Margaret Paul - Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child

It is difficult indeed to struggle against what one has been taught. The childs mind is a helpless one, pliable, absorbing. It makes what it learns a part of its very nature. Yetyou must change your minds, you must renew your hearts, and you must do it alone. There are no teachers for you.

To My Daughters with Love

PEARL S. BUCK

Youve achieved everything youve ever thought would make you happy, but the gnawing, empty feeling that something is missing is still there. To paraphrase Rabbi Harold Kushner, youve discovered that all youve ever wanted isnt enough.

You may feel lost, out of touch with yourself and others, in an emotional fog much of the time. You often feel as if youre doing nothing more than going through the motions. You may agonize over feeling insecure, inadequate, unlovable, and alone.

These are deeply painful feelings, pervasive and persistentso painful, in fact, you may have discovered any number of dysfunctional ways to ignore, deny, cover up, or numb the ache of your emptiness: alcohol, food, work, TV, sex, drugs, all of the above. Then one day something happens, a traumatic experience or an internal shift. You reach a turning point and ask yourself, as Jeremiah Abrams states in Reclaiming the Inner Child , Where is the life we lost in living?

Certainly youre not alone with these kinds of feelings. Most of us struggle with continuous or periodically recurring emotional pain for significant portions of our lives. This happens either because we dont know another, better way, or because were unwilling to try, afraid well only make matters worse. Unfortunately the pain often has to become intolerable, or a crisis must force the issue, before we take action on our own behalf. Take the case of Tom, for example.

Tom had never been in a therapists office and he wasnt happy about being there now. He sat stiffly in his dark blue suit, unaware that his fist was clenched and his expression stern. He would never have come at all, but the CEO of his company took him aside last week and told him that his outbursts of temper were undermining employee morale and driving potential customers away. Get some help, the CEO told him. Frustrated and angry, but seeing no other choice, Tom made an appointment.

After we talked for a while about Toms stress level and work load, I said, It sounds like youre not taking very good care of yourself.

Take care of myself? Thats not realistic. I have too much to do!

But you fly into unpredictable rages, and you could lose your job because of that. And being so stressed out, youre likely to lose your health as well. Can you really afford not to take care of yourself?

I dont think I can, he said softly. I dont know how.

Tom was telling the truth. He didnt know how; hed never learned. He had been at work since early childhood. His father was an abusive alcoholic, so Toms earliest memories were of trying to protect his mother and sister from harm. When he realized his father treated them better when he wasnt around, Tom left home and lived on his own. He was fifteen.

Most of us dont grow up in these extreme circumstances; but even in the best possible beginnings, very few of us know what it looks like to take care of ourselves. We havent seen that kind of behavior anywherenot in our families, not even on TV. So we follow the patterns weve learned, and we let ourselves down because we dont know what it looks like to be loving to ourselves as well as to those around us. We abuse ourselves, ignore or deny our painall because we dont know what else to do. We desperately need to begin to think about these questions: How do we take care of ourselves? How do we make ourselves happy? How do we bring joy into our lives?