How often do you get stuck in anger, anxiety, withdrawal, or depression? You know you can open, pray, and invite love into your heart, and do your Inner Bonding process, yet how often do you find yourself resisting doing so? You might hear yourself say things like, “It won’t work,” or “I can’t,” or “God isn’t there for me so why bother?”

The problem is that our wounded self often gets stuck in resistance. We don’t want to open; we don’t want to love. We don’t want to be controlled by what we “should” do, nor controlled by our higher power. Perversely, even though we may feel miserable, we refuse to open to learning and loving ourselves and others.

When we finally do open, we feel happy and peaceful, wondering why it took us so long.

In fact, once we open, we may find ourselves thinking, “I’m never going back to that misery. This feels so great, so full. This is what life is about!” Yet, the next time we are triggered into our hurt, anger, or fear, we go right back to being stuck in our darkness. Why? Why do we persist in resisting the very thing that would bring us joy?

Understanding your intent is the key to understanding your resistance to loving. When you resist opening to spirit and resist doing Inner Bonding, it’s because your highest priority in that moment is to control and avoid being controlled, in order to avoid the very difficult feeling of helplessness over others and outcomes.

At that moment, controlling and not being controlled becomes your god, your purpose.

When trying to control to avoid feeling helpless over a person or situation is your highest priority, you will not open to learning and loving. You may believe that if you open you will be too vulnerable to being hurt, rejected, dominated. In that moment, it becomes more important to you to avoid the pain of what you fear than it is to be loving to yourself and others, even though you are causing yourself worse pain by disconnecting from yourself and from spirit. So, you try to punish whomever you think caused your pain – whether that is yourself, God or a loved one – by staying in resistance.

All of this is because your wounded self thinks it can find its way by itself.

It thinks that if it just stays ‘safe’ by shutting down, not caring, numbing out with substances or processes, it will be okay. It wants control – especially control over not feeling helpless – more than anything. The problem is that it is impossible to maintain the illusion of control and be open to being guided by spirit at the same time.

Veronica was enraged at her young son. She was extremely frustrated at not having control over his refusal to do his homework. They had an ongoing power struggle over homework. While Veronica realized that she was participating in the power struggle by trying to control her son and not accepting her helplessness over him, she couldn’t seem to stop. Avoiding feeling helpless over him was so important to her that she would keep escalating her anger to the point where she would actually hit him. Mortified by her behavior, she called me for help.

I was able to help Veronica open to her love for her son and to her guidance, but for a while, her deep need to control and not be controlled, and to avoid her painful feeling of helplessness over her son, remained more important to her than loving, and she would succumb to her rage. Eventually, through practice, loving and being guided by spirit became her highest priority, and she was able to move beyond her rage.

This is the human dilemma with which we all struggle: who is in charge of our lives – our wounded self or our spiritual guidance?

Many of us turn to our guidance when things are going well, but immediately revert to the controlling ways of our wounded self as soon as our safety and security are threatened, or our existential painful feelings of loneliness, heartbreak, grief, or helplessness over others are triggered.

What do you do when someone is angry with you, blames you, or doesn’t do what you want? What do you do when things don’t go your way? What do you do with loss? Do you do Inner Bonding and turn to your guidance to learn what is loving to yourself and others, or do you turn to your addictions – to anger, withdrawal, substances, and processes? How long do you stay stuck in your wounded self?

We all have the choice to choose to love over control; we make this choice when loving ourselves and others finally becomes a higher priority than controlling, avoiding, and protecting against pain.

Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”