The first lesson of power is that we are alone. The last lesson of power is that we are all one.
The Woman of Wyrrd
LYNN ANDREWS
Some people find it very difficult to take good care of their Inner Child around others, yet have an easy time making themselves happy when they are alone. These people are generally the caretakers, who shove their Inner Child aside to meet other’s needs and pay attention to their own needs only when there is no one else to take care of. Caretakers often feel relieved when they finally have some time alone, time to pursue their own feelings, interests, and hobbies. In fact caretakers often get ill, sometimes very ill, in order to finally have time for themselves. Because they feel so guilty and selfish taking care of their own wants and needs, the only way they can justify it is by being sick.
Many people, however, fear being alone more than anything and have no idea how to feel whole by themselves. Some people are fine when they choose to be alone, yet fall apart when left alone. Being left alone can touch off such deep abandonment terror that they feel like they are going to die from it, just as they felt as small children.
Some people know how to take good care of themselves when it comes to playing, yet may let their Child down completely when it comes to personal health and safety. The vast majority of people have chosen to abandon their Inner Child when it comes to healing the pain of the past, which is the source of all other internal and external problems. Without the intent to learn about and heal past trauma and abuse, we will go on abusing ourselves and others without even knowing we are doing it. Our ability to take good care of ourselves and to lovingly handle the difficulties that life presents depends on the degree of recovery we have achieved.
People who live in tribal societies never have to face being alone the way we do in our society. Because we live so separately, in separate houses and separate families, we have to face the difficulties that come with being alone. Whether we are alone because we cannot find a partner, or because we have been left alone through death, divorce, or separation, finding our peace and joy depends upon being willing to be a loving Adult for our Inner Child.
Lenore first came to see me when her husband, Nate, was dying of cancer. They had been married for forty years, had raised three children, and were just starting to enjoy retirement when Nate became ill.
Lenore was emotionally dependent on Nate. He was the one who had loved her, praised her, made her feel important. She had never sought friends, relying on Nate to meet all her needs. Nate had been the emotional caretaker, while Lenore was on the narcissistic end of codependence. Now, with Nate being so ill, the tables were turned and Lenore was feeling quite lost. She had to take care of Nate, both emotionally and physically. She was angry and felt guilty about being angry with a man who was so sick and dying and who had loved her so well. She also felt betrayed that he was leaving her. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
Lenore had been brought up by an emotionally caretaking father and a mother who was on the narcissistic end of codependence. Her father treated her and her mother very much the way Nate did, while her mother was always shaming her and yelling at her and was physically abusive at times. Lenore’s Inner Adult was patterned after her mother in the way she treated her own Inner Child and Nate, while she acted as her father’s had when it came to taking care of her children. She had been a fairly loving mother to her own children, but did not role-model taking care of herself.
In spite of all the years of praise from her father and her husband, Lenore could not truly see her Inner Child. Because she saw her Inner Child the way her mother did, she could never take in the praise. Whenever someone told her she was smart or pretty or good at something, she would unconsciously tell her Inner Child not to believe it. She treated her Inner Child the way she treated people other than her children—detached, intellectual, parental, hard, critical, shaming.
Fortunately she began Inner Bonding work while Nate was still alive, and was able to care for him in his remaining months in a way that did not cause her guilt and regret after he died. We spent many weeks helping her release her anger, which on deeper levels was at her mother and at her Inner Adult. She had always dumped the anger she had at her mother and at herself onto Nate and he had always taken it, being a good emotional caretaker.
When Nate died, Lenore went into deep grief, not as much from losing someone she loved, but from losing someone who loved her. She stopped doing her Inner Bonding work. Her Inner Child felt abandoned and alone, lost and frantic, and there was no Adult there to comfort and reassure. She felt like she was going to die.
Lenore went through months of emotional isolation and panic attacks. Her Adult was either absent or critical, leaving her Inner Child feeling constantly alone and unlovable. She couldn’t seem to move through her grief. She finally joined a grief group, which helped remove some of the isolation. But in the group she became the critical parent, telling everyone else how to live their lives, and soon found herself feeling isolated again.
Week after week she came in with one excuse after another about why she wasn’t doing her Inner Bonding work. We would do it in the office and she would always feel better by the end of the session, but would come in the following week back into despair.
Sometimes people have to hit bottom before they are willing to take on responsibility for themselves and show up as a loving Adult. Sometimes they hit bottom and still don’t show up for themselves and end up dead.
