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S2 EP66 – What Actually Makes You Feel Safe

Episode Summary

Are you still doing the things you learned as a child to try to feel safe? Our wounded self is a survival mechanism, designed to keep us safe, but the ways that our wounded self goes about trying to create safety generally have the opposite result. Instead of keeping us safe, it creates fear and anxiety. Which do you believe keeps you safer – your wounded self or your spiritual guidance? 

Transcript

How are we to feel safe in a scary world? We all want to feel safe, and we have all learned many survival mechanisms in an attempt to feel safe. These controlling thoughts and behaviors come from our left brain amygdala – our wounded self. Our wounded self absorbed many controlling behaviors to try to keep us safe, but obviously, this programmed lower part of our brain cannot keep us safe, no matter how hard it tries to control! or bad or try to be perfect to get attention, or we might have projected the fear onto something other than our parents, because acknowledging that it was our parents causing our fear caused more fear.

Even as grown-ups, we might still use the protections we developed as children, except now, instead of making us feel safe, our own self-abandoning controlling behavior causes us to feel unsafe.

For example, my client Stacey grew up with a mother who constantly screamed at her. By the time she was 8 years old, she had a hard time sleeping. She couldn’t sleep with her back to the door for fear that someone would sneak into her bedroom and hurt her. This went on until she was an adolescent and could get out of her house more often.

Stacey married a man much like her mother – a man who was constantly angry at her. Instead of facing the situation head on – which she couldn’t do because she had no idea how to take responsibility for her own safety in the face of her husband’s anger – she focused her fears on her young children, sometimes becoming immobilized by her fears of something bad happening to them. Stacey had learned to externalize her fear.

Whenever she and her husband had a particularly bad fight, Stacey would find something to focus her fears on, worrying herself sick. She never made the connection between her obsessive worrying and feeling unsafe in her environment, until some time after starting to practice Inner Bonding.

Stacey told me that in one of her Inner Bonding dialogues, when she was in the midst of worrying about her teenage son, her guidance told her that it wasn’t about her son. It was about not having taken care of herself in her last fight with her husband. Her inner child felt very unsafe because Stacey was not taking responsibility for her own safety in her relationship with her husband.  

“When I don’t feel safe, I still externalize it, just as I did as a kid when I was terrified of spiders. I was doing really great for a while, and then Bob and I had a bad fight. Instead of disengaging as you’ve suggested, I got so scared that I did anything I could to fix the problem so he would stop being angry. I totally abandoned my inner child, and then I started obsessing about my son. I was so worried about his grades and his getting into drugs that I could hardly think of anything else.”

“Then, in my latest dialogue, I saw that it isn’t about him at all. This is what I do when I don’t feel safe because I’m not showing up as a loving adult. To make things worse, when I focus on externals, I start to lose my faith, and then I really feel unsafe! I seem to have faith only as long as I am making myself feel safe with loving actions. When I do this, I am able to stay connected with God, and when I don’t, I can’t stay connected. I can’t stay in faith when I abandon myself.”

Once Stacey became aware of how unsafe she felt due to not showing up for herself as a loving adult, and how this spiraled her down into deep anxiety, depression and disconnection with her guidance, she became VERY motivated to learn to create inner safety!

While we have to accept that we can’t control the external world, there actually is a way to feel safe. When you have practiced Inner Bonding long enough to have developed a strong connection with your personal spiritual Guidance, you will discover that your Guidance is always looking out for you. Your Guidance WANTS you to feel safe and to be safe, and will let you know AHEAD OF TIME when there is something you need to avoid or something you need to do to be safe.

Do you know that you Are Never Alone – that your Guidance is ALWAYS here looking out for you? But if you are focused in your lower left brain – in your programmed wounded self – you will not hear the voice of your Guidance, or be aware of the feelings or images from your Guidance that are informing you.

To receive information from your Guidance, you need to be focused in your right brain, which is open to receiving information from both your inner Guidance – your feelings – and your higher Guidance – the thoughts and images that come THROUGH your mind.

Consistently practicing Inner Bonding throughout a day helps you learn to stay in your “right mind”. As soon as you move out of the intent to protect and control and avoid, and into the intent to learn, you move into your right brain – your spiritually connected loving adult. It is your intent that moves you out of your wounded self and into your connection with your spiritual guidance.

The challenge is to stay open. Staying focused in your loving adult is a big challenge. Many of us have been encouraged to “pray without ceasing,” and what this means to me is to practice staying present in this moment with gratitude, compassion and an intent to learn, rather than wandering off into our programmed thinking. Being present in this moment with gratitude, compassion, and the intent to learn keeps us open to Guidance – open to creating the inner sense of safety that we experience when we know that our higher guidance is looking out for us and supporting us in our highest good.

