“I Can’t Feel God’s Love for Me”

“When I open to my spiritual guidance, aren’t I supposed to feel loved by God?” asked Tracey in a Skype session with me.

“Yes,” I answered, “but you might have a misconception about how you experience this love. When do you feel love in your heart?”

“I feel the most love when I’m playing with my nephews.”

“So when you play with your nephews, your heart is open – right?”

“Yes. I love them so much and I love playing with them.”

“Tracey, this is what it feels like to feel God’s love. When your intent is to love, your heart opens and fills with God-which-is-love. And the same thing will occur when your intent is to love yourself. Can you imagine wanting to love yourself and take loving action on behalf of the beautiful little child within you the way you love your nephews?”

“I think that’s a problem for me,” she said. “It’s easy for me to want to be present with them and give them love and attention, but it’s hard for me to want to do this for myself.”

What Makes You Feel Most Connected With Others?

Connection with the people who are important to us is a vital need for everyone. Our brains are hard-wired to share love and connection with others. Many of us know that infants and children need a loving connection with their parents to thrive, and that many emotional problems result when this connection is not available.

Through practicing Inner Bonding, we learn how important it is to connect with ourselves and with our spiritual guidance. We learn that it is difficult to connect with another on an emotional level when we are not connected with our own feelings, and it is difficult to be open and vulnerable when we are not connected with the strength and love of our guidance.

Each of us experience connection differently, and for a relationship to thrive, we need to understand what connection means to each of us.

What Heals Your Ego Wounded Self?

The journey of healing our ego wounded self is a profound and deeply sacred journey.

“Does the wounded self ever get healed?”
“How does the wounded self get healed?”
“What happens to the wounded self as we heal?”

My ego wounded self, like everyone’s, came into being when I didn’t receive the love I needed and I decided that it was my fault – that I wasn’t good enough. I hid away my core self and went about trying to figure out how to be to get love, avoid pain, and feel safe. I developed many of false beliefs about myself and others, and learned to be very judgmental toward myself to have control over getting myself to do things “right”, so that others would like me and not get angry at me or reject me.

What Do You Do To Avoid The Pain Of Life?

We all learned many way of avoiding the existential pain of life when we were growing up, because we could not manage feeling it when we were little. Now, as adults, most people continue to protect in the ways they learned, even though today, adults, we can learn to manage our core pain through Inner Bonding.

Most of our core pain comes from others being unloving to us or to themselves, disconnecting from us and from themselves. We all desire connection with those important to us, and we naturally feel these deeper painful feelings, especially when someone important to us disconnects from us with their own protections – their anger, blame, withdrawal, and so on.

Do I Have To Be Healed To Attract My Beloved?

One of my clients asked me the following question: “Can I attract my beloved if I’m still in the process of healing my inner pain?”

The simple answer is “Yes,” but the actual answer is more complex.

Healing is a Process

Healing is an ongoing process of learning to be less judgmental and more compassionate with yourself. Healing pain isn’t just about the past – It’s primarily about how you are currently treating yourself. For example:

• You judge yourself as not good enough and you feel pain. While you might have learned to do this as a child from others who judged or rejected you, the fact that you are still doing it as an adult means that you are rejecting yourself and re-creating your pain. Your pain will not heal as long as you are rejecting yourself.
• You avoid your feelings by numbing them with various addictions, or you avoid them by staying focused in your mind and ignoring what is happening inside where your feelings are. This creates a feeling of inner rejection and abandonment, as well as emptiness and neediness. Again, you are re-creating the old pain of not being loved as you were growing up.
• You tend to make others responsible for your safety and self-worth. They have to approve of you in order for you to feel that you are okay. Your feeling self – your inner child – feels abandoned by you when you give him or her away to others for approval.

As long as you continue to reject and abandon yourself, you will meet partners at your common level of self-abandonment – partners who are also rejecting and abandoning themselves.

Why You Might Afraid to Be Open With Your Partner or Others

“He will be so angry if I tell him that.”
“I’m afraid of losing her if I’m honest with her.”

How often have you said to yourself, “I can’t say that because he or she will get angry, shut down, get hurt, or leave”?

How do you feel when you are not open with your partner or others about your feelings, needs, wants, and actions? I have noticed that when I don’t speak my truth, I feel angry or depressed inside. My inner child really hates it if I allow fear to stop me from being fully authentic. My anger or depression is my inner child’s way of letting me know that I am abandoning her.

When your partner or others react to your truth with anger, withdrawal, hurt, or threats of leaving, they believe that their controlling behavior is working for them. Because you are either willing to lose yourself rather than lose them, or you are willing to lie or withhold the truth, they can continue to react with their controlling behavior without directly experiencing the consequences of their behavior on the relationship.

2 Secrets to Peace, Joy and Keeping Your Frequency High

A high frequency is necessary to feel love and joy, and to manifest your dreams. Learn two secrets to keeping your frequency high.

I have discovered that there are two choices I can make that, together, invariably put me into a high frequency and bring me inner peace and joy. While either of these choices are always beneficial, together they are incredibly powerful!

Gratitude

We all know how important gratitude is, but the problem is that often we express our gratitude in a fairly rote manner. The kind of gratitude I’m referring to is moment-by-moment gratitude for every big and little thing, and the overriding gratitude that we are never alone – that spirit is always here for us.

Obsessing, Ruminating, Worrying…Oh My!

