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TWO

Three Parts of the Personality

The concept of the Outer Child isn’t something that emerged wholly formed out of nowhere for me. In fact, it owes a lot to Sigmund Freud, whose groundbreaking three-part model of human consciousness provides a structure for psychotherapy. In Freud’s theory, the Id represents our innate biological drives—such as the drives for pleasure and survival. It’s the mammal within us—the ape or squirrel within us that’s driven to procreate, nurture our young, fight threats, and avoid pain. At the other end of the spectrum is the rule-driven Superego, the part of us that upholds morals, social conventions, and laws essential to co-existing with other human beings. Between them is the mediating Ego, which (hopefully) keeps the Id’s urges in check—unless it’s safe or appropriate to express them.

Freud formulated his revolutionary Id/Ego/Superego triumvirate to explain the dynamics of neurosis—a malady caused by the self-blaming, self-shaming, and repressing we do when we are burdened with guilt over the Id’s urges and desires. Clinicians who practice Freudian therapy believe that gaining deeper emotional insight into internal struggles is a catalyst for change. In other words that by airing conflicts between the Id and Superego, by bringing them out of the subconscious and experiencing emotional catharsis, change will come. The trouble is (as we’ve seen over the century since Freud first invited a patient to recline on a Viennese couch), you can remain in psychoanalysis for many years, growing ever more self-aware, without any discernable change in behavior.

In Freud’s time, science was not advanced enough to know about the inner workings of the emotional brain structures, but it is today. Recent evidence from neuroscience makes it possible, I think, to extend Freud’s theory by identifying a new component of the psyche.

Our mammalian urges, as I see it, aren’t the problem; they are biological givens with which we all must contend by learning to accommodate and modulate their expression. It is when we act out these urges in impulsive, annoying ways that the problem arises. Freud did not create a separate construct for this acting-out component, but I now believe that it’s essential to do so in order to effectively change self-sabotaging behaviors. And that’s how the concept of Outer Child was born.

The reason I believe we’ve had so little success changing our unconsciously driven behaviors in the past is that we didn’t know enough about the mechanism that generates their persistence within our personalities—within our brain structures—a mechanism involved in habit formation and learned behaviors. These behaviors are automatic, mediated by our autonomic nervous system rather than under cerebral control. That’s why emotional catharsis alone isn’t sufficient to stop them—and neither can conscious will. Fortunately you won’t need iron willpower or searing insight into your childhood (most of us have gaping holes in our childhood memories anyway) to overcome your self-defeating patterns. More on that in Part Two.

This chapter starts you on a journey of growth and discovery by exploring a new three-part concept of personality, the Outer Child framework. Through the course of the book you’ll learn to get all three moving parts of your psyche working together—Inner Child, Outer Child, and Adult Self. It’s important to understand that these are psychological components we all have. This isn’t about being wounded; they just are. Early wounds, however—and we all have some of these—cause these three selves to act out of turn or to co-exist uncomfortably. That discomfort, this walking out of step, is what causes us all to sabotage our own best interests and to fail ourselves.

LITTLE YOU

The Inner Child goes by many names in therapeutic circles—Child Within, Emotional Core, Child Self, Innermost Self, Little You, to name a few. Your Inner Child represents your pure emotional essence, not your behavior. Inner Child consists solely of feelings and needs. When you are sad, it is the defenseless, innocent Inner Child tucked within you who is sad. When you are mad, it is your Child Within who is upset about something. When you are joyful, it is your Child Self feeling happy and excited. When you are tired, hungry, cranky, or bored, it is Little You feeling these things. When you are emotionally eating, it is your Emotional Core that is craving to be soothed or fulfilled. The obtrusive Outer, not the innocent Inner, is the one busily stuffing the feelings with substitute pleasures, like food. When you are eagerly looking forward to something—a holiday, perhaps—it is Little You whose childlike awe and wonder are at play. And when you can hardly wait, it is your Inner Child feeling expectant.

You may already be well acquainted with your Inner Child. There are many self-help books, workshops, and therapy practices that focus almost exclusively on this concept. Some of you have been doing “Inner Child work”—a technique involving written or spoken dialogues of love and acceptance with your Inner Child.

