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FOUR

Outer Child and Your Abandonment Issues

Abandonment casts a wide net, snaring anyone who has ever felt a loss or disconnection. Those old abandonment wounds form the basis for Outer Child’s most intrusive defense mechanisms. Still, it rankles some people to hear “grown men and women” talk about their abandonment issues. Their knee-jerk reaction is: “Stop all that whining!”

We’re not whining. In fact, the purpose of the Outer Child program is to focus you on very specific goals. It helps you heal your deepest issues without dwelling on them.

Abandonment is the crux of the human condition. Exploring this issue takes you on a journey to the center of the self, where deep healing can begin. The tools I’ll describe in this and the next four chapters will help you redirect the residual fear and insecurity seeping out of your oldest wounds. By the time we’re done you’ll be redirecting energy you once used to beat yourself up to propel your life to a better place.

WHAT IS ABANDONMENT?

Abandonment is the feeling of being left behind and it’s a primal fear, a fear of losing life-sustaining support. Its pain can be acute, a burning feeling of rejection and betrayal. Or it can be chronic, an under-the-skin anxiety you can’t trace back to a specific event but which has left you feeling hypersensitive to rejection and loss.

Abandonment can be an intermittent feeling; you might occasionally feel aftershocks of old losses when a friend drops out of your life, when your partner just doesn’t seem to understand, or when you worry about ever finding someone to love. These anxieties rise up from your core, unwelcome reminders of your vulnerability.

Abandonment can also run like a current beneath your conscious awareness. Left unresolved, the primal wound of abandonment festers below the surface, silently eroding your self-esteem, infecting your relationships, and triggering your most self-defeating Outer Child patterns.

Depending on your earlier losses, your abandonment wound can be tender, a raw nerve highly sensitive to anything that makes you feel . . .

excluded

misunderstood

overlooked

unappreciated

taken for granted

ignored

belittled.

My aim here is not to explore the whole abandonment spectrum but to zero in on one aspect that’s particularly relevant to our work: self-abandonment, the emotional root of self-sabotage.

LEAVING YOURSELF BEHIND

The important message here is that while adults can feel abandoned, they can’t actually be abandoned by another person. Unlike children, who depend on caretakers for their very survival, able-bodied adults can take care of their own basic needs. Only children can truly be abandoned.

However, adults can abandon themselves.

My colleague Peter Yelton once created a metaphor that he called “the invisible drain of self-esteem.” As Peter explains it, abandonment trauma is powerful enough to create a drain deep within the self that leaks self-esteem. No matter what you do to bolster your self-image, the invisible drain is always working to funnel away feelings of self-worth.

The invisible drain of self-esteem is driven by self-abandonment. Why do we flush our self-worth away? It’s something we do to ourselves unconsciously. Fortunately it’s something we can undo through the Outer Child program. By administering to our long-neglected primal needs and feelings, we reprogram the trigger points for our automatic behaviors and heal our emotional core at the same time.

WHY WOULD I DO THAT?

Self-abandonment started early, when you were too little to know what to do with your own or other people’s strong emotions. When children feel disconnected, hurt, or criticized they tend to take it to heart and blame themselves (e.g., “Dad’s mad all the time, I guess it’s my fault.” “Mommy never likes to do things with me, I guess I’m just not special enough to make her happy.”) When children feel culpable and disappointed in themselves, they move further away from a core belief in their value and lovability. To a child, rejecting this worthless screwup (who just happens to be themselves) makes perfect sense. And so it begins.

As an adult, a variety of situations can lead to self-abandonment, especially if you happen to be:

• going through a painful breakup

• alone (again) and having trouble finding a relationship

• feeling a loss of love in your current relationship

• dealing with the loss of a friend, a job, or a dream

• experiencing echoes of past hurts whenever you feel a hint of rejection

A major event—someone you love chooses to leave you—can trigger a full-blown abandonment crisis, one that throws your whole sense of reality into an emotional time warp. Old familiar feelings of dependency and panic rush to the surface. As if a small child again, you suddenly feel you can’t live without that person—that you’ll die without him. We’ve all heard stories about people, aging but apparently healthy, who die just a few months after a beloved partner. Like them, it feels like you too will succumb to terminal heartbreak. You’re panicked and weakened and ashamed about losing someone you love and for falling apart over it. You hate yourself and your emotional excessiveness. This self-recrimination is self-abandonment in its most virulent form. In fact, it is responsible for the severe depression and plummeting self-esteem that accompany a heartbreak.

