Why Am I Suddenly in My Wounded Self?

All of us who are doing Inner Bonding have had the experience of suddenly realizing that our wounded self instead of the loving adult part of oursevles has taken control. We realize that we are back in some sort of default mode, trying to make things okay by trying to change someone else-trying to get them to understand our point of view, trying to get them to connect with us, trying to get their approval, making them responsible for our feelings, etc. How did that happen?

I remember at the very first intensive, all of us relatively new to Inner Bonding, being hypervigilant, trying not to be “seen” as being in our wounded selves. That seems comical now, but I think that as we do become more aware of the difference between being in our wounded selves and our loving adult self, we do wind up “trying” not to go there. And when it happens anyway, sometimes we feel that we have not been vigilant enough, we should have had better control. In a way that is true, but I want to suggest that we may be being vigilant about the wrong thing.

The wounded self, as has been said over and over again, is the part of us that was created to manage the feelings that were too big to feel when we were little. The wounded self was created because there was no one there for us, because emotionally we were completely abandoned and did not know what to do. The wounded self STILL shows up automatically for the same reason, even if the inner abandonment is subtle and seemingly momentary. Some of us grew up overwhelmed by our intense feelings and probably it is easier to notice when things are not right, but others, like me, numbed out and checked out and it is easy to not notice.

For me at this point, when feelings are intense, it is easy to do Inner Bonding. My little girl has my attention and I know she needs me and I know what to do. The challenge is to pay attention to the more subtle cues that she is giving me. This is, of course, step one of Inner Bonding, the hardest one of all when our inner kids have learned to numb out in order to cope with big feelings.

What I have totally gotten is that when I find myself back in my wounded self, it is BECAUSE I have failed to pay attention to these cues. I can always roll the scene back in my mind, maybe run it frame-by-frame, and there it is, my little girl was feeling anxious or lonely and I did not hear her. It is not enough to tune into the things that our wounded self is saying that is causing this anxiety and to stop saying them (step 2 of Inner Bonding). The challenge is to be in step 1, to feel the feelings of your inner child and have them CAUSE you to open your heart, just as you probably would with a real child. It is as if when your child is tugging on your sleeve and you pay no attention. That is inner abandonment and it will trigger your wounded self every time.

So if you find yourself closing down, feeling like you have to protect yourself, having interactions that are feeling worse and worse, it is ALWAYS because there was a moment when your inner child was tugging at your sleeve (or even screaming at you) and you turned away instead of opening your heart and embracing your child and making what he or she was feeling right then the most important thing of all. You wounded self then showed up automatically, because your loving adult did not and tried to solve the problem with some sort of protective controlling behavior. It happens in an instant.

Assuming that you deeply want to learn about being a loving adult to your inner child you get to have a do-over. You can go back to that moment. You can practice being the loving adult and reverse the inner abandonment. So each time your wounded self shows up, it can become a “good” thing, a sacred opportunity to practice listening more deeply to the voice of your inner child and a wonderful opportunity to bring more love to your child and to the planet. All you have to do is listen and open your heart this time around.

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Overcoming the Intellectual Bypass by Getting Out of Your Head

The phenomenon of “spiritual bypass,” refers to using the connection with spirit additively to avoid dealing with the deep loneliness of the inner child. In this column, I want to address another, much more common addiction, the “intellectual bypass.” In the case of the spiritual bypass, the false belief is that with sufficient experiences of blissful connection with God, all woundedness and loneliness will automatically disappear. In the case of the “intellectual bypass,” the false belief is that with sufficient understand of the principles of Inner Bonding or other psychological healing modalities and sufficient understanding of the actions of the wounded ego self, healing will automatically occur. In both cases, there is a corollary. “If it is not working, do it more.”

Like all addictions, both of these are self-reinforcing. Connecting with spirit is blissful and finally understanding “why” is a huge relief. The problem is that both are dead ends. There is nothing wrong with trying to understand and there is certainly nothing wrong with connecting with spirit. What I had to learn is that the issue was “why” I was doing it. I had no idea that I was doing it to drown out my little girl. It took me a very, very long time to get this and I am writing this column in the hope of speeding this process up for someone.

The first time I was ever told that I was “in my head” was at my first Inner Bonding intensive. I remember clearly trying to have control over not being in my head (since people seemed to disapprove of it). I consciously tried to move my voice down into my body and keep it there. People seemed to like that better, but looking back, I was completely lost. Re-reading my journal, written at the time of my second intensive, was painful. I thought that I was doing Inner Bonding, learning to connect with my Inner Child, but I was completely in my head, using the protection that I had learned so well.

