S2 EP278 – Is the Past Hijacking Your Present?

Hi everyone Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m looking forward to sharing some things with you about the past and how it might be hijacking your present and what you can do about it.

The past certainly has a very big effect, but it doesn’t have to define you or your present. So I’d like to talk a little bit about my past, I was trained as some of you know, to be a caretaker and to put aside my own feelings, my feelings didn’t count, I was there as an only child to take care of my parents’ feelings, my grandmother’s feelings, my cousin’s feelings, and anybody else’s feelings who were around me.

And there were a lot of false beliefs connected with that. I believed that if I took care of other people’s feelings, then of course they would be kind to me and take care of my feelings. And those of you who tend to be a caretaker know that this actually never happens.

What happens is that you set up a system where you’re the caretaker, you’re giving yourself up in order to try and get love because that’s what I was doing. It was a form of control to give myself up to try and get love. But what happens is that the other person just becomes the taker – you give, they take, you get exhausted, and I did, I got exhausted from giving, giving, giving.

And then of course, when you are the caretaker and other people are not appreciating you, then you get upset, you get angry. “Look at all I’ve done! Look at what I’m giving, and nobody appreciates me!”

Well, the real issue is that you’re not appreciating yourself, you’re actually abandoning yourself to take responsibility for other people’s feelings rather than for your own feelings. And then you’re upset when they’re not doing the same thing, but like I’ve often said, people tend to treat us the way we treat ourselves.

And so when I was giving myself up, not paying any attention to my own feelings, not even knowing what I felt about much, then why would somebody else care about my feelings? When I obviously wasn’t. When I was broadcasting with my caretaking that my feelings didn’t count.

My feelings weren’t important, they weren’t important to me, why should they be important to anybody else? And so this is one of the things that affects us in the present. I had no role modeling for taking care of my own feelings. And without that role modeling, we just don’t know how to take care of ourselves.

We’re either caretaking, trying to get somebody else to take care of us, or taking, trying to get somebody else to take care of us. I had no idea how to manage my big feelings, and this is what happens with so much of the parenting.

Children don’t know how to manage their feelings, how could they? They have brains that are in the process of developing, and the first part of the brain that develops is the lower part of the brain, the amygdala. That’s part of the survival mechanism, the fight or flight mechanism, fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

I learned the fawn, but I also learned to flee, to shut down and not really have any connection with my own feelings. We don’t learn to manage our feelings when our parents have not learned to manage theirs. How many parents, if a child is screaming or has a temper tantrum or throws themselves on the floor, manages to role model what a loving adult would do, which would be to pick up the child, be calm, be soothing, create a sense of safety for the child.

I never had this. I remember very clearly one time I must’ve been about maybe four years old, something had happened, and I can’t remember what it was, it was something with my mother, maybe she was yelling at me, which she did a lot.

And I started to cry, and I was crying really, really, really hard. And my aunt was there, my Aunt Anne, who was much more caring with me than my mother was. And my aunt was there, and she said to my mother, “She’s really upset.” And my mother just kind of gave her a look and put her hand down and said, “Oh, she’ll get over it!”

And so there was no comforting, there was no trying to understand the effect that her behavior had on me. There was no caring about what I was feeling, and therefore no role modeling for how to handle big feelings. I was left on my own, so of course, I never learned how to handle big feelings, most kids don’t. And so they might act out because they don’t know what else to do.

If we as parents did our own inner work and could role model, caring, soothing, balancing, feeling, regulated behavior, then children would eventually learn that as children’s brains develop, then they could learn to develop their loving adult in their higher brain. But if there’s no loving adult role modeling that higher brain, then kids don’t learn that. And of course, that past affects us today.

It’s not that we can’t do anything about it, we certainly can, but that means doing the inner work we need to do to develop a strong, loving adult. The other way the past has a big effect on you is about the decisions you made as a result of your past experiences.

And I’d like to give you an example of this. So there’s a brother and a sister, and I’ll call them Joseph and Nancy. Nancy made the decision to comply and care take in a family that was very, very dysfunctional with both parents being very controlling the father, being angry and punishing in many ways.

And so Nancy decided at a very young age that the way to be safe, because it’s always about safety, the wound itself, the amygdala is about safety, was to comply, was to be a caretaker, and that’s where she is now as an adult. And that’s really holding her back in her life.

Now, her brother Joseph, made a completely different decision. His decision was to resist. He resisted everything, he was the bad kid, and he just did whatever he wanted, he didn’t listen to what anybody, his parents, wanted him to do, he was just the bad kid.

