Welcome to Your Outer Child

What makes you break your diet, or run up your credit card, or be attracted to all the wrong people? You know these aren't healthy things to do, you know you're sabotaging your own best interest, but sometimes you just can't help it. Sometimes you want what you want and there's no reasoning with the devil on your shoulder!

Each of us has self-sabotaging tendencies, the origins of which elude us. Be confused no longer! I'm here to tell you that these behaviors are attributable to a part of your personality that perhaps you didn't even know you had: your Outer Child.

You may already be familiar with the concept of an Inner Child, a psychological construct developed by John Bradshaw, Charles Whitfield, and others. Your Inner Child is your emotional core, the innocent, vulnerable, often needy part of your personality. Many of its feelings emerged at a tender young age and still reside in your psyche; others arise anew from fresh experience. Whatever the origins of its feelings, your Inner Child needs tending to, it needs to be heard, it should be honored.

No less important, your Outer Child is a psychological concept that I have identified to describe the part of your personality that acts out your Inner Child's feelings in self-defeating ways, without giving you, the Adult in charge, a chance to intervene. Simply put, your Outer Child is responsible for your misbehavior. Think of your Outer Child as the impulsive and willful adolescent in you: the person who has trouble regulating behavior and resisting primal urges. Your Outer Child says yes to a third glass of wine when you, the Adult, had already decided on a two-drink limit. Your Outer Child decides to watch the game when you'd resolved to clean out the garage. Your Outer Child wants what it wants and pulls out all the stops to get its own way.

As with an Inner Child, we all have an Outer Child; it is not a flaw. It is, however, the obstinate, selfish, self-centered part of us we all share — a part that until now we have failed to recognize as universal. Outer Child is universal because we all have primal feelings we are barely aware of but that drive our most deeply entrenched defense mechanisms and knee-jerk reactions — if we let them.

Your Outer Child manifests out wardly what your Inner Child feels inside. For instance, if your Inner Child's core fear is abandonment, it is your Outer Child that manifests this fear with all sorts of inappropriate behaviors. When you feel insecure in a romantic relationship, Outer acts out your vulnerable feelings in ways that can only be interpreted as desperate. You might freak out, freeze up, or blow up when your date keeps you waiting more than a few minutes for a call back. In fact, Outer Child usually has a hair trigger when it comes to abandonment fear — the nerve that jangles so easily when any of us feel slighted, dismissed, or rejected. Hence waiting those few minutes for the phone to ring triggers an overriding fear that you will wind up all alone, bereft of love forever.

Lest you think that I'm giving a name to this part of your personality in order to let us all off the hook for bad behavior, think again! Being able to identify and recognize your Outer Child is an important step toward taming it. I have found with my work in private practice with clients and with countless workshop attendees that being able to separate the personality in this way is the first important step toward controlling your actions and your own emotional destiny.

I initially coined the term Outer Child for my book Journey from Abandonment to Healing (2000). I didn't introduce the concept and a list of Outer Child traits until nearly the end of the book, but Outer Child somehow managed to take center stage. Almost immediately after publication I began hearing from readers wanting more information about how to tame their wayward Outer Children. I have spent the past decade applying this tool to a broader range of issues and clinically testing exercises I've adapted to overcome Outer Child's most entrenched behaviors, a program you'll read about in the following pages and chapters.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE THAT PERSON

Think of the things you yearn for — to have a happier love life, to break free of debt, to achieve greater recognition in your field — and consider all the impulsive little things you do that actually hinder your progress toward those goals. Your Outer Child represents that hindrance; it's all the counterproductive habits and tendencies that keep you forever wanting to achieve, but always falling short.

Let's say your Inner Child feels a little anxious in a social situation and urgently wants you to make a good impression. Your Outer Child acts out your nervousness, insisting on making its own impression. It might share information that's way too personal for cocktail party banter, or express an opinion with the kind of vehemence best reserved for competitive debate. So much for that good impression.

One of Outer's favorite ploys is procrastination. It creates as much sabotage by what it doesn't do as by what it does, gumming up the works with indecision and passivity. For instance, it ignores you when you tell it what to do, like "Go to the gym." Instead Outer just goes right on eating potato chips and lounging in front of the TV. Outer Child is the guy who talks constantly about how he's going to move to a cattle ranch out west, but never gets around to it. You don't have to be that person. You can do something to tip the balance in favor of your Adult Self when those internal power struggles arise.

The concept of the Outer Child is a revolutionary self-awareness tool that lets you look at your own behavior from a powerful new perspective. It reveals the third dimension of your personality: the self-rebellious dimension. In exploring this new dimension, you gain access to a part of yourself that was operating undercover, until now.

Those of you familiar with the terms Id, Ego, and Superego may wonder how the concept of an Outer Child fits in. They're closely related, though Outer Child is a newly identified component of the psyche, one that expands Freud's theory of the Id by taking it into the behavioral realm. We'll explore this relationship in more detail in the next chapter.

For now, I want to reassure you that you...