Spiritual Bypassing and Inner Bonding

Spiritual bypassing is a term coined by John Welwood, which defines his experiences he had in meditation communities where practitioners used meditation to skip the work of resolving emotional wounds and unfinished childhood development. To nip this problem in the bud, I chose a modality to explore that has helped me in the past and still helps to this day. Inner Bonding is a process by Dr. Margaret Paul which is a modality of healing that creates a solid foundation for spiritual or philosophical practices. Before we see the impermanence of the self, we first need to get to know the self.

Healing your aloneness

In Healing your aloneness Margaret get us to look deeper at the world we live in. She says, “our culture is rampant with people who are addicted to something — alcohol, drugs, food, cigarettes, work, TV, money, power, relationships, religion, approval, caretaking, sex, affection, romance — all ways to get filled up from outside of ourselves. That’s what addiction and codependence is all about — trying to fill oneself up from the outside.” The above list is not exhaustive. We can also read a lot, or meditate a lot and it is still chasing for something external.

To create some discussion on this I would like to take this time to ask you viewers to think about the answer to this question. “Have any meditation practices increased or decreased your disconnection with the self?”

It’s an important question, because this disconnection is all pervasive in our culture and we are all in the same boat, whether we meditate or not, whether we are spiritual or not, whether we have high status or not, or whether we think we are smart or not. The cultural messages are the same. “Just this next thing, situation, opportunity will do the trick. It will make you happy forever.” In actual experience we will always want more. This can include meditation that treats healthy desires the same as unhealthy ones, or endless expensive meditation retreats where the disconnection continues. What needs to be clear is that internal sources of motivation are more lasting than external sources. As you will see below, dialoging with yourself, validating yourself, and acting on your own behalf generates positive chemicals without the need of others to dialogue with you, validate you, and act on your own behalf.

For example, that long meditation retreat might not help a meditator’s disconnection, just how like that bigger house may not help a social climber’s disconnection. We will only find emptiness in the end because we get used to everything and develop a tolerance and boredom every time. [See: The Origin of Envy and Narcissism: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html] You can even do a great Loving Kindness meditation practice for yourself, but because you are so disconnected from your needs, it doesn’t work. A loving-kindness meditation practice can be helpful but it is at the level of self-affirmations. If you act on your healthy long-term needs, your self-esteem chemicals will start flowing and you’ll feel just as good as a meditation. Maybe even better. Certainly, if you want to investigate your consciousness with meditation, a healthy self will make it easier, not harder. This is a tough nut to crack.

To Margaret, it’s not just a bunch “losers” who are co-dependent. A lot of people, regardless of status, can be chained to one or more of the above addictions, and flaunt how superior to others they are, which is also another addiction. An addiction to approval, and an advertising addiction to the onlookers who look back with envy. For many people, their consumption and boasting about it to others is the only thing left of the pleasure once it disappears. They know their feelings of pleasure disappear into emptiness, but they ignore those feelings and look for substitutes, like social comparison to keep the happy chemicals going. “I did such and such a thing and you didn’t! Therefore I’m superior.” It may not manifest itself in a glib statement like that, but it comes up in conversation, and then the subject waits for some statement of approval, or a twinge of envy from the listener, to feed off of.

This kind of disconnection creates conflict when we require exploitation of others in our relationships to feed our identity when the social comparisons aren’t favourable. This looking outward faces away from where we need to look. By creating wholeness and connection within, it is easier to share that wholeness and connect with others because we don’t run out of those happy chemicals so easily. It’s almost impossible to be nice others when we feel empty.

Intention

For Margaret, her method of Inner Bonding starts with Intention. We need the Inner Adult to develop an intention to learn from the Inner Child, to replace the intention to protect. The protection here she talks about is not basic protection of your life and property, but over-protection that prevents us from getting our needs met.

Her methods remind me of Sigmund Freud to a certain extent [See: The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html] but she prefers to keep the concepts simple so that people can easily use it. She defines the Inner Child as your “modes of being, feeling, and experiencing”, and the Inner Adult as your “modes of doing, thinking, and acting.”

How we can get cut off is the intention to protect becomes so repressive that it doesn’t even have a dialogue with the child. [See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html]. The child talks to us with authentic feelings in the moment, which requires us to move into a learning intention if we want to make that connection. The feelings are teaching us about ourselves all the time, but they can be drowned out by all the addictions listed above, or discounted by the adult.

