S2 EP275 – Navigating Love and Relationship Challenges

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m addressing some of the challenges we have regarding our relationships, especially our relationship with a partner.

One of the issues that frequently comes up with my clients and people who attend my events is about what the point of a relationship is. This comes up when people first start to learn Inner Bonding and realize that they need to learn to love themselves, and they get confused regarding why open to a relationship if you are loving yourself and meeting many of your own needs, or why open to a relationship when so many of them end in divorce.

Jeanine asked me the following question at one of my events:

“My parents divorced when I was 9 years old. I am 37 and single. Part of me resists serious commitment because I feel like, ‘What’s the point? It’s all impermanent anyway, so why even bother?’ I am afraid that after the honeymoon is over, I will be taken for granted and trapped in a loveless marriage. Can you help me?” 

What I said to Jeanine is, “I can hear how scared you are to end up like your parents. But the truth is, everything is impermanent. Life in a body is impermanent. The lack of permanence isn’t the issue. The issue is that relationships offer an amazing arena for healing fears and false beliefs, and for opening more and more to loving.

“Your parents didn’t role model for you what a good relationship looks like, so it sounds like you are stuck with some major fears and false beliefs about love and marriage.

“The point of a relationship is to learn together, grow together, share love, and enjoy fun, creativity, and companionship. We are here on this planet to evolve in our ability to love ourselves and others. Relationships offer us the most profound arena for learning about love. Relationships trigger everything that is unhealed in us – everything that prevents us from loving ourselves and others, giving us the opportunity to heal our fears and false beliefs.

“Your fear – that you “will be taken for granted and trapped in a loveless marriage” – is coming from some false beliefs.

“Let’s look at your fear of being taken for granted. Since others tend to treat us the way we treat ourselves, you might want to look inside to see if there are ways you are taking yourself for granted, or ways you do not speak up for yourself and take loving care of yourself when others are treating you unlovingly.

“I assure you that if you do your inner work of learning to love and value yourself and learn to take loving care of yourself around others, you will not end up trapped in a loveless marriage. If you were loving yourself and sharing your love with others, you would attract a partner who is also loving themselves and sharing their love with you.

“I’m wondering why you believe that you would ever be trapped. Obviously, your parents divorced, so neither of them was trapped. You might want to go inside and explore where you got the belief that marriage means being trapped.

“I suggest you focus on learning to see, love, and value your own beautiful essence. The more you learn to love yourself, the more you desire to share your love with others. Loving yourself fills you up with love, which you then want to share with others. When we love ourselves, we generally desire to have a partner with whom to share our love.

“In my experience, sharing love is the best experience on the planet. The more you love yourself, the more you find yourself wanting to fully manifest the magnificence of who you really are, and a loving relationship is one of the major ways of doing this.

“The part of you that ‘resists serious commitment’ is your wounded self, who got programmed by your parents to fear relationships. This is the part of you that believes there is no point in relationships, and this is the part of you that needs healing. The more you open to learning about your true, soul essence, and learn to love and value your essence, the more your wounded self gets healed.”

Sometimes people get confused in relationships regarding the issue of responsibility, and sometimes people feel trapped by their beliefs regarding what they are responsible for.

Caleb consulted with me because he was feeling very withdrawn from his girlfriend, Ella. Now in his middle 50s, he had been in and out of relationships for years, always running away when he felt a certain shut-down feeling.

“I don’t want to run away again,” he told me in our first session. “I’m tired of running and I don’t want to hurt Ella, but I can hardly look at her right now and I don’t feel anything for her. I don’t want to be around her.”

Caleb told me that when they were out to dinner, Ella had said something that sounded derogatory, and he commented to her about it. She became very upset with herself and started to cry. From this point on, Caleb felt withdrawn, and he wanted to understand what got triggered in him so we explored the cause of his withdrawal.

Caleb came from a childhood where his mother was very needy and was often an emotional wreck. Caleb had always tried to take responsibility for his mother’s feelings so that she would take care of him. The moment his mother would cry, Caleb would feel afraid that she wasn’t there for him, and at the same time he felt pulled on and trapped by her neediness.

As an adult, he fell into the same pattern in his relationships. He tells himself that he is responsible for Ella’s feelings, in order to feel in control of getting her to make him feel safe. Any time she is upset, he feels responsible and pulled on, just as he did with his mother, and he withdraws. He projects onto her the responsibility for making him feel safe – which is self-abandonment. The moment he tells himself that he is responsible for her, and makes her responsible for him, he believes that she is the source of danger – when actually his self-abandonment is causing the feeling of danger. It’s an inner vicious cycle that causes him to feel that he is trapped, which he actually isn’t.

Once he projects onto her that she is the source of the danger – that she is the one controlling him – he then withdraws, not realizing that he has trapped himself by telling himself that he is responsible for her feelings so that she will take responsibility for his feelings.