Lenore hit bottom and finally showed up for herself. She finally began the process of bonding to her Inner Child, of reparenting her wounded Child. Slowly, through practicing dialoguing each day, Lenore’s loving Adult appeared, at first for only moments at a time. Slowly the sparkle came back into her eyes as she began to give her Child what she had previously received only from others—love.
Using her own concept of good parenting, which she had developed with her children, she began to pay attention to her Child’s wants and needs and to take action in her Child’s behalf. As Lenore got to know her Inner Child, she found a wonderful and alive little girl there who wanted to meet people and play. She found that she wanted to travel, something that Nate had never liked doing.
She was well off financially, and was able to become part of a group touring ancient mystical sites, something that had always fascinated her. When she returned she became deeply involved in her church and in doing volunteer work with battered women, and through this developed new friendships with women. She had found new purpose, new reasons for being alive.
Lenore was now giving, to herself and others, instead of just taking as she had done with Nate. She told me, just before ending her sessions with me, that she felt happier and more alive than she had ever felt during her whole marriage to Nate. She experienced sadness and regret that she had not been able to give to him in the way she was now giving to others, but grateful that she had at least been able to be there for him in his final months.
Bert’s wife left him after thirty-five years of marriage. His wife, Dorothy, had been a caretaker for most of those years, keeping the house clean, raising the children, and catering to Bert’s every need. Ten years ago she decided to open her own business, and had done very well at a time when Bert’s business was foundering.
Dorothy had always been there for Bert in the first twenty-five years of their marriage; but in the last ten years she had developed close friendships with women with whom she spent time. Bert had never developed close friendships with men. He had lived an isolated life, working and waiting for Dorothy to take care of him.
Instead of supporting Dorothy in her efforts to break out of their codependent system, Bert did everything he could to keep her in the system. He was angry and sullen much of the time, and blamed her for his business difficulties, claiming that he couldn’t function well because of her lack of support.
Bert had functioned well in life as long as Dorothy was willing to be the loving Adult for his Child, but as soon as she started to be a loving Adult for her own Child and to give up responsibility for Bert’s Child, Bert began to fall apart. Instead of rising to the challenge of becoming a loving Adult for his own Child, he sank deeper into his anger, self-pity, misery, and gloom, unconsciously hoping that if he was unhappy enough Dorothy would see the error of her ways and come rescue him. Instead she left him.
When he had lost all hope of pulling her back into the old system, Bert started reading self-help books. After reading Healing Your Aloneness, he came in for Inner Bonding Therapy.
Bert’s narcissism started in infancy, with a smothering, seductive, narcissistic mother and an emotionally absent father. His mother met his needs without his asking, and at the same time subtly implied that she had to do this because he couldn’t do it for himself. Bert grew up believing he had to plug into a woman to jump start himself. He never developed a loving Adult because he never had to; first his mother did it for him and then Dorothy did it.
Bert, like Lenore, had hit bottom, the place where people either get sick and die, commit suicide, end up in the streets, or decide to take responsibility for themselves. In reading and coming for help, Bert had made the decision to heal rather than die. From the moment he finished reading about the Inner Bonding process, he began to dialogue every day. He found that what his Inner Child wanted from him were all the things Dorothy had given him in the past—his undivided attention, concern, and actions in his behalf.
Bert had lived his life mostly unaware of his own feelings and thoughts. When Dorothy would ask him what he was feeling or thinking, he rarely knew. She would end up feeling shut out, something she had complained about throughout their marriage. It was not that he was shutting her out on purpose, but that he was so out of touch with his Inner Child that he really did not know what he was feeling and thinking.
Bert had ignored his Child for so long that it took a long time before he had any real contact with him, but fortunately he was persistent. After about nine months of daily dialogue, his Child finally let him in on his deep fears of inadequacy, of being wrong, and of abandonment. He was able to relive all the subtle ways his parents had created his sense of inadequacy, his mother by doing everything for him and his father by being an empty, inadequate man. He was able to see that his fear of being wrong came from his fear of abandonment, which in turn came from his belief that he could not take care of himself.
Bert went from being flat and unemotional to being filled with emotions. For a while everything made him cry, making him feel very vulnerable. But as he allowed this outflow of feeling, he found that he was feeling more and more full on the inside. He had much to grieve.
Bert began to move himself out of isolation by joining a men’s support group and by attending Codependents Anonymous meetings. Through these sources he made men friends for the first time in his life. He began to exercise and get his body in shape, something he had ignored for most of his sixty years.