Feel the feels!

Margaret reminds us that at this present moment with your feelings, there is a choice. The choice to learn from those feelings. This is the junction where the Adult can listen and find realistic ways to respond to those feelings of the Child. [See again: The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html]. Every time those feelings are ignored and something external is used to numb the pain of the child, the sense of wholeness disappears, until you start listening again. When you get sensitive enough to feel the differences in the modes of connection and disconnection it can feel almost like flipping a switch.

The Abandoned Child

The Inner Child contains our memories and responds to the adult as feeling loved or unloved. The Inner Child is unloved when it is being “criticized, neglected, shamed, abandoned, rejected, and indulged.”

Margaret says, “The Inner Child learns to fear being rejected, abandoned, and controlled, first by external caretakers and then by the Inner Adult, and eventually projects these fears onto others, generally believing that others are rejecting, abandoning, or attempting to control him or her”, whether this is happening or not. The pain of rejection as a child is so unbearable that it gets compounded by the helplessness of children, when they have no Inner Adult to protect it from exploitation from others.

“The abandoned Inner Child is constantly afraid of being wrong because it believes that being wrong is what leads to rejection. Therefore, it strives to find the ‘right’ way to be in the world. It becomes addicted to ‘shoulds’ and rules as a way to control rejection. It develops a need to be perfect and a belief that it is possible to be perfect. Perfectionism and the fear of being wrong are symptoms of the internal disconnection between the Inner Adult and the Inner Child.”

When we do not learn to give ourselves approval then we have no choice but to look for it from others. This can open the inner child to abuse from others when all the power is given to others to provide the approval. This can be in toxic family relationships and also in the workplace. The abandonment is then complete inside and out. The fear of being engulfed in relationships keeps the inner child isolated, and contact from others can lead to defensive, over-protective, comments towards them and the Inner Adult.

The Loved Child

The loved Child feels safe and is open to letting the Adult know what we authentically feel and what we authentically want. If we cannot feel what is true, then we cannot access the wisdom of the Inner Child. When the Inner Adult is working well with the Inner Child, the Inner Adult provides the skill mastery, and the Inner Child provides the sensitivity and intuition of experience. The Loving Adult parents the Child by learning what brings the Child Joy and acts to bring it out. The Adult is balanced and not permissive or authoritarian in its actions. The adult can question the child’s desires and it doesn’t have to enable the child just like people can enable the addictions of others. The adult can use truth to teach the Child.

Inauthenticity

Margaret says, “the Adult expresses through action the needs and feelings of both the Child and the Adult,” on the other hand, “experiencing feelings without the action of the Adult leaves us stuck, and likewise, action without feeling behind it is an empty experience.” This is how our authenticity can evaporate. For example, Margaret says “if you feel warmth toward someone, but do not express it with some form of action, [people] never get a true experience of you. However, if you act affectionate without a feeling of love, then the act is empty, and may even be manipulative.”

Naturally others can also be inauthentic to you, and may even use shame and flattery to control your inner adult and child. When the co-dependent takes a low self-esteem identity from being shamed, or abandoned, then it can increase low self-esteem with all kinds of addictions which add to the shame. The cycle then leads to mental illnesses like depression.

Inner Bonding vs. Inner Slavery

Margaret also describes the opposite situation. She says that, “treating our Inner Child lovingly creates the inner connection that fills the emptiness from within rather than needing to fill it externally with addictions. The more we learn to treat our Inner Child lovingly, the more solid and full the internal connection becomes, leading to peace, joy, power, and wholeness, erasing the need to give ourselves up to be loved by others.” Your perceptions change, and how you look at those addictions. The addictions tend to lose their luster. The self-abandonment ceases and so does the slavery.

When people are disconnected from the loved child by the behaviour of the unloving adult, both parts are projected onto others and they mistrust their unloved parts of themselves. This leads to conflict with disconnected others as each person cannot access authenticity and share it with others. They can only share resistance, mistrust, hypervigilance, and pre-emptive strikes.

