In a healthy, loving relationship, partners ask each other for what they need, and generally receive a caring response. But sometimes this can get tricky – depending on whether it is your loving adult asking, or your wounded self. This dilemma is expressed by Julie in the following question:

“How can I express to my partner that sometimes I need the time and attention he gives to other people without sounding jealous or selfish.”

While this might seem like a simple question, it has many subtle aspects to it.

Julie, the first question I would suggest you ask of yourself is, “Why do I need the time and attention that my partner gives other people?”

“Why am I Struggling After All My Healing?”

I can’t tell you how often I hear from my clients that “I should be further along in my healing process,” especially when it comes to relationships.

Sophia is struggling with this:

“I’m finding my new relationship extremely challenging. After three years of being single, I thought I’d be further along with self-esteem challenges, but no! I can so easily find myself feeling needy with my partner AND abandoning myself – behavior that feels frightening and shameful. Suggestions on how to soothe myself in the moment? I do EFT and Heartmath exercises that help, but am still really struggling. Thanks!”

Sophia may have done much inner work during the three years she was single, but being in a relationship triggers old fears of rejection that likely never got triggered in the three single years. You can do a ton of work on yourself – learning how to take loving care of yourself in many different ways, but taking care of yourself in a relationship is a whole other thing.

Is your addiction to caretaking stopping you from knowing yourself?

“I have had to parent my whole life, never really able to be a kid from my childlike mother to my son-like husband. Everything seems to depend on me doing the right thing and staying on the straight and narrow. My husband is saying he is going to leave for many years and I know it is the right thing, but I’m scared of facing ME, I don’t even know Loretta. What is one thing I can do to let go? After 18 years with my mother and 21 with my husband, dysfunctional relationships are all I know, despite my years of therapy and self-help books.”

If you were brought up in a codependent family system and learned to be a caretaker, it is likely that you do not know yourself. Despite years of therapy, this is the position I was in when our guidance brought us Inner Bonding, and this is the position Loretta is in:

Can We Ever Heal From Childhood Abuse?

If you had an abusive childhood, will you always suffer from it? This is the question that Andrea asked me about:

“I had a terrifying childhood. I have had counseling, motion light therapy, and been hypnotized, and they have done wonders for me, yet I still long for completion in my mind over these things. My question is – is there ever an end to your struggle in dealing with such things?”

The answer is Yes, You Can Heal, But There are Challenges…

Major healing occurs when you practice Inner Bonding and learn to give yourself the love you didn’t receive as a child. You need to learn to be the loving inner parent that your inner child needs. This is what will create the inner safety and self-worth that are necessary for healing.

Your Guidance is Always Here For You

The kind of control that actually blocks our ability to access spirit is when we try to control what we can’t control – such as others’ feelings and actions, and outcomes of events. We also block our access to spirit when we try to control our own feelings with our various forms of self-abandonment – staying in our heads, judging ourselves, turning to addictions, and making others responsible for our worth and safety. All these attempts to control lower our frequency and make it very hard to access our guidance. We cut ourselves off from the ongoing flow of love and truth when we lower our own frequency through our own unloving thoughts and actions.
I often hear from clients that they have a hard time connecting with their spiritual guidance, and they wonder why. They also get confused about when controlling creates a problem and when it doesn’t.

Staying Loving In The Face Of Others’ Unloving Behavior

One of our greatest challenges in relationships is to not get triggered into self-abandonment when others are unloving – to stay connected with ourselves rather than getting triggered into our wounded self.

Lila asks:

“When I find myself in an unfriendly situation, I find it a challenge to take loving action towards myself. Even if I know the other person has a wound they are living out, I still become hurt and instead of tending to myself I demand an apology or cry or get angry. It’s difficult to search my mind for the loving action towards myself in the heat of the moment. How do I stay with myself in these moments?”

This is about becoming conscious of your intent and healing some underlying false beliefs. You demand an apology or cry or get angry because your intent is to control the other person rather than to be loving to yourself. You have not come to terms with your big false belief that you can control how others feel. And you have not defined your own worth through your spiritual connection. You are handing to the other person the responsibility of making you okay – they have to apologize in order for you to be okay.

