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FIVE

Outer Child and Your Self-Esteem

The relationship you have with yourself is the most important relationship in your life. It is the template upon which all your other relationships are built, the source of your self-esteem, and the driving force behind your choices and behaviors. It’s the very foundation of your psychological functioning. Whether or not we realize it, we’ve been trying to improve the relationship we have with ourselves all our lives—often not very effectively. This chapter presents you with tools for changing all that.

The way you feel about yourself affects the way you relate to other people. This in turn affects the way they view you.

I have a desire to show off my talents, but I’m so inhibited, nobody knows what I’ve got inside.

No two people feel the same way about themselves. You developed the way you feel through many experiences, especially interactions with other people—your parents, peers, teachers, and significant others. You strove to live up to what they expected of you and unwittingly absorbed the way they responded to you—their affection, disapproval, esteem, acceptance, rejection, criticism, and indifference. You measured your worth against certain standards you came to believe in and compared yourself—sometimes favorably, sometimes not—to others. Through this haphazard trial-and-error manner, you calculated your rank in the pecking order, a process that was neither deliberate nor conscious. The net quotient of this automatic process constitutes your self-esteem (the way you feel about yourself) and your self-image (the way you think other people see you).

We all know people who seem to have come out of this process feeling terrific about themselves. They have a healthy and appropriate sense of entitlement. They’re confident, self-possessed, and hold themselves with great personal dignity and pride. Many of us wish we could be like that and fault ourselves because we can’t get there. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Consider the quality of your current relationship with yourself. Do you hold yourself in high esteem? Would you like to? Can you identify any areas that could use improvement? I’ve never met anyone who didn’t wish they had more self-esteem!

I’m oversensitive to rejection. Any hint of criticism makes me defensive and impossible to be around.

My Outer Child is self-spiteful. I punish myself when someone treats me poorly instead of standing up for myself.

I put more pressure on myself than anyone else ever could. I drive myself to overachieve. I’m a type A for sure.

A member of one of my workshops, Steve, presents this testimonial about how the program helped him develop a nurturing, loving relationship with himself:

My self-image was a disaster. My father had brutalized me as a kid. People could SMELL the shame on me somehow. But then I figured . . . if I don’t hold myself in high regard, why should they? I had no confidence in me, so why should anyone else? So I tried to cover up my shame and self-doubt by putting on this big act. I acted like I thought I was a pretty together dude (the way my father acted). I was faking it, not just with them, but with myself. I was trying to make the feelings go away.

Steve’s as-if persona meant he was not being genuine with himself or others. His sometimes jokey, sometimes overearnest manner came across as hollow.

I couldn’t be real because I was ashamed of being ashamed. It was a vicious cycle. I’d been ACTING for so long, I sometimes forgot how low my self-esteem was. But then something might happen, like me getting laid off at work, and I’d hit bottom and come face-to-face with my self-loathing once again, petrified that I would die a loser.

Steve’s Inner Child had feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, and inadequacy, but as uncomfortable as these feelings were, they were not the problem. The problem was the way he reacted to these feelings—the Outer Child defenses he had erected to avoid having to deal with them. Steve’s attempt to cover them up (remember, Outer Child loves to put on an act) interfered with his ability to be himself.

It didn’t take Steve long to grasp the root of the problem and his next question was a universal conundrum: So now I know why I do it, but how do I change it? People gain insight but don’t know how to use it. A program I call “separation therapy” provides a hands-on solution—a way to use your insight. I borrowed the term from the late Richard Robertiello, MD, a psychoanalyst, my mentor, and the co-author of Big You, Little You: Separation Therapy.

SEPARATION THERAPY: PHYSICAL THERAPY FOR THE BRAIN

The Outer Child framework accomplishes something revolutionary. In separating the parts of the personality, it gives you access to an internal dynamic that dictates how you relate to yourself (and others) and what you accomplish in life.

The separation therapy we’ll begin in this chapter gives voice to the three dynamic parts—Inner Child, Outer Child, and Adult Self. Through simple dialogues you get these parts to talk to one another and work together productively.

