Why Skin Health is the Ultimate Test of Longevity
Do you know what you should be doing to stay healthy, but are having trouble following through? Do you feel like you are not in control of your health and happiness? Do you think you don’t deserve to be healthy and happy?
In this podcast, our nutrition team lead Romilly Hodges MS CNS talks with Margaret Paul PhD about how and why our thoughts and emotions can get in the way of taking positive steps towards healthy food and lifestyle choices, rewarding relationships, success and happiness. Most importantly, we’ll review what you can actually do to change the underlying factors that are impeding you in reaching your full potential. Stay tuned to learn:
- How self-abandonment drives poor choices and behaviors
- Where self-abandonment comes from
- What false beliefs you might be holding on to
- What addictions you have that you may not realize are addictions
- Why you might be judging yourself too harshly
- How to tune into a higher guidance, even if you don’t consider yourself spiritual
- How to truly listen to yourself and act in your own best interests
- How a simple mind shift from ‘intention to protect’ to ‘intention to learn’ can dramatically change our emotions and thoughts
- How a process such as Inner Bonding® can provide a framework for working through all of these situations and make healthy choices much easier to follow through on
- Why, if you’re a parent, practicing Inner Bonding® can set your children up to be happier and healthier
MARGARET PAUL is a bestselling author, popular Huffington Post writer and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process, and the related SelfQuest® self-healing software program – recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner and singer Alanis Morissette. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows(including Oprah). Her book titles include “Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You” (and subsequent titles “Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By God,” and “…By My Kids”), “Healing Your Aloneness” and “Inner Bonding.” Margaret holds a PhD in psychology, is a relationship expert, public speaker, consultant and artist. She has successfully worked with thousands and taught classes and seminars for over 48 years. Go to Inner Bonding for a free Inner Bonding course and join Dr. Margaret for her “Love Yourself” Course at Inner Bonding.
Links:
Margaret Paul, PhD
Romilly Hodges: Hello, and welcome to this bonus podcast for New Frontiers in Functional Medicine. This is Romilly Hodges. I am staff nutritionist and nutrition team lead at the clinic of Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. You can find out more about Dr. Fitzgerald and see her full podcast lineup at www.drkarafitzgerald.com.
Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Margaret Paul, who will be talking with us about our thoughts, our emotions, how they affect our physiology, our relationships, our health … and how we can learn to apply specific practices that help us untangle unhelpful thoughts and emotions, and create a happier, more successful, healthier you.
Welcome, Dr. Paul. We are really delighted to have you.
Dr. Paul: Well, thank you very much. I’m delighted to do this with you.
Romilly Hodges: Oh, great. I just wanted to give our listeners your bio before we start.
Dr. Margaret Paul is a best-selling author, popular “Huffington Post” writer, and co-creator of “The Powerful Inner Bonding Self-Healing Process”. Also, the related “SelfQuest” self-healing software program which is recommended by actress Lindsay Wagner, and singer Alanis Morissette. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including Oprah. Her book titles include “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?” and subsequent titles, “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By God?” and “By My Kids”, “Healing Your Aloneness” and “Inner Bonding”.
Margaret holds a PhD in psychology. She’s a relationship expert, a public speaker, consultant and artist. She’s successfully worked with thousands, and taught classes and seminars for over 48 years. I also came across Dr. Paul’s work through her seminars at Kripalu, which many of you may be aware of. I have taken her online Inner Bonding course, which I highly recommend.
Let’s begin. Dr. Paul, could we start out with a little bit of background about you and your journey? How did you get to the place of doing what you’re doing?
Dr. Paul: Actually, I decided when I was five years old that I wanted to be a psychologist. My background with my family was not a happy one. My mother was a rage-aholic, and so I was a very nervous five year old. She took me to a psychiatrist, and he talked to me and he talked to her, and then he talked to both of us. I remember this tall skinny guy, looking down at me and saying, “Now tell your mother not to yell at you.” My thought was, which I remember so clearly, “I’m five years old. She is not going to listen to me. You tell her.” Then my next thought was, “You know, I could do a better job than you.” That’s when I decided that I was going to be a psychologist.
