Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting (S.W.I.R.L.)—and explained what to expect during each phase, as well as how to deal with each one. During the final stage, Lifting, you are learning to manage the painful feelings of the breakup, find your balance, and establish a new normal. Depending on the length of time you were in the relationship, it could take a year or more of going through the S.W.I.R.L. process before you are emotionally ready to make a new connection. Even then, you may still feel vulnerable and yearn for your lost love, which is normal. But vulnerable or not, during Lifting it is usually better to practice making connections with new people than to avoid relationships altogether.
When you do stick your toe into the unknown waters of a new relationship and your amygdala declares a state of emergency, don’t fault yourself or deem yourself incapable; likewise, don’t assume you are biting off more than you could chew with a new job or big project. Just accept the feelings as feelings and push through the fear. Get on with your life. Have a little faith and summon some courage. Don’t let Outer Child use your breakup to gain new ground. Rising to this challenge will do more to promote your emotional growth than avoiding it will.
Please note that I’m not suggesting you use someone new—exploit her without consideration for her needs and feelings. The highest degree of personal responsibility is in order here. What I am saying is that avoidance is one of Outer Child’s favorite forms of self-sabotage, one that does more harm than good in the end. Why? Because while you are avoiding, your fears are secretly gaining strength (not melting away).
When you attempt a new relationship, Outer Child may be chomping at the bit to act out your incubating fears in all sorts of obnoxious ways, like imposing excessive emotional demands on your new significant other; or playing childish games of hard-to-get; or haranguing her for “making” you feel insecure; or ending things rather than trying to work them out. Outer has a whole bag of inconvenient-to-romance tricks. But no matter what your Outer Child is up to, it’s time to stop avoiding, worrying, and self-blaming—and get your Adult Self to take command. We’ll be learning about a whole battery of tools in this section of the book, designed to put your Outer Child in its place, and we’ll pick up the first one now.
UP FOR ADOPTION
When the diagnosis is self-abandonment, the first course of treatment is to adopt your Inner Child. We’ll be using a guided visualization (a directed use of your imagination) to put your Adult Self in the role of caretaker of this most vulnerable part of yourself. You won’t need pen or paper here, just a quiet few minutes alone. Ready?
Imagine a child, one who’s been abandoned and is living on the streets in a distant foreign city. (Imagine this child is of the same gender you are.) This child is cold, hungry, wounded, and scared. Her fondest wish is for someone to care for her and protect her from harm.
Picture yourself coming upon this poor abandoned child as you are on a trip, walking the streets of the city where she lives. You sense something familiar about this child. You don’t know why, but you feel compelled to approach her and offer her your jacket and something to eat. At first the child shrinks from you in terror, but you patiently and gently convince the child you mean no harm, that in fact you want to help.
After she’s eaten, you go together to the authorities and through them learn that she has no living relatives who can take her in. Worse yet, there is no social service system that can care for her in the way she needs.
Now you make a critical decision: You decide to care for this child yourself. You’re going to do whatever it takes to assuage her fears and meet her long-neglected needs. And not temporarily either. You promise to never abandon this child. You’ve decided to adopt her.
The child becomes an important and meaningful commitment and focus in your life. Adopting her is a gift of love and connection unlike any you’ve ever given.
This child is you, your own Inner Child—and she’s counting on you.
Now that you’ve committed yourself to your Inner Child, you’re ready to start nurturing a stronger, healthier relationship with yourself.
IMPROVING YOUR BRAIN HEALTH THROUGH SELF-LOVE TECHNIQUES
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, using fMRI brain scans, shows that when people are directed to visualize compassion toward themselves or others, the practice stimulates neural activity in the left frontal cortex, a site that mediates positive emotions. When we feel happy, energetic, or enthusiastic, the left frontal cortex lights up, whereas our negative emotions make the right side light up. Victims of a stroke or injury to the left frontal cortex can succumb to “catastrophic worrying,” while those with damage to the right side “appear unduly jovial and seemingly unconcerned about their condition.” Researchers can induce positive emotions by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the left frontal cortex. Most significant is that yogis who have been practicing mindfulness meditation for many years show greater development in this area, suggesting permanent beneficial changes in their brain.
The upshot is that by developing compassionate, nurturing feelings toward your imagined Inner Child—including them in a daily practice of mindfulness and positive intention toward self and others—you are improving your emotional set point and increasing your brain health. I’ll be showing you hands-on tools to help you give loving kindness to your newly adopted emotional center both imaginatively and behaviorally—all to become a more self-loving, mindful, self-responsible Adult Self.
Outer Child and Your Self-Esteem
The relationship you have with yourself is the most important relationship in your life. It is the template upon which all your other relationships are built, the source of your self-esteem, and the driving force behind your choices and behaviors. It’s the very foundation of your psychological functioning. Whether or not we realize it, we’ve been trying to improve the relationship we have with ourselves all our lives—often not very effectively. This chapter presents you with tools for changing all that.
The way you feel about yourself affects the way you relate to other people. This in turn affects the way they view you.
I have a desire to show off my talents, but I’m so inhibited, nobody knows what I’ve got inside.
No two people feel the same way about themselves. You developed the way you feel through many experiences, especially interactions with other people—your parents, peers, teachers, and significant others. You strove to live up to what they expected of you and unwittingly absorbed the way they responded to you—their affection, disapproval, esteem, acceptance, rejection, criticism, and indifference. You measured your worth against certain standards you came to believe in and compared yourself—sometimes favorably, sometimes not—to others. Through this haphazard trial-and-error manner, you calculated your rank in the pecking order, a process that was neither deliberate nor conscious. The net quotient of this automatic process constitutes your self-esteem (the way you feel about yourself) and your self-image (the way you think other people see you).
We all know people who seem to have come out of this process feeling terrific about themselves. They have a healthy and appropriate sense of entitlement. They’re confident, self-possessed, and hold themselves with great personal dignity and pride. Many of us wish we could be like that and fault ourselves because we can’t get there. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Consider
