Personal Responsibility: Do You Trust Yourself To Love Yourself?

How often have you felt anxious about having to face a challenging situation? Do you tell yourself that your anxiety is about how someone will respond or what will happen in the situation? Are you convinced that your anxiety is about what's going to happen externally rather than internally?

More often than not, the anxiety is because your inner child doesn't trust you as a loving adult to take loving care of yourself. The anxiety is about your inner child fearing that you will abandon yourself rather than take personal responsibility for yourself.

This is the situation that Robyn finds herself in:

"How can I trust myself to take care of myself when I have such deeply ingrained habits of self-abandonment? Even though I hate to admit it, I'm still not sure I really want personal responsibility for my feelings. I think I waffle on wanting the responsibility because I don't trust myself to follow through. I want to change this, but so far I can do pretty good for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks and then something happens and I find myself back in the abandonment pattern. I think it's at least partly a trust issue. How can I change this pattern?"

Moving from self-abandonment to self-love may be the biggest journey we will ever take. As Robyn stated, the patterns of self-abandonment are so deeply engrained that, unless we are very conscious of our ability to make a choice to love ourselves, we will continue to fall back into old patterns.

Robyn asks, 'How can I change this pattern?"

This is what the consistent practice of Inner Bonding is all about. As I've often stated, anything worth learning takes a lot of practice, and Inner Bonding is no exception.

The practice starts with Step One of Inner Bonding – learning to stay present in your body with your feelings. You can't take personal responsibility for learning from and lovingly managing your feelings if you are not aware of your feelings. So here are two suggestions for practicing Step One – one for people who like a moving meditation, and the other for people who like a sitting meditation.

1. For those of you who are not sitters and enjoy a walking meditation, try taking a walk first thing in the morning, and practice using your breath to take you inside your body, getting present with any physical sensations you are aware of. Emotions are often felt as physical sensations. Move toward all feelings with compassion, and if you feel anything other than peace and fullness inside, move ahead with an out-loud Inner Bonding process.

2. For those of you who enjoy a sitting meditation, take some time each morning to sit and breathe, following your breath inside your body and getting present with all feelings. As above, if you feel anything other than peace and fullness inside, move ahead with an out-loud Inner Bonding process.

You don't need to structure the time or force yourself to do it for a particular amount of time. Sometimes it might be five minutes and other times it might be 30 minutes. It's best not to try to exert control over how long you do this. But if you take some time each morning to practice being present in your body, you will find it gets easier and easier to stay present throughout the day, and to do a brief Inner Bonding process whenever you feel anything other than peace and fullness inside.

The more you do this internal loving action, the easier it becomes to take external loving actions as well. Eventually, your inner child will come to trust that you will take loving care of yourself.

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."

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