As he learned to ignite his own energy rather than rely on Dorothy to do it, his business slowly turned around—which certainly helped his sense of adequacy. He had always been convinced that whatever success he had was only because of Dorothy and that he couldn’t achieve on his own. Turning his business around without her was a turning point in his growth.
Six months after his separation, he met a woman he was attracted to; but within a few months of dating her, he found that he still tended to give his Child away to her when he was with her. He decided not to date until his inner relationship was more solid.
In the second year after his separation, he found that his relationships with his children were changing, becoming deeper, more meaningful, more fun. He found this deeply gratifying, though he went through much grief at how much he had missed during their growing up years.
Two years after separating, Bert and Dorothy came back together.
And did they live happily every after? Well, yes and no. Life is never without challenges. Learning to take care of yourself alone is not the same thing as taking care of yourself around another person. Dorothy and Bert ran into many conflicts that challenged their commitment to personal responsibility, and sometimes they slipped back into their old system. But because they both did their Inner Bonding work (Dorothy had read the book and come in with Bert to learn the process), they were quickly able to tune in and rectify the situation.
The last I heard they were laughing and playing a lot, something they had not done in thirty-five years of marriage.
Jolene, twenty-three years old, sweet, bright and beautiful, was stood up by a man she had been out with once before. She had really liked him, had been looking forward to seeing him again, and felt crushed when he didn’t show up. She called and left a message on his answering machine, wondering if perhaps he had car trouble but he never called her back. She came in for her session feeling anxious and depressed. She had just recently started her work with me and this was her fourth session.
Jolene followed through on her commitment. After a while she was actually spending about an hour a day talking and writing with her Inner Child. Because she worked so hard, she made very rapid progress, and within six months met a sweet and caring man she was actually attracted to—much to her own surprise!
We all need to learn not to take it personally when someone doesn’t show up for a date or appointment. Not only that, we need to learn to shift gears and use the time in ways that are fulfilling. That also holds true when someone we are counting on spending time with suddenly changes the plans. If the same person cancels or changes plans frequently, we might not want to make plans with that person anymore; but still, good relationships need to have some flexibility.
In order to be flexible for our own sakes, we need to have other pursuits that are exciting and fulfilling for us. For example, when someone suddenly changes plans with you, it’s a good idea to have a few things you look forward to doing and for which you never have enough time, whether it’s reading, gardening, listening to music, or puttering around the house, whatever you look forward to doing. Then, when someone lets you down, instead of feeling lonely, you can be just as happy as you would have been with the person who changed plans or didn’t show up.
All of us need to have ways of making ourselves happy alone so that we do not depend on others for our happiness and do not get angry at others when they change plans. If you are happy only when you are with others, then you need to explore the fears and beliefs behind that codependence.
However, your Adult still needs to make sure that you have enough good friends to call on when you don’t feel like being alone, friends you talk to on the phone or go out with spontaneously to have dinner or see a movie or go for a walk and talk. Friends you can take a new class with. Friends who will be there for you in the hard times and hold you when you are in pain.
When we love and value our children, we try to take good care of them physically, emotionally, and in matters of health and safety. Parents who physically, emotionally, or sexually abuse their children are obviously not protecting them. They are not letting them know they are precious and lovable little beings. Instead the parents are teaching their children to believe they are bad and unlovable.
Some parents do this on purpose, such as parents who are involved in Satanic cults, and may deliberately and consciously set out to destroy the will of their children. Most parents do it unconsciously, acting out on their children their beliefs in their own badness and unlovability. When this was done to us, we tend to perpetuate it with our Inner Child and our own children.
When we do not know that the Child in us is a good and lovable person because our health and safety was not protected by our parents, then we may ignore our own health and safety by not taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, or financially. We might indulge our Inner Child and physically abuse our bodies through alcohol, drugs, caffeine, smoking, sugar and overprocessed foods, overeating and obesity, bulimia, anorexia, overwork, not enough sleep, lack of exercise, or watching endless hours of TV. We might neglect ourselves by not going to a doctor when something is physically wrong, hoping it will go away by itself, perhaps threatening our very survival. Everyone seems to know someone who found a lump and did not see a doctor for fear it was cancer, and by the time that person did go, it was too late.
Some of us might keep ourselves isolated when we are physically ill or emotionally overwhelmed rather than reach out for the help we need. Others of us indulge our Inner Child by overspending and putting ourselves in financial jeopardy, buying things rather than paying attention to the pain that is covered over by the spending.