The Inner Child concept was created to help nurture and love yourself—to become your own loving parent. But like Freudian therapy, it’s hard to demonstrate that this concept alone can effectively help us change unwanted behaviors. While the Inner Child concept helps us connect with the source of deep-seated feelings, there is another step we need to take to overcome the acting-out behaviors triggered by those feelings—and that is where the Outer Child exercises come in.

THE MISSING LINK

Both your Inner Child and your Outer Child developed during childhood—first Inner Child when you were a just a wee thing, experiencing life purely through your needs, instincts, and feelings. Outer Child emerged later, as you developed language, motor, and other skills that enabled you to act (however primitively) on those needs.

Outer Child began its rise to power during the terrible twos—when you were a little tyrant, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain at all costs. As you grew, so did your Outer Child, eventually developing into a kind of crusader and defender. The Outer Child is a hedonist (that pleasure-seeking part doesn’t change!) as well as protector of your Inner Child, attempting to shield you from fear and hurt. Indeed, Outer is the embodiment of all your defense mechanisms—including those that can later sabotage your efforts to live a better life.

REVISING THE THREE-COMPONENT PERSONALITY

Psychology and self-help books have addressed “self-sabotage” in the past, but their authors tended to make these behaviors a function of the Inner Child. Following Freud’s example, they didn’t make a point to distinguish between “inner” and “outer” processes. In not creating a model that delineated reactive behavior as an outward manifestation of an inward emotional process, they unwittingly allowed feelings and behavior to remain merged.

In Freud’s Id, feelings and reactive behaviors are merged. The Id represents emotional drives along with their behavioral discharges. Rather than divide these stimulus-response processes in two, Freud divided the Adult in two—Ego and Superego—thus completing his personality triangle. His superego represented an internalized parent figure (sometimes overpunitive) whose role was to manage and limit the primitive emotional drives of the Id. Freud’s Ego represented the executive in charge who mediated between the overzealous, guilt-inflicting Superego and the legitimate needs of the self.

Many people are familiar with the Parent/Child/Adult framework from Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis. This framework follows Freud’s same three personality divisions. Berne’s Parent, like Freud’s Superego, manages (and overmanages) the Child’s needs and impulses. Berne’s Child, like Freud’s Id, needs to be compassionately managed and nurtured. And Berne’s Adult, like Freud’s Ego, guides the individual rather than impugns or chastises the Child self.

From Freud onward, conceptual models have differentiated two adult components while leaving feelings and behavior merged. The Outer Child framework is also a triangle, but instead of dividing the Ego in two, it divides the Id (or Child) in two. Inner Child represents the Id’s emotional drives and Outer Child represents its motoric discharges (behaviors in reaction to those emotions).

Like the other models, the Outer Child framework posits the Adult at the top of a triangle. The only difference is that our Adult Self integrates Freud’s Ego with constructive elements of the Superego, combining the roles of mediator and nurturer. The Adult Self is the executive in charge of the personality, ever striving to get stronger to better guide your life’s mission. A stronger Adult Self, en route to becoming your higher self, no longer blames your self-defeating behavior on your feelings, no longer shames and blames your Inner Child (that would be a punitive Superego), but tames your Outer Child’s behaviors, nurtures your Inner Child’s needs, and chooses positive goal-promoting behaviors.

When my parents tried to get me to do things like my homework or clean my room, I resisted—I guess you’d say passive-aggressively—by doing the absolute minimum. My Outer Child still relies on this strategy; I still perform at a minimum.

Outer Child is the “yes but” of my personality.

The Inner Child within you remains a helpless, innocent child of about five—an embodiment of your most vulnerable feelings, completely dependent on the other parts of your personality. In contrast, Outer continued gaining strength over a longer period of time and got stuck somewhere between the rambunctious age of 10 and the restless, hormone-driven age of 13. In terms of the way your Outer Child acts out, it is a lot like you were at that age—old enough to have a willful mind of your own but not yet old enough to understand the consequences, let alone the rights and feelings of others. That is why self-centeredness is age-appropriate for Outer Child. Outer isn’t cognitively developed enough to make well-considered decisions, so it acts out instead.

When responding to your Inner Child’s need for pleasure, for instance, Outer might choose to binge on candy in spite of the fact that you, the Adult, are steadfastly sticking to a diet (or so you thought). Intellectually you know for certain that your desire for pleasure is better served by keeping trim—better for both your health and your self-esteem. But Outer Child, a glutton for immediate gratification, wants to satisfy these urges now and grabs for the candy.

