you can’t find the perfect outfit, you’re not going. You’d rather stay home and feel miserable.
Your Adult Self finds a middle ground by accepting the fact that we all have imperfections, shortcomings. We are all bent twigs. The knuckles, knots, and bends in your twig are what give your personality its special contour and distinctiveness. If perfectionism is one of your traits, rather than be ruled by it, accept it as a part of your Outer Child portfolio, and balance this trait with wisdom coming from your more reasonable, self-accepting higher self.
TEMPER, TEMPER
Anger is Outer’s favorite emotion, because anger is so energizing. And self-justifying! When your Inner Child feels angry, your Outer is charged to do something about it. Anger is Outer’s excuse to strike out. It becomes bloodthirsty; its rampage is fueled by adrenaline and other brain chemicals that increase your impulsivity and decrease your reasoning capacity.
Anger is not a primary, but a secondary emotion. First comes pain. When you stub your toe, it hurts: pain. Then you scream in anger because the pain makes you angry. Pain first, anger second. When something in your life creates chronic emotional pain (failed attempts to start a new career, a partner who withholds emotionally), you might direct your anger at the person triggering it or any inanimate object that gets in your way.
Being rejected by a loved one can create abandonment rage, which can trigger Outer Child’s most destructive, dangerous, and self-justifying behaviors. In the extreme, abandonment rage has been responsible for some of the most infamous headline-grabbing murder-suicides. You might remember the case of the man who, in a jealous rage, set fire to the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killing 87 people.
Your developing Adult Self knows that anger is head-bending. So when you become angry, Adult takes precautions, learns how to assume complete responsibility for your behavior, learns to avoid alcohol and other substances that reduce one’s control, learns how to nurture and calm this most volatile of emotions.
BENEATH IT ALL
Why, when we’re faced with a new challenge, does our Outer Child pitch a hissy fit? Since when did the failure to assemble a futon frame spell the end of the world? Your Inner Child might be feeling frustrated or inadequate and beset with primal abandonment fear, the fear of being deemed unworthy of love and left behind. This primitive fear is residual of our Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear days, when banishment or abandonment meant death.
Your developing Adult Self realizes that your helplessness is learned helplessness and knows that you must calm down so that you can use your cognitive resources to override this learned response and accomplish the task—whether it’s hanging those shelves or learning to apply the tools of the Outer Child program. Adult also knows it can ask for help.
And help is on its way. Next, in Part Two, as we continue exploring your Outer Child behavior and what motivates it, I’ll guide you through a program for overcoming all your self-sabotaging behaviors.
In the meantime, keep tabs on your Outer Child. To this day, I still keep a daily inventory of my own Outer Child characteristics. It helps me stay honest, in tune with myself, and motivated to keep my higher self in the lead. One of my most productive Outer Child insights involved locating evidence of egotism that was hiding out in my seemingly humble demeanor. I thought I had already gotten rid of most of my egotism, but as I peeled away the layers, I saw it. The clarity proved to be both humbling and empowering. For instance, I noticed, because now I wanted to notice, that sometimes I assumed I understood something when in fact I had not understood it.
Owning up to this trait didn’t make me want to beat myself up because I figured if I had it, my colleagues had it, Freud probably had it, and just about everybody had it, at least to some extent. I was just grateful for being able to detect it in myself. Thank you, Outer Child! This new awareness helped me look beyond my own egotism to see my egotism.
I started to have multiple sightings of this Outer Child trait. For instance, I’d catch myself nodding my head in a knowing way as if to say “I understand,” when in fact I hadn’t. I noticed this happening when doctors used medical terminology in giving me test results or when someone expressed a complex worldview. I realized that I’d walked away perplexed instead of asking for clarity. I saw how this behavior caused so much going on around me to remain unquestioned and poorly understood. In correcting this, I began learning new things by leaps and bounds, but it meant first acknowledging my ignorance to myself and then, of course, to others.
I don’t know exactly at what point in my life this presuming to know set in—probably becoming a psychotherapist gave it a good boost—but I do know that this Outer Child trait had been hiding out in my Adult persona, protecting my insecure feelings and serving my egotism quite nicely. I also know that when I can’t tell the difference between understanding something and thinking I understand it, it blocks me from knowing more. Catching myself in the act of presuming to understand got me to delve further into many truisms I had taken for granted. What a gift. Discovering my Outer Child helped me penetrate the surface reality of things and take a giant step forward as a theoretician and person.
Here’s an example relevant to doing the research for this book. It got me to continually question the assumptions I was making about exactly how Outer functioned within the personality. Thanks to my new awareness, I’d peel away another layer of assumption, take a second look, and realize there was something about Outer’s underpinnings that still eluded me. For instance, I discovered I wasn’t exactly sure where Outer’s outbound energy derived from. So I removed yet another layer of preconceived assumption and asked myself more probing questions. I dug further into the newly unfolding neurobiological research, seeking help from research mentors, and consulted again with co-creator of the Outer Child concept, Peter Yelton. In this digging, questioning manner, I was able to penetrate many uncertainties I had about Outer Child (the hardest part was realizing I had uncertainties) and to admit to the ones I still had.
It was in this tentative, searching manner that I was able to resolve the conundrum about how it’s possible to have emotional insight but not know how to use it. I slowly honed specialized power tools that allow you to actually use your insight. The solution involved trial and error, and realizing error when I saw it.
Presuming to know was just one facet of my Outer Child persona. I have identified hundreds of others (none terribly flattering). If you add up all of my Outer’s features, they’d tell the backstory about the many ways I manage to get in my own way. Many of these discoveries are included in The Outer Child Inventory posted on my website www.outerchild.net.
As you discover the unique maneuvers of your own Outer Child, please send them to me. Contributions from around the world help me continue building the Outer Child Inventory. It’s clear the concept has an enormous impact on people’s lives.
Remember, you don’t want to bind and gag your Outer Child. It will only fight harder to act out. It’s when you acknowledge your Outer Child and learn constructive ways to use its energy that your life begins to change.
Now that you understand the Outer Child concept, it’s time to get started on putting that good knowledge to use. Part II introduces you to the three prongs of the Outer Child program: separation therapy, guided visualization, and action steps. I have been developing these techniques for over 30 years as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. Gurus with whom I have studied and colleagues have shared their techniques, which I have integrated, and some are my own, practices molded by trial and error as I have