Margaret Paul

Margaret Paul (born 1939) is an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and relationship counselor best known as the co-creator, with Dr. Erika J. Chopich, of the self-healing process called Inner Bonding.

Holding a doctorate in psychology and decades of clinical practice, Paul came to prominence first as co-author (with Jordan Paul) of the relationship classic Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? (1983), then turned toward the inner roots of the relational patterns she was seeing in couples.

With Chopich she developed Inner Bonding over many years and set it out in Healing Your Aloneness (1990) and, in its fullest single-author statement, Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

She has since built innerbonding.com into a teaching organization with online courses, a certification program, and further books and workbooks. Inner Bonding is Paul’s attempt to make inner-child healing into a concrete, repeatable daily practice rather than a one-time insight.

Its core map is a three-way relationship inside the person: a “wounded self” (the shame-based ego that learned in childhood to control, avoid, or numb pain), a “loving Adult” (a present, compassionate, responsible part that can choose to feel and to learn), and a source of “higher guidance” (a wiser, loving inner or spiritual resource).

Healing, in this model, is the loving Adult turning toward the wounded inner child with compassion instead of abandonment, discovering the false beliefs driving the pain, consulting higher guidance for the truth and the loving action, and then taking that action.

Within the Atlas, Paul anchors the practical, devotional end of the inner-child / parts-work thread: she sits alongside Schwartz’s IFS and Assagioli’s subpersonality work as a parts-relational model, but distinctively folds an explicit spiritual “guidance” step into an everyday self-parenting protocol.