So I did become a therapist, and I practiced traditional psychotherapy for 17 years. I was not at all happy with the results. I realized in my own spiritual search, that you can’t really heal without a spiritual connection. I started to pray for a process that would help people rapidly and deeply, and a process that they could learn and do on their own, and not always have to see a therapist every time something came up.
That’s when I met Dr. Erika Chopich. She had half the Inner Bonding process, and I had half the Inner Bonding process, so of course we had to meet. That process has been evolving now for over 32 years, and it’s an incredibly powerful self-healing process, as you know.
Romilly Hodges: How would you say that Inner Bonding has changed your life?
Dr. Paul: Oh, it’s changed my life so completely. Before Inner Bonding, I just wasn’t happy. I didn’t know how to be in joy, I didn’t know how to connect with my higher power, my higher wisdom. My creativity was blocked. I just was not a happy person. Since Inner Bonding, all of that has changed completely. I feel so much joy so much of the time. I live in connection with my higher guidance. I don’t do anything without being guided. That’s how I do my work. I work through allowing my higher guidance to work through me. My creativity has flourished enormously through my Inner Bonding practice. I’m so grateful for this process.
Romilly Hodges: Great. I’m going to get into asking you some questions about exactly some of the terms that you were using and what you’re talking about that that means. But before we go there, obviously we work in this area of functional medicine at the clinic here, how would you say that your work fits in within that functional medicine paradigm?
Dr. Paul: It’s very interesting, because I was a very sickly child. In my early twenties, I decided, “I’m done being sick.” I started doing a lot of research at that time. I read “The Poisons in Your Food” and I read “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, and then I got into reading Adele Davidson. At that time, there weren’t functional medicine doctors, but I was doing the best I could and I started to experiment around with foods. I’d do everything out of my kitchen after reading these books, and started to shop at the one little health food store that was there in Los Angeles, a co-op market at the time. I really started trying a whole lot of different kinds of ways of eating. I finally hit on the way of eating that functional medicine doctors are recommending today, and I healed.
I have actually been following that way of eating through the last 55 years. Then a very interesting thing happened. As I was on my spiritual search, I was trying to connect. I knew that there was a source of higher wisdom there. I didn’t know how to connect to it. Then, when I met Dr. Erika Chopich, she knew how to do that, and she helped me connect. I was able to do that very easily, once I understood how to keep my heart open. Then I thought that this would be very easy for my clients, I could teach them to do it. But in fact, it wasn’t that easy.
What I realized is that we have to learn to keep our frequency high. Our higher guidance exists at a higher frequency, a higher vibration than we operate at. There’s two major things that we need to do in order to keep our frequency high. One is, we need to be open to learning about love. Our intention needs to be not to protect and control, but to be open to learning. The other is on a physical level. If we’re eating junk food, then we’re going to keep our frequency too low to connect with our higher wisdom. We need to be moving into physical health, high frequency foods, nutrient dense foods, which is what functional medicine is all about.
Our cells need to be full of the micro-nutrients that we need for high frequency. I realized that the reason that I had an easy time is because I was not eating junk foods, and then I learned not to have junk thoughts, not to have junk actions, and that made it easy for me to connect with my higher guidance.
Romilly Hodges: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Why do you think that some people resist taking care of themselves when it comes to diet and lifestyle?
Dr. Paul: I think, and this is where functional medicine and Inner Bonding intersect, in that, obviously, people do need to learn to take care of themselves on a physical level. But, if they loathe themselves, if they don’t know who they are, if they think they’re not good enough, if they think they’re unimportant, if they think they’re flawed in some way … Which most of the people that I work with, they just don’t think they’re adequate. They don’t think they’re lovable. If you don’t think that you’re worth it, then you’re not going to feed yourself well. There are some people who are motivated to feed themselves well for other reasons, they’re athletes and they want to do well, but for a lot of people, they’re not motivated to feed themselves well if they don’t love themselves.