A woman wrote, asking:

“I am trying to connect with my family of origin. I’ve been working on my recovery for a bit over a year (ACA & Coda steps). I’d like to have a healthy relationship, with boundaries, of course, with my untreated family. But I can’t seem to have a relationship with my mother yet as I’m still processing my feelings from her abuse. I also feel that I need to confront her (when ready) to let her know my truth instead of ‘pretending’ that things are fine between us. This has been a DIFFICULT journey for me that affected my life. Though I know my mother can’t give me what I would like, I wonder if confronting her eventually would help ME with my relationship with her. I know some people don’t agree with confronting. I’m torn about this. I want to eventually have forgiveness for my mother, but I’m not there yet.”

The question you need to ask yourself is, “What do I hope to gain by confronting my a abusive mother or father?”

Here are some possible answers:

There are two ways to heal the lack of touch – with another person, and within yourself.

Were you deprived of comforting holding as a child? I was. I was held by my mother, but the energy of her touch was so needy and engulfing that I hated being held or touched by her.

Babies and toddlers especially need warm, tender, caring, comforting holding and touch to know they are loved and to help them learn to regulate their feelings. Without this loving physical nurturing, they feel deeply rejected and abandoned.

How can we heal this yearning for the nurturing loving touch that we might have missed out on?

Brandon asks:

“When I try to get in touch with my anger, the thought comes up “my mother.” I think I didn’t get touched, cuddled, and caressed as a child. Here I get stuck! I draw a blank. I don’t know what the next step of the Inner Bonding process is.”

There are two ways to heal the lack of touch – with another person, and within yourself.

The outlook doesn’t have to be bleak for those of us who had abusive or neglectful parenting.

“There are clear links between an individual’s psychological coping strategies and his or her physiological coping strategies. Both are established in infancy and toddlerhood and tend to persist through life.” –Sue Gerhardt, “Why Love Matters,” p. 77

Sue Gerhardt paints quite a bleak picture of our chances of being whole and happy if we didn’t receive the love we needed as infants and toddlers. At the end of her excellent book, ‘Why Love Matters,’ she does say that people can heal with extensive and expensive psychotherapy. But what if you can’t afford expensive psychotherapy?

She states in her well-researched book that part of the brain – the part of the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for being able to manage and regulate very painful feelings – does not get developed when we have parents who were unable to lovingly regulate our feelings for us as infants and toddlers. Can this part of the brain develop in adulthood?

Stay centered and connected

“I work hard with my Inner Bonding process to get into a centered and connected place. I’ll be doing great and then out of nowhere Seth blames me for something and it all goes out the window. I get so upset at him for blaming me and then I feel off center and down for days. Maybe I shouldn’t be with him? Maybe my guidance is telling me that I’d be better off without him so I can stay in a good space?”

“No Jenna, that’s not what your guidance is telling you. While it’s hard for you to see this right now, Seth is providing you with a wonderful opportunity to learn to stay centered and connected, even in the face of his wounded self. Can you imagine being able to do this? Can you imagine how good you would feel to not disconnect from yourself just because he is disconnected?”

Self-Abandonment Is Handed Down Through Families

Lauren, a client of mine, has been practicing Inner Bonding for a number of years but she was still resistant to taking emotional responsibility for herself. She thought she was taking care of herself because she treated herself to massages, got places on time, exercised regularly, was kind to people and mostly took care of money matters. But when it came to her painful feelings, she abandoned herself by projecting on to others and blaming them when they didn’t do what she wanted, and pulling on them for attention. She also avoided responsibility for her feelings by eating junk food.

It became apparent when working with her that she was addicted to others validating her and making her feel special because she rejected and abandoned herself – her inner child – when she was in pain. She would do anything to avoid feeling her painful feelings and learning how she was causing them. Unable to compassionately manage the inevitable pain of life, she stayed focused in her mind rather than her body where her feelings are. Judging her feelings as wrong, she turned to various addictions, and she made others responsible for her feelings – rejecting herself in all of the four major ways we abandon ourselves.