As painful as feeling abandoned is, it’s the things you do to yourself in the wake of “being dumped” that cause the most damage. It’s the self-abandonment—the self-criticizing, blaming, and shaming—that fractures your sense of self and keeps you mired in a swamp of self-doubt. This attack on yourself heightens your fear of future abandonments. In fact, Outer Child develops its most entrenched patterns in a misguided effort to defend you against these fears.

We are barely conscious of it when we commit self-abandonment. It’s a silent process, one that creates a fertile breeding ground for an Outer Child to secretly gain power within the psyche and create self-defeating defense mechanisms.

IT’S CONDITIONING

The Outer Child is a function of brain activity. It represents the behavioral manifestation of our most deep-seated human fears that reside in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located within the brain. This tiny organ has everything to do with who you are emotionally and how you react to those emotions. Thanks to what goes on in your amygdala, you’re conditioned (think Pavlov’s dogs) to respond to certain situations with learned knee-jerk behaviors.

Think of this tiny brain structure as the seat of primal fears (Inner Child) and the trigger-point for your reactive patterns (Outer Child) to those fears. Just as feet and noses vary from person to person, so do our amygdalae. Some of us have more prominent, easily activated amygdalae than others.

My amygdala must be huge. I’m a train wreck if I even think about attempting a new relationship.

I have a hyperactive amygdala. My Outer Child is off to the races if my partner disagrees with me. It takes over before my Adult Self has a chance.

Your higher thinking brain can send messages to your amygdala, but that’s a dial-up connection compared to the information superhighway that links the amygdala with the part of your brain that carries out your behavioral impulses. The amygdala’s job is to prepare you to act first, think later. It creates a state of action-readiness to prime you for an instant emergency response. You fight, flee, or freeze if your amygdala perceives any potential threat to your well-being. And this all happens under the radar of your conscious awareness.

Long ago the time it took to react to a threat could be the difference between life and death. You ran or were eaten for lunch by a tiger! Today’s threats to safety and well-being take different forms. And they’re individualized. Your amygdala’s stimulus-response system has been conditioned by your own personal history of emotional experiences, stemming all the way back to when you were born—experiences you’ve mostly forgotten. The way you respond, which emergency defenses you use, that’s uniquely yours too.

The amygdala is always on the lookout for a threat and it picks up subliminal triggers. This causes you to react automatically before your higher thinking brain has a chance to consider a more prudent course of action. In other words, you flinch before you think. Yes, flinching can save your life if you’re jerking away from a rock hurtling in your direction, but when there is no physical threat, flinching can make you appear jumpy and extremely nervous.

When you perceive a threat—you fear your partner may be falling out of love with you—your amygdala sends an urgent warning down through the brain (to areas like the brain stem) to activate a behavioral response. These behaviors stem from a two-part process: first a buildup of emotional arousal in your amygdala; then a behavioral discharge of activity. In this sense, emotion and behavior—stimulus and response—function like symbiotic twins: One feels; the other reacts. Inner feels; Outer acts it out.

I screamed at my boyfriend over this little thing, knowing my outburst would be the last straw, but I couldn’t stop myself.

Your primal fears and your learned automatic defenses are coupled, and this coupling is what my program is designed to undo. Until the advent of the Outer Child concept, we lacked a tool for untangling feelings from behavior. But now we can separate them, empowering our Adult Self to use our higher brain to intervene, even in moments of passion (which are, of course, amygdaloid in nature).

YOUR ADULT SELF

Outer Child, Inner Child, and Adult Self all stem from functions in higher, middle, and lower regions of the brain. The Adult essentially comes from the higher, cerebral brain centered around the frontal and parietal lobes. The Inner Child’s fears and other emotions come from the mid-range area, containing your limbic structures, centered around the amygdala. And your Outer Child’s repetitious behaviors, while triggered in the amygdala, are behaviorally discharged primarily through brain operations connecting from the motor cortex and basal ganglia, to the lower region of the spinal cord, which controls movement.

Learning about the amygdala and how it connects to higher and lower brain areas helps us understand why we might lash out at someone or freeze up instead of having the mature conversation we had planned. That lashing out can catch you by surprise because abandonment fear and other primal emotions can be triggered by seemingly ordinary life experiences (e.g., an offhand comment). Your emotional triggers may be subliminal, but they are often powerful enough to induce reactive behaviors (from the lower brain) that go against your better judgment (in the higher brain).