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

Your mental capacities continued developing beyond pre-adolescence of course. Somewhere in your teens an Adult Self slowly emerged. You used your expanding cognitive abilities to limit your Outer Child’s self-rebellious behavior, trying to free yourself from the bonds of crippling defense mechanisms you didn’t even know you had. But try as you might, even as a full-fledged adult, Outer Child can still get the better of you. Outer was there first, and there’s a powerful psychological inertia supporting its behaviors. And it can act out when you least expect it.

IS IT MY INNER OR MY OUTER CHILD?

In trying to control Outer’s maneuvers, it’s sometimes hard to tell Inner’s voice from Outer’s. When your Inner Child starts pining for something specific—a second helping of ice cream, a car you can’t afford, or a particular lover you know to be “commitment phobic”—be suspicious. This is not your Inner Child, but your Outer Child disguising itself in your Inner Child’s voice. Your Inner Child is not attached to specific things like a particular food, car, or lover. Its needs are more basic and substantial—to feel special, loved, and fulfilled—and doesn’t want to become fat, broke, or heartbroken getting there. Your specific cravings are nothing more than Outer Child trying to take over your life.

Imagine that you are feeling slighted by your colleagues—lately they’ve been dismissing 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 to put an end to the self-sabotage.

Sarah used Outer Child tools to feed her long-standing need for love and connection in a direct, new way. She behaviorally addressed her oldest, most hidden emotional issues without food-feeding them. Instead she healed them. (You too will learn how to accomplish this, when we explore Outer Child and your Diet in Part Three.)

Giving Outer Child its own separate identity provides the conceptual backdrop for Inner Child to finally emerge as the pure and innocent little child its authors—Bradshaw, Whitfield, Peabody, and others—always meant it to be. It was never their intention to blame the victim—to have Inner Child take the heat for the self-sabotaging, impulsive, habituated behaviors. The problem was, we simply didn’t have a framework that clearly separated our self-sabotaging behaviors from our blameless emotional inner selves.

We all have a relationship with ourselves—whether or not we’ve ever written a letter to our Inner Child—a relationship sustained by an unconscious, internal dialogue. The quality of that dialogue, be it adoring or self-loathing, has been asserting itself beneath the surface of your life, all along silently affecting your ability to love yourself.

Outer Child is a conceptual tool that functionally separates behavior from feelings. Outer personifies output while Inner personifies input, thus creating simple language for articulating the dynamic interplay between INCOMING emotional sensation and OUTGOING behavioral reaction. In case there’s any doubt: Emotions are not right or wrong, they just are. Behavior, not emotion, is what is judged culpable. Once you tease the two apart, you can effectively short-circuit the unwanted behaviors that have been holding you back.

BEING A BETTER PARENT

The ability to separate feelings from behavior is a critical skill not only for people attempting to parent themselves, but also for those looking to better parent their children. I led parent education workshops for over 15 years and meted out this advice, coined by my colleague Nancy Steinbach, over and over again:

Validate and nurture your children’s feelings, but never accept those feelings as an excuse for unacceptable behavior.

(“I know you are angry at your brother, but hitting him is unacceptable.”)

Once parents learn this principle—that feelings and behavior need to be dealt with differently—they’re able to comfort their scared child (or calm their angry child) and show her how to express that fear (or anger) without taking it out on a sibling or herself, or anyone else. As an added bonus, they are learning to better parent their own Outer Children.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

Once you can separate feelings from behavior, your Adult Self can finally deal with Outer Child, and not just the isolated embarrassing incident, but the overarching personality dynamic that embodies your storehouse of defense mechanisms, repetition compulsions, personality tendencies, impulsive behaviors, habits, quirks, and knee-jerk reactions. You’ll deal with these behaviors as part of an interrelated phenomenon that acts in response to, but is separate from, your internal needs, urges, drives, and feelings. The latter you can finally validate, cherish, and love. In fact, you’ll find that developing a strong emotional connection to your Inner Child is what prevents Outer from galloping away with your life’s mission.

Reading this chapter may already have given you a few ideas about your own Outer Child’s more prominent traits. In the next chapter I’ll introduce you to tools for taking an inventory of them—including some of the more difficult to observe behaviors and the emotional triggers that set them in motion. You will find that in taking your Outer Child inventory, what would normally take hours of morose soul-searching is an easy empowering task that propels you forward.