S2 EP288 – Your Emotions Are Messengers – Did You Learn to Listen?

Hi everyone, Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m talking about moving from emotional avoidance to emotional wisdom.

Did you learn to learn from and regulate your emotions? I certainly didn’t. I never saw anybody taking responsibility for their own emotions, I never saw my parents sitting down and saying “Huh, I wonder what I’m doing and what I’m telling myself to make me feel this way.” No, it was blaming or avoiding.

And so what I was taught about my emotional feelings was not to trust them, not to cry over spilt milk, which means don’t go into your feelings, avoid them, don’t see them as important, don’t see them as letting you know whether you’re loving yourself or abandoning yourself or what’s happening with another person. Just ignore them. Don’t deal with them, get rid of them. And of course, we learned many, many ways of getting rid of them.

We learned early from our parents, from media, from peers to get up in our head and avoid our body, which is where our feelings are – to judge them that we shouldn’t be feeling this way. What’s wrong with us for feeling this way?

Many of us learned addictions early, whether it’s food or television or screens or whatever, or pornography or spending or shopping, or whatever you saw your parents do or other people do or whatever was available. If they were alcoholics avoiding their feelings, you might’ve learned to drink really early as a way to avoid your feelings.

If you were brought up like I was where you made other people responsible for your feelings, then you learned to do that. You learned to believe that your feelings are not about how you treat yourself or how you treat others, but about others and whether or not they’re approving of you, whether they’re loving you or not – that your feelings come from something external rather than from how you treat yourself.

And so most of us never learned any way of managing our emotions or learning from our emotions. We learned to be in our head, to judge, to turn to addictions, to look to others, to act out rather than act in. And this is really what Inner Bonding is about – it’s about going in, it’s about recognizing that all of our feelings are instant messengers about how we’re treating ourselves and what we’re telling ourselves.

But few of us learned to be a loving adult. We didn’t learn that our emotions are messages for us, that our emotions are vital for us to understand what’s going on inside of us. We didn’t learn to manage our feelings of life and learn what they’re telling us. Very few of us learned anything about self-regulation. If your parents did not know how to regulate their own feelings – and certainly my parents did not learn that – then we learned what was role modeled for us.

We learned to do what our parents did or our other caregivers. And so think about what did – what you saw role modeled. Here’s what I saw. I saw my parents shutting down, withdrawing love, giving me mean looks, getting angry, blaming each other, blaming me, being very judgmental, turning to food, and somewhat turning to alcohol, turning to busy-ness. That was what was role modeled.

I never saw my parents really have the slightest bit of interest in learning from their feelings. They had no recognition at all that their emotions were messengers that were very important to listen to. So what’s important is to understand what your emotional feelings are telling you. Like I said, they’re telling you whether or not you’re loving yourself or whether you’re abandoning yourself.

And this is really, really important. They’re telling you whether you’re treating yourself the way your parents treated you or treated themselves or other caregivers, or whether you’re present in your body with your feelings, wanting to be with that feeling self, which is your inner child, your soul, recognizing that these are vital messages.

So it’s really important to want to know about your feelings so that you know whether you’re loving yourself or abandoning yourself. Your feelings also tell you so much about other people. If you’re with somebody and you’re feeling, for example, made responsible for their feelings, you’re feeling pulled at, that gives you information that they’re abandoning themselves and expecting you to take care of them.

If you feel judged, then that’s going to tell you that they’re in their wounded self, they’re not open, they’re likely empty people judging you as a way to feel better about themselves. Your feelings can also tell you whether somebody is open or closed, whether they’re safe or dangerous. Now, this is really important information.

I’ve worked with so many clients where they didn’t listen to those feelings and they ended up getting themselves into a dangerous situation or ended up in a relationship with somebody who was treating them badly because they didn’t listen to their inner knowing, they didn’t listen to their emotional feelings.

As you learn to tune into your feelings, you learn to trust yourself. You learn to trust your intuition, your inner knowing. You recognize that your feelings are a form of inner guidance. Our feelings instantly let us know these things – they instantly let us know whether we’re loving ourselves or abandoning ourselves, they instantly let us know what’s happening with somebody else that we may be involved in or even a situation that we might want to avoid.