I went to the movies with my boyfriend, and all of a sudden, I got to worrying that he might not love me anymore. He didn’t know what hit me and neither did I. It ruined our whole evening.

THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED IS GROWING

Joseph LeDoux, leading research expert on the amygdala, has produced another piece of information so vital to the work we are doing that I can’t say it often or loud enough:

Fear tends to incubate rather than dissipate over time.

In other words, fear develops and grows fuller over time rather than fading away. When I first learned that fear incubates, I finally understood the dilemma for abandonment survivors. Their fear tends to burrow beneath their conscious awareness, where it intensifies and rebounds with greater force when they attempt to start a new relationship.

Did it ever occur to you that certain fears might intensify? That the monster under the bed was growing larger and more threatening? If you’re like most people, probably not. So when you attempt a new challenge, the intensity of your abandonment fear can come as quite a shock. Abandonment survivors tend to experience more than their share of these unexpected bouts of intrusive insecurity and anxiety.

Let’s say you’ve been through a painful breakup and decide there’s no need to rush back out there to replace your ex. You’re not ready. You’re prudently taking time to heal, to find your balance, to reduce your emotional neediness. No rebound relationship for you (you’re way too smart for that). But when you finally think you’re ready to meet someone, one of two things can happen:

1. No one turns you on (even though they look great on paper) or

2. Someone does turn you on and you’re suddenly so vulnerable you can barely stand being in your own body.

What’s going on here? In the first instance, no one turned you on because your overefficient amygdala was short-circuiting the attraction, triggering the release of numbing opiates and other anti-passion neurohormones (similar to the ones creating numbness during early bereavement) designed to blunt your emotional responses. Uninvited, it was doing (overdoing) its job to protect (overprotect) you from getting attached and potentially hurt again.

In the second instance, your amygdala declared a mini state of emergency precisely because you were attracted to someone. In fact, it pulled out all the stops, sounding the alarm to warn you about a full-blown abandonment crisis in the making. Your amygdala had learned (through fear conditioning) to perceive losing someone as a life-threatening situation. After all, to children, losing a caretaker could mean life or death and this fear incubates and remains into adulthood.

All this neural activity takes place beyond your conscious control. Powerful stress hormones, triggered by your primal abandonment fears, went coursing through your body and sent you into an involuntary state of fight, freeze, or flee. This put you at your most defensive just when you thought you were ready to get back on that horse.

I really liked this woman, but my heart raced and my mouth went dry when I tried to ask her out on a date. So much for trying to act casual.

Therapists and self-help books might tell you that if you are emotionally overreactive to a new person it means you’re not ready, but often, that’s simply not true. You could have waited another decade to become “ready” and still freak out when you find yourself genuinely connecting with someone new. Why? Because the fear instilled by your last breakup didn’t dissipate; it had grown.

The same is true when you avoid taking any other positive risk in your life, such as making a career change, moving to a new area, or asserting yourself to your boss. The longer you procrastinate, the more your anxiety and inhibition can escalate. Avoidance and its cousins procrastination, isolation, and inertia are probably the most common ways we abandon ourselves. While you’re isolating, your ever-industrious Outer Child builds new walls and spins ever-thicker cocoons of defenses in response to your incubating fear. Ultimately they’re roadblocks to moving forward into a new venue or relationship.

I’ve become increasingly awkward around attractive people. It’s become easier to avoid those situations.

I’ve created a romantic fantasy life that no real relationship can compare with.

I’ve been alone so long my love map has changed. It no longer matches other people’s.

What to do? The good news is, you don’t have to avoid relationships and other risks just because you have performance anxiety or feel awkward. The heightened vulnerability you feel is involuntary. And it has nothing to do with how intelligent, strong, and independent you happen to be. It has to do with fear conditioning (reinforced by your past breakup) that took place in your amygdala (beyond your conscious control). It’s an automatic reaction, part of being a human being who has experienced a painful loss, disappointment, or hurt.

IS IT TOO SOON?