When your intent is to love yourself and others, and you love yourself enough to put clean high vibrancy food into your body, you will be able to open to the constant information that is always coming from your guidance regarding your safety. Whereas your wounded self cannot possibly know in advance something like not getting on a particular plane, or taking a different route home, or not going into work that day, your guidance does know, and will communicate this important information to you when you are open to it.

While the wounded self would love to have control over getting this information, it is the very choice to try to control that lowers your frequency and makes it impossible to access the information regarding your safety that is here for you.

You cannot be devoted to control and to loving yourself in the same moment. The moment you choose to love and to learn about what is in your highest good, and your body is in a high frequency due to eating clean healthy foods, your frequency goes high enough to access the information you need regarding your safety. I know this to be 100% true as it has happened over and over in my life and the lives of so many of my clients and others practicing Inner Bonding.

So be honest with yourself about which is really safer – trying to control people and things and the future that you can’t control, or opening to physically and emotionally loving yourself? Which is safer – numbing your feelings with substance and process addictions, or staying open to your feelings – your inner guidance system that is one way Spirit communicates with you? What if your guidance is trying to let you know that something is dangerous and you are too numbed out from food, drugs, alcohol, TV, or staying in your head to feel the feelings that would alert you to danger? What if your addictions are numbing you to the messages that Spirit is sending you through your feelings? Is this really a safe way to live?

Do you really want to go on listening to your programmed and ignorant wounded self regarding your safety? Do you really believe that your wounded self knows more about keeping you safe than your guidance, who has access to all the information in the universe?

When you make the decision that loving yourself and sharing your love with others is your highest priority, and you learn to listen to your guidance and take loving action on your own behalf, you will discover that you feel far safer than with your wounded self in charge.

One of the qualities that we often find compelling in others is genuine kindness. When we meet someone who is very kind, we feel safe and valued. We feel safe and valued because kindness is the opposite of judgment. Being judged is one of the things that makes us feel unsafe, so being judged by others is what most people try hard to avoid.

Likewise, in order to feel safe inside, we need to treat ourselves with deep kindness. But too often we judge ourselves to get ourselves to do things ‘right’ in order to attempt to control getting kindness and acceptance from others.

Take a moment to tune in to how you feel when you tell yourself that:

“You are not good enough.”

“If you fail, you are a failure.”

“If you make a mistake, you are unworthy.”

“If someone doesn’t like you, you are not okay.”

The wounded self believes that self-judgment will get you to shape up and make you feel safe, yet the truth is that self-judgment creates emptiness, neediness, anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, shame and low self-worth. The more you judge yourself, the more unsafe you feel, and the more you need kindness and acceptance from others to feel safe. 

Judging yourself is very unkind to yourself. You might get caught in a vicious circle of desperately needing kindness and acceptance from others to feel safe, due to your self-judgments, and then judging yourself in an attempt to get others to be kind and accepting toward you. Then, due to feeling inadequate, anxious, unsafe, and depressed as a result of the self-judgments, you judge yourself once again in order to get yourself to do it right in order to get the needed kindness, sense of safety, and acceptance from others. This vicious circle of inner abandonment gradually leads to more and more anxiety, depression and low self-worth, creating a deep lack of a sense of safety. 

One of the jobs of the loving adult is to become aware of when you are judging yourself and to move into kindness toward both your essence and toward your wounded self who is doing the judging. However, kindness does not mean indulging. You can kindly and gently stop your wounded self from judging yourself by consciously changing your judgmental thoughts to kind thoughts. Since your self-judgments are lies meant to control, they will always make you feel unsafe. If you stay in Step One of Inner Bonding, staying tuned into your feelings, you can know immediately when you are judging yourself and feeling unsafe. At that moment of awareness, you can go to your Guidance and ask whether the judgment is the truth, and opening to learning about what actually is the truth. Once you tune into the truth, you can tell this to yourself. Telling yourself the truth is kind and will bring relief and a sense of safety.

Becoming aware of your intent is vital if you are going to change from self-judgment to kindness, compassion and acceptance toward yourself. As long as your intent is to get others to be kind, compassionate and accepting toward you, and you hand to others the job of making you feel safe, you will judge yourself to try to get yourself to act right in order to control getting what you want from others, and you will continue to feel unsafe. Once you shift your intent to loving yourself instead of controlling others, you will start to be aware of your feelings that come from your self-judgments, and you will be amazed at how much safer you feel!

Everything changes when you move from self-judgment to kindness toward yourself. The more you come from the truth that comes from your Guidance, rather than from the lies of your wounded self, the safer and worthier you feel. Eventually anxiety and depression are replaced with peace and joy. When being loving and kind to yourself is your highest priority, you will treat yourself kindly in all areas of your life – physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, organizationally, and in relationships with others.

You will discover that the kinder you are to yourself in all areas of your life, the kinder you naturally are to others. When you no longer need others to validate you and make you feel safe, you will find great joy in being kind to others.

