exercises to overcome them.
The unrecognized voice of the Outer Child has been interfering in the internal dialogue we all have between our Adult Self and our Inner Child. Identifying and isolating Outer Child’s voice quells its commotion and allows our heart to finally communicate with our head, and vice versa. The Outer Child concept transforms what had been a two-dimensional dialogue into the integrated, three-dimensional, dynamic approach we have needed all along in order to get unstuck.
Gaining Outer Child awareness allows us to finally love ourselves unconditionally. Until now, we’ve tended to blame our behaviors on our feelings—especially intrusive feelings like anxiety.
My anxiety holds me back. It makes me tongue-tied and brain dead when I’m around the higher-ups in my company.
I hate my insecurity; it makes me act too needy with my girlfriend.
It’s my anger that makes me say the wrong thing.
When you blame the way you acted on your anxiety or any other feeling, you are, in effect, blaming your Inner Child. There’s no question that your Inner Child’s feelings are what triggered that moment of mental or verbal paralysis or what prompted you to become too attention-seeking in a social situation. So, if you ask yourself, “How do I feel about my anxiety?” you’d probably answer, “I hate it.” But wait. How is it possible to simultaneously love your Inner Child unconditionally and hate its feelings for holding you back? That’s been the hidden problem.
Attributing the behavior pattern to Outer Child resolves that internal conflict. It’s natural to feel as if you’ve let yourself down in the wake of a self-defeating outburst. Most of us judge ourselves mercilessly for these self-sabotaging behaviors. But when you blame them on your feelings, you compound the self-abuse. You allow self-anger and self-hatred to silently leach into your internal dialogue, contaminating your relationship with your innermost self. Identifying the third dimension of the personality—Outer Child—removes the contamination.
Many therapists recommend positive affirmations as a way to cleanse and heal your relationship with yourself. Maybe you’ve tried it and wondered what all the fuss was about because it didn’t seem to change anything. Why? Because when you stood before your mirror and said things to yourself like, “I love you just the way you are,” you unwittingly made that “you” the object of your frustration and fix-it energy. You’re saying the words “I love you just the way you are,” but you’re hearing this: “I love you even though you’re a basket case and ruin my life with your damned anxiety!” or “I’m trying to love you, if only you weren’t so needy and reactive around people.” Your well-intended affirmations became contaminated with subliminal negative messages.
Before you can truly benefit from self-affirmations, you must first attribute the self-sabotaging behavior to something outside of the Self—namely, the Outer Child. When you feel frustrated with yourself, you can direct your fix-it energy toward your Outer Child. This spares your innermost self—your tenderhearted Inner Child—from the toxic subtext.
THE BLAME GAME
Letting Outer take the flack liberates your Inner Child from blame. It allows you to get beneath the unconscious contamination to zero in on your Inner Child’s true needs and feelings for the first time. This is self-love at its purest and most healing.
A former client, Sarah, illustrates what a difference this makes: When she first came to see me, she was 32 and single.
My beauty is buried under the 50 pounds I’ve gained over the last 10 years. I’m always on a diet, but I keep getting bigger. I guess that’s what happens when you just keep eating. I used to be a model in college. Now I’m stuck in hell.
Sarah understood that her overeating emerged from unresolved emotional needs. She’d already connected the dots between traumatic events in her childhood and the struggle to lose weight. She’d met with a therapist weekly to work on her self-image and strengthen her resolve—and that therapist had been a good analyst and supportive coach. Sarah had also done Inner Child work, writing letters of love and acceptance to herself through a series of “Healing the Child Within” workshops over the years. But she continued to struggle with emotional eating; although when she grabbed for the second helping of pasta, she did so with greater self-awareness.
What stood between Sarah and the physical appearance she desired was (you guessed it) an unrecognized Outer Child. For the past 10 years, Sarah’s Outer Child had been busily misappropriating her drive for pleasure and tension-reduction by gratifying all of her yearnings with food. When Sarah got wise to her Outer Child, everything changed:
When I saw my Outer Child for the cunning, obstinate, gluttonous, don’t-take-my-candy-away-from-me addict that it was, I was ready to face it down. But I knew Big Me needed to be stronger and I knew I had to love Little Me more.
Doing the Outer Child exercises is what did it. In isolating Outer’s interfering voice, I was finally able to hear my Inner Child begging me to make her beautiful. I no longer resented her or blamed her. I actually grew to feel real compassion for her, even love, for the first time. It got me to care enough about myself to put an end to the self-sabotage.
Sarah used Outer Child tools to feed her long-standing need for love and connection in a direct, new way. She behaviorally addressed her oldest, most hidden emotional issues without food-feeding them. Instead she healed them. (You too will learn how to accomplish this, when we explore Outer Child and your Diet in Part Three.)
Giving Outer Child its own separate identity provides the conceptual backdrop for Inner Child to finally emerge as the pure and innocent little child its authors—Bradshaw, Whitfield, Peabody, and others—always meant it to be. It was never their intention to blame the victim—to have Inner Child take the heat for the self-sabotaging, impulsive, habituated behaviors. The problem was, we simply didn’t have a framework that clearly separated our self-sabotaging behaviors from our blameless emotional inner selves.
We all have a relationship with ourselves—whether or not we’ve ever written a letter to our Inner Child—a relationship sustained by an unconscious, internal dialogue. The quality of that dialogue, be it adoring or self-loathing, has been asserting itself beneath the surface of your life, all along silently affecting your ability to love yourself.
Outer Child is a conceptual tool that functionally separates behavior from feelings. Outer personifies output while Inner personifies input, thus creating simple language for articulating the dynamic interplay between INCOMING emotional sensation and OUTGOING behavioral reaction. In case there’s any doubt: Emotions are not right or wrong, they just are. Behavior, not emotion, is what is judged culpable. Once you tease the two apart, you can effectively short-circuit the unwanted behaviors that have been holding you back.
BEING A BETTER PARENT
The ability to separate feelings from behavior is a critical skill not only for people attempting to parent themselves, but also for those looking to better parent their children. I led parent education workshops for over 15 years and meted out this advice, coined by my colleague Nancy Steinbach, over and over again:
Validate and nurture your children’s feelings, but never accept those feelings as an excuse for unacceptable behavior.
(“I know you are angry at your brother, but hitting him is unacceptable.”)
Once parents learn this principle—that feelings and behavior need to be dealt with differently—they’re able to comfort their scared child (or calm their angry child) and show her how to express that fear (or anger) without taking it out on a sibling or herself, or anyone else. As an added bonus, they are learning to better parent their own Outer Children.
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN
Once you can separate feelings from behavior, your Adult Self can finally deal with Outer Child, and not just the isolated embarrassing