When we do not take care of our health and safety, it is because our Adult believes our Child is not worth it, just as our parents may have believed about us or themselves. And the more we ignore our own health and safety, the more we reinforce our own sense of worthlessness and unlovability. As we engage in the Inner Bonding process and gradually discover the roots of our false beliefs about ourselves, as well as discover our own preciousness, we will naturally want to treat ourselves more lovingly. We will know we deserve it.
Lance sought me out for help because he felt he was dying inside. Twenty-six years old, medium height, slender, fair, and good looking, he felt he had nothing to look forward to, and he was destroying himself with alcohol and marijuana. He had dropped out of college in his third year of pre-med, and was working as a clerk in a factory.
I spend every night alone getting drunk or stoned. There must be more to life than this. I feel old. I don’t go out with women because I’m too afraid of rejection. I don’t have any friends. I’ve had a ton of therapy. I know my mom emotionally and physically abused me. My parents split up before I was born. I was a problem child and was always getting into trouble. I did okay in school, and after high school I wanted to go to an art school. But my mom put me down for my art my whole life and told me I had to be a doctor. I hated college, and here I am doing nothing with my life.
My mom still puts me down and I always feel guilty when I’m around her. I see my dad once in a while, but he’s pretty fucked up himself. He’s been an alcoholic and is now going to AA. I guess maybe he’s trying to straighten out. I guess I’m like him even though I never lived with him. If I didn’t drink and smoke grass, I don’t know what I’d do with my time. Nothing interests me anymore, not even art. I just feel dead and empty inside. Sometimes I think about killing myself.
Lance was functioning in the world as an abandoned Child with no Adult to take care of him. He was a little boy in a grown-up body, lost, frightened, alone, and doing the best he could to get by. But his Adult did seek help, which was the first step in getting well.
Lance learned the Inner Bonding process in our first session, and I asked him to commit to reading Healing Your Aloneness and dialoguing for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night. I suggested he start attending AA meetings. He needed to move out of his isolation and receive support from others who understood his pain. He agreed.
He got half-way through the book by the second session and had done some dialoguing, but was having a hard time with it. His Child wouldn’t talk to him. He just wanted to drink. He had attended one AA meeting and hadn’t liked it. He “couldn’t get into the God stuff.” I suggested he see God as his own Higher Self, something that existed within rather than without, and he seemed to accept that. I asked him to ask his Inner Child why he wouldn’t talk to him.
It’s hard to know what it means to be a loving Adult to your Inner Child when you don’t know what it looks like. Lance was helped by remembering the image of how his mother treated her cats. He started dialoguing with his Child, using the same interested loving energy that his mother used with her cats. Within a few months I could see the life beginning to come back into him.
Lance had stopped drinking and getting stoned and was attending AA meetings regularly. In the following sessions we explored his codependence with his mother, always trying to please, always seeking her approval, even to the point of giving up his own dreams of art school to do what she wanted. No matter what he did, he never got her approval. He finally recognized he never would, but that he could give it to himself.
Lance realized that he would never be happy with a job just to earn a living. He wanted to be an artist; and from what I saw of his work, he had a lot of talent. He decided to take some night classes in art at a junior college.
He was terrified before attending his first class. His old rejection fears surfaced but he went anyway, and it proved to be a turning point in his life. The teacher was very supportive, and Lance decided to finish college with an art major and get a teaching credential so he could teach art. He went through night school, and the last I heard he was about to graduate and was dating a girl he had met at school.
In a phone conversation he told me that he still attended AA and CoDA meetings on the weekends because he liked them. He was also playing basketball again, which he said his Child loves. He said he still dialogued out loud a few minutes each day, just to check in, but that he felt he was in contact with his Child throughout much of the day and that he is delighted and grateful for his Child’s artistic talent. Finally, he said, he felt free of needing his mother’s approval. Their relationship actually improved. Also, he felt closer to his father than he ever had.
I felt grateful for his mother’s cats and Lance’s determination to love his Child. Without that, he could have been dead by now.
Issues of personal health and safety are often related to childhood trauma and abuse. The more we were abused, the worse we feel about ourselves and the harder it is to take good care of ourselves.
Daren first sought help with me because of his struggles with alcohol and cocaine and his resulting financial distress. Daren, dark, stocky, with piercing blue eyes, was in his late twenties. He owned his own construction business, which was falling apart because he was overextending himself financially to pay for his cocaine habit. He was hitting bottom and was ready to do something about it.