Here’s where Inner Bonding comes in. It teaches people how to love themselves so that they become motivated to take care of the house of their soul. That’s what I call the physical body. The house of our soul. When we truly value who we are, when we know and value who we are, then we’re very motivated to create a healthy body for our beautiful soul to live there. This is really where the two intersect.
Romilly Hodges: Yeah. I think it’s so fascinating. Obviously in the work that we do, we work with a lot of fascinating and wonderful people who come to the clinic. A lot of times, we’ll see that obviously we know what we should be doing when it comes to looking after ourselves, but what is it that gets in the way of actually following through on that? I think this is such an interesting area to explore.
One of the things that you kind of alluded to, but you touch on in your course is this concept of self-abandonment. Could you talk a little bit about that and how you see that affecting health and relationships as well?
Dr. Paul: Yes. There’s basically four ways that most people have learned to abandon themselves, and we learned to do this because we had to. When we were little, we did not have the capacity to manage deeply painful feelings, feelings such as loneliness and grief, and heartbreak, and helplessness over others. We had to learn to disconnect from our feelings. All the ways we disconnect are self-abandoning. We learned to say it’s in our head, rather than be present in our body, because our feelings are in our body. When we learn to be in our head, we don’t feel our feelings. That’s one form of self-abandonment.
Another is we judge ourselves harshly. Judgement and self-judgement is a form of control. These are all forms of control to not feel what’s really going on on the emotional level. We judge ourselves to try and get ourselves to do things right so that other people will like us because we’re not liking ourselves. We’re abandoning ourselves, and then our sense of self is dependent on other people’s love and approval and attention.
Then we abandon ourselves with various addictions, including food. Junk food addiction, sugar, white flour type things that are so detrimental to the body. When we indulge in eating junk foods for that period of time, we blot out our feelings. We numb ourselves. We lower our frequency and we just don’t feel what’s really going on.
The fourth way is that we make other people responsible. In other words, we blame others. We hand our feelings over to another person and make them responsible for whether or not we feel okay. Of course this greatly affects relationships.
These four ways of self-abandonment, they affect us on all levels. Physically, emotionally and spiritually. Relationally, organizationally, financially. They affect us on all these six levels. In the Inner Bonding process, we focus on teaching people how to develop what we call the loving adult self. The loving adult self is the part of us that can take loving action on our own behalf in all of these areas.
Obviously, if we reach a place where we are taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, organizationally, and financially … we’re going to feel fantastic. We’re going to feel wonderful. We’re not going to be living lives full of anxiety and stress. This is what we teach in Inner Bonding.
I know that you know this in functional medicine, that stress is a huge issue. It’s not just food, it’s stress. 90% of people who come in to doctors, their issues are stress-related. Inner Bonding is an amazing process for learning from our stress, rather than trying to cover it over with our various addictions and other forms of self-abandonment.
Romilly Hodges: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I completely am on the same page with you about that and how it can be so helpful to work with our stress response, and how we interpret those perceived stresses in our environments.
You’re talking about addictions a little bit, and sometimes I think other people might not feel that they have any particular addictions, “I don’t do alcohol,” maybe you’re not doing drugs or anything like that … but I know that you have this broader definition of what addictions look like. What are some of those patterns of either behavior or thoughts that are in your definition of addictions that people might not realize that they’re actually succumbing to?
Dr. Paul: We can use anything as an addiction. Anything that we use to avoid responsibility for our own feelings. If we’re feeling them and learning from them, all of our feelings have information for us. Unfortunately in our society, we’ve been taught to avoid our feelings rather than learn from them. Anything that we use to avoid our feelings becomes an addiction. We can use, like you mentioned, drugs and alcohol. We can use food. We can use sugar or fast food, junk food. We can use TV, and work, and gambling, and pornography, sex … There’s so many things we can use. We can use anger, we can use compliance, giving ourselves up.
