CARLA: But you act like there’s something wrong with me. You think I’m not capable of doing anything right. You think I’m not good enough for you to try harder. I don’t count.
Carla’s Inner Child remained impatient with her Adult Self throughout the three-day workshop and that was quite an eye-opener. When Carla got home, she kept the conversation going to get closer to those feelings and soon understood where those feelings came from. Her parents had both been alcoholics. No matter what she did as a child, it was never enough to get them to stop drinking or to parent her. That, she realized, was why she’d been wasting her life at a dead-end job, being loyal to a boss who took her for granted and underpaid her. But hearing Little Carla’s voice lit a fire under her—she realized she had an Inner Child who needed her. It gave her a mission.
Time to get started on your own dialogue.
Big You will speak caringly and consolingly to Little You. You, the individual writing the dialogue, often have to reach up pretty high into the top of your human potential to find the words to coax Little You out of its secret hiding place. Remember, this stretch is good for your changing brain. Some Inner Children don’t want to leave their protective shells, but don’t be surprised if once you get it started, it won’t shut up. Whatever the initial response—whether it’s complete silence, verbal diarrhea, or angry tirade—just let it flow from pen to paper.
Go for it . . . Write your dialogue. Big You begins the dialogue by asking Little You to open up and explain (in its own five-year-old words) how it feels having had to wait so long to reach its dreams.
BIG ME: How are you feeling, Little, about . . . (restate your goal and the fact that it has not yet been achieved) __________?
LITTLE ME: I feel __________, __________, __________, etc.
BIG ME: I want to help you by telling you __________, etc.
How did it go? Was the hardest part finding words to comfort and reassure Little You? Join the club. Some Littles remain inconsolable for the first several dialogues. They force Big You to try harder and harder to soothe them. The idea is to comfort with solemn promises that things are going to change. As you make those commitments, you will give your brain a good physical stretch. (Remember, later you have to follow through: Never break a promise to a child. In Chapter Eight, you’ll learn an exercise for increasing your follow-through efforts.) Your first attempt might feel clumsy, but no matter, you’re just practicing. Every bit of practice you do helps your Adult Self (and your brain) grow.
Writing about your feelings and behaviors involves integrative brain functioning. It gets you to tune in to your primal emotions, which activates the primitive mammalian center in the brain (the amygdala). As you weave freshly aroused feelings into your dialogue, you engage neural pathways that link this emotional brain and your higher cognitive regions. Having personified the three components of your personality—Inner, Outer, and Adult—and getting these distinct voices to talk to one another, you have been engaging brain regions involved in visualization, simulation, practicing, creativity, symbolization, as-if reasoning, working memory, problem solving, prioritizing, decision making, and language processing—phew! It’s a real workout for your changing brain. It also enervates regions of the brain involved in inhibiting acting-out. When this area functions properly, you can have a vivid mental picture of throwing a punch without having to carry out the action.
On a conscious level, by addressing your innermost self, you’re learning the fine art of self-nurture. Your relationship with yourself will improve to a level you never thought possible, but it will do so incrementally. Soon you will learn this physical therapy for the brain like the back of your hand. You’ll integrate it into your relationship with yourself. It will become effortless, automatic, a new habit.
All it takes is practice and I’m here to inspire, guide, and support you along the way. My former clients and workshop members continue to offer their help throughout. Earlier you met Steve, whose low self-esteem made it difficult for him to “act real.” Steve used the Outer Child program to reverse the impact of years of self-abandonment. He became both more self-assured and self-possessed—attractive qualities people gravitated to—because he’d taken on the role of commander-in-chief of his Outer Child.
The dialogue helped me connect to my most vulnerable feelings in a way that got me to heal from the inside. I didn’t need to look to other people to make me feel okay, because I was able to give acceptance to myself.
My Outer Child is now under house arrest. I don’t punish him—I actually like the guy, especially now that he answers directly to me instead of running around loose out there. I keep Outer busy doing healthy, fun things. But anytime I fall back into my old patterns, it reminds me to get closer to Little Me. That starts the self-love-fest all over again and the self-consciousness around other people slips away.
With a stronger Adult Self, Steve felt good enough about himself to present “the real Steve” to other people. His false self dissipated. He no longer seeks validation from the outside world, but instead gives validation and love directly to himself, dissolving the root system of his problems in a bath of healthy nourishment.
As dialogue-writer-in-chief, it is up to you to decide which issue to address in your dialogues. You can stop the writing anytime if you feel it is unproductive or if you get inundated with a lot of uncomfortable feelings all coming to the surface at once. It is up to you to set the pace for the process. No need to rush it. You can pick up on it again anytime. The important thing is that you remain in complete control of the dialogue at all times, even when you find yourself surprised by the things Little You says or the depth of the emotional needs it reveals.
The dialogue performs the work of separation therapy in that it provides a practical, hands-on way to effectively separate feelings from behavior—Inner from Outer—while also strengthening Adult Self.
Separating feelings from behavior—stimulus from response—will become progressively easier and, as you’ll discover, nothing short of life-changing. With this shift in the paradigm, and the tools we’ll discuss in the coming chapters, your stronger Adult Self can turn your life around.
Building a better relationship with yourself includes developing a more confident sense of future. Everyone has a sense of future. Though they’re not always conscious of this sense, it looms in the background, working for or against them. For most people, it’s a vague assortment of assumptions ranging from positive to negative about where life seems to be taking them. Take a moment to reflect on the quality of your own sense of future. Does it stretch before you like a yawning vacuum? Is it tinged with a subliminal sense of dread? Is it punctuated with events you are looking forward to, like a trip you’ve planned or a move to a new home?
In conjuring up your “future,” you can’t help but use your imagination because the future doesn’t exist yet. You have to imagine it. When you engage your imagination in this automatic manner, you can unintentionally project worry, anxiety, or pessimism into the scenario—or you might infuse it with an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking—maybe you’re unrealistically expecting a risky business venture to land you on easy street, so you let more solid prospects fall by the wayside.
The good news is that once you start using your imagination in a more deliberate, conscious way, you can get it working for you, rather than against you. The exercise in this chapter exemplifies