Think of separation therapy as physical therapy for your brain. It effectively builds your self-esteem—just as physical exercise builds cardiovascular health and muscle mass—and improves your confidence. The idea is to zero in on your deepest emotional recesses so that you can heal and resolve any underlying sources of self-doubt or inhibition.

You’ve already begun preparing for separation therapy by increasing your awareness about your Outer Child and adopting your Inner Child. The next step is separating your Outer Child from your Inner Child, freeing that Inner Child to receive your unconditional love. At last! Separation therapy provides a hands-on way to give love and esteem directly to yourself. What used to be an easier-said-than-done aphorism—love thyself—now becomes a goal within reach.

If all this talk about separating constructs from one another sounds theoretical, that’s because it is based on a theory, but fortunately one that’s easy to put into practice. In this chapter the practice will be writing simple letters and dialogues.

No one’s asking you to become a fluent writer if you are not so inclined. I’m talking about jotting down a few notes, not writing volumes. To the Outer Children out there looking for a magic bullet—kindly take a backseat. We know how good you are at avoidance. As we practice using this and the other tools, we’re going to override Outer’s passive-avoidant tendencies and engage the more action-oriented areas of your brain—in this case by putting pen to paper. The patterns of self-sabotage we are deconstructing here are so deeply entrenched that they call for hands-on measures to undo them.

If you’ve already decided to excuse yourself from actually writing anything down, stop and read that last paragraph again and ask yourself who’s in charge here. You won’t get the same benefits just reading about the exercise.

If you want to tackle your most important goals, you simply must go beyond digesting the Outer Child framework intellectually. You need to take action. Committing your thoughts and feelings to the written word engages a wider range of brain functions than just reading about them does—it changes the brain, strengthening existing neuronal pathways and triggering structural changes.

Separation therapy is more like physical therapy than it looks at first glance. When you put pen to paper, you activate neurons connecting to tendons and muscles in your arm, hand, fingers, etc. You are using a graphomotor task to bring diverse brain activities to the table at once, engaging mental functions involved in reasoning, emotional memory, imagining, practicing, and those that integrate multiple brain systems. In fact, strengthening the brain’s integrative functions—the neural networks coordinating emotion, cognition, and intentional behavior—may prove to be the most valuable aspect of all this incremental brain exercising you are doing.

As with any other type of physical therapy, you won’t instantly see improvements. It may take a few sessions before you feel something, but then one day, there it is—you feel less inhibited and more confident. With multiple sessions, over time you begin to feel and act like a new person. The more regularly you exercise your brain, the greater the positive change.

Let’s get started so you can feel the difference between understanding the concept and truly experiencing it.

NOTE TO SELF

First, dedicate a special notebook to taming your Outer Child. Now write today’s date along with your intention to improve your relationship with yourself—remember, that’s the point of all this.

Get specific about what you want and need in your life to feel better about yourself. Think of a goal you have been trying to reach but have not yet achieved. Zeroing in on this goal is central to our work here. All of your goals are to be honored. Each one becomes a friend who accompanies you throughout this book to help you build your relationship with yourself. When you focus on your goal, you center your energy and improve your aim toward the target.

Some examples from my workshops:

My goal is to become solvent. I’m three months behind in my mortgage and it makes me feel irresponsible and ashamed.

My goal is to get in shape; I’ve let myself go. If I fixed this, I’d feel more comfortable in my own skin.

My Outer Child blocks me from getting recognition, though I’m not sure how. I know my performance at work is excellent but I haven’t been able to get it across. My goal is to learn how to get the recognition I deserve.

Now it’s your turn. Zero in on a specific goal and write it down.

WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?