All of these are forms of addiction, to try and have control, either over our own feelings or over others. Whenever we are operating out of these addictions, and we’re trying to control our own feelings, we are abandoning ourselves. Of course this leads to more unhappiness.
It’s like if you have a little child who comes to you distressed, and instead of attending to the child’s distress and wanting to understand what it’s about, even if it has to do with you, you grab a cigarette, or you grab a drink, or you go and graze in front of the refrigerator. The child is not going to feel loved. The child’s not going to feel heard and seen and attended to.
That’s what we do on the inner level. We can say that our feelings are like an inner child. When we’re abandoning those feelings with our various addictions, then we actually end up feeling worse down the line. Addictions become addictions because they work for the moment. What I mean by that, is they work to numb out what we’re feeling. If you’re flipping through the channels on the TV, you’re numbing out your feelings. If you’re stuffing yourself with food, and especially sugar and other junk food, you’re numbing yourself out for the moment.
It feels good for the moment, but in the long run it’s going to feel empty. You’re going to feel empty, you’re going to feel alone inside. You’re going to feel more stress, you’re going to feel anxious or depressed, or angry, or guilty, or ashamed when you act out of your addictions. The problem with addictions is that they work in the short term, but in the long term they don’t work at all. They make things a whole lot worse.
Romilly Hodges: Take us through, then, how you would describe the steps of Inner Bonding in an overview.
Dr. Paul: Okay. Step one of Inner Bonding means that you have to become willing to feel your feelings. If you’re not willing to feel your feelings, you’re just going to keep on abandoning yourself. So you have to practice being present in your body. We teach people to use their breath, to follow their breath to get down inside their body and get present. Scan their body for physical sensations, for any emotions they’re aware of, and get present with these feelings. Even if they’re painful. We need to be present with them in order to understand what they’re trying to tell us. As I said, all feelings have information.
Step one is learning to be present in your body. This can take some time and practice. Also, finding a place in you that actually wants responsibility for your feelings, rather than continue to blame or disconnect or dissociate from them, that you want that responsibility.
Then in step two, we focus in our heart. We consciously move into the intention to learn about loving ourselves. In Inner Bonding, there’s only two intentions. One is to protect against pain, with some form of self-abandoning controlling behavior, and the other is to open to learning about what’s truly in our highest good, what’s truly loving to ourselves.
We consciously make that choice, and then we invite our higher presence in. We teach people that when they are open to learning about loving themselves, that’s a major part of being able to connect with their guides. As I said, the other part is whether their bodies are in a high enough frequency. We teach people to invite the presence of love and compassion into their heart. That’s step two. We become what we call the loving adult self.
In step three, we are dialoguing with our feelings. In other words, if you realize that you’re feeling anxious, for example, you would be asking the anxious part of you what you’re doing, what you’re telling yourself, how you’re treating yourself, that may be causing the anxiety. Now, something like anxiety, as you know, can also be caused by a microbiome being very, very out of balance. The recent research says that when the bad flora, when the bad bacteria overtake the beneficial flora, they put out toxicity. That toxicity can go up into the brain and cause anxiety and depression. That’s still something that we want to tune into.
In step three we’re saying, “What am I doing, what am I telling you, how am I treating you that’s causing this anxiety?” It may be primarily physical, it may be primarily emotional, it might be both. We’re exploring how we’re treating ourselves that may be causing or contributing to our painful feelings.
Once we understand what we’re doing, then we explore with what we call the wounded part of ourselves. This is the fight or flight mechanism in the lower part of the brain, in the amygdala. This part of us is programmed with many, many, many false beliefs about things like who we are and whether we’re worth anything, and being able to control other people, and not being able to manage our pain, and all kinds of false beliefs.