I used to spend hours and even days ruminating about different things – a conflict with someone important to me, a work situation, finances, time pressures. I would obsessively worry or try to figure out the “right” thing to do or how to get the outcome I wanted. Of course, I would end up drained, anxious and confused, but this didn’t deter me from this addiction. It was in my blood, absorbed from my mother and grandmother.

In some wounded part of me, I believed that ruminating, obsessing, and worrying would somehow give me control over the outcome of things. I was afraid not to obsess – not to try to control others and outcomes.

But ruminating, obsessing and worrying created very low-frequency feelings of fear, anxiety, and depression…

Relationships: Avoiding the Line of Fire

How often do you ask a question of or make a statement to a partner, co-worker, friend, or relative at a time when you already know they are closed or angry? Then, when they are predictably angry or defensive, you feel upset by their response. Why do you put your inner child in the line of fire? What are you hoping to gain by asking a question or making a statement when you already know they are closed?

Go inside for a moment and ask yourself this question: “Why do I try to communicate with someone whom I already know is angry, defensive, or withdrawn? What do I hope will happen?”

If you are honest with yourself, you will see that your hope is that by asking the question or making the statement, the other person will respond with openness. Now, again be honest with yourself – how often has this happened? What usually happens instead?

Very often, they continue to be angry or defensive and then you feel really badly because your covert manipulation hasn’t worked.

Are you a procrastinator? Are you ready to get unstuck?

Oscar was stuck in his life; the following issue he presented in our session was one example of how he was stuck:

“My parents are coming to visit tomorrow and, as has been my pattern, my house is a dirty mess. I usually spend the day before they arrive frantically cleaning, which I will do today, but this time I’d like to do it differently and not beat myself up and judge myself. How to get the tasks done with peace, joy, and compassion? It’s a challenge because I feel pressured and get angry with myself for letting things go.”

“Oscar, there must be a good reason that you keep your house a mess and then feel frantic when you need to clean it up. How old were you when you first started resisting things like cleaning up your room? And how old were you when you started to beat yourself up for letting things go?”

“I think I started resisting things when I was very young. I resisted getting toilet trained, and I resisted getting good grades. My mother was so controlling and invasive that I think I learned these ways of not being controlled by her.”

“So the part of you resisting is two or three?’

“Yes, that sounds right. And now that I think of it, my mom was very judgmental and I think I took over the job of judging myself when I started junior high school.”

“So you have an inner system with a young adolescent trying to control you with anger and judgment, like your mother did, and then a 2-3 year old not wanting to be controlled and resisting. As long as these parts of you are in charge, you are not going to be able to clean up with peace and joy. Is it just about cleaning up that you procrastinate, or do you do it with other issues?”

“I do it most of the time with everything.”

We Can’t Control Others, But Here’s How To Influence Them

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” – Albert Schweitzer

Inner Bonding teaches that we have no control over others’ intent, choices, and how they feel about us. However, while we have no control, we can influence others. Our own loving or unloving behavior can have a huge influence on others.

Think back in your life to the people who most influenced you.

• Who influenced you regarding your controlling and addictive behavior?
• Who influenced you regarding your loving, personally powerful behavior?

The problem for many of us is that we have far too many role models of unloving behavior toward ourselves and others, and far too few role models of loving behavior. This is why it is so important to be able to turn to your guidance for what’s loving to you and to others.

The One and Only Dependable Source of Love

Seth and Lisa consulted with me because they had been married only a year and were having problems. Seth was often angry at Lisa, and Lisa felt shut down to Seth.

“Seth,” I asked him, “What are you wanting from Lisa that you are not getting?”

“I want her to be my dependable source of love. She is my wife and she should be my dependable source of love.”

Seth was doing what many people do in relationships – he was making Lisa his Higher Power. Having no spiritual connection of his own, he kept trying to access love through Lisa. Lisa, feeling pulled on by Seth to fill the emptiness caused by his self-abandonment, had withdrawn.

We all need a dependable source of love, but to expect another to be that dependable source creates the codependency that leads to the relationship difficulties that Seth and Lisa were experiencing.

3 Underlying Reasons Why You Might Judge Others

I received the following request from a member of Inner Bonding Village:

“I was just thinking that it would be helpful to understand how Inner Bonding helps us with the following: We tend to judge or be critical of others in our lives – at work, strangers, relationships of all types, with people we come in contact with in our lives. We see them as people we criticize for whatever reason – they annoy us, irritate us, or we see them as too fat, too thin, too bald, too much hair, too cute, whatever. We treat others around us in the workplace or other places with contempt or just plain don’t like them for whatever selfish reason. How does inner bonding fit into this? I can think of people at work whom I really don’t like being with for whatever reason. We tend to judge and be critical and non-empathetic, including drivers, phone solicitors, etc. How can Inner Bonding help us with this negative outlook of others, and why is this so common? Thanks – an article on this would be helpful.”

Do You Judge Your Feelings? Here is What to Do Instead

Did you grow up being taught that feeling and expressing your feelings is wrong or bad – especially your painful feelings?

I often have the experience with my clients of hearing them apologize when they start to cry. “I’m so sorry that I’m getting emotional,” they often say to me.

“It’s okay to cry,” I tell them. “Crying is a natural way of expressing feelings and releasing pain.” When they are trying to be very quiet about it, I often say, “It’s okay to cry out loud and allow yourself to make noise.”