Next, list the little things you do that interfere with you achieving your goal. These counterproductive tendencies are, of course, prime examples of Outer Child’s underhandedness. Let me use another example from one of my workshop attendees, Bob:

My goal is to make more money. Being broke all the time makes me feel like a loser. If I had a better job, I’d like myself more. I don’t make enough money because I don’t feel good about myself. And I don’t feel good about myself because I don’t make enough money. But when I thought honestly about what I could be doing to reach my goal and what I had done, I could start to identify behaviors. Here’s what I wrote:

My goal is to make more money. My Outer Child interferes by:

1. Procrastinating

2. Coming home and vegging out instead of networking

3. Forgetting to buy the paper to check out the help-wanted pages

4. Falling asleep in front of the TV instead of researching jobs online

5. Being self-indulgent instead of taking initiative

6. Avoiding making phone calls to promote myself

7. Succumbing to distractions.

Okay, in what ways does your Outer Child interfere with your identified goal? Write them down! Like this:

My goal is ________________ and my Outer Child interferes by: ________________, ________________, ________________, ________________, etc.

WE CAN DO BETTER

Your next task is to list behaviors you would like to perform, productive behaviors that would help you reach this goal. Here’s what Bob wrote, as unrealistic as they seemed to him at the time:

These things would help me reach my goals:

1. Every day, find out more about how other people make money—what jobs, businesses, or other ventures are more financially rewarding than what I’ve done.

2. Take positive risks.

3. Change my daily regimen; take a small step every day toward finding a better job or venture.

4. Avoid distractions.

5. Stay determined until I reach it.

6. Pursue training or a degree if that’s what I need to do.

Now it’s your turn: Write down a list of things you could do that would take you a step closer to your goal. Writing them puts these would-be behaviors on your radar screen. It helps you lay the groundwork for a new way of thinking. Just fill in the blanks:

My goal is ________________ and here’s what I would like to do to reach it: ________________, ________________, ________________, etc.

FROM NOW ON

Great! Now it’s time to put your Outer Child on notice. Explain what your goal is and let Outer know about the changes you plan to make to achieve it. Make sure that when you address your Outer Child, you do so affirmatively. For instance, rather than say what you would like to change, speak as if you’re actually going to do it (even if you’ve never considered making these changes). Like the exercise we did in the previous chapter (adopting your Inner Child), visualization is involved in this exercise. It helps you picture yourself making changes, which in turn stimulates brain cells that neuroscientists have recently dubbed mirror neurons. These newly discovered cells are the focus of numerous ongoing research studies that demonstrate a remarkable brain function: When you visualize taking an action, you activate the same areas of the brain that would light up if you were actually taking the action. Thanks to your mirror neurons, visualizing something allows your brain to take a trial run, strengthening the neural connections that would be involved in the action you plan to take, increasing your skill set. This neurological practice increases your capacity for and likelihood of reaching the goal you are aiming for.

Writing this note has another benefit. It performs the work of separation therapy I’ve been telling you about: It identifies your automatic, habitprone Outer Child as apart from your Inner Child or your Adult Self. Once separated, these voices can interact in constructive new ways, with Adult Self in the lead, gaining strength along the way.

Bob shared his note with the group:

Dear Outer,

My goal is to make more money. I want you to cooperate. I want you to stop doing these things: [here he listed his Outer Child’s self-defeating behaviors]. Now I, the Adult, will be taking responsibility for the situation.

I know you were only trying to help . . . and that I’ve been letting you run around loose out there on your own. But now I’M going to be calling the shots. Here is how I’m going to do things differently: [here Bob listed steps he would like to take].

Sincerely,

Bob’s Adult Self

Now write a note like this to your own Outer Child.

Don’t expect this simple exercise to make you feel better on the first try. In fact, it probably will feel more awkward or hokey than anything else. Remember, this is physical therapy for the brain. And just like physical therapy for the body, it involves a series of small steps. Raising your right arm five times or writing this exercise may seem pointless, but that’s only because it is too early to expect results. When you put your Outer Child on notice, you are beginning a new internal dialogue with yourself whose benefits reach fruition through practice.

The note focuses your mental energy on how you would like (plan) to resolve the issue. You’re picturing yourself as free from self-sabotage and taking goal-directed actions. Picturing yourself in this way actually increases the possibility that you will ultimately act out those behaviors. Writing focuses your mental energy on the solution rather than letting it stagnate on the problem. It gets you out of a rut and creates a new mental space where productive behaviors begin to germinate.