This is the trap of taking responsibility for others and for making others responsible for you. The moment you do this, you have abandoned yourself, which makes you feel very unsafe. You feel engulfed the moment the other person is upset, which makes it impossible for you to be truly caring about the other person. You cannot be caring when you are busy taking responsibility for another, hoping to have control over them taking responsibility for your feelings.

The way out of this trap is to move into the truth – to realize that your intent is to have control over making the other person love you because you are not loving yourself. The way out is to get that you are creating your own feelings of engulfment by taking responsibility for another’s feelings rather than for your own.

Others cannot make you feel trapped and engulfed, unless they have tied you up or have a gun to your head. You are the one trapping yourself, by telling yourself the lie that you are responsible for others’ feelings, and they are responsible for yours. You trap yourself when you abandon yourself by not taking responsibility for the thoughts and actions that are making you feel trapped and engulfed and controlled.

The moment you fully accept responsibility for your own feelings and let go of responsibility for others’ feelings, you are free from both the fear of rejection and the fear of engulfment. You are free to care about others and truly share love.

Caleb was ready to hear this. He was ready to let go of responsibility for Ella and take responsibility for himself, and as he practiced Inner Bonding, his feelings of love for Ella gradually returned.

I’ve frequently spoken about the fear of engulfment, which so often keeps people from being able to share love.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to share love but being afraid to really open to it? This is the situation Mandy finds herself in:

“How can I do a better job of letting love in and sharing love? I seem to feel a fear of engulfment with loving, kind people and I tend to get overwhelmed and very introverted….in a sense pushing them away…..I want to change, but I don’t know what else to do.” 

What I said to Mandy is, “Mandy, the fact that you experience a fear of engulfment with loving kind people indicates how much you want loving kindness, which triggers your fear that you will want it so much you will give yourself up to keep it. It’s the fear that you will give yourself up to avoid losing a loving kind person that leads to you pushing others away. Pushing them away is currently the only way your ego wounded self knows to protect you from losing yourself.”

There is much Mandy can do to heal this.

The fact that she is so fearful of giving herself up and allowing herself to be controlled and engulfed indicates that she is not giving herself the loving kindness she needs. Her inner child needs much loving kindness, so when she doesn’t give it to herself, she becomes needy of getting it from others. But being needy for loving kindness from others makes her vulnerable to losing herself, which is what is so very scary for her, so she ends up pushing people away as her protection against engulfment.

So I said to Mandy, “The first thing you need to do to begin to heal your fear of engulfment is to focus on giving yourself the loving kindness you need. Loving kindness toward yourself means letting go of self-judgments and of addictions that numb your feelings. Loving kindness toward yourself means attending to all your feelings with much kindness, gentleness, compassion and an intent to learn about what your feelings are telling you about how you are treating yourself, how you are treating others, and about how others are treating you.

“The other reason you push people away is because you have not yet developed your loving adult to the point of being willing to lose the other person rather than lose yourself. And you have not developed your loving adult to the point of setting healthy limits against being engulfed. Your ego wounded self is likely afraid of rejection, which can lead to losing yourself to avoid rejection. Without a loving adult to set limits against engulfment and to manage rejection in loving ways, you are left with the only thing you know to do, which is to pull away or push people away.

“In order to heal both your inner abandonment – your lack of giving yourself loving kindness – and your lack of loving limits against engulfment and not managing rejection, you need to practice Inner Bonding, which is what develops your loving adult.

“Once you are giving yourself the loving kindness you need, you will not be so vulnerable to giving yourself up to avoid losing another’s loving kindness. Once you develop your strong loving adult, you will know that you can manage loss and rejection – that you don’t have to give yourself up to avoid it. It is only when you know that you can manage rejection and loss that you will feel safe enough to open your heart and risk loving.

“This is what will enable you to stop pushing people away out of your fear of engulfment. This is what will enable you to keep your heart open to letting love in and to sharing your love.”

Relationships offer us more opportunities for personal growth than just about anything else in life. But sometime the opportunities are very challenging!

For example, Larry asked at one of my events:

“Whenever I feel a real connection with someone, whether it’s for friendship or a love interest, I lose my cool completely, can’t function and I end up losing them. What can I do?”

What I said to him is, “Larry, I’m certain that many people can identify with your experience. Let’s look at the underlying cause of this. The bottom line that leads to losing your cool is self-rejection, which means that you are abandoning yourself.

“Imagine that you have an actual little boy, and every time he makes a friend, you say to him, “If your friend doesn’t like you, then you are unworthy and unlovable.”  Your little boy would be so anxious that he could not be himself. He would be trying so hard to impress his friend that he would ‘lose his cool completely’, as you do. He would not be able to function and would end up losing the friend, which would reinforce his sense of unworthiness.

