Wounded Energy: It’s Better Than Having Nothing

In Inner Bonding we talk about connecting with our essence, the beautiful part of us who is who we really are. What is referred to as inner abandonment is not connecting with our own essence. We talk a lot about how we develop a wounded self to protect against the overwhelming pain of being abandoned and how being in our wounded self creates inner abandonment. Recently, I got the clearest picture I ever have about how this works.

I knew that I was born connected with my own essence, but that this essence was not received. I deeply wanted to share loving energy, share my essence, with my parents but they were too wounded to do it. The need to share energy, I think, is one of the most fundamental ones we have. It is how we get nourished. So, like almost everyone else, I was left heartbroken and desperate. I can actually remember being a baby and realizing how it was going to be, an experience of total despair. I was never going to be seen for who I really was. If I was to survive, I had to find a way to share energy somehow.

I think this is the origin of the wounded self. We find a way to tune into our parent’s wounded energy, to create a wounded resonance, so that we are filling with SOMETHING! Something, no matter what the frequency, is better than the emptiness and despair of having no way to fill with love and light.

As we get older, this wounded energy coalesces around certain ways of being. Judgment is a good example. If our parents have a lot of judgmental energy, we will fill with that because it gives us a connection with them. If they judge us, we will begin to judge ourselves, because it fills us with something. We get together with people and have judgmental conversations about others. We read judgmental columns in the newspaper. We find ways to share that energy so that we will have something rather than nothing. I think even the specific beliefs that we consciously and unconsciously absorb from our parents are anchored in specific energies that we learned to fill with.

So, we develop certain wounded resonant frequencies and we grow up to find others who resonate with us, helping us keep on filling up with this familiar energy, no matter what the frequency, no matter how ordinary-seeming or dark.

Meanwhile, our inner child, our essence who is love, is totally left out. There is NO room to connect with him or her, because we are not tuning into the frequency that brings love and connection, we are filling with something else. This abandoned part of us is in agony, alone, heartbroken, suffering.

I have done this all my life, as have most of us. But this time, I got the image, literally of a crucifixion. That my essence, my little girl, has been suffering THAT much because I learned to use wounded energies to fill up; those of my own wounded self and the wounded energies of others. By tuning into these frequencies, by filling up with these energies, I have automatically shut out my true self, never even noticing the little girl on the cross. The realization was devastating. It was absolute. ANYTHING except connecting with my little girl and seeing her beautiful essence, no matter how benign, causes THAT much suffering.

I think this is the essence of Inner Bonding. Not so much noticing the wounded beliefs and behaviors in our heads, but finally facing the suffering that is caused by our energetic choices. We do have a choice, at each moment, to fill with wounded energy or stay connected to our essence. There are certainly layers and layers of realizing this truth, but the bottom line is that there is no “in between.” It is a sobering and exhilarating realization.

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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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