If you slip back the next day into one of your self-defeating behaviors, don’t beat yourself up. Remember, Outer has a penchant for immediate gratification and has only been trying to help in its own misguided way. Outer has remained unsupervised for so long that its habits are entrenched. You can always write Outer another quick note to firmly call him on the behavior, saying “Thanks but no thanks” and restate your adult action plan.

CREATING A RECIPROCAL DIALOGUE

Writing to your Outer Child is the first stage of separation therapy. To stretch your mental muscles further, we go to the next level and create a dialogue between your Adult Self and your Inner Child. This second-level dialogue builds on the legacy of Bradshaw, Robertiello, and others, getting you to exchange communications with your Inner Child. The reciprocal dialogue gets underneath the problem to deal with the cause. Working with the primal source taps into your motivational core, approaching your Outer Child at an oblique angle. You discover that what had been the source of your interference and pain now becomes a wellspring of motivation and forward-moving energy.

THE CAST

Before you open a dialogue, first take a minute to clarify who’s in your psyche, and cleanse the concept from any debris that may have inadvertently collected on it.

Remember, Inner Child represents your feelings, not the behaviors those feelings may trigger. To get in touch with your feelings, consider how much you’d like to be rid of those self-sabotaging behaviors and how frustrated and trapped you feel right now. These feelings—desirous, frustrated, impatient—all belong to your Inner Child.

Like any small child, Inner Child is full of hopes and dreams; it wants to be loved, heard, indulged, cherished, and freed. Your Inner Child is that child on the street corner: small and helpless and incapable of providing for itself. It’s up to your newly emerging Adult Self to meet the child’s needs. When you care for yourself, it is called “self-love.” When you value yourself, it is called “self-esteem.” As I’ve said, your most important adult responsibility (the one we are all most likely to shirk) is to perform the tasks of self-love, self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-nurturing on your Inner Child’s behalf.

For the purpose of this dialogue, let’s borrow terminology from Kirsten and Robertiello’s book, Big You, Little You. Think of your Adult Self as “Big You” and your Inner Child as “Little You.” This dialogue works to resolve the relationship between these two voices. The universal dilemma for most people is that Big You has been too weak, Outer too strong, and Little You neglected and growing ever needier. As a result of this exercise, Big You gets stronger and is able to finally validate, nurture, calm, and love Little You. When this happens Outer no longer has the opportunity to act out your Inner Child’s stray feelings.

So consult your notebook and revisit your goals. Write them down again and add today’s date. As you write your goals, remember to honor each one no matter how big or small, no matter how outlandish someone other than you might think it is. Your goals give your life aim, trajectory, and vision.

Now zero in on one particular goal and think about how you feel about not (yet) achieving it—and attribute the feelings to your Inner Child. Bob explained how he got started:

My goal was to increase my income but I was afraid to go out there. I was afraid I’d fail. So I wrote a dialogue and gave this feeling to my Inner Child—my Inner Child was afraid. I also wanted to feel better about myself. If I made more money, I wouldn’t feel so inadequate. I gave that feeling to my Inner Child too. I imagined that he was feeling a whole combination of things: hopeful, afraid, impatient, angry, frustrated, and sad.

Now get in touch with your own feelings. Might Little You feel impatient about fulfilling its dreams? Frustrated? Hopeless? Excited? On edge? Desirous? Desperate? Any feelings that come up belong to your Inner Child. Capture those feelings in your notebook, like this:

My goal is ________ and I haven’t reached it yet. My Inner Child feels the following ways about it: ________, ________, ________.

As you get these two parts of your psyche talking to each other, remember Little You is your inner self. The individual who will write the dialogue is your higher Adult Self, who creates your Inner Child’s voice, giving it a vocabulary befitting a five-year-old (or younger) child. Your higher self also creates the voice of the stronger Adult Self you are becoming. In creating a persona for Big You, you are once again using the regenerative powers of the imagination, this time to create an image of a loving parent-self fully capable of administering to your deepest emotional needs. For inspiration, you can look to people you’ve admired for qualities to emulate. Your goal is to create the kindest, most empathic, nurturing, wise Adult Self you can give voice to.

