Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child

242 Pages·1992·2.21 MB·English

by  Margaret Paul

INNER BONDING
Becoming a Loving Adult to
Your Inner Child
MARGARET PAUL, Ph.D.
Dedication
To Erika Chopich,
who taught me Inner Bonding.
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
P 1 INNER BONDING THERAPY
ART
Chapter 1 Finding the Life We Lost in Living: Understanding Inner Bonding
Chapter 2 Taking the Road Less Traveled: The Inner Bonding Process
Chapter 3 Creating the Inner Bond: Using the Five Steps in Your Own Life
Chapter 4 Who Is Crying in the Night? The Abandoned Inner Child and the
Intent to Protect Chapter 5 Heading for Home: Parenting, Reparenting, and
Staying Bonded P 2 BECOMING A LOVING ADULT TO YOUR
ART
INNER CHILD
Chapter 6 The Big Challenge: Loving Your Inner Child with Your Spouse
Chapter 7 Starting Off Right: Loving Your Inner Child with Your Lover
Chapter 8 What Are We Responsible For? Loving Your Inner Child with
Your Parents Chapter 9 Becoming Role Models for the Future: Loving Your
Inner Child with Your Children Chapter 10 We Take Ourselves with Us
Wherever We Go: Loving Your Inner Child with Your Friends Chapter
11 Power Struggles Follow Us Everywhere: Loving Your Inner Child in
Your Work and Professional Relationships Chapter 12 Personal Power:
Loving Your Inner Child When You Are Alone Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Margaret Paul
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
There are many wonderful books on reclaiming and healing the wounded Inner
Child, and many people are deeply involved in this profound inner work.
However, they find as they move through the healing process that it is not
enough to reclaim and heal the Child of the past. The Child of the present needs
to be seen, heard, and loved every moment of the day, when around others and
when alone.
Taking care of ourselves on an everyday basis is an even greater challenge
than healing the Child of the past, because there are so few role models in our
culture of truly loving behavior—that is, behavior that is loving to ourselves and
others. It is not as if we can reach into our own past or present experience for
examples of loving behavior in specific situations with others or when alone
with ourselves. We cannot reach into a collective unconscious for this
information, because the information isn’t there due to a lack of role-modeling in
our society. We have to make it up as we go along, through trial and error,
staying tuned to the Child within in order to know whether or not our choices are
enhancing or diminishing our self-esteem.
I have spent years learning how to take care of myself in specific situations in
ways that are loving to myself and others. This is an ongoing process for me, one
that I expect will continue my whole life. The suggestions I’ve come up with are
just that—suggestions. There is never one “right” way to handle a given
situation; what I am presenting are options that work for my clients and for me. I
hope these options will lead you into your own creative thinking regarding new
patterns of behavior that truly support and nurture your Inner Child.
Becoming a loving Inner Adult/Parent to our Inner Child is the key to a
productive and joyful life, as well as to the ability to establish and sustain
intimacy. It is not enough to tell the Child within that we love and cherish him or
her, and that he or she did not cause our parents to be abusive. Unless we
become the parents to ourselves that we always wanted, every moment of the
day, our Inner Child will never believe he or she is really lovable. If the Adult in
us does not treat the Child in us lovingly, then telling the Inner Child he or she is
lovable is just lip service and will create no real change in our present life.
This book illustrates the psychotherapy of Inner Bonding, a psychotherapy
developed by Dr. Erika Chopich and me, and introduced in our book Healing
1
Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child. Since
the book’s publication, we have received many letters from people wanting to
know more about the process of developing a loving Inner Adult. I hope this
book helps you along the path toward wholeness and love.
The usefulness of understanding the process of Inner Bonding Therapy is not
primarily for therapists. This book is written for all those who have a desire to
help themselves and others.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
January 1992
Part 1
INNER BONDING THERAPY
CHAPTER 1
Finding the Life We Lost in Living: Understanding
Inner Bonding
It is difficult indeed to struggle against what one has been taught.
The child’s mind is a helpless one, pliable, absorbing. It makes
what it learns a part of its very nature…. Yet…you must change
your minds, you must renew your hearts, and you must do it
alone. There are no teachers for you.
To My Daughters with Love
PEARL S. BUCK
You’ve achieved everything you’ve ever thought would make you happy, but the
gnawing, empty feeling that something is missing is still there. To paraphrase
Rabbi Harold Kushner, you’ve discovered that “all you’ve ever wanted isn’t
enough.”
You may feel lost, out of touch with yourself and others, in an emotional fog
much of the time. You often feel as if you’re doing nothing more than going
through the motions. You may agonize over feeling insecure, inadequate,
unlovable, and alone.
These are deeply painful feelings, pervasive and persistent—so painful, in
fact, you may have discovered any number of dysfunctional ways to ignore,
deny, cover up, or numb the ache of your emptiness: alcohol, food, work, TV,
sex, drugs, all of the above. Then one day something happens, a traumatic
experience or an internal shift. You reach a turning point and ask yourself, as
Jeremiah Abrams states in Reclaiming the Inner Child, “Where is the life we lost
1
in living?”
Certainly you’re not alone with these kinds of feelings. Most of us struggle
with continuous or periodically recurring emotional pain for significant portions
of our lives. This happens either because we don’t know another, better way, or
because we’re unwilling to try, afraid we’ll only make matters worse.
Unfortunately the pain often has to become intolerable, or a crisis must force the
issue, before we take action on our own behalf. Take the case of Tom, for
example.
Tom had never been in a therapist’s office and he wasn’t happy about being
there now. He sat stiffly in his dark blue suit, unaware that his fist was clenched
and his expression stern. He would never have come at all, but the CEO of his
company took him aside last week and told him that his outbursts of temper were
undermining employee morale and driving potential customers away. “Get some
help,” the CEO told him. Frustrated and angry, but seeing no other choice, Tom
made an appointment.
After we talked for a while about Tom’s stress level and work load, I said, “It
sounds like you’re not taking very good care of yourself.”
“Take care of myself? That’s not realistic. I have too much to do!”
“But you fly into unpredictable rages, and you could lose your job because of
that. And being so stressed out, you’re likely to lose your health as well. Can you
really afford not to take care of yourself?”
“I don’t think I can,” he said softly. “I don’t know how.”
Tom was telling the truth. He didn’t know how; he’d never learned. He had
been “at work” since early childhood. His father was an abusive alcoholic, so
Tom’s earliest memories were of trying to protect his mother and sister from
harm. When he realized his father treated them better when he wasn’t around,
Tom left home and lived on his own. He was fifteen.
Most of us don’t grow up in these extreme circumstances; but even in the best
possible beginnings, very few of us know what it looks like to take care of
ourselves. We haven’t seen that kind of behavior anywhere—not in our families,
not even on TV. So we follow the patterns we’ve learned, and we let ourselves
down because we don’t know what it looks like to be loving to ourselves as well
as to those around us. We abuse ourselves, ignore or deny our pain—all because
we don’t know what else to do. We desperately need to begin to think about
these questions: “How do we take care of ourselves? How do we make ourselves
happy? How do we bring joy into our lives?”
Take Sandy, for example. Sandy is a divorced mother of two young
daughters, a third-grade teacher. Long hours of preparation have paid off—her
students love her, their parents praise her, and the principal has commended her
in glowing written evaluations. Practically the only one who isn’t convinced that
she is a competent, worthy, lovable person is Sandy herself. Constantly
exhausted, nagged by indecisiveness and depression, she’s discounted everything
she’s accomplished, including others’ affirmations. The only reason Sandy
entered therapy was for her daughters. She was determined that they wouldn’t
suffer the way she had.