Dr. Margaret Paul, co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process, is the author/co-author of several best-selling books, including:
- Do I Have To Give Up Me to Be Loved By You?
- Do I Have To Give Up Me to Be Loved By You?…The Workbook
- Healing Your Aloneness
- Inner Bonding
- The Healing Your Aloneness Workbook
- Do I Have To Give Up Me to Be Loved By My Kids?
- Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By God?
Dr. Paul’s books have been distributed around the world and have been translated into many languages.
Dr. Margaret works with individuals and couples throughout the world – on the phone, via the web on http://www.innerbonding.com, in workshops, and in multi-day group intensive programs.
Relationships can provide a wonderful arena for healing love addiction.
Many relationships flounder due to the issue of love addiction. Since people come together at their common level of woundedness – i.e., their common level of self-abandonment – if one partner is love addicted, it is likely that the other partner is also love addicted or addicted to caretaking the love-addicted partner.
Does the relationship need to end to heal this, or can it be healed within the relationship? This is the question that Marianne is asking:
“Is it possible to recover from a love addiction and remain in/redefine the relationship? What is required of both partners to make this successful?
“We are in the process of changing a love-addicted relationship into a loving relationship. How will we know when we’ve achieved it?
“I think I may have confused love addiction for love in my relationship. Is there a ‘litmus test’ to determine if this is the case? Is it possible for real love to grow in a place where previously only a love addiction existed?”
I will answer each of these questions, one at a time.
“Is it possible to recover from a love addiction and remain in/redefine the relationship?”
Yes! In fact, it’s far preferable to heal love addiction within the relationship than to try to heal it outside of the relationship, because the underlying issues get triggered within the relationship. If you leave the relationship, the deeper issues might not surface again until you are in another relationship, and then it is likely that the same issues will emerge.
“What is required of both partners to make this successful?”
While one partner can begin to change the codependent system, when both partners are willing to learn how to take loving care of their own feelings, they have an excellent chance of healing their relationship.
Love addiction, like all addictions, is the result of self-rejection/self-abandonment. When each partner practices Inner Bonding and learns how to take loving care of their own feelings, then they are no longer needy of the other’s love and attention to feel lovable and worthy, and no longer available to care-take a love-addicted partner.
“How will we know when we’ve achieved a loving relationship?”
When you find yourselves loving to be together – fully enjoying each other and having fun together and you are able to caringly resolve conflicts, you are well on your way to a loving relationship. When you are no longer making your partner responsible for your self-worth, and are no longer taking responsibility for your partner’s feelings of self-worth, you will likely find yourselves feeling much more connected with each other.
“I think I may have confused love addiction for love in my relationship. Is there a ‘litmus test’ to determine if this is the case?”
You are loving your partner when you are able to fully support your partner in whatever brings him or her joy. When love-addicted, you often want to limit what your partner does out of your fear and insecurity, but when you love your partner, you feel joy for their joy. You are focused on sharing your love with your partner rather than on getting love.
“Is it possible for real love to grow in a place where previously only a love addiction existed?”
Yes, it is very possible, but it depends on each partner’s devotion to loving self-care. Your ability to share real love with your partner is the result of learning how to fill yourself with love so that you have love to share. If you are rejecting and abandoning yourself, you are empty inside and needy of another’s love to feel okay. The love between you will likely grow as you each learn to love and value yourselves.
Connect with Margaret on Facebook.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process – featured on Oprah, and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Click here for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com for more articles and help. Phone and Skype Sessions Available. Join the thousands we have already helped and visit us now!
Posted in Relationships, Self Improvement & Personal Growth
Tags: addiction recovery, Addictions, Inner Bonding, love, love addiction, love-addicted, Margaret Paul, real love, Relationships, self worth, self-abandonment, self-rejection
Do you understand the power of kindness to change your life?
“Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” Og Mandino, 1923-1996, Author
Being kind is a simple act, so why isn’t it more common? Why is being caring, kind and loving to everyone such a challenge for most people? Some of the reason may have to do with some false beliefs about kindness:
- If I’m kind to everyone, I will be seen as weak and I will be taken advantage of.