We want to become aware. Like if we find that we’re anxious because we’re putting a lot of pressure on ourselves, judging ourselves, telling ourselves that we have to do everything right, we have to be perfect. Then this inner child feeling part of us feels very anxious because we’re putting this pressure on ourselves. Then we explore where do we get the belief that we have to be perfect in order to be okay? How old were we when we established this belief? What was going on? This takes us into memory, it takes us into understanding our false beliefs and where we got them.
In step four, we’re going to our higher self, our higher guidance, and we’re asking it two questions. One is about the truth, about these false beliefs. What is true about any of these false beliefs that we’ve uncovered? And the other is, what is loving to ourselves? What action do we need to take that would release this anxiety?
For example, if we’re putting all this pressure on ourselves to be perfect … Let’s say that you have a presentation to give, and you’re telling yourself you’ve got to do it right. You’d better not mess up. Don’t be a failure. Don’t make a mistake. You’re putting all this pressure on yourself, and then you’re feeling very anxious. What would be loving, would be to say to your inner child, “Honey, I’m going to love you whether you do well or not.” “We don’t control how people feel about us.” “It’s not your job to do this presentation, it’s my job as the adult, so you just get to relax.”
You find that as you bring in the loving action, as you actually take the loving action that you’re guided to take, which is step five of Inner Bonding, you start to feel better. Whether you were feeling guilty, or ashamed, or angry, or anxious, you start to feel lighter. You start to feel better as you take the loving action.
In step six, that’s what we’re looking at. How do you feel? How will you feel as a result of taking the loving action? If we do feel lighter, if we do feel better, then we know that the action we’ve taken is in our own highest good.
That’s a very brief outline of the Inner Bonding process.
Romilly Hodges: Thank you for that. So, essentially, by practicing working through a process like this, then the underlying tension, or anxiety, or behavior that we’re experiencing just basically is no longer present, because we’re processing it in a healthier way.
I just want to talk a little bit about this concept of spiritual guidance that you have. How do you talk about this with somebody who, for example, doesn’t consider themselves as being particularly spiritual, and isn’t sure how to apply that?
Dr. Paul: Actually, I work with many people that don’t believe that there’s anything spiritual at all. I tell them a number of things. First I ask them to just use their imagination, and imagine an older, wiser part of themselves … Most people don’t have too much trouble imagining themselves let’s say a hundred years from now … who is very wise, and very powerful, and very loving. That can help them access this information.
Whether they believe it or not, the information is there. This one guy that I worked with, he says, “I don’t believe in anything,” and, “I don’t want to be programmed to believe in anything.” I just encouraged him when he asked questions about truth and loving himself, just ask the air. I said, “Just ask the air.” Which he did, and he started getting answers that popped into his mind.
The answers pop into your mind in words or pictures. They come in feelings. At one point he said to me, “I don’t know where these answers are coming from and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m feeling a lot better.” You don’t have to believe anything, but you do have to ask the questions with a sincere desire to learn, and you will find that answers start coming to you, regardless of your belief system.
I work with all kinds of people, and some are deep believers and some don’t believe at all, but they’re all equally successful if they open to learning about love and truth.
Romilly Hodges: Another thing that you’ve mentioned as you went through those Inner Bonding steps, was the importance of taking responsibility for our feelings. Can you say a little bit more about that, and what does it mean to take responsibility for feelings?
Dr. Paul: This is what we do in the Inner Bonding process. Taking responsibility for our feelings means that we deeply want to understand what we’re doing, what we’re offering from our belief systems. How we’re treating ourselves that’s causing our feelings, instead of being victims of other people. Now certainly there are feelings that are caused by others.
We differentiate between two kinds of feelings, between the feelings we cause with our own self-abandonment which is the anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, emptiness, aloneness … and what we call the core painful feelings of life that are caused by situations and other people. Such as loneliness, and heartbreak and grief, and helplessness, and sorrow when you see people hurting each other. Fear of real and present danger. These are core painful feelings.