There were people like in 9/11 for example, that had an intuition that morning not to go to work. Something told them not to go to work. That was their inner guidance their higher guidance saying, “Don’t go to work today.” Now, I don’t know how many people who ended up dying in 9/11 had that intuition and didn’t listen to it, but I know there are quite a few who did have the intuition and listened to it.

And so obviously that saved their life, listening to their inner knowing, their intuition. The important thing here is to learn to trust yourself. And how do you learn to trust yourself if you’re not willing to start to listen to your emotional feelings? How do you learn to trust yourself unless you test it out? You sometimes listen, you sometimes don’t, and you see what happens.

I had to go through that process, which I’ve talked about before, where I tested things out and invariably when I didn’t listen, things did not go nearly as well as they did when I did listen. I listen to the big things, I listen to the small things. Guidance is always there – it doesn’t matter that whether it’s big or little is not that important. What’s important is to be listening inside and trusting what your feelings are telling you.

And the way to go about learning to trust is to test it out, how else do you learn something? You test it out to see what’s going to happen if you listen, and what’s going to happen if you don’t.

Now, of course, this might take some courage, which you’re going to need to access your guidance, to listen to your higher guidance, to listen to your inner guidance, because most of us have been listening to our wounded self all this time, and the wounded self says “Oh, I’ve been keeping you safe, I protect you, I’m the one you need to listen to. You’re still alive, you’re sane, (hopefully) and I’m the one that’s taking care of things.”

But that’s not true because if you feel anxiety, if you feel depression, if you feel fear, if you feel empty and alone, then the wound itself isn’t taking care of things, isn’t taking responsibility for your feelings, which the wounded self cannot do, but the wounded self is adamant about it’s the one that can keep you safe.

It does take courage to open to your inner guidance and your higher guidance and start to listen to that after a lifetime of listening to your wounded self. It takes courage. It took me courage to start to listen inside. I had never been listening. I was so tuned into other people’s feelings and completely not tuned into mine.

So it took courage to get inside my body, to be aware of my feelings, to recognize that my feelings had information for me, and to start to listen to that. I think I’ve recommended before and I’m going to recommend again Kate Silverton’s book: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Naughty’.

She writes about how to parent so children learn to self-regulate. And this is actually a great role model for self-parenting. You don’t have to have children or work with children to read this book. You can read it from the point of view that everything she says about an actual child is what she’s also saying about your inner child.

And what she’s modeling is a loving adult. And we don’t have very many role models for loving adults, but she role models a very open to learning, compassionate, caring, loving adult, not an authoritarian or permissive adult, which doesn’t work well with kids, and it doesn’t work well with our inner child either.

So she has different words for the wounded self and for the loving adult. She calls the wounded self a baboon, and she calls the loving adult a wise owl, and she calls the instinctual part of the brain, the fight or flight mechanism, the lizard brain – that’s the real lower brain.

But it makes it easy to understand the wounded self and the loving adult through her metaphors of a baboon and a wise owl. And she encourages parents to be their own wise owl with their children. But in order to do that, you have to have a wise owl, which is a loving adult to role model for your children.

So if anybody wants to have children, it would really be great for you to learn this before you have children. It’s great to learn Inner Bonding and develop your loving adult before you become a parent. To be that wise owl with your children, you need to learn to be that wise owl, that loving adult, with yourself, because children learn mostly through role modeling.

If your children see you being a loving adult with them, as well as with yourself – it’s not just with them – it’s with yourself. In fact, for some people, it’s how their parents treated themselves that they absorbed more than how their parents treated them.

I was just working with somebody last week who’s had a lot of therapy, but she got really confused as to why was she having so many problems because her parents were quite loving and supportive with her, and she’s looked for what went on that’s causing her so many problems in her life.

And what she realized is that her parents were not loving to themselves. They did not role model being that wise owl, that loving adult. And so they became her role model for how to treat herself, which is what happens with so many of us. I work with so many people who say “Yeah, but my parents were really loving to me.”

And then I say “Well, how did they treat themselves?” “Oh, well, my mother gave herself up all the time, she was a caretaker, she was always exhausted. My father worked hard, he came home, he was angry, he sat in front of the television or he participated in pornography.” Even if those parents were kind and loving to their children, that’s what they were role modeling for you.

So it’s really important for you to take a look at how did your parents treat themselves, because that’s going to let you in on a lot of information regarding how you’re treating yourself from your wounded self, because we all absorbed the wounded selves of our parents, we all absorbed their false beliefs, their way of treating themselves, and that may be how you are treating yourself now.

