"FINDING THE LIFE WE LOST IN LIVING: UNDERSTANDING INNER BONDING"
You've achieved everything you've ever thought would make you happy, but the gnawing, empty feeling that something is missing is still there. To paraphrase Rabbi Harold Kushner, you've discovered that "all you've ever wanted isn't enough."
You may feel lost, out of touch with yourself and others, in an emotional
fog much of the time. You often feel as if you're doing nothing more than
going through the motions. You may agonize over feeling insecure,
inadequate, unlovable, and alone.
These are deeply painful feelings, pervasive and persistent--so painful, in
fact, you may have discovered any number of dysfunctional ways to ignore,
deny, cover up, or numb the ache of your emptiness: alcohol, food, work,
TV, sex, drugs, all of the above. Then one day something happens, a
traumatic experience or an internal shift. You reach a turning point and
ask yourself, as Jeremiah Abrams states in Reclaiming the Inner Child,
"Where is the life we lost in living?"
Certainly you're not alone with these kinds of feelings. Most of us
struggle with continuous or periodically recurring emotional pain for
significant portions of our lives. This happens either because we don't
know another, better way, or because we're unwilling to try, afraid we'll
only make matters worse. Unfortunately the pain often has to become
intolerable, or a crisis must force the issue, before we take action on our
own behalf. Take the case of Tom, for example.
Tom had never been in a therapist's office and he wasn't happy about being there now. He sit stiffly in his dark blue suit, unaware that his fist was clenched and his expression stern. He would never have come at all, but the CEO of his company took him aside last week and told him that his outbursts of temper were undermining employee morale and driving potential customers away. "Get some help," the CEO told him. Frustrated and angry, but seeing no other choice, Tom made an appointment.
After we talked for a while about Tom's stress level and work load, I said,
"It sounds like you're not taking very good care of yourself."
"Take care of myself? That's not realistic. I have too much to do!"
"But you fly into unpredictable rages, and you could lose your job because
of that. And being so stressed out, you're likely to lose your health as
well. Can you really afford not to take care of yourself?"
"I don't think I can," he said softly. "I don't know how."
Tom was telling the truth. He didn't know how; he'd never learned. He had
been "at work" since early childhood. His father was an abusive alcoholic,
so Tom's earliest memories were of trying to protect his mother and sister
from harm. When he realized his father treated them better when he wasn't
around, Tom left home and lived on his own. He was fifteen.
Take Sandy, for example. Sandy is a divorced mother of two young daughters, a third-grade teacher. Long hours of preparation have paid off--her students love her, their parents praise her, and the principal has commended her in glowing written evaluations. Practically the only one who isn't convinced that she is a competent, worthy, lovable person is Sandy herself. Constantly exhausted, nagged by indecisiveness and depression, she's discounted everything she's accomplished, including others' affirmations. The only reason Sandy entered therapy was for her daughters. She was determined that they wouldn't suffer the way she had.
Where do beliefs like this come from? Why does Sandy believe that she doesn't deserve love? After all, if she did, she'd take care of herself. She loves her daughters and takes great care of them, making sure they eat right, rest enough, and so on. Sandy values her car. If it's not running well, she gets it fixed. Sandy is no different than any of us: We all take care of whatever we value.
How, then, can we learn to value ourselves so that we can become loving to
ourselves, as well as to others? That's what this book is about. It's
about Tom and Sandy and the multitudes of others who have absorbed or
assumed the false beliefs and self-defeating attitudes and behaviors they
saw in their childhood years. Because that's what they have believed in
and unwittingly copied, they have limited the potential for joy and love
and fun in their lives. The purpose of this book is to teach aII of us,
each with our different pasts and present circumstances, another way of
being in the world--a freer way of loving and living than the one we have
known. That's the promise and the power of Inner Bonding.
Inner Bonding is about giving ourselves, each and every moment, what we
never had--or never learned--as children. It is about developing a loving
relationship between our Adult and our Inner Child, a relationship that
takes care of our Selves when we are around others and when we are alone.
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