Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this edition of the FBL, where I want to talk about having a fear-bonded relationship versus a love-bonded relationship, and how most people, in my opinion, have fear-bonded relationships with life, with God, and with their experience in this world—and how that is actually the source of most of the hardship and problems they end up experiencing.

And then I want to talk about what to do about it.

So, if you haven't seen any emails, I just want to let everyone know I'm running an Intrusive Thoughts Intensive.

If you deal with intrusive harmful thoughts, intrusive sexual thoughts, intrusive thoughts about God, about your faith, about anything related to religion, that's starting this coming Wednesday.

I'm very excited about it. I've never run anything like it.

And when it comes to working with me, you know, it's one of the most accessible ways that I can make this available.

We're doing seven deep-dive sessions across a period of eight weeks. We're taking Thanksgiving off.

So, if you haven't applied yet, we're capping it at 30 spots because I want to keep it completely anonymous, but I also want to make space for questions, so you can submit questions privately.

It's completely anonymous. I know there's a lot of guilt and shame with this stuff, so one of the things we're going to be focusing on is how to release guilt and shame, and how to actually do that and release the fear, too, around the thoughts.

Anyways, I'll link that down in the notes.

So let's talk about a fear-bonded versus a love-bonded relationship.

Most of you have probably heard of attachment theory, where you have a secure attachment, an insecure attachment that's anxious, an insecure attachment that's avoidant, and then a disorganized attachment.

What I want to talk about today is the idea of having a fear-bonded relationship to creation, or life, right?

Now, most of you are probably okay with me using the word God. If you don't like the word God, use the word life, universe, or whatever describes this experience that you're having.

There is a big difference between living from a fear-bonded relationship, or an insecure attachment, versus a love-bonded relationship.

Most of us start and learn early on that we are bad, that we're not good enough. And this is communicated to us, whether it's from our parents, from someone in a church we went to, or wherever.

This narrative, right, that you're not enough, that you're not inherently worthy, that you have to earn your worthiness and earn your goodness, is really, in my view, a major source of a lot of the fear and turmoil that we experience in life.

And this is where basically any kind of anxiety experience is going to come from, because you see yourself as separate. You see yourself as someone who needs to do, needs to fix, needs to obtain.

And through that, you see the world in a very overwhelming state.

You see the world as something that's against you.

And when you live that way, it's very easy to interpret everything as a problem. Everything is a struggle. Everything is hardship.

So you live in a state of fear, and that stimulates the nervous system, hijacks the mind, creates all these what-if thoughts, and causes you to produce and project those thoughts onto things.

A lot of times, we project our own fear bond onto God.

We take our fear and project it onto our creator.

This is what the intrusive thoughts I'm going to be talking about, doing a deep dive on here in the next few weeks, are all about, right?

When you are terrified of your creator, you are going to feel fear, and you're going to project your fear onto your creator.

It doesn't mean that your creator is terrifying. It doesn't mean that life is terrifying.

It means that all of that is your projection because of a distortion, a fear bond, right? An insecure attachment.

And unless you heal that, which is a large part of what we talk about in TBC, and really anything that I'm going to be doing—including the Intrusive Thoughts Intensive, where I'm going to be talking about it pretty in-depth—you will live in a fear orientation toward life.

The difference is the love orientation, right?

In life, you see life for what it is. You feel supported. You feel worthy. You feel the love connection to begin with.

And so think of it like this, and I really understood this once I had children.

I can never terrify my kids into loving me, right?

I cannot condemn them and tell them how to behave and expect that to ever equate to a loving relationship.

It might equate to an obedient relationship, unwillingly, right? But when it comes to an actual loving relationship, that can never be created by fear.

You can never have a loving relationship with your creator or with life by living in fear.

It is the opposite energy.

In fact, fear is the absence of love.

Now, if I begin my relationship with my children from love, it's, "You're loved unconditionally. I love you just as you are, right now. You don't ever need to do anything. You couldn't do anything to earn it, because it could never be taken away."

From there, it's a completely different life. It's a completely different setup.

And if you've lived by fear for a long time, if you find yourself feeling fear, if you are operating from fear all the time, the reality is that you have a fear-bonded relationship.

Now, you may not use the word creator, but you have a fear-bonded relationship with life.

And that is the source of suffering, because it's a complete distortion of how we are designed to live.

And the reason there's so much suffering there is that the fear is actually trying to point to and wake you up to that fear-bonded aspect of yourself so you can heal it.

And until you do, it's going to keep projecting onto thing after thing, theme after theme, change after change.

And that's why, when I try to articulate the importance of addressing fear, there is nothing more important, in my view.

It's like, if you had a physical injury, right? You would see the importance of addressing it.

If your leg were broken, you would see the importance of fixing it. You wouldn't just kind of exist with it, you know?

The problem is that most of us have lived in fear for so long that we don't even understand there's another way. So we don't see it as something we can heal, and we try to heal the symptoms of it, and that doesn't go well.

So then we think it's just something we have, and we decide to exist with it.

For the most part, this is what a lot of people do with fear, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and all this stuff. They just decide to exist with it.

They try certain things to get rid of the symptoms instead of actually healing.

And this is what's so difficult to communicate. It's impossible to explain this verbally and have you fully understand the implications of it.

The only way you'll understand that is when you actually get to a place of being healed inside, where you truly live from this state of a love-bonded connection.

And so, if that's where you are on your journey and this is something you're really ready for, number one, you can definitely check out my Intrusive Thoughts Intensive.

Like I said, we're keeping it a very intimate group. It's all anonymous, and we're really aiming to not only target intrusive thoughts but also the guilt and shame.

One of the things I'm going to be talking about is the fear-bonded relationship and really going into that.

On top of that, if you want to go deep with this and work with me directly on it, that's an option as well.

I'll link both options, TBC and the Intrusive Thoughts Intensive, in the notes.

And if you feel aligned with it, fill out an application. Let's chat.

So, with that, wishing you all a great day.