S2 EP280 – The Two Decisions That Transformed my Life

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I want to share with you two vital choices that I made that changed my life and also healed me physically.

Before Inner Bonding, as I’ve shared many times, I was a caretaker giving myself up a lot. I had been eating really well for many, many years and exercising, but I got really, really ill. And I had no idea, the doctors were saying that my immune system was shutting down, I was headed for very serious illness, and I was sick all the time, and I had no idea why.

And the doctors had no idea why. So at that time, I was a caretaker. I was very, very fearful of rejection, I believed that I wasn’t good enough, that I was a bad person, and most people, I had been trained to think that rejection was my fault, and that if only I was a better caretaker, if only I did things better for other people, then people would love me, but they didn’t.

And so I gave and gave, and they took and took, and I got exhausted, and I got sick. And then I met Dr. Erika Chopich. And Erika had half of Inner Bonding, and I had half of Inner Bonding. And we realized as we talked about it, that we could put this together into something that was really, really powerful. And our guidance helped us to create the actual six steps.

But before we learned to access that, we put together the ideas that we had and then realized that we needed to put it together into a process. That’s when I realized how much I was abandoning myself, and that abandoning myself was making me sick. I realized how much I was judging myself; I was creating so much stress, so much anxiety with my self-judgments, I was ignoring my feelings, I didn’t even know what I felt about anything.

I was just in my head. I was tuned into others’ feelings but having no idea about my own. So I was completely abandoning my inner child, my own soul, in fact, I had no idea who I was as a soul because I had been trained, like I said, to think that I just wasn’t good enough as a person.

And so I started to realize that judging myself and staying up in my head and actually making everybody else responsible, everybody had to like me, everybody had to love me, for me to be okay, and I would get so hurt with rejection.

And also, I was addicted to various things. I was addicted to giving myself up, to being angry when people didn’t do what I wanted. I was addicted to, well, I was kind of addicted to sugar, I had sort of gotten over that, but it was still looming over me at that time.

And so what I realized when I started to practice Inner Bonding, that there were two choices, two decisions I needed to make if I was going to live, because I was so sick that I knew that I had to do something different than what I was doing.

And I realized that I needed to decide, number one, that I was willing to be hurt. I was willing to be rejected rather than continue to give myself up, that I had to start to learn who I am and to take responsibility for my own feelings rather than be caretaking others, hoping that they’re going to then caretake me, which had never worked.

Now, that wasn’t an easy decision, having spent my whole life giving myself up, being a caretaker, trying to get love from others, having no idea how to love myself. And I was afraid that if I started to take care of myself instead of take care of everybody else, my fears were going to happen, that I was going to be rejected.

The other decision that I had to make in order to take care of myself is that I was willing to lose others rather than continue to lose myself. I knew if I continue to lose myself, I would likely die. So many of my clients have been down this path and they end up with breast cancer or ovarian cancer or some other illness, some other life-threatening illness and that is where I was headed.

And again, I was really, really scared because I was afraid that if I didn’t give myself up, if I didn’t caretake others, I was going to find out that the people who said they loved me really didn’t, that my parents didn’t, that my kids didn’t, that my husband didn’t. But I knew that I needed to be willing to find this out. And in fact, almost everything that I was afraid of happened.

I lost my 30 year marriage. Two of my three kids were very angry with me, and my parents disowned me. After telling me for so many years that I didn’t have to worry about retirement because I was getting their inheritance, and that got cut off without my knowing it. So there were many scary things that happened at that time.

But the result was that I got better. I got a lot better. I really believe that those decisions saved my life. And not only that, but I got happier even though I was losing a lot, I felt happier. Maybe I felt joy for the very first time.

I don’t know. I think I remember some joy as a child, but as an adult, joy was not something I was feeling until I stopped abandoning myself and started to take loving care of myself. What a change in my life that this made.

Now I know that it’s not easy to make decisions like this. I know how scared I was. And when I started to do this, I was living in a loft upstairs. I wasn’t staying with my husband at that time because I had said to him when I started to take care of myself that I’m not going to spend time with him until he can be kind with me for three months.

I gave him time, but that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen that when I was around him, he was caring, he was kind. He could do it for a short period of time, and then it would go back to being angry or being withdrawn and me being lonely about that. And so I had moved upstairs into this loft area, but I could feel him, and I could feel my kids being upset with me.