Here’s Bob’s experience:

I had a beloved aunt. She genuinely cared for all of us: children, pets, my parents. I trusted her to always be there. She was warm, kind, intelligent, and understanding. When I created an image for my Adult Self, I based a lot of it on my aunt. As I wrote the dialogue between Big Me and Little Me, I channeled my aunt and started to BECOME her.

Creating the image of a higher-functioning Adult Self—and staying in character for the duration of the dialogue—stimulates your mirror neurons and provides high-level physical therapy for the brain. By first creating and then writing from this character’s perspective, you give your mind a powerful picture of you to digest. Doing this exercise is part of the process of becoming the adult you always wanted to be!

YOUR TURN

Here are a couple of examples to help inspire you to get started. A member of a workshop offered the excerpt below of one of his first dialogues. His goal was to get in shape. Getting started was awkward, he admitted, but he found a way.

BIG FRANZ: How do you feel about getting fit, Little?

LITTLE FRANZ: Scared.

BIG: Why?

LITTLE: Because you won’t do it.

BIG: Why do you think so, Little?

LITTLE: Because you don’t do anything to help me. I feel so bad about myself. And you don’t care.

BIG: But I’m changing that, Little. I want you to feel better.

LITTLE: I don’t feel good like other people. They go to the gym, but you don’t take me. You just let me look like a blob and feel worthless and bad.

BIG: I’ve let you down in the past, Little, but I’m going to change that. I want you to feel good about yourself.

LITTLE: Yeah, but you won’t bother. You’ll just do the same stupid stuff all over again.

BIG: Little, I’m going to care more. I’m going to make things better.

LITTLE: I’m just not important enough for you to take me to the gym. Other people are important enough to take care of themselves, but I’m not. You just stay home and watch TV instead of doing anything to make me healthy and strong.

BIG: I will from now on, Little, because I’m finally listening to you and I won’t let you down again.

LITTLE: I don’t trust you. I’ll feel even more mad and upset because you won’t bother to do what you say.

BIG: Yes I will . . .

Franz told us he didn’t expect to be confronted by his Inner Child, didn’t know he had such a resentful, hurt little kid inside. It both moved and motivated him. He reported later that he had to hear about his Inner Child’s feelings more than once before he started to change his habits, because he felt a strong pull to go back to his old ways, but dialoguing set him on the road to developing new, more constructive habits.

One more example and then it’s your turn. A woman from the same workshop offered a sample of her first dialogue, which focuses on her career development. Like a lot of people in my workshops, she began by asking her Inner Child how she was feeling.

BIG CARLA: How do you feel about the job, Little? I was thinking about moving on, maybe starting my own business.

LITTLE CARLA: I want to be somebody. I feel like a nobody.

BIG CARLA: I’m glad you’re telling me, Little. You are somebody. I want you to feel better about yourself.

LITTLE CARLA: But you act like there’s something wrong with me. You think I’m not capable of doing anything right. You think I’m not good enough for you to try harder. I don’t count.

Carla’s Inner Child remained impatient with her Adult Self throughout the three-day workshop and that was quite an eye-opener. When Carla got home, she kept the conversation going to get closer to those feelings and soon understood where those feelings came from. Her parents had both been alcoholics. No matter what she did as a child, it was never enough to get them to stop drinking or to parent her. That, she realized, was why she’d been wasting her life at a dead-end job, being loyal to a boss who took her for granted and underpaid her. But hearing Little Carla’s voice lit a fire under her—she realized she had an Inner Child who needed her. It gave her a mission.

Time to get started on your own dialogue.

