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.

When the whole Coronavirus stuff started to go down earlier this year, I noticed how another virus was spreading even faster than COVID: The fear virus. Fear was taking root and spreading around the globe faster than the speed of light. 

Fear is contagious. And it’s easy to make it the enemy. But fear shouldn’t be viewed as the enemy itself.

In fact, I believe that when we make choices out of fear, we’re making choices to protect ourselves and those we love. It comes from a desire for self-preservation. Fear can be important. We need some level of an alarm system to keep us out of harm’s way. 

Fear brings a message with it. 

We can’t ignore it — because ignoring it simply buries the emotions. We can’t bypass it — because we have a lot of collective trauma that needs to be addressed and healed. I invite you to see fear as a valuable piece of information. Throw out the concept that you shouldn’t feel fear. At its core, fear is actually friendly. Fear wants to protect us, and is a biologically-rooted system that’s working on our behalf 24/7 to warn us of possible threats to our life. It’s trying to keep us safe and alive. 

But we also don’t want to give in to it or give it more power than it warrants.  

Sometimes we can feel discouraged because our past efforts have never prevailed over what challenges us, so why try now? Or perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves itself to be hopeless. Maybe we get downcast in the day because our body, or our mind, is no longer capable of doing what it once could in younger years, and all we see on the horizon are more limitations.

The point is -- when it comes to these dispiriting states -- it makes no difference what they say is the cause of their punishing presence within us. The truth is that these dark states find the cause they need to inhabit us right from within the content of our own past experience! What does this mean?

How do you forgive and what do you do if you've been hurt and you really want revenge?

You know folks in life as human beings. We have all been hurt at some point and many times you may have loved big and gave your heart and soul to friends, family and relationships. 

You’ve pulled your resources, your energy, your time, your trust. Nothing hurts more than loving someone, trusting someone and giving them everything, and maybe they didn’t appreciate you. Maybe they didn’t honor you. Maybe they betrayed you. 

As human beings, this human experience and relationships can be difficult and challenging in moments. They’re never easy and can be complicated.

When you know in your heart that you must keep going but your feet just aren’t getting the message, self-understanding can open and carry you through doors that self-insistence cannot. The key to leaving behind our self-created and self-limited world is found in our willingness to keep going, even when it “feels” like something bad is happening to us or that we’re going “nowhere fast.” The idea of quitting or turning back is the unfortunate option that occurs only when we have an incomplete understanding of any given situation. This is where higher self-knowledge becomes so important for our real inner progress. 

Your life is showing you where you are conscious, or it’s showing you where you are unconscious. It’s showing you where you are still in fear, and running programs and circuits that are fear-based, based in survival, or your life is showing you where you are in love and being able to meet life as presence. 

Life is very binary. This whole life thing, in the experience of this whole life, isn’t really that complicated at all. The key is to recognize that life is showing you who you are and who you are not. The key is being willing to shine the light of your own awareness on yourself. When you turn the lens of your awareness on yourself, you are beginning your journey of empowerment. As long as you continue to blame people, places, situations, circumstances and things for your internal state of being, you are a victim.    

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:

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.