And I remember sitting there wrapping my arms around my legs and rocking and saying to myself, “I can handle this. I can handle this. I can handle this.” It wasn’t easy. And so I totally understand that it’s very hard to make these decisions, yet unless you’re willing to do that, you’re going to be giving yourself up.

You’re going to be either caretaking or being angry, trying to control overtly, trying to control covertly to get love rather than learning to love yourself. And this is really what Inner Bonding is about – this six step pathway to learn to love yourself. And I look back at having made those decisions and what I lost as a result, and I have no regrets.

My practice started to flourish in a way that it hadn’t before, new friends came into my life to support me in what I was doing. Erika was a huge support because she really understood why I was so sick, and things started to happen in a way that life hadn’t happened for me before. I became able to access my higher guidance as a result of no longer giving myself up.

When I made those decisions, it helped me to stay open to learning with my guidance. And I realized at that time how to connect with my guidance. I had been trying for so long and I had been eating well, I was still eating well for so long, and I didn’t realize at that time that I had to be open to learning about loving myself.

And once I started to do that, my frequency went high enough because I had been eating well for so long, and the intention to learn raised my frequency high enough that I started to access my higher guidance. Now, that’s hugely life changing.

Being able to go through your life, knowing that you’re being guided moment by moment, knowing that there is a source of love and wisdom, and strength and courage and comfort here for you all the time makes a huge difference in how you live life.

Learning to trust your feelings, learning to trust your inner guidance, your soul, your inner child is huge. Learning to trust your intuition, your inner knowing, this changes everything, and it changed everything for me.

Now, it’s ongoing, even though I made those decisions about 40 years ago, I have to still practice. I have to be aware of my intention. I have to be aware of whether my intention is to control, or my intention is to be loving to myself and to others. And so it’s just ongoing. It’s not like you make these decisions and that’s it.

It’s a moment by moment choice to decide what your intention is and be willing to deal with the consequences of that intention. Because so often in my work with people, I mention these decisions that I made, and I understand that they’re not willing to make that because they believe that it’s somebody else’s love that’s their lifeline.

Now, I also understand this because when we were very small, we were infants, others love was our lifeline, and if we didn’t get it, then we likely never learned how to manage our big feelings. And so we continue to try and control others. We continue to turn to various addictions to try to avoid those big feelings that we never learned to manage.

Think about your parents or other caregivers. Did any of them role model showing you how to take care of their own big feelings? Or did they act out? Did they get angry? Did they withdraw? Did they blame? What did they do rather than manage their feelings? Did they overeat? Did they take drugs? Were they alcoholics? Were they workaholics? Were they addicted to television or pornography or having affairs?

There’s so many ways that people avoid responsibility for their feelings, and if that’s what you grew up with, where would you have learned to do that? I didn’t learn to take care of my feelings. I learned the opposite. My feelings didn’t count; I had to take care of everybody else’s feelings. And so I didn’t learn to manage my own big feelings.

I didn’t learn to learn from my anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or anger or aloneness or emptiness. I didn’t learn to learn from those feelings. I didn’t learn that I was the cause of those feelings with my self- abandonment, and I didn’t learn what I was avoiding on the deeper level.

I didn’t learn that I was avoiding deep feelings of loneliness and heartbreak and helplessness over my parents and over others. I didn’t learn that everybody didn’t have the same level of empathy that I have and that they could be mean to me, which I couldn’t do because of feeling empathic towards the effect that my behavior had on others.

I didn’t understand that others may not have felt the same way that I did. And so it was easy for me as an empath to take responsibility for others’ feelings. And now I’m grateful for the fact that I got so sick because if I hadn’t have gotten sick, I might not have decided these two decisions that I was willing to be hurt, I was willing to be rejected, and I was willing to lose others rather than continue to lose myself. These decisions were deeply, deeply life-changing for me on so many levels.

These decisions enabled me to be very devoted to practicing Inner Bonding and developing the neural pathways for my loving adult, which of course I didn’t have.

Most people that I work with, they don’t have the neural pathways for the loving adult because unless your parents were very warm, very comforting, there for you, showing you with their own behavior how to manage their own feelings, how to be a loving adult; unless they didn’t get triggered if you were upset or angry or had a tantrum or went into resistance, if they stayed open to learning with you. How many of you had parents like that?

Well, of course I don’t get people like that in my practice because anybody who was raised like that likely is able to do that for themselves. They likely learn to develop their own loving adult because of the role modeling that their parents gave them.