- If I’m kind to someone before I know whether they are going to be kind to me, I will end up feeling rejected and hurt.
- If I’m kind to someone, they might think I’m strange or that I want something from them.
- What’s the point of being kind to everyone with no thought of any reward?
All of these beliefs bypass the underlying reason why kindness toward everyone is so important.
Why Be Kind to Everyone
Do you feel happier and more peaceful inside when you are kind to others, or when you are mean toward others or discounting of them?
The main benefit of being kind to others is that it is actually kind to yourself to be kind to others. When we are being kind to others, our heart is open and filled with loving energy. This feels good!
When you are being harsh, shut down, or discounting toward others, you might think you are protecting yourself from getting hurt, but acting in these unloving ways is so much more hurtful to yourself than another’s rejection of you. When you deny your true self – your kind, loving, open and caring self – you are actually rejecting yourself, which always feels bad inside.
Feeling safe and feeling loved are not the same thing. We feel loved inside when we are being kind and loving to ourselves and others. We might think we feel safe when we are harsh, judgmental, controlling, shut down or angry, but this kind of safety – the safety that comes from unloving, controlling behavior – actually doesn’t make us feel safe. Not only do we not feel safe when we are unloving, we also feel unlovable and inwardly rejected.
There is a level at which we are all one. Just like all the cells in our body make up our whole body, so each soul is a part of the whole. We are each an individualized spark of the Divine, and each of us is vitally important to the whole that is God.
If you were hurtful to one cell in your body, that would affect your whole body. You cannot hurt even a tiny part of your finger without it affecting how you feel. The same is true of hurting others. We cannot harm another without harming ourselves – without hurting our soul that is also, on the energy level, connected to everyone else’s soul.
We cannot value and cherish ourselves when we treat others with anything less than kindness and caring. Likewise, we may have a hard time being kind and caring with others if we are treating ourselves badly. If you find that you are not able to be kind to others, look to see how you are treating yourself. Are you harsh and judgmental toward yourself? Are you projecting this harshness onto others?
You will find it much easier to be kind to others when you are being kind to yourself, and you will find it much easier to be kind to yourself when you are kind to others, with no agenda attached.
Try it! It truly can change your life!
Connect with Margaret on Facebook.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process – featured on Oprah, and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Click here for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com for more articles and help. Phone and Skype Sessions Available. Join the thousands we have already helped and visit us now!
Posted in Self Improvement & Personal Growth
Tags: controlling behavior, Inner Bonding, kindness, love, loving behavior, Margaret Paul, Relationships, self-abandonment, self-judgment, self-rejection, soul, spirituality
Our culture seems to promote love addiction to such an extent that it seems like a healthy way to relate. While it is very common, it is anything but healthy. Because it is so prevalent, many people don’t realize they are love addicted.
Henry asks:
“Is love addiction like when I see a friendly woman a couple times in public, and I start obsessing about her, how wonderful she is (even though I don’t know her), and thinking how great it would be to be with her?”
Fantasizing about a woman you don’t know is one form that love addiction can take. Let’s explore what Henry is describing to see how it is a love addiction.
Henry is obsessing about how great it would be to be with this woman that he doesn’t know and is making up. In making her responsible for him feeling great, he is avoiding taking responsibility for his own feelings instead focusing on his fantasies of her. What feelings is Henry avoiding by obsessing about this woman? Perhaps he is feeling anxious or empty or alone and he doesn’t know how to learn from and manage these feelings, so he turns to fantasies of being with this woman to avoid the difficult feelings.
The problem is that when Henry does finally meet a woman he wants to date, he will be needy – wanting her to make him feel great because he is not making himself feel great. That’s what a love addiction is all about – getting someone else’s love to fill up your emptiness, take away your aloneness, and define your worth. He may latch on to this woman, pulling on her to give him what he is not giving to himself. He may want to spend all his time with her, and he might feel angry or jealous if she wants to spend time with her friends.