Choose to connect

The way out is for the Adult to listen and intuit the feelings and needs of the child and then the Adult has to make good decisions to satisfy those needs. When the inner child feels loved, the brain creates an internal source of loving neurochemicals that makes you feel more satisfied and content, and more often. Your perception of external rewards changes so that those external rewards look as empty as they are. The problem with external rewards is that they die out quickly, so like in an addiction, you constantly need replenishment to prevent emptiness.

Self-intimacy and relationships

This translates into relationships when how we show up often attracts people who are similar. Margaret says that, “most of us enter our relationships with low self-esteem, hoping our partner will make us feel whole and good about ourselves. This is one of the major difficulties in relationships, expecting our partner to be responsible for our good feelings. But it is only when we already love ourselves through loving connection with our Inner Child that we can truly love another, by wanting to know that person and by supporting his or her growth and happiness. When we do not love ourselves, we are threatened by the other’s growth. So instead of supporting them, we attempt to diminish and control them. When we do not know and love ourselves, we fear rejection / abandonment and domination / engulfment by our partner and find many ways to protect ourselves from our fears. A withdrawn or resistant person may touch off our fears of abandonment, so we protect ourselves by becoming controlling. A demanding or controlling person may activate our fear of being engulfed, so we protect ourselves by becoming withdrawn or resistant. We cannot give love when we are protecting ourselves from these fears. Until we know that we are lovable, we will be dependent on others to make us feel good about ourselves, and will continue to fear being abandoned or engulfed.”

For couples struggling and who want to go to therapy, Margaret has a warning about codependent therapists, “if the couple tries to get help through therapy, there is a good possibility that the therapist is an unrecovering codependent and therefore not helpful. A codependent therapist who is not in recovery cannot help others face their codependence. We cannot see in others what we have not dealt with in ourselves. Codependent therapists may even do more harm than good, since they may actually foster codependence in their clients.”

Margaret shines a light on our lack of self-intimacy, and how it makes us incapable of being intimate with others. She says, “the first prerequisite of intimacy is to be intimate with oneself. As long as we are looking outside ourselves for intimacy, we will never have it and we will never be able to give it. In order to be intimate with another person, we have to know who we are, what we feel, what we think, what our values are, what is important to us, and what we want. If we do not know these things about ourselves, we can never share them with another person.” Another way of looking at this is that, if we don’t know our true preferences, and it’s the same with our partner, it means we are locked away from our inner children and therefore cannot please each other, which is what relationships are about, pleasing each other. We may end up enabling each other’s addictions instead.

For Margaret, these inner bonds that eventually connect with others who are also inner bonded is “the most wonderful feeling we can ever experience.”

So now that we know what Inner Bonding is, how do we get more of that?

Here are 5 steps that Margaret lays out in her book, “Inner Bonding”, to show us how to reconnect with that inner intimacy:

Inner Bonding

Step 1. Recognize your inner conflict: Becoming aware of your feelings

As we go about our day, our habits of repressing the Inner Child can make us unconscious of the existence of an Inner Child at all. Those with rigid personality disorders may never be able to complete step one, which is to analyze their feelings. In this case therapy is necessary.

Margaret says, “we cannot explore our feelings until we know we are feeling. Many of us have learned to numb our feelings with our substance and process addictions. Until we become willing to pay attention to and feel the feelings of our Inner Child, we cannot begin to learn about them. Feeling your feelings means focusing inward into your body — paying attention to your gut, your neck, your shoulders, your legs — wherever you hold your tension, anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, disappointment. It means not doing the things you normally do to not feel your pain — not taking that drink, not eating that candy bar, not turning on the TV, not working those extra hours, not yelling at your mate or your kids.”

Step 2. Respond as a loving adult: Moving into the intent to learn

For Margaret, Step 2 is switching from the intent to protect and to move into the intent to learn. For her we have to believe that our feelings have a good reason for being there. To do this we also have to be willing to feel emotional pain.

Belief in good reasons

For most people, who didn’t get the “good enough” parenting, we have lots of self-judgement for listening to those feelings. Margaret says, “we cannot truly embrace the intent to learn as our primary intent until we are no longer controlled by the fear of other’s judgment or self judgment. Until then, protecting against being seen as wrong and against experiencing the deep pain of shame will be more important to us than learning.”