I was told that I was “in my head” in each of the many Inner Bonding intensives I attended in succeeding years. I kept trying not to be, but how can you get out of your head FROM your head? After awhile, every time I said that I “understood”something, Margaret Paul, who was leading the intensive,would wince because she knew that it was understanding it from my head only. People tried to make helpful suggestions but I could not get it from my head.

I don’t know how the shift finally occurred, but by the last intensive, I knew that it had. Suddenly, when someone was in their head, I knew it because I could fell the pain of their lonely child, as others had mine for so long.

So let me try to explain this. Being in your head is like having your left brain make a huge amount of noise. You are busy thinking away, making sense, explaining, cogitating. But, just like with a spiritual bypass, this intellectual bypass drowns out the other sounds inside you. It drowns out and disconnects you from the quieter sounds of your right brain, your feeling self, your inner child. Even though I had become quite capable of taking good care of my little girl when I could hear her, when she was triggered, when her cries were louder than my thoughts, without turning down the volume of my thoughts, without really listening, I was completely unable to hear her when I abandoned her by being in my head. I was also completely unable to hear her loneliness when someone else was doing the same thing.

What I want you to know is that when you are busy trying to solve everything by thinking about it, you are automatically tuning out your child. You might feel sort of good but your inner child is in agony. You cannot figure out how to “not” do this. You have to experience it. But I hope that if you know that there is something inside you that you need to listen for, something that is not a thought, something that you cannot hear by figuring it out, that maybe you can turn down the volume enough that maybe, just maybe, you can get out of your head and reconnect with your lonely inner child.

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Creating Loneliness By Not Feeling It

When I was a child, I was completely unaware of how lonely I was. I remember clearly, when I was about 14 and at summer camp, hearing someone say that they felt lonely and puzzling over that because I could not remember feeling that way. I was never homesick or scared to go to school, even when I started kindergarten at 4 ½ years old. In fact, even then, I was puzzled when I saw other children sobbing and clinging to their mothers. I knew that I did not feel that way at all. Remarkably, I often felt completely unable to connect with other kids, completely unacceptable, but I never named that feeling as loneliness.

I have recently learned about naming the feeling of loneliness for our inner child – holding him or her and saying “I know you feel lonely right now.” Protecting against loneliness is one of the most fundamental jobs of the ego, the wounded self.  Suddenly, I was stunned to realize that the reason that I did not feel lonely as a child was not that I was not lonely, it was that I was TOO lonely to allow myself to feel it. I had completely numbed out, very, very early. I realized that my ego/wounded self WAS completely devoted to protecting me from the loneliness by not going there. I saw too that numbing out my loneliness was like losing one of my senses, losing feedback. It was as if I could not know if something was too hot until I noticed the burn on my skin and then I would not understand why it happened or what I could to to keep it from happening again. I could not notice the effect I was having on people, not notice when they were pulling away. I could not tell who was available and who was not. I kept touching the hot surfaces and getting burned and and not understanding why.

I was filled with sadness as I realized that, just as with all of our protections, not feeling my loneliness at the moment it happened had actually created enormous loneliness in my life. Instead of noticing the instant of loneliness, instead of being able to say to my little girl “You feel lonely now, what am I doing to cause this?” I had always disconnected immediately, gone to my head, tried to get connection by trying to control others in different ways and often winding up, as I said, getting “burned” and then finally noticing that my little girl did feel lonely. I even knew that I was missing her signals but could not understand why.

The power that NAMING the loneliness has it that it tells my little girl that I hear her and it tells my ego/wounded self that I am on the job, that she does not have to handle this anymore. The result was extraordinary. I noticed that often when someone was in their ego/wounded self, I would experience them as not being “okay.” I finally recognized that when someone felt “not okay” to me, i.e.,not open and connected, my little girl was telling me that she was feeling lonely. Now, when this happened, I was able to turn to her and say “Even though they are not okay right now, we can still be okay.” Every time I did this, my little girl, now reassured, went to joy. It was amazing to realize that when someone felt “not okay” to me, instead of it causing me to feel more alone, it can actually be an occasion for me to joyously connect with my child. In the old paradigm, I would try to fix them, something that in the end always created even more of what I was trying to avoid.

So I have been blessed by the realization that feeling lonely, rather than being something I need to automatically and unconsciously avoid, is actually a sixth sense that I need to cultivate. That avoiding feeling lonely is a way to put on a blindfold and then get behind the wheel. I have realized that, ultimately and seemingly paradoxically, feeling my little girl’s loneliness, the very huge feeling I could not afford to feel when I was little, is actually a profound gift for which I am extremely grateful, because feeling my child’s loneliness is the very thing that allows me to finally take care of her in the present moment instead of letting her get burned over and over.

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