Since people are attracted at their common level of self-abandonment, a woman who is attracted to Henry will likely be a person who is also needy for his love. She might be a caretaker who is willing to give herself up to try to have control over getting his love, or she might be fairly narcissistic and demanding, while he might give himself up to get her love. In either case, they will establish a codependent relationship that probably won’t work well.
Love addiction is like any other addiction in that the purpose is to avoid responsibility for your own feelings. Just as someone becomes addicted to food to take away emptiness and aloneness, people become addicted to another’s attention to take away these painful feelings.
It’s a vicious cycle. The feelings of aloneness and emptiness are being caused by the lack of self-love that results from the various forms of self-abandonment. As long as Henry is abandoning himself by not lovingly attending to his feelings and by not learning to love himself, he will continue to feel empty and alone – no matter how much attention a woman gives to him. While her attention might feel good, as long as Henry is treating himself badly by ignoring his feelings, judging himself and turning to addictions to avoid his feelings, he will feel empty and alone. The emptiness and aloneness are the inevitable results of self-abandonment.
Henry, if you learn and practice Inner Bonding, you can heal your love addiction and eventually create a loving relationship, where you are sharing your love rather than trying to get love.
Connect with Margaret on Facebook.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process – featured on Oprah, and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Click here for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com for more articles and help. Phone and Skype Sessions Available. Join the thousands we have already helped and visit us now!
Posted in Addictions, Self Improvement & Personal Growth
Tags: Addictions, aloneness, codependent, I feel empty, Inner Bonding, inner emptiness, love addiction, Margaret Paul, obsessive thinking, Relationships, ruminating
Should you leave a relationship that is stuck in a negative cycle?
It is quite common for me to work with clients who are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship cycle. Sarah describes a common cycle that she wants to resolve:
“I am stuck in a two year uncommitted relationship. When he fears he is losing me that’s when he is on his best behavior and does anything he can to win me back (which doesn’t require much). Once he gets me he pulls back. Then I become needy. Then I pull back and the cycle begins again. I would like to experiment with creating a higher standard to win me back and see what happens. I am eager to get married and have children. Is this a waste of time?”
Sarah, I will answer your last question first: “Is this a waste of time?” Well, yes and no. Here’s why.
It is a waste of time to move on, because you are as much a part of this stuck relationship cycle as your boyfriend. If you move on without learning about and healing your end of this system, you run the risk of creating the same or a similar system in your next relationship. This is because this system is based on two fears that you will take with you: The fear of rejection and the fear of engulfment. Both you and your boyfriend are likely operating from these two fears, although your primary fear seems to be the fear of rejection, and his primary fear is the fear of engulfment. I will show you how I know this from your question.
“When he fears he is losing me that’s when he is on his best behavior and does anything he can to win me back (which doesn’t require much).”
When his fear of engulfment is diminished due to you pulling away, he goes into his best behavior to win you back. Your fear of rejection leads you back into the relationship. Neither of you are operating as a loving inner adult – who knows how to manage rejection without giving yourself up.
“Once he gets me he pulls back. Then I become needy.” He pulls back because of his fear of engulfment, which gets triggered as soon as he is back in the relationship. Then your fear of rejection is triggered and you get needy – which further triggers his fear of engulfment. He doesn’t want responsibility for your worth and safety, and he doesn’t have a loving adult self who knows how to set limits against being controlled by your neediness, so he pulls back even further to protect himself from your pull on him.
Instead of taking care of your own feelings when he withdraws, you abandon yourself, which is what creates your neediness. You are actually rejecting yourself rather than learning to love yourself.
“Then I pull back and the cycle begins again.” Your fear of rejection leads to you pulling back rather than to taking loving care of your own feelings of worth and security.
“I would like to experiment with creating a higher standard to win me back and see what happens.” This will do no good at all. He will certainly try harder because his fear of rejection will be motivating him, but without both of you doing the Inner Bonding work of creating a loving adult so that you can manage your fears, rather than continue to pull and resist, the same system will continue.
