Inner Child’s feelings and conduct an internal dialogue that soothes and assuages your underlying needs so that you can delay gratification to get your work done. Having postponed your Inner Child’s needs, your Adult Self must eventually follow through and gratify them in a healthy way, like eating a nutritious snack or reading the next chapter of a good book. We all need to take breaks from hard work; you’ll read more about how to do that kind of self-nurturing in Part Two.
PEOPLE PLEASING
In your childhood, your parents may have been emotionally unavailable due to any number of reasons—alcoholism, grief, workaholism—and you groveled for their attention and love. You felt worthless and inadequate when you were not able to get them to parent you. Outer Child runs with these long-standing feelings of worthlessness and re-creates that same dynamic in your adult relationships. In other words, you chase after people who don’t, can’t, or won’t give you what you need. When Inner Child feels needy, Outer springs into action to practice what it knows best—its excellent groveling skills. Practicing scratches the itch of the old pain, but that only aggravates the rash. There are better ways to connect with other people, as you’ll read about in chapters on relationships in Part Three.
DRIVEN TO EXCESS
Your Inner Child desires pleasurable things like love, connection, and fun. Outer Child finds that satisfying its sweet tooth is the most immediate way to get pleasure—it’s instantaneous! Outer, the hedonist, is a champion of pleasure and will valiantly smuggle cookies to your bedroom, especially when you’re dieting.
Your developing Adult Self learns to gratify its need for pleasure in more substantial ways, such as developing a new relationship or building a new career, rather than relying on quick fixes that are not good for your health, reputation, or waistline.
ALL THE WORLD’S YOUR STAGE
What’s with all the Outer Child drama? In acting out Inner Child’s feelings, you would think your Outer Child was preparing for a career on the stage! Inner Child may have a whole backlog of feelings stemming, perhaps, from having been raised by dysfunctional, neglectful parents, and Outer takes these feelings and uses adult circumstances as a stage on which to reenact the same dynamics. This is Outer’s way of externalizing your internal feelings. So, for example, your boyfriend has a habit of cheating on you, but instead of moving on, you catch him over and over again, each time enacting your long-standing angst of unrequited love with a live person. He’s a substitute for the parent who abandoned your needs in childhood. Or you drive a malfunctioning jalopy instead of a more reliable car, and—surprise, surprise—it breaks down a lot. Your “incompetent” mechanic then becomes the perfect target for your feelings of helplessness and frustration.
People, places, and things become props on Outer’s melodramatic stage.
Your developing Adult Self knows what is going on inside and becomes self-constructive—no need to create dramas involving other people, as you’ll read in the chapter on Trauma in Part Two.
SHE’S SO . . .
Sometimes Outer Child behavior is anything but deep-seated. Inner Child might simply be cranky from a long day’s toil, so Outer goes looking for someone to use as a scratching post.
Or it might go deeper. You might be feeling frustrated with yourself for not landing that new client, or for carrying around those extra twenty pounds for the last decade. When that sort of self-criticism simmers inside, your Outer Child may eventually displace feelings onto other people. “Why can’t he get it together and find a steady job?” “She’s so inconsiderate; there she is, late again.” Your Adult Self recognizes your fault-finding as a warning sign. It reminds you to focus on improving your own life conditions in order to meet your Inner Child’s needs in more substantial ways.
PERFECTION IS A TRAP
When Outer Child insists that nothing but perfection will do, your Inner Child might be feeling empty, disconnected, or worthless. Maybe as a child you felt left out, perhaps resentful of one of your siblings for being the “special” one or grabbing more attention. So your Outer Child takes these longstanding feelings of jealousy and inadequacy and acts them out by trying to be perfect. There’s still a chance to steal the spotlight from your older brother (the smarter, taller, more popular one), isn’t there? Of course, you’re no longer in competition with anyone but yourself!
Situation: You’re planning to go to a party, but you haven’t been shopping in months. There’s nothing spectacular enough in your closet to wear. Clothes you liked yesterday are suddenly hideously passé. If 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