Paradoxically, one of the main purposes of our wounded self is to create a sense of safety. Of course, the wounded self goes about creating safety in ways that we learned as we were growing up. Your wounded self may believe that you will be safe if: 

  • You shut down as a way to avoid the pain of rejection.
  • You get angry as a way to control others and the outcome of things.
  • You get angry or irritated as a way of avoiding your feelings of helplessness and loneliness in the face of others’ unloving behavior.
  • You give yourself up as a way to avoid criticism and rejection.
  • You resist to avoid being controlled.
  • You shut down, resist, or get angry to avoid being taken advantage of.
  • You judge yourself as a way to have control over getting yourself to do things “right.”
  • You shame yourself as a way to continue to believe that you are the cause – and therefore are in control – of others’ behavior.
  • You stay in your mind as a way of not being controlled by God or others.
  • You hand your Child over to others and make others responsible for your feelings and needs.


Yet every one of these protective behaviors is an abandonment of self, and therefore makes your Inner Child feel unsafe. What your wounded self learned to do to try to make you feel safe as a child actually undermines your sense of safety as an adult. 

Again, paradoxically, inner safety is created through risk-taking, such as: 

  • Taking the risk of rejection by speaking your truth, stating your limits, and taking action based on your truth.
  • Taking the risk of being controlled by God by opening to the love and wisdom of your Guidance.
  • Taking the risk of rejection by being true to yourself rather than giving yourself up.
  • Taking the risk of others thinking they are controlling you by doing what is in your own highest good, rather than resisting others or God.
  • Taking the risk of losing yourself (your ego self!) by letting go of being guided by your limited mind and opening to the Guidance of Spirit.
  • Taking the risk of letting to of trying to control the outcome of things and staying present in this moment with how things are.
  • Taking the risk of defining your own self-worth instead of handing that job to others.
  • Taking the risk of staying present in your own body and feeling your feelings rather than staying in your mind to avoid the painful feelings of your self-abandonment, or the painful feelings of life.


You will never feel safe if you are trying to figure things out from your limited mind. You will never feel safe when you try to have control over things you have no control over – others and outcomes. You will never feel safe when you abandon yourself and try to get others to take care of your feelings and needs. 

You will start to feel really safe only when you are willing to risk letting go of control and resistance, and open to the love and wisdom of the Guidance that is always here for you. As I previously stated, when you open to knowing that you are never alone on this planet – that your spiritual Guidance is always here and always supporting the highest good of your soul’s journey, you will start to feel safe. 

True safety comes when you know that you are not your body – that you are an eternal being that is here on a soul’s journey. Safety comes when you know that you were not dropped here alone to fend for yourself, but that you are being guided toward your peace and joy every moment of your life. True safety comes when you surrender your individual mind to your higher Guidance and allow your soul to have dominion over your body and mind. 

In my work with my clients, people often tell me that they don’t trust their guidance. I understand the fear of trusting since I experienced that for many years. But what I came to question is: Why am I not afraid of trusting my wounded self? Why do I “trust” the controlling, programmed part of me who make things up? True, she comes off as if she is an authority, but in reality, she has no access to truth at all. I eventually came to accept that she is the voice of ignorance – she doesn’t know what is truly in my highest good, and that she has no idea how to keep me safe.

The way I came to trust my Guidance was by deciding to trust, and then seeing what the results were.

Something that occurred in my life in 2001, which I wrote about in “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By God?”,is that my guidance warned me way ahead of time to get everything of value out of my house in Los Angeles after I sold it. My guidance said that I had to get these things out at least one week before escrow closed. I had images of my house all crumbled. I had no idea what it meant, but I’m so glad I listened, because one week before escrow closed, construction workers accidently burned my house down. If I had not listened, everything of value to me would have been lost.

After the dust settled and I was in a rental house, my guidance told me that, since I had lived and worked in that house for 31 years, it needed to burn for my health. My guidance told me that much of my energy was trapped in the walls, and that if people had moved in, they would have depleted my energy and I would have become ill. I didn’t even know this could happen! There is no way my wounded self could have known any of this! 

I realized then that staying connected with and listening to my guidance is what makes me feel safe.

By practicing Inner Bonding and trusting my guidance, many things I’ve wanted have happened. Before Inner Bonding I wasn’t able to manifest my dreams, and now I can. Knowing that my guidance is always co-creating with me to manifest what is loving for me creates a deep inner sense of safety. 

My higher self knows what she’s doing! She keeps me safe enables me to manifest my dreams.

Learn to Connect with your Spiritual Guidance with Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom, A 30-Day Home-Study Experience with Dr. Margaret Paul.

Learn Inner Bonding with my 30-Day Love Yourself course.

For a very deep dive into healing, take my upcoming 5-Day Intensive. Click on Events at Inner Bonding.com and then click on Intensives to learn more about it, or call our assistant, Valerie, at 310-459-1700.

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