Willingness to feel pain

“Most of us suffered pain — from being sexually abused, physically abused, or emotionally abused by being ignored, neglected, ridiculed, put down, yelled at, or called names. And we were alone and trapped with our pain and shame. We were too little to leave, to call a friend for help, or to find ourselves a therapist. For an unfortunate number of us, childhood was hell, and to survive we had to find ways to protect ourselves. As long as we choose to protect against [pain], the work we must do to avoid that pain controls our lives. In order to open to learning, an individual must decide that he or she is willing to feel and learn from the pain. Opening to learning from pain is an essential aspect in healing. Once a person opens to learning, he or she can learn to pay attention to the emotional discomfort and pain of the Inner Child. This facilitates understanding that there are good reasons for the discomfort or pain, exploring and challenging the false beliefs that are causing the present unhappiness, discovering what brings joy, and acting to bring it about. As the Inner Adult learns to handle the pain of the Inner Child, the door to memory opens and we can finally remember, grieve, and heal the experiences that created our core false beliefs about ourselves.”

Step 3. Dialoguing with your inner child

Now that the loving adult is responding to the child’s feelings there is an opening for connection. You can ask the child direct questions. Through the use of automatic writing, Margaret shows how the connection with the Inner Child can grow deeper. With practice, the diary can be filled up with what has been repressed for so long. Margaret instructs us to “ask a question directly to your Inner Child, saying the words out loud or writing them down, using your non-dominant hand when answering as the Child. Then gently move from thinking to feeling. Pay attention to the feelings in your body and allow yourself to react as if you were a small child. Let the answers to your questions float upward into your consciousness.”

You can also use a doll, stuffed animal, or a picture of yourself as a child to help the dialogue process.

How the adult can facilitate the dialogue is as follows:

The adult can ask simply “what are you feeling?” Then you can go into the body and find out and explain the emotions from the vantage point of the child. The adult can then validate the emotion without the threat of rejection, which is most important. The Inner Adult can respond by asking what the child wants done differently. At this point all the false beliefs that suffocated the Inner Child are revealed and can be explored by yourself or with a therapist. It is important that the adult thanks the child for the depth of inner wisdom, and most important the adult must find a real way to act on those requests so that the inner child doesn’t feel abandoned again.

What Inner Bonding practitioners often experience at the beginning of the process is a very resentful child that can spew expletives and communicate a lack of trust of the adult. The adult cannot use their old belief systems and defenses against the inner child otherwise it’s just more of the same repression as before.

When the child feels loved, the connection is warm and the trust is stronger. The feeling of being a victim disappears with each act of the adult to support the child.

Step 4. Dialogue with your Higher Power

To Margaret the Higher Power we are talking about is not the Inner Child or the Inner Adult, but the bond between the two. As long as the conversation between both continues the access to our Higher Power is open. She says, “the focus needs to be on what is loving to ourselves, to our own Inner Child, first and foremost. If we focus on what we think is loving to others, we may end up caretaking instead of loving, and our Child will get cast aside.”

Step 5. Take action

“Once you’ve had a dialogue with your Inner Child and your Higher Power, and decided what the loving behavior would be in a given situation, your Adult must make it happen. Just as you would take action to relieve the pain of your actual child, you as the Adult need to be the one to take action to relieve the pain of your Inner Child. Then, as explained earlier, when your Adult does what is needed to meet the Inner Child’s needs in ways that have long-range, positive consequences, your Child feels loved and cared for and your Adult has a sense of inner strength.”

Whether we want to blame our parents for our parenting, in the end, we are still the only ones who can change our inner state this way. Margaret says “one of the sad but true things about life is that if we didn’t get what we wanted and needed from our parents, it is too late as adults to get it from outside of ourselves. As adults, we can get all the love in the world from outside of ourselves and all it does is make us feel good for the moment, as does any addiction. As long as we continue to treat ourselves in unloving ways we will continue to feel unworthy or unlovable, no matter how much outside love we get. We have to give ourselves the love first, before any outside love can even come in any permanent way. Outside love cannot come into a closed heart, and unless we are open to learning and loving within, our heart is closed and other’s love is just a temporary drug.”

When our heart is open then the inner child can feel much more freedom. Margaret says, “One theme that runs throughout … is freedom — freedom from fear, from internal struggles, from inner resistance, from the need for emotional protection, from your own or another’s attempts at control, freedom to feel and the freedom to value that feeling.”