all of your ideas. You’ve started to think about other ways to pitch them when your Outer Child suddenly swoops in and takes over, going on a hotheaded rant, telling everyone in a crowded conference room that this time they’re going to give your idea due consideration (your Inner Child was feeling hurt and angry, no doubt). You got their attention, all right, but probably not the way you intended. Did I mention that one of Outer’s favorite mottos is: Negative Attention Is Better Than No Attention at All? In fact, it’s only made things worse—you feel more isolated and misunderstood than before.
“My Outer Child has OPD—obnoxious personality disorder.”
Your Inner Child still has wants and needs, but is desperate to break away from Outer’s clumsy, destructive way of handling things. That pesky devil child has been butting into your Inner Child’s life, behaving like the typical overprotective older brother who’s “only trying to help.” Meanwhile Inner’s been waiting—most likely for decades—to be rescued. It’s time for your Adult Self to step up to the plate.
The Adult Self we’re talking about here is, of course, you, the person reading this book, and the executive in charge of fulfilling your life’s mission. I salute you for taking this opportunity to become a stronger, more capable person. I wrote this book to offer practical tools for integrating feelings and behavior—Inner and Outer Children—to help us become our higher selves.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR FEELINGS IS NOT ENOUGH
The concept of the Inner Child has made a potent psychological contribution, helping millions of people get in touch with and nurture their most difficult to reach feelings. Many who apply the concept, though, get stuck when it comes to changing their behavior. They gain awareness, but still seek clear-cut ways to use it.
Let’s look at just one example. The concept of the Inner Child has helped us understand that when we overeat, we’re often “emotionally eating.” We’ve come to recognize that overfeeding ourselves is a misguided attempt to fill the empty, needy Child Within. But when hunger overtakes us again, we wonder, Now what? How do we translate this valuable awareness into action? Lacking concrete answers, we remain a nation of overeaters.
The Outer Child framework offers access to the mechanism perpetrating these self-destructive behaviors as well as effective 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
