Child concept, I’ve adapted these exercises to the special task of overcoming our most entrenched self-defeating patterns, taking into account new advances in brain science and other related research along the way.
The Outer Child program involves working directly with all three components of the personality—Outer Child, Inner Child, and Adult Self—to resolve internal conflicts so they no longer interfere from within. You learn to calm your Inner Child, tame your Outer Child, and strengthen your Adult Self. The goal is to get those three parts of the psyche working together on your behalf, toward your dreams.
Your insight into these inner workings of the personality will increase chapter by chapter to a level beyond where you’ve been before—to the point where you’re taking action to eradicate old patterns and create healthy new ones. We will explore important areas affecting your life, including abandonment, self-esteem, unresolved childhood issues, and stress, and we will apply the exercises to help you effectively work through each one. Once you learn how to use these tools, they serve as a template to apply to any problem area of your life, helping you reach your full potential as a human being.
Outer Child and Your Abandonment Issues
Abandonment casts a wide net, snaring anyone who has ever felt a loss or disconnection. Those old abandonment wounds form the basis for Outer Child’s most intrusive defense mechanisms. Still, it rankles some people to hear “grown men and women” talk about their abandonment issues. Their knee-jerk reaction is: “Stop all that whining!”
We’re not whining. In fact, the purpose of the Outer Child program is to focus you on very specific goals. It helps you heal your deepest issues without dwelling on them.
Abandonment is the crux of the human condition. Exploring this issue takes you on a journey to the center of the self, where deep healing can begin. The tools I’ll describe in this and the next four chapters will help you redirect the residual fear and insecurity seeping out of your oldest wounds. By the time we’re done you’ll be redirecting energy you once used to beat yourself up to propel your life to a better place.
WHAT IS ABANDONMENT?
Abandonment is the feeling of being left behind and it’s a primal fear, a fear of losing life-sustaining support. Its pain can be acute, a burning feeling of rejection and betrayal. Or it can be chronic, an under-the-skin anxiety you can’t trace back to a specific event but which has left you feeling hypersensitive to rejection and loss.
Abandonment can be an intermittent feeling; you might occasionally feel aftershocks of old losses when a friend drops out of your life, when your partner just doesn’t seem to understand, or when you worry about ever finding someone to love. These anxieties rise up from your core, unwelcome reminders of your vulnerability.
Abandonment can also run like a current beneath your conscious awareness. Left unresolved, the primal wound of abandonment festers below the surface, silently eroding your self-esteem, infecting your relationships, and triggering your most self-defeating Outer Child patterns.
Depending on your earlier losses, your abandonment wound can be tender, a raw nerve highly sensitive to anything that makes you feel . . .
excluded
misunderstood
overlooked
unappreciated
taken for granted
ignored
belittled.
My aim here is not to explore the whole abandonment spectrum but to zero in on one aspect that’s particularly relevant to our work: self-abandonment, the emotional root of self-sabotage.
LEAVING YOURSELF BEHIND
The important message here is that while adults can feel abandoned, they can’t actually be abandoned by another person. Unlike children, who depend on caretakers for their very survival, able-bodied adults can take care of their own basic needs. Only children can truly be abandoned.
However, adults can abandon themselves.
My colleague Peter Yelton once created a metaphor that he called “the invisible drain of self-esteem.” As Peter explains it, abandonment trauma is powerful enough to create a drain deep within the self that leaks self-esteem. No matter what you do to bolster your self-image, the invisible drain is always working to funnel away feelings of self-worth.
The invisible drain of self-esteem is driven by self-abandonment. Why do we flush our self-worth away? It’s something we do to ourselves unconsciously. Fortunately it’s something we can undo through the Outer Child program. By administering to our long-neglected primal needs and feelings, we reprogram the trigger points for our automatic behaviors and heal our emotional core at the same time.
WHY WOULD I DO THAT?
Self-abandonment started early, when you were too little to know what to do with your own or other people’s strong emotions. When children feel disconnected, hurt, or criticized they tend to take it to heart and blame themselves (e.g., “Dad’s mad all the time, I guess it’s my fault.” “Mommy never likes to do things with me, I guess I’m just not special enough to make her happy.”) When children feel culpable and disappointed in themselves, they move further away from a core belief in their value and lovability. To a child, rejecting this worthless screwup (who just happens to be themselves) makes perfect sense. And so it begins.
As an adult, a variety of situations can lead to self-abandonment, especially if you happen to be:
• going through a painful breakup
• alone (again) and having trouble finding a relationship
• feeling a loss of love in your current relationship
• dealing with the loss of a friend, a job, or a dream
• experiencing echoes of past hurts whenever you feel a hint of rejection
A major event—someone you love chooses to leave you—can trigger a full-blown abandonment crisis, one that throws your whole sense of reality into an emotional time warp. Old familiar feelings of dependency and panic rush to the surface. As if a small child again, you suddenly feel you can’t live without that person—that you’ll die without him. We’ve all heard stories about people, aging but apparently healthy, who die just a few months after a beloved partner. Like them, it feels like you too will succumb to terminal heartbreak. You’re panicked and weakened and ashamed about losing someone you love and for falling apart over it. You hate yourself and your emotional excessiveness. This self-recrimination is self-abandonment in its most virulent form. In fact, it is responsible for the severe depression and plummeting self-esteem that accompany a heartbreak.
As painful as feeling abandoned is, it’s the things you do to yourself in the wake of “being dumped” that cause the most damage. It’s the self-abandonment—the self-criticizing, blaming, and shaming—that fractures your sense of self and keeps you mired in a swamp of self-doubt. This attack on yourself heightens your fear of future abandonments. In fact, Outer Child develops its most entrenched patterns in a misguided effort to defend you against these fears.
We are barely conscious of it when we commit self-abandonment. It’s a silent process, one that creates a fertile breeding ground for an Outer Child to secretly gain power within the psyche and create self-defeating defense mechanisms.
IT’S CONDITIONING
The Outer Child is a function of brain activity. It represents the behavioral manifestation of our most deep-seated human fears that reside in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located within the brain. This tiny organ has everything to do with who you are emotionally and