are bad for your health, reputation, marriage, career, figure, or bank account.
That’s because Outer is a glutton for immediate gratification and adept at foiling your best laid self-improvement plans by cleverly substituting self-indulgence for self-nurturance. The difference between the two is vast, but Outer, a master of rationalization, does its best to confuse them. Self-nurturing is taking action to truly benefit your life. Outer prefers self-indulging, in other words, momentary feel-good things like buying an extravagance on credit, or taking another nap—things that are easy to rationalize in the short run, but sabotage your goals and dreams in the long run. You will learn exercises throughout this book to help you delay gratification, remain goal-directed, and guide your behavior in the direction of your highest potential.
OUTER CHILD AS LOVE ADDICT
So who, exactly, can benefit from this program? For starters, many of the people who read my first book on abandonment. I mentioned above that a lot of your self-sabotaging behaviors hearken back to unresolved abandonment issues. Depending on your earlier losses, heartbreaks, and disappointments, Outer Child can wreak havoc in romantic situations by acting too needy. When you become unsure of your partner’s love, you grow these enormous emotional suction cups that are irresistibly drawn to your lover. You frantically try to hide them lest they scare her away, but to no avail; new emotional suction cups keep surfacing, making it increasingly difficult to appear self-contained. The Outer Child program shows you how to redirect that neediness at yourself—so that you, and not an unwitting partner, become ultimately responsible for fulfilling your deepest emotional needs.
Outer Child has lots of other relationship issues. One of its patterns is so prevalent that in one of my books I coined a special term for it: abandoholism—addiction to the emotional drama and love chemicals of abandonment. Abandoholics are exclusively attracted to people who are unavailable. Their Outer Children only feel passion when in “pursuit mode”—when they are trying to win over someone’s love. This puts many an otherwise secure marriage (in which partners sometimes take each other for granted) in the doldrums and has many a single person chasing after hard-if-not-impossible-to-get lovers. There are those who are well aware of the fact that they’re love addicts and would readily admit they “get a high on abandohol” and complain that “otherwise life feels too humdrum.”
Abandoholic Outer Children are addicted to the biochemistry of abandonment, which is why they suddenly feel no chemistry when a previously unavailable romantic interest actually does become available. Learning to tame your Outer Child helps you uncross your brain wires so that you can feel love and passion without having to chase an emotional challenge.
WHEN OUTER CHILD TAKES CONTROL
Outer Child specializes in power and control. Its primary adversary is your Adult Self. When you try to achieve a goal, Outer Child can act like an oppositionally defiant 10-year-old. Outer is bent on wearing you down, on getting you to fall back into one of your old habits, addictions, or compulsions. That’s why awareness alone isn’t enough to stop it. You’ll need my program’s specialized tools to learn how to take the reins securely into your own hands.
Outer Child has been known to grab control of the celebrity spotlight. We’ve all witnessed some of our most honored officials, athletes, and movie stars whose Outer Children got caught in the act of philandering, using steroids or other drugs, perpetrating financial scandals, or shouting “politically incorrect” epithets in public—all examples of their Outer Children breaking through their public personas and gaining control.
Speaking of control . . .
Beware: Outer can catch you off guard and take control when you least expect it, especially when you are angry. Outer overreacts to anger. Sometimes it overreacts by underreacting. This is because many people are too insecure to risk expressing direct anger toward someone (like their boss or lover); they fear losing that person’s acceptance. Outer can act out your fear and lack of assertiveness by getting you to take your anger out on yourself. One of my workshop attendees described just such an episode:
The other day when I failed to speak up for myself for the millionth time, I started slamming things around the kitchen. I accidentally broke a dish I really liked. That was my good old Outer Child acting-out in its usual self-destructive way.
In other cases, Outer takes your anger out on innocent bystanders and makes you look like a monster. As one workshop attendee put it, “When my Outer Child is cranky, it tries to bite someone’s head off.”
Outer’s control issues really kick up in relationships: When Outer Child gets into power struggles with other people’s Outer Children, watch out. Outer Children tend to battle one another for control and wrangle over “who’s right.” They also take one another as emotional hostages, demanding reparations for hurts and betrayals inflicted by old relationships, dating all the way back to childhood. (If only you could send your respective Outer Children out to play—or to Outer Childcare!—so that the Adults could work things out rationally and fairly.) The Outer Child program I will offer in this book shows you how to nip these Outer Child shenanigans in the bud and untangle the interference. My program provides a powerful new model for couples counseling as well.
Your Outer Child doesn’t just try to bully your partner or other people; it bullies you: When your Adult Self is too weak and your Outer Child is too strong (as it is for many of us), Outer can become so powerful that it completely controls the person.
Some people, like this former client, are almost all Outer Child:
I ate what I wanted, even though I got fat and lost my looks. I drank want I wanted, even after I got arrested a few times for drunk driving. I spent what I wanted, even though I eventually defaulted on my mortgage.
Think of your Outer Child as a horse—an untamed horse—and your Adult Self as a trainer trying to mount it. Sometimes the horse is more determined, more powerful than the trainer and you’re thrown from the horse. Then Outer Child goes galloping off in his own direction. The Outer Child program in this book educates you about the creature you’re trying to control, offers tools for the job and lots and lots of opportunities to practice using these tools so that eventually you’ll be the one in control.
OUTER CHILD UNDERCOVER
Outer’s maneuvers can be subtle. It wears many disguises. It slyly masquerades as free will, while leaving you, the Adult, in shackles. It poses as your ally, but is really distracting you from attending to your true needs.
Since Outer Child is an outward manifestation of your emotional self, some of its characteristics are on prominent public display, out in the open for others to see. We don’t mind owning up to some of these behaviors, but there are others we don’t like to acknowledge. It’s far easier to identify those in other people. Take self-centeredness for example: Outer loves to project this less-than-stellar trait onto others, usually behind their backs. (“I can’t stand the way she grabs center stage; it’s always all about her. I never get a chance to say anything.”) Gaining Outer Child awareness allows us to own up to our own self-centeredness and transform it into a positive force.
Think of it this way: Outer is you on autopilot. Its mission—to hijack your Adult Self’s best interests—keeps you forever stuck in old patterns. Outer is always waiting in the wings to spring one of its knee-jerk, defensive strategies, especially when you’re trying to change.
In addressing self-sabotage, many experts focus primarily on symptom relief. But teaching people how to save money or lose weight doesn’t address the powerful component of our personalities that acts out in spite of our best intentions. The advice from personal finance and nutritional experts is valuable; it’s just hard for a lot of us to put their counsel to good use while our Outer Child is in control of driving. That’s why we relapse or substitute one problem so readily for another. For example, we pay off one credit card only to run up another; we give up smoking only to gain 30 pounds.
To extend the metaphor, by learning about your Outer Child, you take yourself off of Outer Child autopilot and switch