And so the way to start is with step one of Inner Bonding, which means getting present in your body. You can’t move into the other steps of Inner Bonding – you can’t move into being able to hear yourself, listen to yourself, know what’s going on unless you are in your body, which is where your feelings are.

And this isn’t always easy. This is not an instant process. I think I’ve said previously in one of the podcasts that it took me quite a while – that I had to have reminders, I had sticky notes around, I wore this gadget called a MotiVator. I just couldn’t remember to check in with my feelings for a long time.

And so I had to work hard at remembering, I had to have a lot of reminders, even like wearing a special bracelet or wearing a special pin or something that when you touch it, it reminds you to check in, to go inside and check in with your feelings.

Now, once you really learn and practice Inner Bonding, then the moment you’re feeling anything other than fullness inside peace inside, then you know it’s time to do the work of Inner Bonding.

It’s time to open to learning about how you’re treating yourself. It’s time to ask for help from your higher guidance. It’s time to inquire, to explore with your inner child, who is your feeling self, how you’re treating your little girl or a little boy that may be causing something other than peace inside, that may be causing some anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or anger or aloneness or emptiness or jealousy or envy or bitterness or resentment.

These feelings are feelings that we cause, as I’ve said very often, with our self-abandonment – with our ignoring our feelings, with our judging ourselves, with our turning to addictions and numbing out, with our blaming others and making others responsible. These major four ways of self-abandonment are causing these painful feelings.

Now, you can certainly go on believing that they’re being caused by outside factors, outside people or outside experiences, and certainly outside experiences can cause difficult feelings – can cause grief, can cause heartbreak, can cause loneliness and helplessness over others and situations. These are very hard feelings – can cause sorrow over people hurting each other and things like that.

But even if there’s difficult outside situations, a feeling such as anxiety is generally coming from what you tell yourself about that something like “Oh, this is never going to get better.” Or “Oh, I’m going to end up on the streets.”

I mean, that’s very scary, that creates a lot of anxiety. And so when you feel those feelings, you want to take a look at what are you telling yourself? How are you treating yourself that’s causing these feelings? And you can’t do that if you’re not present in your body.

And so that’s why step one of Inner Bonding is learning to be present in your body with your emotional feelings and your physical feelings, because your physical feelings have information for you too. Very often our emotions show up physically like a tightness in your stomach or a tightness in your heart or in your jaw.

And so by being in your body rather than in your mind, you can become aware of how you’re treating yourself, and you can also become aware of things that are very important to tune into with others and with situations.

And so I’m hoping that you’re going to be motivated to learn and practice Inner Bonding. If you have never done Inner Bonding, I suggest you come to our website and take our free seven day course, if you want to deepen your experience in Inner Bonding, then you can join me for my 30-Day home study Course “Love Yourself. It’s a video course that teaches Inner Bonding and it’s a very, very powerful course.

We have other courses and events that help you learn Inner Bonding, but what’s important here is to really start to practice step one of Inner Bonding, being present in your body, just like a loving parent is present with their baby.

If they’re not holding their baby, they have a baby monitor on. I call this having your inner baby monitor on. They have a baby monitor on so they know when the baby cries, they know when to pick up the baby, they know to tune in. The baby can’t tell them, the baby can’t say “I’m hungry” Or “I’m lonely” Or “I need a diaper change” Or “Something’s hurting me”.

They can’t say that. The parent has to open and intuit. And the only way they’re going to do that is if they’re either holding their baby or they have a baby monitor on and they’re listening for the baby’s cry. That’s what we’re doing on the inner level – we’re listening inside so that we can attend to our own needs and our own feelings rather than expecting somebody else to do it for us, somebody to read our mind and know what we need or blame somebody for what’s happening for us.

You can also learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from all of our books, from everything on our website and from my Master Circle which you can find by looking under events on our website.

There’s so many ways of learning Inner Bonding, so I really want to encourage you. This is so life-changing, been so life-changing for me and the hundreds of thousands of people that I’ve worked with. I really want to encourage you to not only learn Inner Bonding, but to integrate it into your life, to be practicing step one throughout the day and practicing Inner Bonding anytime there’s something other than peace and fullness inside.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.