Kenneth consulted with me because he was scared. In his mid 50s, he was looking at the rest of his life, knowing that he didn't want to live it the way he had for the past 56 years. With two failed marriages, he was very lonely and afraid of ending up alone the rest of his life.

Kenneth was a successful businessman, but nothing else in his life was successful. He had lived his life intent on avoiding pain - with his many addictions. He was addicted to alcohol, sex, attention, busyness, anger, and blame. Along with his two failed marriages, he had many other failed relationships due to the anger and blame that inevitably surfaced when a woman failed to fill the empty, scared, abandoned place within him. He went from woman to woman trying to find the "right" one, who could take away his fear and fill his emptiness.

While Kenneth was raised with religion and believed in God, he did not have a personal connection with a higher power. He had long ago stopped praying. As a result of having no spiritual connection, he had no loving adult and no way of seeing his true essence, his soul self. He thought he was his ego wounded self and felt deeply inadequate. Since he had been using women for so long, he believed he was a bad person.
 

Kenneth's various addictions were the only ways he knew to survive.

Without a spiritually connected loving inner adult, his wounded self was doing the best it could.

Instead of focusing on abstinence regarding his addictions, our work was focused on developing his loving adult. Kenneth was able to imagine an older, wiser part of himself - his higher self. He was also able to tune in to the very wounded part of himself - a six-year-old whose father had died in an accident and whose alcoholic mother had abandoned him to his aunt. This six-year-old little boy was always terrified of being abandoned and alone, and had learned to use various addictions to ameliorate the pain of abandonment.

Kenneth would continue to feel this terror of abandonment until he developed a loving adult and started to learn to love himself rather than continue to abandon himself as his mother had abandoned him.

Due to being in so much pain, Kenneth was highly motivated. He read all the Inner Bonding books, attended an Intensive, and had weekly phone sessions.
 

Within the first few weeks of doing Inner Bonding, he decided to stop drinking, and was surprised at how easy it was.

In the past, he had not been able to sleep unless he was fairly drunk, but now he found that if he held his inner little boy with loving kindness, he became calm enough to sleep. He discovered that sex was not what this abandoned little boy needed. When Kenneth started to attend to his own feelings and to the many ways he had been abandoning himself, his need for constant sex and attention went away. When he was no longer making women responsible for making his little boy feel safe and loved, he found his anger at women disappearing.

His compulsive busyness was also disappearing, due to his emerging inner peace. As he practiced being a loving adult, he started to be able to see his beautiful essence - his caring, curious, creative, and spontaneous true self – his beautiful inner child. No longer believing that he was a bad person, he no longer had to avoid his feelings with his various addictions. He was able to separate out his programmed and frightened wounded self from his true self, and he now knew that he was not his wounded self.

Kenneth's addictions naturally and gradually disappeared as he learned to take loving action on his own behalf through his practice of Inner Bonding.

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."