What is Keeping You from Taking Responsibility for Your Inner Child?

One of the hardest challenges in learning Inner Bonding is to reach the point of truly taking responsibility for our own feelings, for those of our inner child, especially for creating the feeling of being loved. Until we do, we are stuck. I speak from experience. It took me over 10 years to get it. As I work with people over the phone, I realize that this is a common issue. I wondered why. I realized that for many people, including me, there are three things in the way. The first is a lack of a source of love, a spiritual connection. The second is the belief that our best feelings come from someone else loving us. The third is the belief that if we are getting what we think we need, because we have gotten someone else to take care of us or because we have found an addiction that "works," then we really are okay.

Lack of connection to a source of love is a deal breaker. We can understand that we cause our own feelings, as I did and try to be aware of how we are causing them, but when something happens and our child feels unloved, our attempts to remedy this will always fall short. Our little ones simply will not feel loved. We try to do the 6 steps, but we only feel slightly better. The energy of love is completely available, but we have to find out what is in the way for us. In my case, it was the belief that there was some sort of test and that I had failed it, so I did not deserve God's love. If you cannot access a source of love, it is because there is a belief in the way. Find it. It is false.

I also believed that nothing could feel as good as my husband's love. Nothing that I could remember ever had. So, rather than being focused on learning to love my little girl, I was focusing all my energy on trying to get him to learn to take care of his little boy so that we could connect, and I could have his love. I was convinced that if I could ever learn to bring love to my little girl, it would feel exactly the way his love felt, only I could do it when he was mad at me. I was completely wrong. I discovered, and everyone else who has had this experience has discovered, that when we bring love through to our inner child, the feeling is far beyond anything we ever got from another person. So why settle for less?

Finally, I believed that when I was getting my husband's love, my little girl was okay. That may be the hardest one to let go of. It did feel so good. In a recent column, Margaret wrote " The problem with this is that, just as an actual child would feel abandoned if you kept trying to give him or her to someone else to care for, your inner child feels abandoned the moment you make another person responsible for your feelings." I understood that when my husband would not take the job of loving me, but it was also true, just as true, when he did. The only time our inner child does not feel abandoned, no matter how things seem, is when we take the job of loving him or her. If we do not, no matter how we get around it, no matter how good we think we feel, our inner child will feel abandoned.

I had already gotten the spiritual connection, but I had not gotten this part about her feeling bad when I thought I was feeling good. When my little girl showed me how much pain she was in when I gave her to my husband, whether he took her or not, I got that the pain would be there whether I felt it or not. At that moment I realized that I had no choice, except to take care of her myself. Any other choice would result in terrible pain. And that was also the moment that I found out that when I stopped giving her away, when I took the job of loving her, that MY love was the best thing going. Trust me on this one, yours will be too.