Great stuff by Robert Burney

I really like this guy and he has written so much.  I thought I'd start by sharing some of it.

"I needed to learn how to set boundaries within, both emotionally and mentally by integrating Spiritual Truth into my process. Because "I feel like a failure" does not mean that is the Truth. The Spiritual Truth is that "failure" is an opportunity for growth. I can set a boundary with my emotions by not buying into the illusion that what I am feeling is who I am. I can set a boundary intellectually by telling that part of my mind that is judging and shaming me to shut up, because that is my disease lying to me. I can feel and release the emotional pain energy at the same time I am telling myself the Truth by not buying into the shame and judgment."

The key, in terms of the concept of internal boundaries as I use it and apply it, is to set those boundaries from a loving place instead of from a shaming and judgmental place.  We all learned to try to control our behavior and feelings with shame, guilt, and fear because those were the tools our parents and society used on us.  That is where the critical parent voice is born.  It is an attempt to have internal boundaries through shame, criticism, and fear of consequences.

To set internal boundaries from shame and fear is dysfunctional in the long term.  When we try to control our behavior out of shame and fear it doesn't work because we end up rebelling against that attempted control.  We rebel by acting out in the self abusive ways that we are shaming ourselves for in the first place.  Thus the codependent cycle of shame, blame, and self abuse, the squirrel cage that most of us have spent our lives running around and around in, is fed by the very shame and fear messages that we are using to try to stop it.

"If I am feeling like a "failure" and giving power to the "critical parent" voice within that is telling me that I am a failure - then I can get stuck in a very painful place where I am shaming myself for being me. In this dynamic I am being the victim of myself and also being my own perpetrator - and the next step is to rescue myself by using one of the old tools to go unconscious (food, alcohol, sex, etc.) Thus the disease has me running around in a squirrel cage of suffering and shame, a dance of pain, blame, and self-abuse."

The reason we rebel is because when we are shaming and abusing ourselves we are betraying ourselves - and on some deep level we know that is not right.  The rebel in us fights against this self abuse - but at the same time because we are reacting out of a false, dysfunctional, black and white belief system, the rebel also becomes allied with the very addictions and dysfunctional behavior we are trying to stop with the shame.  On the highest level the rebel within is trying to get us to be True to our True self - but because of the black & white, dysfunctional and false attitudes, beliefs, and definitions we are reacting out of, it identifies our True self as being the part of us that feels the need for the addictive substance or relationship or whatever.

Thus, does the dysfunction feed more dysfunction. 

"Any time we judge and shame ourselves, we are feeding back into the disease; we are jumping back into the squirrel cage.

This is a brilliantly insidious disease!

The war within cannot be won by fighting the disease, by fighting ourselves.  The only way to break out is to start giving ourselves a break, to start being kind to, and having compassion for, ourselves and our inner children." 

Love is the answer

The only way to effectively stop the self destructive, reactive codependent cycle is by loving ourselves - by treating ourselves in ways that are more loving.  The only Truly effective way I have found to effectively do this is to integrate into all levels of our internal process a Spiritual belief system which supports the idea that we are Unconditionally Loved.  And the key to integrating Spiritual Truth into the internal emotional process and to finding balance emotionally and mentally is to have Loving internal boundaries.

Internal Boundaries

What follows is a brief description of the four main relationships internally that are in need of boundaries.  These are levels of our being/dimensions of the self in which the concept of internal boundaries needs to be applied in order to change our relationship with ourselves into one that is more Loving. 

Following that is a brief description of the benefits derived from focusing on having internal boundaries in our relationship with these levels of our being.

(The concept of internal boundaries can be applied to numerous interrelationships within our relationship with ourselves.  Many of these will be mentioned in the course of this book.)

Within the Mental

Within the mental level of our being it is vital to start having a boundary between the part of our mind that is reacting to the childhood wounds and programming - the critical parent/disease voice - and the part of our mind that is telling us our intuitive Truth.

The Critical Parent/Disease Voice

"One of the difficulties in this healing process is that even after we start to awaken to being butterflies, a part of our mind keeps telling us that we are low, crawling, disgusting creatures.

Taking the power away from that part of us is the key to the healing process.  A key to stopping the war inside.  We need to take the shame and judgment out of the process on a personal level.  It is vitally important to stop listening and giving power to that critical place within us that tells us that we are bad and wrong and shameful.