Now, interesting today, Nancy sees herself as a failure as an interior decorator. And Joseph is a huge success as an actor. So interesting to see two people who I know quite well from the same family with the same background, who made completely different decisions as children and how that affects them now.

And so yes, the past has a huge effect, but we have something to do with that as well, depending upon the kind of decisions that we made. Now, the kinds of decisions I made was yes, to be a caretaker, but also I knew that I couldn’t rely on my parents, I knew that I had to rely on myself.

And so while I would comply with them, when I was around them, when I was off by myself, I did my own thing, and that’s why I don’t see myself the way Nancy does as a failure. That’s why I’ve been able to pursue my own passion and be a success with what I love to do because of the decision that I made to be my own person when I was alone, not around others, but when I was alone.

Now, here’s another example. I’m going to call this person Hannah. And Hannah is a very open, loving person who has two other siblings, and her siblings are very mean and very controlling. Now, they all came from a very abusive background. They came from the same parents who did not role model loving behavior at all, but very early, Hannah made the decision, or maybe she came in that way, I don’t know, as a higher being, I don’t know, but she made the decision at some point to be a caring, open, loving human being. Whereas her two siblings made the decision to be very controlling, very mean.

Now, I don’t know how much people come in with this. It may be an old soul and a young soul, I don’t really know that, but I do know that people make decisions really early in their lives about who they want to be.

It would be so much easier if we had loving role models as parents, parents who had done their own inner work, parents who were able to role model what it looks like to be a loving adult. So often with my clients, they want to learn to be a loving adult, but they say, I have no idea what that looks like. No idea, even if they had children, and even if they were loving parents to their children, they don’t get that it’s the same thing on the inner level.

If they were loving parents to their children, they had enough of an adult to be there for their children, but they don’t turn it around on themselves and see that they need the exact same kind of comfort and caring and sense of safety that they gave to their children, especially when their children were very young and their brains were growing very rapidly.

So as you can see from these examples, each of these people made different decisions as children, and these decisions showing up as beliefs currently affect their present. And so our past effects are present in a number of ways, but as I said, we don’t have to be defined by that. We can do the healing work, that is what I talk about.

And the healing work is about Inner Bonding. Inner Bonding is an amazing process to heal the past, to develop the strong, comforting, loving adult that we all need to be for ourselves. Learning to give ourselves what we didn’t get, learning to become the strong caring mom and dad that you might not have had. The practice of Inner Bonding teaches you how to do this.

When I first started practicing Inner Bonding and I had no idea how to be a loving adult. None whatsoever, because if you don’t have the role modeling, how do you know that? You look around, where are the role models? Where are the role models for being a loving adult?

And so, because Inner Bonding is also a spiritual process, and we realized, Dr. Erika Chopich and I as we were creating it, that we needed a higher power to be the role model because where else could we find that?

And so as I started to practice Inner Bonding, which I was blown away by when Erika and I met and I had half the process and she had half the process, and we started to put it together, I just realized, wow, this is really, really, really powerful. But I needed to practice it, it wasn’t natural, I wasn’t in touch with my feelings in step one, and I needed to become more conscious of my intention.

But one of the main things that the practice of Inner Bonding gave me is a connection with my higher guidance. And I remember very clearly early in my practice of Inner Bonding, realizing that I on my own, in my own mind, did not know how to be a loving adult.

And what I did at that point is I asked my higher guidance to be the loving adult for me. I said, “I invite you into my body. I invite you to act through me because I don’t know what to do, but I know you do.” And it was a major letting go process, letting go of the control, the control of caretaking, of giving myself up, of taking responsibility for everybody but myself and allowing something higher, which I had not been brought up with to act through me.

My parents, as I’ve said previously, were atheists, they taught me nothing about spirit. So I had to go on faith that something was actually there until I could access that and feel it. But even though I couldn’t feel it a lot, I invited it to act through me, to be that loving adult, to be that strong mom and dad for my little girl who I was just discovering.

I was just discovering that my feelings were a source of guidance, which is a major part of Inner Bonding, recognizing that your feelings have so much information for you. It took me a long time to even be aware of my feelings because I was so much in my head, so much tuning into other people’s feelings, but had completely learned to ignore my own because I had no idea how to take care of painful feelings.