They likely felt safe when they were scared or upset because they had a safe parent there for them, but most of us didn’t have that. Our parents did not know how to take responsibility for their own feelings, and so they role modeled for us all the various ways of abandoning themselves, and we all absorb that into our own wounded self.

The wounded self cannot be a loving parent. The frequency of the wounded self is too low to access any source of love or any source of truth. And so when we’re operating from our wounded self, there’s no way that we can be a loving adult to ourselves; we are going to act out.

And you have only to look at what’s happening in our society with so many people acting out, acting out their anger, acting out their hatred, coming from their wounded self. The loving adult would never be acting that way.

The loving adult is caring, is compassionate, is connected to a powerful source of love and wisdom. The loving adult can tune into that guidance and ask, what would be loving to me? What would be loving to me right now?

That’s one of the things that you might want to start to practice is asking throughout the day, what would be loving to me right now. It’s the same thing if you have kids, if you have little ones that are acting out or even teenagers that are acting out, being able to ask what would be loving to them? What would a loving parent do for them right now?

And that’s what you want to ask of yourself. What would a loving parent do for my beautiful inner child? And one of the things that happens as a result of practicing Inner Bonding and getting connected with your higher guidance is that you start to see who you are in your soul.

You start to see how beautiful you are, that you are a spark of the divine. You start to be able to define your worth on the inner level by who you are rather than by how you look or what you do. You start to be able to see that the false belief that there’s something wrong with you or you’re not good enough or you’re bad is a false belief – that there’s no truth to that at all, because your soul can’t be inadequate.

Your soul can’t be bad because it is a spark of the divine. When the wounded self says to you, ‘you’re not good enough, you’re inadequate, you’re not lovable, this person has to love you for you to be okay, you’re not okay on your own,’ it’s actually talking about its itself. The wounded self is something we created. Spirit created our soul essence, and as the wounded self, we are not okay, we are not complete, we are not whole.

We are coming from so many false beliefs. One of the false beliefs I was operating from is that I couldn’t handle rejection. I had no idea how to do that, so I had to be a caretaker and make sure everybody liked me, except it didn’t work out at all because people were treating me the way I was treating myself. People were not loving me in the way that I was not loving myself.

And that’s why everything changed for me, even though there were the losses, what changed for me was how I was treating myself on the inner level. And I found that the more I was seeing and valuing and loving myself, the more I experienced that with the more open people in my life, that as I learned to reflect my own essence to myself, my own inner child, as I learned to mirror the beautiful qualities that I learned from spirit, then other people actually started to give me what I’ve been trying to get.

All those years, been trying to get the love, trying to get the reflection from them that I was okay. But it was only when I started to give this to myself that other people were naturally giving me that. And of course, I didn’t need it. I mean, it is like the icing on the cake. I didn’t need it in the same way that I needed it when I was abandoning myself.

Of course, it’s always nice to get seen and valued and heard by others, but as I said, it was the icing on the cake. My loving myself was the foundation, it was the cake. When I wasn’t loving myself even if people were giving me positives, there was no place for it to land, it didn’t go in a deep way. So I had to keep being a caretaker over and over and over again to try and get these little bits of validation.

But once I was doing that for myself, then that became the foundation that became the cake. And so now when people give me positive comments, there’s a place for it to land. It’s the icing on the cake, but it’s not the cake.

I don’t have to rely on others reflecting me, listening to me, hearing me in order for me to know that my soul is a beautiful individual expression of God with my own gifts and my own talents. And I reflect this to my inner child all the time. So she knows I’m here just like a loving parent reflects that to their children.

I reflect it to my own inner child, and this makes her feel loved, this makes her feel safe, this makes her feel full, so that when others reflect me, it’s great. It’s fine, but it doesn’t define me. I don’t need other people to define me anymore since I’ve learned to define my own sense of worth.

I really, really encourage you to learn and practice Inner Bonding, to learn who you really are in your essence, to learn, to take responsibility for your feelings, to develop your spiritually connected, loving adult. And this is why I encourage you to take my bimonthly Master Circle and receive my life help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

And it’s why I encourage you to take my 30 day home study course that teaches Inner Bonding, Love Yourself, an Inner Bonding experience to heal anxiety, depression, shame, addictions, and relationships. This is a great way to learn Inner Bonding as well as from our many books and other courses at our website at http://www.innerbonding.com. 

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.