I don’t mean to suggest that you should seek a new relationship while you are still in the throes of abandonment’s initial stages. In my previous books, I outlined the five stages of abandonment—Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting (S.W.I.R.L.)—and explained what to expect during each phase, as well as how to deal with each one. During the final stage, Lifting, you are learning to manage the painful feelings of the breakup, find your balance, and establish a new normal. Depending on the length of time you were in the relationship, it could take a year or more of going through the S.W.I.R.L. process before you are emotionally ready to make a new connection. Even then, you may still feel vulnerable and yearn for your lost love, which is normal. But vulnerable or not, during Lifting it is usually better to practice making connections with new people than to avoid relationships altogether.

When you do stick your toe into the unknown waters of a new relationship and your amygdala declares a state of emergency, don’t fault yourself or deem yourself incapable; likewise, don’t assume you are biting off more than you could chew with a new job or big project. Just accept the feelings as feelings and push through the fear. Get on with your life. Have a little faith and summon some courage. Don’t let Outer Child use your breakup to gain new ground. Rising to this challenge will do more to promote your emotional growth than avoiding it will.

Please note that I’m not suggesting you use someone new—exploit her without consideration for her needs and feelings. The highest degree of personal responsibility is in order here. What I am saying is that avoidance is one of Outer Child’s favorite forms of self-sabotage, one that does more harm than good in the end. Why? Because while you are avoiding, your fears are secretly gaining strength (not melting away).

When you attempt a new relationship, Outer Child may be chomping at the bit to act out your incubating fears in all sorts of obnoxious ways, like imposing excessive emotional demands on your new significant other; or playing childish games of hard-to-get; or haranguing her for “making” you feel insecure; or ending things rather than trying to work them out. Outer has a whole bag of inconvenient-to-romance tricks. But no matter what your Outer Child is up to, it’s time to stop avoiding, worrying, and self-blaming—and get your Adult Self to take command. We’ll be learning about a whole battery of tools in this section of the book, designed to put your Outer Child in its place, and we’ll pick up the first one now.

UP FOR ADOPTION

When the diagnosis is self-abandonment, the first course of treatment is to adopt your Inner Child. We’ll be using a guided visualization (a directed use of your imagination) to put your Adult Self in the role of caretaker of this most vulnerable part of yourself. You won’t need pen or paper here, just a quiet few minutes alone. Ready?

Imagine a child, one who’s been abandoned and is living on the streets in a distant foreign city. (Imagine this child is of the same gender you are.) This child is cold, hungry, wounded, and scared. Her fondest wish is for someone to care for her and protect her from harm.

Picture yourself coming upon this poor abandoned child as you are on a trip, walking the streets of the city where she lives. You sense something familiar about this child. You don’t know why, but you feel compelled to approach her and offer her your jacket and something to eat. At first the child shrinks from you in terror, but you patiently and gently convince the child you mean no harm, that in fact you want to help.

After she’s eaten, you go together to the authorities and through them learn that she has no living relatives who can take her in. Worse yet, there is no social service system that can care for her in the way she needs.

Now you make a critical decision: You decide to care for this child yourself. You’re going to do whatever it takes to assuage her fears and meet her long-neglected needs. And not temporarily either. You promise to never abandon this child. You’ve decided to adopt her.

The child becomes an important and meaningful commitment and focus in your life. Adopting her is a gift of love and connection unlike any you’ve ever given.

This child is you, your own Inner Child—and she’s counting on you.

Now that you’ve committed yourself to your Inner Child, you’re ready to start nurturing a stronger, healthier relationship with yourself.

IMPROVING YOUR BRAIN HEALTH THROUGH SELF-LOVE TECHNIQUES

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, using fMRI brain scans, shows that when people are directed to visualize compassion toward themselves or others, the practice stimulates neural activity in the left frontal cortex, a site that mediates positive emotions. When we feel happy, energetic, or enthusiastic, the left frontal cortex lights up, whereas our negative emotions make the right side light up. Victims of a stroke or injury to the left frontal cortex can succumb to “catastrophic worrying,” while those with damage to the right side “appear unduly jovial and seemingly unconcerned about their condition.” Researchers can induce positive emotions by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the left frontal cortex. Most significant is that yogis who have been practicing mindfulness meditation for many years show greater development in this area, suggesting permanent beneficial changes in their brain.

The upshot is that by developing compassionate, nurturing feelings toward your imagined Inner Child—including them in a daily practice of mindfulness and positive intention toward self and others—you are improving your emotional set point and increasing your brain health. I’ll be showing you hands-on tools to help you give loving kindness to your newly adopted emotional center both imaginatively and behaviorally—all to become a more self-loving, mindful, self-responsible Adult Self.