult.

One of the first things you can pay attention to regarding moving from your wounded self into your loving adult is to consciously choose self-compassion rather than self-judgment.

In the many years I’ve been counseling clients, I’ve never had a client who was not judging themselves, and also not realizing the profound negative effects of self-judgment. Most are afraid to let go of self-judgment, believing that without judging themselves, they will sit and do nothing. When they finally take the risk of self-compassion, they realize that far from doing nothing, they are now motivated to be far more productive and creative. If they were previously doing well, it was in spite of their self-judgment, not because of it. If they were not doing well, it was because the self-judgment was immobilizing them.

Moving into compassion for ourselves, for our painful feelings, for the mistakes and failures that are part of being human, is magical! Self-compassion opens us to learning, healing, and new choices that can bring us much joy. I encourage you to become aware of how badly self-judgments make you feel and to take the risk of consciously starting to practice self-compassion.

Another very loving action you might want to practice taking as a loving adult is to make it okay to be rejected.

How much energy do you spend trying to be perfect, saying or doing the ‘right’ thing, giving yourself up, avoiding being yourself, and not being spontaneous? The big false belief here is that we can have control over how others feel about us and treat us. What if you accepted that you don’t have this control over others, just as they don’t have this control over you? What if you accepted rejection as a fact of life, and instead of attaching your worth to what others think, you define your own worth? Defining your own worth is a powerful way of healing a fear of rejection. When you know who you really are as a soul, you no longer take others’ unloving and rejecting behavior personally. You know that their unloving behavior is coming from their own self-abandonment and actually has nothing to do with you.

There are two ways to define your worth – extrinsically and intrinsically. When you define your worth extrinsically, you are defining yourself by your looks, achievements, and performance, and by what others think of your looks, achievements and performance. This is a very hard way to live, as you constantly have to strive to feel like you are okay, and rejection and failure is not okay.

When you define your worth intrinsically, you define yourself by your inborn eternal qualities – the qualities that not only don’t fade with age, they often get better with age. While looks and performance fade with age, intrinsic qualities such as kindness, caring, compassion, goodness, creativity, passion, aliveness, joy, curiosity, courage, honesty, and integrity can deepen with age. When you define yourself by your intrinsic worth, you are valuing who are, and then what you do becomes an expression of who you are, rather than a definition of your worth as a person.

When you know you are inherently worthy, then it becomes okay to fail. Rather than failure defining your lack of worth, failure becomes a learning experience, letting you know what else you need to learn. As a loving adult, you make it okay to fail and you no longer see failure as defining you in any way, which opens the door to trying new things that can bring you much joy. 

As you practice Inner Bonding, developing your loving adult, and defining your intrinsic worth, it becomes much easier to not take others’ behavior personally. As I previously said, when you know and value who you are intrinsically, then you accept that others’ unloving behavior is about them rather than about you.

As a loving adult, you learn to stay present in your body with your feelings. When you live in your head rather than in your body, you are thinking rather than experiencing. You are missing the moment, which is where joy is. Staying in your head, thinking about the past or future, is a form of control that most of us learned as we were growing up to protect against pain. But, as you’ve heard me say in other podcasts, pain and joy live in the same place in the heart, so when you avoid the pain of life, you also avoid the joy of life. Rather than avoiding pain by staying in your head and numbing with various addictions, why not learn how to manage the pain of life through developing your spiritually connected loving adult? Then you can stay present in your body, experiencing the beauty, joy, and wonder of the present moment.

It’s only when you learn to stay present in your body that you can give your inner child the love and nurturing he or she needs to thrive. Taking responsibility for your feelings is essential for your inner child to feel loved, safe, and nurtured. 

By maintaining a presence in your physical self, you can provide your inner child with the necessary love and nurturing required for joy, growth, and well-being.

If you’ve been hearing my podcasts, you know that your intent is what governs how you feel and behave. When your intent is to protect against pain with some form of controlling behavior – trying to control your feelings, others, and outcomes – you end up abandoning yourself and may feel anxious, depressed, empty, alone, guilty, angry, and shamed. When your intent is to learn about loving yourself and sharing your love with others, your heart opens, and you receive the joy that is a gift of spirit. You cannot be intent on controlling and being open to learning at the same time, and you cannot be a loving adult when your intent is to control. So being aware of your intent is basic to developing your loving adult. Too often, the wounded self masks as a loving adult, acting open but not actually being open. So in order to develop your loving adult, you need to learn to be very honest with yourself about your intention.

Whether you are aware of it or not, you have the free will to choose your intention at all times. In fact, our ability to choose our intention is the essence of our free will. When you give dominion to your programmed mind, which is your wounded self, to govern your thoughts and actions, you will likely feel badly rather than joyful. The wounded aspect of the mind has been programmed with many false beliefs that can cause you much pain. When you open to learning with your spiritual guidance and give your higher-self dominion over your thoughts, choices, and actions, you operate from truth, and the truth really will set you free!

A major part of being a loving adult is to focus on what you do have rather than complaining about what you don’t have, which is what the wounded self does. When you choose gratitude throughout the day for all the small and beautiful things about life, your heart opens to the experience of joy. Choosing genuine gratitude is one of the quickest ways of accessing your loving adult. 

While this might seem daunting to develop your loving adult, just start with practicing self-compassion rather than self-judgment. As you get better and better at this, you will find yourself gradually developing new neural pathways for your loving adult.

As you learn to be the loving adult that your inner child needs to feel safe, loved, nurtured, and valued, you will find so much in your life changing for the better. But remember, this isn’t an instant process. Like anything worth learning, it takes much practice. But what’s more important than doing the deep healing work to develop your loving adult? 

Our world would be a wonderful place to be if all of us operated as a loving adult rather than operating from our controlling wounded self. Our planet would heal and we would open the door to the Golden Age. I hope I see this in my lifetime.

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 and creating loving relationships from all of our books and courses and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.