In the first session Daren claimed that although his father left home when he was little, he had a happy childhood because his mother was so loving with him. I sensed that Daren was in great denial about his childhood, and that the substance abuse was one of the ways he was able to deny the deep, underlying pain that showed in his eyes. He smiled and laughed a lot, but all I felt from him was great sadness and grief.
Daren agreed to attend thirty AA meetings in thirty days, a necessary commitment to begin his recovery process. Daren could not access his Adult for any significant period of time while he was drinking and using drugs, but he had enough functioning Adult to make the decision to move into recovery. He also decided to attend some Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
Within a few weeks of beginning his Twelve-Step programs, Daren was able to begin his Inner Bonding work, and he became as committed to his dialogue process as to his Twelve-Step work. Within a few months his childhood memories began to emerge, and with the memories came the pain that he had worked so hard to suppress with the substance abuse.
His father left his mother when Daren, the middle of three children, was three years old. He rarely saw his father after that. His mother had to work nonstop to support the children, since the father sent no money. While his mother worked, Daren was left with his younger sister much of the time, alone, frightened, and hungry, while his older sister was in school. Sometimes his mother left them with neighbors who sexually abused both Daren and his little sister. Later, his mother married a violently abusive man who terrorized the children.
As Daren’s clear memories emerged, he went into months of deep grief from the terror, pain, and aloneness he had felt so much as a little boy. Eventually Daren was able to release the rage he felt at his mother for not protecting him from his stepfather and from the neighbors. He saw why he had established the belief that controlled much of his life: “I don’t matter. I don’t count.” He attended a few Survivors of Incest Anonymous (SIA) meetings.
Daren was a sweet and caring man. In order not to turn his rage onto others, he turned it onto himself. He started to drink when he was eleven, and by fifteen was a drug addict. Because he believed that he didn’t matter, he could abuse his body without even realizing he was abusing himself.
In his relationships with women and friends, Daren was always the caretaker, again coming from the belief, “I don’t matter.” He felt used in all his relationships, because he constantly put himself aside in deference to others’ wants and needs. He realized after about six months of Inner Bonding work that he needed to go into abstinence regarding relationships, just as he had done with drugs and alcohol; because until he was more deeply bonded with his Inner Child, he would continue to be involved in codependent relationships. He added CoDA meetings to his list of Twelve-Step meetings.
Daren struggled hard to develop a loving Adult regarding his business problems. He was a hard worker, but his handling of money seemed always to come from his abandoned Inner Child.
DAREN: |
I can’t seem to get a handle on what this block is about money. I’m always overdrawing on my account and then checks bounce and I’m embarrassed. I don’t like it, yet I keep doing it over and over again. |
MARGIE: |
You must have a good reason for doing it. |
DAREN: |
There’s something about money itself that really bothers me. I want it, but when I have it, I can’t stand keeping it. It makes me nervous when I do have extra money and I always find some way to blow it. |
MARGIE: |
Daren, ask your little boy what his feelings are about money. |
DAREN: |
(Picking up a bear) Little Daren, what do you feel about money? |
CHILD DAREN: |
It scares me. |
ADULT DAREN: |
Why? |
CHILD DAREN: |
It makes me feel bad things. I get all scared inside about money. Bad things happen. |
ADULT DAREN: |
What bad things? |
CHILD DAREN: |
You know. The bad things with the people next door. |
ADULT DAREN: |
Oh my God! Now I remember! They would give me money after they abused me so I wouldn’t tell! And they told me if I ever told anyone they would kill my older sister! I believed them! I was so scared of them. (He starts to sob, his whole body shaking with the memory. He hugs the bear and sobs deeply for about five minutes.) |
|
God, no wonder I hate money. No wonder it scares me. It’s always made me anxious and I’ve never known why. |
Memories and awarenesses like this do not happen suddenly. They occur after months of dedicated Inner Bonding work, when the Inner Child feels that he or she can trust the Inner Adult to be there for the unbearable pain. I’ve seen it happen over and over again, yet each time I feel a sense of awe when memories like this come up, memories to which the person had no access before doing their Inner Bonding work. I always feel privileged to be let in so deeply with another person and to be allowed to participate in their healing process.
Daren continued to attend his Twelve-Step meetings, cutting down to three times a week. He no longer felt any desire to drink or take drugs. He continued to dialogue daily and to give his Inner Child time to grieve. And he spoke to his Child every day about money, letting him know that it was not the money that hurt him. Gradually his relationship to money shifted, and he was able to handle it from his Adult.