That "critical parent" voice in our head is the disease lying to us.  Any shaming, judgmental voice inside of us is the disease talking to us - and it is always lying.  This disease of Codependence is very adaptable, and it attacks us from all sides.  The voices of the disease that are totally resistant to becoming involved in healing and Recovery are the same voices that turn right around and tell us, using Spiritual language, that we are not doing Recovery good enough, that we are not doing it right. 

We need to become clear internally on what messages are coming from the disease, from the old tapes, and which ones are coming from the True Self - what some people call "the small quiet voice."

We need to turn down the volume on those loud, yammering voices that shame and judge us and turn up the volume on the quiet Loving voice.  As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are feeding back into the disease, we are feeding the dragon within that is eating the life out of us.  Codependence is a disease that feeds on itself - it is self-perpetuating.

This healing is a long gradual process - the goal is progress, not perfection.  What we are learning about is unconditional Love.  Unconditional Love means no judgment, no shame."

It is also vital to start changing the dysfunctional, false, black & white beliefs, attitudes, and definitions that are dictating our emotional reactions to life.   Our attitudes, beliefs, and definitions determine our perspective and expectations which in turn dictate our emotional relationship with everything - with ourselves, with life, with other people.  It is very important to start taking the power away from those false beliefs in order to start changing our relationship with self and life.

"Perspective is a key to Recovery.  I had to change and enlarge my perspectives of myself and my own emotions, of other people, of God and of this life business.  Our perspective of life dictates our relationship with life.  We have a dysfunctional relationship with life because we were taught to have a dysfunctional perspective of this life business, dysfunctional definitions of who we are and why we are here.

It is kind of like the old joke about three blind men describing an elephant by touch.  Each one of them is telling his own Truth, they just have a lousy perspective.  Our disease is all about having a lousy relationship with life, with being human, because we have a lousy perspective on life as a human."

Between Mental and Emotional

Thoughts are not feelings and feelings are not thoughts - it is vital to start separating out our thoughts from our feelings.  There are feelings attached to thoughts and thoughts attached to feelings but they are two separate parts of our being.  They are intimately interconnected of course, but it is very important that we be able to start seeing clearly the difference between them.  Part of the dysfunction is due to enmeshment between the mental and emotional levels of our being.  Having a clear understanding of the difference between thoughts and emotions is vital in order to practice discernment and own our power to make choices about how we want to respond to life instead of unconsciously reacting our of the old wounds and old tapes.

"By learning to set a boundary with and between our emotional truth, what we feel, and our mental perspective, what we believe - in alignment with the Spiritual Truth we have integrated into the process - we can honor and release the feelings without buying into the false beliefs."

Within the Emotional

In order to start responding to life honestly in the moment from an mature adult perspective it is very important to start separating out the emotional reactions of the child from the emotional messages from our intuition.  The reason that we have internal conflict is because we have different parts of our beings reacting in very different ways.  The romantic within does not want to set boundaries in an intimate relationship for fear of making the other person angry enough to abandon us - at the same time that other parts of us (the rebel perhaps or the angry child) wants to push the person away so that we don't get hurt.  It is very important to start understanding where these conflicting messages are coming from so that we can make choices about which parts of us we want to be in charge of our life. 

"The next time something does not go the way you wanted it to, or just when you are feeling low, ask yourself how old you are feeling.   What you might find is that you are feeling like a bad little girl, a bad little boy, and that you must have done something wrong because it feels like you are being punished.

Just because it feels like you are being punished does not mean that is the Truth.  Feelings are real - they are emotional energy that is manifested in our body - but they are not necessarily fact. 

What we feel is our "emotional truth" and it does not necessarily have anything to do with either facts or the emotional energy that is Truth with a capital "T" - especially when we our reacting out of an age of our inner child.

If we are reacting out of what our emotional truth was when we were five or nine or fourteen, then we are not capable of responding appropriately to what is happening in the moment; we are not being in the now. 

When we are reacting out of old tapes based on attitudes and beliefs that are false or distorted, then our feelings cannot be trusted. 

When we are reacting out of our childhood emotional wounds, then what we are feeling may have very little to do with the situation we are in or with the people with whom we are dealing in the moment."

Between Being and Behavior

Toxic shame is what cripples us emotionally and causes us to be our own worst enemy.  It is vital to stop giving the shame we feel the power to dominate our relationship with ourselves.  The more we can start integrating the belief that we are Spiritual Beings having a human experience into our relationship with ourselves the easier it becomes to start accepting our human limitations. 