What do you do when you have painful feelings, which we all have the painful feelings of life, the loneliness, the grief, the heartbreak, the helplessness over others or the feelings that we cause with our self-abandonment, the anxiety, the depression, guilt and shame, I lived with so much guilt and shame and so much anxiety, and I had no idea that I was the cause of that. And I had no idea what to do about it until I started to practice Inner Bonding.

And it took time for me to even become aware of my feelings, so I don’t want those of you who are starting Inner Bonding to get discouraged, this is not an instant process. It’s like learning anything that’s important to you. If you want to learn to play a musical instrument, you’re going to have to practice and practice and practice, and if you want to stay good at it, you have to practice your whole life.

Sometimes my clients say to me, “Well, how long do I have to do this?” Or “How much time does it take?” Well, it’s not about that. It’s like saying, well, how long does it take when you have a baby to be a parent or “How long do you have to be a parent?” You’re always a parent. No matter how old your kids are, you’re always a parent.

Well, it’s the same thing on the inner level. We are always the mom and dad to our own feelings, our own soul, our own inner child. That doesn’t go away just because we learned at one point to take care of our feelings, we have to do it moment by moment.

And so still, now 40 years later, I still ask my guidance throughout the day, “What is loving to me right now? What is in my highest good right now?” And I listen and I take the action of whatever it is that my guidance is telling me is in my highest good. And it could be about anything. It could be about what I have for breakfast or lunch, it could be about how I respond to a challenging situation.

It could be about how I spend some free time, like on a weekend, what my inner child really wants, what would be loving to me? Would it be best for me to go out and do something fun? Would it be best for me to stay home and rest and just play some games with my golden girl housemate? What’s in my highest good?

This is what we want to be asking, learning to ask, getting in the habit of asking throughout the day, what is loving to me? What is in my highest good? And then we need to be willing to take the action. Our inner child is inside, it’s our soul. It’s not the part of us that can take action.

Our wounded self is that amygdala at the bottom of the brain, the fight or flight mechanism that has all the false beliefs. And when we take action based on that advice, the advice of our wounded self, who likes to act like an authority, the actions are not going to be loving.

They’re not going to be loving to ourselves, and they’re not going to be loving to others. In fact, all actions that are hurtful to ourselves and to others are actions that are coming from the wounded self. When our higher mind, our left brain that takes the action, listens to the advice of the wounded self, rather than opening to learning and hearing the guidance of your higher self.

I cannot emphasize how important this is for our world right now. So many people are operating from their lower mind, their wounded self, which comes from fear, which has hatred, which can hurt others in so many ways.

It is so important right now to be doing this inner work, your Inner Bonding work, instead of listening to that voice of your young or adolescent wounded self filled with fear and false beliefs, you are opening to listening to the higher voice of your higher self, your higher guidance, which would never advise you to do anything that would be hurtful to yourself or hurtful to others.

The wounded self is about separation. It sees us in terms of us and them, and it’s threatened by people who are different than you. The wounded self will look at people of different genders or different races or different sexuality and judge them because they’re different, because the wounded self always feels one down and always is trying to feel one up.

And one of the ways the wound self feels one up is to put other people down. And it’s easy for somebody to put somebody down who’s a different gender or has a different form of sexuality, or is a different race or a different religion, that is what the wounded self does.

But it’s not at all what you do when you’re listening to your higher self because the more you learn to be a loving adult and take loving care of yourself and really see the beauty of your own soul and realize that you’re not your wounded self, you are that beautiful soul within you.

The more you see that and know that and develop that loving adult, that spiritually connected, loving adult, the easier it is for you to look at others and see beyond their race or their religion or their gender or their weight or their sexuality, and see their soul. That is who they are. And when you do that, separation goes away.

You feel a sense of oneness because you realize that all living things are sparks of the divine. That we are all one and are planet needs this so badly right now, we need to experience our oneness, not our separation. So I’m hoping that you’re going to do your own Inner Bonding work so that you can learn to be a strong, spiritually connected, loving adult for your beautiful inner child, your beautiful soul, and also be able to see the souls of others and feel the oneness with all of life.

And this is why I encourage you to take my bimonthly Master Circle and receive my live help, which you can learn about at innerbondinghub.com/membership and it’s why I encourage you to take my 30 day home study course that teaches Inner Bonding, Love Yourself. This course will teach you Inner Bonding, it will teach you how to heal from your anxiety, your depression, your guilt, your shame, your addictions, it will help you heal your relationships. This is a really great way to learn Inner Bonding as well as from our many books and other courses from our website at innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.

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