“If you said this to your actual little boy, you would be lying to him, because his worth and lovability would have nothing to do with whether or not someone likes him. If you were a loving father, you would let him know that he is intrinsically worthy and lovable because of his inherent qualities, such as his kindness or curiosity or empathy or aliveness or natural sense of humor, or sense of wonder, or his playfulness. You would let him know that he is worthy just for being himself. And if he knew this, he would not worry about whether a friend liked him, because his worth was not on the line.

“But on the inner level, you are rejecting your own inner child. You have not defined your own inherent worth, and instead you are giving your inner child away to others to define. This creates huge stress and you lose your cool. You can’t be yourself because you have to try to control whether or not the other person likes you. Then, because they likely feel pulled on by you to approve of you, they pull away. Most people do not want responsibility for another person’s sense of worth. Most people feel resistant and repelled when they sense that you are not being yourself and instead are trying to control how they feel about you.

“If you want to heal this, you need to decide that you want responsibility for defining your own worth and lovability. You need to start to tune in to how stressed you feel when you put pressure on yourself to impress someone. You need to open to learning with a higher power to learn to see yourself through the eyes of love rather than the eyes of self-judgment. You need to tune into the self-judgments you level at yourself that make you feel unworthy, inadequate, and unlovable.

“You will not be able to stop ‘losing your cool’ in relationships until you develop a loving and connected relationship with yourself – your true self. And you can’t bring the truth of who you are to your inner child, nor the love he needs from you, without a connection with a higher, spiritual source of love and truth.

“I suggest you learn and practice Inner Bonding, which is what will develop this inner connection. The consistent practice of Inner Bonding develops your loving adult self, the part of you who can connect with your higher power and bring the love and acceptance to your inner little boy that you need. Until then, you will likely continue to abandon yourself through your self-judgments, which will continue to create the stress that results in losing your cool.”

I often have clients and people who attend my events, who tend to isolate as a way of protecting against their fears – especially their fears of rejection and engulfment. They are so afraid of being disliked, disapproved of, attacked or having demands made on them, that they choose to avoid relationships, rather than learn how to deal with these challenging situations. If asked, most of them say they want a relationship, yet protecting against getting hurt is more important to them. One of the major decisions I made when I started to practice Inner Bonding many years ago, was that I was willing to be hurt, and the other major decision was that I would rather lose others than lose myself. These decisions were vital for me to made in order to keep my heart open to loving myself and sharing love with others.

The people who isolate from their fear of getting hurt have never developed a loving adult who knows how to take loving care of them when others are angry, rejecting, or demanding. They believe they prefer loneliness over the challenge of relationships.

Yet, time and again, I see the devastating effects of constant loneliness. We are social beings, meant to live within the safety and connection of family or community. While to people who isolate, it seems safer to avoid relationships, the research shows that a lack of community has a very negative effect on health and wellbeing. Research shows that far more single people are unhappy than married people, and people without friends die earlier than people with friends.

If you are a person who isolates, you can learn to feel safe without giving up being with people. You will feel safe when you learn how to take loving care of yourself, especially in the face of others’ anger, disapproval, and demands.

This means that you need to learn a number of very important things, which are not new to those of you who have been listening to my podcasts and who are practicing Inner Bonding.

• You need to learn to define your own worth, so that you are not reliant on others’ approval to feel good about yourself. 
• You need to learn to not take others’ behavior personally. While others’ blaming, attacking, disapproving, rejecting, demanding, or needy behavior can cause heartache and heartbreak, it is very important to know that it is not about you, and not about there being anything wrong with you. 
• You need to learn to manage the loneliness and heartbreak of others’ unloving behavior. It’s one thing to feel lonely when you have chosen to isolate – since you are in control of it – but quite another to feel the loneliness of others’ closed hearts and accept your helplessness over their choices.  Yet closing your own heart is not the answer. 
• You need to reach a point in your life where you know that being open-hearted and loving with yourself and others is why you are on the planet, and that there is no way of avoiding the loneliness and heartbreak of loving someone who is not being open-hearted with you. This is why learning to manage the very challenging feelings of loneliness and heartbreak – and your helplessness over others’ choices – is so important. Without knowing how to do this, you will likely be too afraid to love.

Practicing Inner Bonding is what will heal the fears and false beliefs that keep you isolated and afraid, by developing your loving adult who is capable of taking loving care of you in the face of others’ unloving behavior.

This is what will free you from isolation and the fears of rejection and engulfment. 

It takes great courage to learn how to take loving care of yourself – to speak your truth and take loving actions on your own behalf, risking others’ disapproval and rejection rather than giving yourself up to control how others feel about you, or isolating to avoid the challenge.

Do you have the courage to open your heart and learn how to love yourself? Do you have the courage to open your heart to others and risk rejection or loss? No one can ever make it “safe” for you to do this; truly loving is, in a sense, one of the least safe things we do on the planet. It is also the most fulfilling and joyful experience we ever have.

I hope you embrace the challenges to learning and growing that love and relationships have to offer.   

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 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 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.