When you do your inner work to develop a loving adult self, then you will not become needy in the face of his pulling back. Instead, you will move into compassion for your own feelings. If he also does his inner work, then he will lovingly show up for himself when his fears of rejection or engulfment are triggered, rather than pull away.
So the answer to “Is this a waste of time?” is that continuing this same system is a waste of time, but staying in the relationship and learning to take loving care of yourself in the face of whatever he does is not a waste of time. Even if the relationship ultimately doesn’t work out, you will have learned a lot that may enable you to move on to a more loving relationship.
Connect with Margaret on Facebook.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process – featured on Oprah, and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Click here for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com for more articles and help. Phone and Skype Sessions Available. Join the thousands we have already helped and visit us now!
Discover why you may be sabotaging and punishing yourself with your self-judgment and self-rejection.
Would you love to manifest your dreams and have the life you want? Most people would unhesitatingly respond with a resounding “YES!” Yet, do you sometimes find yourself sabotaging yourself in achieving this? Georgette finds herself in this position and wants to know how to stop.
“My inner parent took over the job where my biological and step-parents left off. She’s negative and critical to the point that I find that I’m consciously sabotaging myself — just to be sure I get what I deserve. (?) It feels as though I would be out of integrity if I don’t punish myself. That message stuck with me from very early in childhood and I continue to struggle with it. By virtue of the fact that this struggle even exists seems to validate the negative assessment that I’m worthless. I’m 60 years old and this life-long habit is still fresh and active, even though the original perpetrators of the vile message are long dead. In my brain, and even my heart, I know that I am not worthless — no one is. But emotionally, it feels so real. Is this message something that will ever be overcome? I’ve done so much personal work, and have assisted many others in dealing with similar issues, yet I can’t seem to unravel it within myself. Any insight and direction would be so much appreciated. Thank you.”
Georgette, the question you need to ask yourself is, “What feelings or outcomes am I trying to control or avoid when I judge and punish myself?”
Your parents were trying to control you when they were critical of you, and you absorbed the messages you heard as a child into your wounded self. The wounded self is the part of us that learned various ways of trying to control our painful feelings and the outcome of things regarding others and events.
Because we could not manage very painful feelings when we were little, we needed to try to control as part of our survival.
The problem is that your wounded self is still in charge, and still trying to control. As long as your intent is to control your feelings and outcomes, you will continue to sabotage yourself with self-judgment. Your wounded self is not actually trying to sabotage you – she is trying to protect you from getting hurt, but the way she tries to protect you ends up sabotaging you. So it’s not working.
When you shift your intent from controlling to loving yourself, you will eventually be able to stop judging yourself. When you decide that being loving to yourself – and learning about what that means – is more important to you than avoiding your painful feelings, then you will gradually be able to stop sabotaging yourself.
The painful feelings most of us learned to avoid when we were little are the core painful feelings of life – loneliness, heartbreak, grief and helplessness over others and outcomes.
The wounded self is so averse to the core painful feelings of life that it ironically creates other painful feelings such as anxiety, depression, guilt, shame or anger in order to avoid the deeper feelings.
When you learn to connect with a loving spiritual source of comfort, and compassionately embrace these feelings, then you will no longer need to avoid them. When you accept your helplessness over others’ feelings and actions, and over the outcome of things, and learn to take loving care of yourself in the face of challenging situations, then you no longer need to attempt to control. This is what will allow you to let go of the self-judgment/self-rejection that is sabotaging you.
The Inner Bonding process is wonderful for developing your spiritually connected loving adult self who is capable of managing your painful feelings.
Connect with Margaret on Facebook.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books, relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® process – featured on Oprah, and recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. Are you are ready to heal your pain and discover your joy? Click here for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com for more articles and help. Phone and Skype Sessions Available. Join the thousands we have already helped and visit us now!
Posted in Self Improvement & Personal Growth
Tags: controlling behavior, heartbreak, Inner Bonding, loneliness, Margaret Paul, self-abandonment, self-judgment, self-rejection, self-sabotage, spiritual guidance, spirituality, wounded self
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