Even though these may be caused by somebody else … Let’s say somebody rejects you or yells at you or leaves you, and you feel crushed, and you feel heartbroken, and you feel helpless over them … you’re still responsible for learning to manage these feelings in loving ways. If you don’t learn how to manage these core painful feelings of life, then you’re going to keep being a victim and blaming others, and trying to control others to be different.
This causes a lot of pain when we do this because we don’t have control over others. We like to think we do, but we don’t have control over others. When we blame others for their unloving behavior, or we blame situations, or we blame God, we get stuck with these very, very painful feelings, and they can cause illness.
When we don’t open to our deeper pain with love and with compassion, and we don’t embrace them with tenderness, and caring and understanding, they get stuck in our body. Those stuck feelings can cause a lot of illness. It’s so important for us to not only learn from our wounded feelings and what we’re doing to cause them, but learn how to lovingly manage all of our feelings with tenderness and caring and compassion.
Romilly Hodges: The other area that you had mentioned as well, around … obviously all these concepts are quite related as well, but this concept of self-abandonment. Where might people be thinking or exploring the concept of self-abandonment in terms of where that comes from? The roots of self-abandonment. Can you walk us through some examples of how that comes about?
Dr. Paul: Sure. Let’s say you grow up in a family where your mother is abandoning herself by not taking care of herself at all, just being compliant and being a caretaker, and taking care of everybody but herself. She is role modeling that form of self-abandonment. Let’s say that your father comes home every night and drinks beer and sits in front of the TV. He’s role modeling abandoning himself in that way. Maybe both your parents are role modeling poor eating and they’re abandoning themselves that way. Perhaps they’re not expressing their feelings at all, they’re numbing out in a whole lot of ways.
We learn from the role modeling that we’re brought up with many, many ways of abandoning ourselves. We learn it in the media. We learn it in school. I don’t think there’s anywhere in our society that isn’t role modeling various forms of self-abandonment. Let’s say that your father is a very angry person, and yelling at you and yelling at your mother and your siblings. He’s blaming everybody for his feelings, and you might learn that form of self-abandonment.
If we look into our childhood, we can see so many different forms of self-abandonment that we were programmed with. When I’m teaching a course and I ask how many of you saw one or the other of your parents when they were upset, go inside and want responsibility for their own feelings and ask what they were doing to cause their pain, not a single person raises their hand.
We didn’t get role modeling for taking responsibility for our own feelings. We got a ton of role modeling for how to abandon ourselves and be victims.
Romilly Hodges: I have to say, this is one of the things that I particularly loved going through the course that you hosted that I took, was giving me, as a parent, myself, some skills to be able to help my children through role modeling and also talking to them about some of these processes in age-appropriate ways. I think that’s a massive opportunity as parents that we have to learn some of these things and then help to use them, and help our children through those processes as well.
Dr. Paul: Absolutely. I wish every parent, before having children, would learn Inner Bonding, learn how to take responsibility for themselves so they could role model that. But it’s not too late at any stage to become a role model of personal responsibility, because as parents, we are always the role model for our kids. The more we develop these skills of learning from our feelings, and being compassionate towards ourselves, and healing the old false beliefs, and learning to connect with our higher selves, the more our children will learn them.
In fact, children learn Inner Bonding extremely easily. I’ve had parents teach kids as young as three years old to learn how to tune into their feelings. Three year olds often have an imaginary friend they turn to anyway. It’s easy for them to imagine that they have a baby inside whose feelings they can take care of, and they can go to their higher imaginary friend and ask for help. So kids learn it really so much more easily than we do. When parents are doing it and role modeling it, it’s such a huge, huge benefit for kids.
I wish I had known it when my kids were young. I didn’t start doing Inner Bonding until my youngest was 12. It was great, they did learn a lot, but I wish I had known it when they were really young.
Romilly Hodges: My kids are a little younger than that, six and eight at the moment. It’s been my experience as well that they’re very open to these ways of working through their own feelings, as well. That’s been wonderful to see as well. I don’t think it’s about necessarily being a perfect parent, that if we haven’t done this then we’re somehow … haven’t lived up to what we should be doing, but it’s really kind of about understanding our own imperfections and working with those to be as productive and happy as we can be.
