HEALING YOUR ALONENESS
Healing Your Aloneness
By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A psychologist.”
“A psychologist! How do you even know what a psychologist is?
“I just know.” I was five years old.
I was not a happy child and when I was five my parents took me to a child psychologist. He told me I should tell my mother to stop yelling at me. I thought to myself, “I’m five; she isn’t going to listen to me. You tell her.” And I decided right then that I could do a much better job than him!
I hated the psychology department at UCLA. It was not at all what I had in mind, so I switched to an art major and a psychology minor. Meanwhile, I was in psychoanalysis – on the couch 4 days a week for four and a half years. After all this time, with me talking and him listening, he said, “You’re analyzed.” I thought this meant that I was healthy – even though I was still not happy, so I decided it was time to get married.
I was 23 years old when I fell madly in love – which lasted for three weeks. I spent the next 30 years trying to get back what I had experienced for those first three weeks. Despite the pain, I am deeply grateful now for my difficult marriage; it taught me so much about myself and about relationships.
After teaching high school art for two years, I started having babies. I was still not experiencing much joy in my life, so I started to work with every kind of therapist I could find. I tried spiritual groups and workshops. I voraciously read every self-help, personal growth, and spiritual book available at that time. I had to find out how to be happy and have a happy marriage.
Meanwhile, I was helping one of my friends with a sexual problem in her marriage. She was seeing a psychiatrist and told him what I had told her. Out of the blue, he called me and said, “I have a patient with sexual problems whom I’m not helping. Will you see her?”
My success with her led him to tell many of his doctor friends about me, and pretty soon I had a full practice! I went back to school and received my M.A. in Marriage and Family Counseling and my Ph.D. in psychology. During this time my husband and I wrote a number of books, including the bestseller, “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?”
However, after working for 17 years as a traditional psychotherapist, I was not happy with the results. I prayed for a process that worked rapidly and deeply – a process that people could learn and use without having to constantly work with me. It was during this time that I met Dr. Erika Chopich, the co-creator of Inner Bonding and my best friend. She had half the process and I had half the process, so our meeting had profound results.
We’ve been evolving Inner Bonding for 31 years, and it has become a most powerful psychological and spiritual process for self-healing anxiety, depression, aloneness, emptiness, addictions, shame and relationship issues, as well as for becoming loving parents to your children.
The Six Steps of Inner Bonding
Inner Bonding is a six-step practice that leads to learning how to love yourself rather than abandon yourself. Below is a very brief outline of this process.
Step One: Willingness to Feel Pain and Take Responsibility for Your Feelings
Feelings are informational. In Step One, we are willing to feel our feelings to learn what they are telling us, and we consciously decide we want responsibility for them.
Step Two: Move into the Intent to Learn
In Inner Bonding, there are only two possible intentions in any given moment:
To protect against pain and to avoid responsibility for it, through various forms of addictive, controlling, self-abandoning behavior.
To learn about what we are doing or thinking that may be causing our pain, or what may be happening between us and another person or situation, so that we can move into taking loving action in our own behalf.
Step Three: Learning About our False Beliefs
Step Three is a deep process of exploration, learning about our own beliefs and behavior and about what is happening with a person or situation that may be causing our pain – and about what brings joy.
Step Four: Dialogue with Our Higher Self
We ask our higher self:
What is the truth about the thoughts/false beliefs I may have uncovered in Step Three?
What loving action can I take for myself in this situation? What behavior is kindest to myself and others?
When your heart is open to learning, the answers will come though. It’s the intent to learn about loving yourself that raises your frequency high enough to access your spiritual guidance.
Step Five: Take Loving Action Learned in Step Four
Step Six: Evaluate Your Action
Check in to see if you feel true relief.
For me – and for thousands of others around the world – Inner Bonding has brought the love, joy, passion, aliveness, creativity, and spiritual connection that I sought for so long!
For more information on Dr. Margaret Paul go to http://margaretpaul.com/