1440: What happens to us when we don't get the love we need as a child?
Margaret Paul:1440: How does this line of thinking help the situation?
Margaret Paul: The wounded self figures that if it's our fault we're not being loved, then we can try to figure out how to do it right—how to act right and how to be good enough in order to get the approval we need and avoid the disapproval we can't handle when we're that young.
It gives us a sense of control over getting love and avoiding pain.
1440: But this doesn't seem to work. Why not?
Margaret Paul: Unfortunately, when we operate from the wounded self, we take the beautiful essence, the soul essence, of who we really are and hide it away in order to create an image or mask that we hope will be good enough.
We call this hidden part our inner child. It's the part that often expresses to us through our feelings and intuition.
It has a lot of wisdom and a lot of guidance for us, but if we've hidden away that beautiful, wonderful, gifted part of ourselves, we don't have access to who we really are, to what brings us joy, and to what our passion and purpose is.1440: Does the suppression of our inner child lead to issues like depression and anxiety?
Margaret Paul: It can lead to all kinds of things, including feeling empty, anxious, depressed, angry, guilty, or ashamed. Maybe a relationship is ending and you realize you can't have a loving relationship with others because you don't have one with yourself. Maybe you don't feel alive or joyful and are feeling lonely or alone. All these painful feelings are often what start people on a healing process.1440: There are also challenging things in life that happen in school and elsewhere as we're growing up, so it's not just about our parents, right?
Margaret Paul: Some of our painful challenges came from our parents and some of them came from school or other situations. Maybe we felt rejected by our peers or lost someone we loved. When we were little, we couldn't handle the big, painful feelings of life—the loneliness, the helplessness over other people's behavior toward us, the heartbreak of being unloved, the grief of loss. We had these little bodies that just couldn't manage these big, painful feelings.1440: Is it possible to reparent that inner child?
Margaret Paul: The good news is, that part of you is never lost and you can always reclaim it. It's been shoved away and ignored, but it's there.1440: So how do we do it?
Margaret Paul: In any given moment there are two intentions available. We can try to control and avoid, which is what the wounded self does. Or we can have the intention to learn about loving ourselves using a process like Inner Bonding. Learning about loving ourselves also means wanting to learn how we are treating ourselves in ways that may be causing our pain.1440: How do we do this if we didn't have any role models for it?
Margaret Paul: Here is where learning to connect with your higher self—your spiritual guidance—comes in. Your higher guidance becomes the role model for loving yourself.Loving yourself is not about having your nails done once a week or getting a massage. That's fine, but imagine what it would mean for a parent to truly love a child. They would attend to them and care about their feelings.
1440: What do you say to those who say it is selfish to focus on yourself so much?
Margaret Paul: I say it's really quite the opposite: loving yourself is self-responsible. It's about learning to take care of yourself so that you're not needy or manipulative in an attempt to make others responsible for you. When you're all filled up with love, you have love to share with others. Far from being selfish, loving yourself is what leads to seeing, valuing, and accepting others.This interview was conducted on behalf of 1440 Multiversity by Jenn Brown—a freelance writer, editor, producer, and educator.