A year after starting his Inner Bonding work, Daren began a relationship with a woman. He was now ready to face his codependency issues within a relationship. As he found out, we can deal with many issues when we are alone, but our deepest issues get touched off in relationships. His learning is an ongoing process, as it is for all of us.
Paul came for help because his third marriage was breaking up and his consulting business was falling apart. Paul was a small but powerfully built man in his late forties. In the first session he told me that he had spent time in jail due to his violence, which would erupt unexpectedly and he would be out of control. He was very much afraid of his violence, but he had no idea where it came from.
His violent aspect was in sharp contrast to his personality the rest of the time—soft, caring, sensitive, and creative. He felt like there was a demon in him that would eventually destroy him, wrecking his relationships and his work.
Paul’s mother was a very mean woman who screamed at Paul and his younger brother and hit them daily. All his life he had hated his mother and adored his father, a hardworking, successful accountant. At the beginning of our work together, Paul only had wonderful things to say about his father.
Slowly, through working diligently with his Inner Child, Paul began to remember other, contradictory things about his father, such as his sudden violence, especially toward his younger brother. Paul’s brother, large and outgoing in contrast to Paul’s quietness, seemed to infuriate Paul’s father.
But these memories did nothing to help Paul’s own violence, which continued to erupt periodically. There had to be something more.
One evening, after having sex with a new lover, Paul found himself crying. He picked up his bear, asked his Inner Child why he was crying, and his Child said, “Daddy took my body away from me.” Paul got scared with this information and shut down.
He came in for the next session upset and confused. I had him visualize that situation after sex and talk to his Child about what he meant.
PAUL: |
(Looking at his bear, anger coming up) I don’t want to talk to him. I want to beat him up. |
MARGIE: |
Why? |
PAUL: |
I don’t know. He’s a bad boy. (Pause, anger subsiding) Okay, I’ll talk to him. Paul, what did you mean when you said, “Daddy took my your body away from you”? |
CHILD PAUL: |
I’m afraid to tell you. You’re gonna get mad. |
ADULT PAUL: |
I really want to know. I won’t get mad at you. |
CHILD PAUL: |
Daddy did bad things to me and made me do bad things to him. |
Paul was stunned at the beginnings of memory of his father’s sexual abuse. It took many more months for these memories to surface clearly, while Paul struggled with his love for his father, as well as his deep rage. I assured him that he could continue to love his father even if his father had abused him, but that Paul needed to know the truth in order to heal his Child.
As the memories emerged and Paul worked through his rage at being so violated and betrayed by the man he loved so much, his violence slowly diminished. One day Paul came in and told me he was no longer afraid of his violence. It no longer felt out of control.
It was Paul’s dedication to Inner Bonding that finally gave his Child a safe arena to speak his truth. Because Paul had been terrified of this truth and the pain that went with it, he had spent most of his life completely cut off from his Child, who would then erupt violently at unexpected times. Paul’s inner work was slow; it took a long time to reach these memories, but it was his willingness to stay in contact with his Child through daily dialogue that finally created the safety to remember.
Paul found that once he remembered and grieved these memories, taking better care of his Child in all ways began to come naturally. He began to exercise regularly, eat well, and he moved into a relationship with a woman who was open and caring, unlike the other women he had chosen. All of his relationships improved, including his relationships at work. Because he no longer hated his Child for what had happened to him, he could give him the love he needed.
It is very important to know that we can not only take care of ourselves financially and survive alone, but that we can be happy and fulfilled alone. Whether we end up alone because of death, separation, divorce, or because we cannot find a mate, we need to know that we cannot just survive but thrive.
Many people move into and stay in dysfunctional or abusive relationships because they are afraid of being alone. Many people end up pushing away the ones they love by trying to control them because of the fear of being alone. One of the very important explorations in dialoguing with your Inner Child is to find out what gives him or her joy alone and then take action to bring it about. Whether it’s something your Child wants to do, learn about, or create, your Adult needs to make sure it happens.
Over and over I have seen that others seem to treat us as we treat ourselves. Often I hear people complain about not being supported by a mate, a friend, a boss, or a parent, and as we explore their inner relationship, it becomes apparent that their Adult is not supporting their Child. People also complain that others do not respect their boundaries, that they feel violated by other’s behavior toward them. As we look inward, it becomes apparent that the Adult is not setting boundaries to protect the Inner Child.
Our external relationships are mirrors for our internal relationship. Others will love us and support us when we learn to love and support ourselves.