Dr. Paul: Right, and teaching our children self-compassion, rather than self-judgement. That’s so incredibly valuable.
Romilly Hodges: I love that.
If somebody feels that they’ve had a childhood upbringing that really they didn’t feel like they got love from their parents, how do you take them through that process and help them learn to love themselves and feel that self-compassion?
Dr. Paul: Many of us did not have good childhoods. I certainly didn’t. But what I’ve learned, as I’ve practiced Inner Bonding, is that I can now give that little girl in me that didn’t get what she needed when I was growing up, I can now give her all that she needs now. That’s what heals. That’s what makes an enormous amount of difference.
I work with people who have had horrible, horrible, horrible abuse. Just unimaginable abuse. Who, when they learn Inner Bonding, and they learn to see and value their beautiful soul essence, because fortunately there’s a place in us that no matter what happened to us, is still unwounded and pure, through Inner Bonding, people learn to see that beautiful, pure, unwounded part of themselves … Who they were as a soul when they came into their body. As they learn to see and love and value that beautiful essence, then they start to give themselves the love and the attention, the caring and the compassion that they never got. That changes everything.
It’s really amazing what happens with people when they learn to give themselves what they didn’t get as they were growing up. As they do that, as they really learn to love themselves and value themselves, they find that they’re forgiving their parents, even their abusers. Not condoning, but they’re forgiving because they realize that those people were very wounded themselves. They were operating maybe at a five year old level, six year old level, who knows. The wounded self can be very, very young when we’re operating out of that part of ourselves and can wreak havoc on others.
As my clients learned to love and value themselves, and as I learned to love and value myself, I was able to have compassion for my parents. I was able to forgive them. I was able to actually give them some of what they didn’t get as they were growing up, to give them some of the gentleness and the compassion that they didn’t get. And they loved it. They didn’t know how to give it to themselves. They never did learn how to give it to themselves, but they certainly valued it when I was able to give it to them. That was helpful to me too, because for so many years I was angry at them. For so many years I felt like I was a victim of them. Once I practiced Inner Bonding, I learned to love myself, all that went away. All that got healed.
Romilly Hodges: I appreciate you sharing your story so openly as well. I think it’s very inspirational and really helps to explain exactly what you’re doing with Inner Bonding as well. I appreciate that working on ourselves like this, it just can really help provide those missing pieces that sort of stand between knowing what we should be doing to take care of ourselves and then actually following through and being able to make positive changes in our lives as well.
I really appreciate your work. I know that we are drawing to the end of our time and conversation together, and I just wanted to say thank you very much, Dr. Paul. It’s really an absolute pleasure having you on our podcast. I wanted to mention that listeners, you can go to www.innerbonding.com where you can see there is a free Inner Bonding course, and you can also join Dr. Margaret for her next 30-day Love Yourself Inner Bonding Experience.
Is there anything else, Dr. Paul, that you’d like to mention in closing or about how listeners can engage with you?
Dr. Paul: We also have other 30-day courses. I have one coming up, Frequency, we have Loving Relationships, and I work with people on the phone and Skype. I have many trained facilitators who also work with people on the phone and Skype. We have a wonderful community, Inner Bonding Village, a membership community where people support each other and help each other in their process. There’s many, many ways of learning Inner Bonding and getting support for our healing process. Even though Inner Bonding is a self-help process, most of us need support in our healing, so that support is available at innerbonding.com
Romilly Hodges: Okay, great. We’re going to put all those links onto your podcast page as well, so anybody can go and find them there and connect with you.
Wonderful. Thank you once again. I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Dr. Paul: Okay. Thank you so much. It was a lovely interview. I enjoyed it.
Romilly Hodges: Thank you, me too. Take care.
Dr. Paul: You too. Buh-bye.
