The Challenges of Single Parenting

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 by: Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Having worked with parents for the last 35 years and
written books on parenting and relationships, I’ve discovered that one
of the greatest challenges for us as parents is to be loving
role-models for our children, showing our children through our behavior
how to take personal responsibility for their own feelings and needs.
Our children need to learn from our role-modeling how to nurture
themselves within and how to create a sense of safety in the world. In
families where both a mother and father are present, both parents can
participate in nurturing the child emotionally and taking care of the
child in the world, and both parents can role-model what it looks like
to do this for themselves.

Single parents have a far greater challenge - they have
to be both mother and father to the child. Mothering energy is that
energy that nurtures while fathering energy is that energy that
protects in the world - that is, earning money, setting boundaries with
others, speaking up for oneself. While our society often defines women
as the nurturers and men as the protectors, both men and women are
capable of both nurturing and protecting in the world.

In order for a single parent to successfully be both
mother and father, he or she must have learned how to be both mother
and father to the Child within. In other words, we have to have learned
how to nurture our own Inner Child - how to take responsibility for our
own fears, pain, anger, hurt, and disappointment, and how to take care
of our Inner Child in the world - earn money, set boundaries, and so
on. There is no way to successfully teach our children these skills
until we are doing them ourselves, which means that each of us needs to
be in a process of learning how to do this.

We have developed a process that teaches us how to care
for and nurture ourselves, while also loving others. This process,
called Inner Bonding, teaches us how to become a loving Adult to our
own Inner Child and to our actual children. Inner Bonding is a six-step
psychospiritual process that can be learned and practiced daily, and
that leads to the development of a spiritually-connected loving inner
Adult.

Inner Bonding defines the Inner Child as our core self,
who we are when we are born - our natural creativity, intuition,
playfulness, imagination, talents, feelings, and ability to love. Our
Child is our inner experience. Our Adult is everything we learn after
we are born. It is our thoughts, beliefs, and ability to take action.
We start learning how to be an Adult from the moment we are born
through watching our parents and other caregivers. The Adult we learn
to be is a child-adult, the part of us that learned many fears and
false beliefs and learned addictive ways, such as using substances, TV,
spending, anger, or compliance to avoid pain. A true loving Adult is
that part of us that is spiritually connected to a Higher Source of
truth and love and is able to bring that truth and love down into the
Child and share it with others. The adult many of us operate from most
of the time is really a wounded child masquerading as an adult. It is
our unhealed wounded self that causes us problems with ourselves and
our children. Inner Bonding is a process for healing the wounded self
and developing a spiritually-connected loving Adult.

In Inner Bonding, there are only two possible intents at
any given moment: the intent to learn about love and the intent to
protect against and avoid pain. The intent to learn says that we want
to learn about our own pain in order to understand what we need to do
to be loving to our Inner Child and others; The intent to protect says
that we want to avoid experiencing our pain at all cost. The
child-adult is always in the intent to protect and the loving Adult is
always in the intent to learn.

The six-steps of Inner Bonding are:

1. The willingness to become aware of our pain rather than protect against it with our various addictions.

2. The conscious decision to move into the intent to learn.

3. Dialoguing with our wounded self to discover the false
beliefs and resulting behavior behind the pain. Releasing anger and
pain in appropriate ways.

4. Dialoguing with our Higher Power to learn about truth and loving behavior.

5. Taking loving action in behalf or our Inner Child.

6. Evaluating the action.

All parents needs to be in a process of healing
themselves. It is particularly important for single parents to be in
this process since they are the primary role-models for their children.
The more you heal the fears and false beliefs of your wounded self, the
more loving you will naturally be with yourself and your children.
Learning to utilize these six step throughout the day, especially in
times of anger, fear, anxiety and stress, will eventually heal the
false beliefs leading to these difficult feelings.

About the Author

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books, including "Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?" She is the co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding healing process. Learn Inner Bonding now! Visit her web site for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com or mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com. Phone sessions available.

margaret@innerbonding.com

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