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Taming Your Outer Child. Susan Anderson
Читать онлайн.Название Taming Your Outer Child
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781608683154
Автор произведения Susan Anderson
Жанр Личностный рост
Издательство Ingram
THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS
Your Inner Child is afraid people won’t like you if they can see your selfishness. Yet Inner can’t help but stay focused on its own feelings and needs; it just doesn’t want to be criticized for it. Maybe one of your parents called you selfish during your childhood and it hurt and confused you. You tried to hide your self-interests and felt guilty for having them.
Now as an adult, you see other people get away with selfish behavior—and perhaps your Inner Child is resentful and envious that it doesn’t have the guts to do the same. Your Outer Child takes these perfectly normal feelings and uses the emotional energy to point the finger at others.
The truth is that self-centeredness is not something to be ashamed of—in fact, it’s universal to the human condition. Everybody has this self-serving part, so why not you or me? After all, if you’re not looking out for your most basic emotional needs, who will? By identifying and recognizing these needs for what they are, you become enlightened.
Self-interest hails from a primal, primitive place built into the mammalian brain (the stomping grounds of your Outer Child). The function of this primitive part of the brain is to promote the biological and emotional needs of the self. Your Adult Self’s role is to identify the self-driven part without causing shame. No one’s indicting you, the whole person, for having these perfectly normal needs. But by identifying this part of yourself, you will no longer be unconsciously motivated by it. You can now make conscious choices based on self-acknowledgment rather than self-denial. Owning up to the primitive Outer Child trait of selfishness rather than denying it, masking it, rationalizing it, or projecting it onto others offers a real boon to your personal growth.
As Joe, a former workshop attendee, puts it this way:
Outer Child was like a jolt of self-awareness. I’d always prided myself on NOT being selfish. But learning that we all have a self-centered part and that we all have an Outer Child was freeing. Now instead of accusing everyone else of selfish motives, I am more prone to catch myself in the act. It allows me to take a step back, maybe laugh about it, make amends if it’s appropriate, grow a little more self-aware, and move on. It’s helping me evolve to a higher place. I’m a work in progress.
COMING CLEAN
What might your Inner Child be feeling when your Outer Child makes a mess of things? How about nervous about how you’re going to make ends meet now that you’ve left your job and your Outer Child has stalled about finding a new one? Or how your boss will respond to the proposal that is now a month overdue?
Or maybe you’re just craving pleasure; your day wasn’t rewarding enough. So right in the middle of a project, Outer Child goes off to rest, eat, or call a friend instead of letting you finish what you’re doing. Or it might go deeper. Your Inner Child may have an undercurrent of anxiety or depression stemming from old wounds. Your Outer Child is reacting by forestalling real work with self-soothing quick fixes.
Your developing Adult Self learns how to recognize 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