As long as we are expecting ourselves to be superhuman we are set up to fail.  As long as we unconsciously or consciously give power to the toxic shame we feel deep within we will never succeed in learning to Love our self.  It is very important to start seeing our being as having Divine worth and our behavior as being the result of our humanness and our wounds in order to forgive and Love ourselves.

[When I use the term "judge," I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people's beings based on behavior.  In other words, I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake.  That is what toxic shame is all about:  feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we have human drives, human weaknesses, human imperfections.

There may be behavior in which we have engaged that we feel ashamed of but that does not make us shameful beings   We may need to make judgments about whether our behavior is healthy and appropriate but that does not mean that we have to judge our essential self, our being, because of the behavior.  Our behavior has been dictated by our disease, by our childhood wounds; it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings.  It means that we are human, it means that we are wounded.

It is important to start setting a boundary between being and behavior.  All humans have equal Divine value as beings - no matter what our behavior.  Our behavior is learned (and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions).  Behavior, and the attitudes that dictate behavior, are adopted defenses designed to allow us to survive in the Spiritually hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.]

We need to have internal Boundaries with and between the emotional and mental components of our being so that we can:

- feel our feelings without being the victim of them or victimizing others with them;

- achieve some balance between feeling and thinking, intuitive and rational;

- know which feelings are telling us the Truth and which are reactions to old wounds so that we can discern between emotional honesty and indulgence.

Boundaries:

- with the disease/critical parent voice so that we can stop giving power to the judgment and shame on a personal level & stop letting our own mind be our worst enemy;

- between being and behavior so that we can take responsibility without blaming ourselves;

- with our inner children to allow us to Lovingly parent and set boundaries for the wounded children within which allows us to own the magical, spontaneous, creative, Spiritual child inside;

Boundaries which:

- allow us call on the Power Within any time, any place, that we need it;

- allow us Integrate the Truth of an Unconditionally Loving God-Force/Goddess Energy/Great Spirit into our experience of the process so that instead of just knowing Spiritual Truth intellectually we can start feeling it emotionally;

- allow us to relax and enjoy life more.

"As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are giving power to the disease.  We are feeding the monster that is devouring us.

We need to take responsibility without taking the blame.  We need to own and honor the feelings without being a victim of them.

We need to rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling our lives.  STOP them from driving the bus!  Children are not supposed to drive, they are not supposed to be in control.

And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned.  We have been doing it backwards.  We abandoned and abused our inner children.  Locked them in a dark place within us.  And at the same time let the children drive the bus - let the children's wounds dictate our lives.

We were powerless out of ego-self to do anything any different than we did it.  We are powerless out of ego-self to heal this disease.  Through Spiritual Self, through our Spiritual Connection, we have access to all the power in the Universe.

We need to have the willingness: willingness to get to a new level of self-honesty; willingness to start listening to the Loving inner voice instead of the shaming ones; willingness to face the terror of healing the emotional wounds.

Our disease causes us to have a distorted and repressed emotional process, and the only way out is through the feelings.  Our disease gives us a scrambled mind, a reversed dysfunctional way of looking at ourselves and the world, and we have to be able to use the wonderful tool that is our mind while changing our attitudes and reprogramming our thinking.

It seems awfully complicated, doesn't it? 

That is because it is!

On another level it is also very simple.  It is a Spiritual Dis-ease.  It can only be healed through a Spiritual Cure.  It cannot be healed by only looking at the symptoms.  That is backwards.

The cure is available through surrendering control to a Higher Power.  We cannot do this healing by ourselves.  We need a Loving Higher Power in our lives.  We need other Recovering people in our lives.

We are powerless out of human ego-self to get out of this quagmire.  That is the bad news.  It is also the good news.

Once you let go enough times, once you becoming willing to go to any length, to do whatever it takes, once you become willing to make healing the number one priority in your life, then you will be guided all the way.  You will get the tools you need when you need them.  You will get the help you need when you need it.  You will have Loving, supportive people come into your life when you need them.  You will start making rapid, discernible progress in your healing transformation.

On the other side of powerlessness is all the power in the Universe.  On the other side of powerlessness is freedom, happiness, and peace within.  On the other side of powerlessness is Joy and Love!

The answer is to stop fighting it, to surrender to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you do deserve to be happy and Loved."