Big You will speak caringly and consolingly to Little You. You, the individual writing the dialogue, often have to reach up pretty high into the top of your human potential to find the words to coax Little You out of its secret hiding place. Remember, this stretch is good for your changing brain. Some Inner Children don’t want to leave their protective shells, but don’t be surprised if once you get it started, it won’t shut up. Whatever the initial response—whether it’s complete silence, verbal diarrhea, or angry tirade—just let it flow from pen to paper.

Go for it . . . Write your dialogue. Big You begins the dialogue by asking Little You to open up and explain (in its own five-year-old words) how it feels having had to wait so long to reach its dreams.

BIG ME: How are you feeling, Little, about . . . (restate your goal and the fact that it has not yet been achieved) __________?

LITTLE ME: I feel __________, __________, __________, etc.

BIG ME: I want to help you by telling you __________, etc.

How did it go? Was the hardest part finding words to comfort and reassure Little You? Join the club. Some Littles remain inconsolable for the first several dialogues. They force Big You to try harder and harder to soothe them. The idea is to comfort with solemn promises that things are going to change. As you make those commitments, you will give your brain a good physical stretch. (Remember, later you have to follow through: Never break a promise to a child. In Chapter Eight, you’ll learn an exercise for increasing your follow-through efforts.) Your first attempt might feel clumsy, but no matter, you’re just practicing. Every bit of practice you do helps your Adult Self (and your brain) grow.

Writing about your feelings and behaviors involves integrative brain functioning. It gets you to tune in to your primal emotions, which activates the primitive mammalian center in the brain (the amygdala). As you weave freshly aroused feelings into your dialogue, you engage neural pathways that link this emotional brain and your higher cognitive regions. Having personified the three components of your personality—Inner, Outer, and Adult—and getting these distinct voices to talk to one another, you have been engaging brain regions involved in visualization, simulation, practicing, creativity, symbolization, as-if reasoning, working memory, problem solving, prioritizing, decision making, and language processing—phew! It’s a real workout for your changing brain. It also enervates regions of the brain involved in inhibiting acting-out. When this area functions properly, you can have a vivid mental picture of throwing a punch without having to carry out the action.

On a conscious level, by addressing your innermost self, you’re learning the fine art of self-nurture. Your relationship with yourself will improve to a level you never thought possible, but it will do so incrementally. Soon you will learn this physical therapy for the brain like the back of your hand. You’ll integrate it into your relationship with yourself. It will become effortless, automatic, a new habit.

All it takes is practice and I’m here to inspire, guide, and support you along the way. My former clients and workshop members continue to offer their help throughout. Earlier you met Steve, whose low self-esteem made it difficult for him to “act real.” Steve used the Outer Child program to reverse the impact of years of self-abandonment. He became both more self-assured and self-possessed—attractive qualities people gravitated to—because he’d taken on the role of commander-in-chief of his Outer Child.

The dialogue helped me connect to my most vulnerable feelings in a way that got me to heal from the inside. I didn’t need to look to other people to make me feel okay, because I was able to give acceptance to myself.

My Outer Child is now under house arrest. I don’t punish him—I actually like the guy, especially now that he answers directly to me instead of running around loose out there. I keep Outer busy doing healthy, fun things. But anytime I fall back into my old patterns, it reminds me to get closer to Little Me. That starts the self-love-fest all over again and the self-consciousness around other people slips away.

With a stronger Adult Self, Steve felt good enough about himself to present “the real Steve” to other people. His false self dissipated. He no longer seeks validation from the outside world, but instead gives validation and love directly to himself, dissolving the root system of his problems in a bath of healthy nourishment.

As dialogue-writer-in-chief, it is up to you to decide which issue to address in your dialogues. You can stop the writing anytime if you feel it is unproductive or if you get inundated with a lot of uncomfortable feelings all coming to the surface at once. It is up to you to set the pace for the process. No need to rush it. You can pick up on it again anytime. The important thing is that you remain in complete control of the dialogue at all times, even when you find yourself surprised by the things Little You says or the depth of the emotional needs it reveals.

The dialogue performs the work of separation therapy in that it provides a practical, hands-on way to effectively separate feelings from behavior—Inner from Outer—while also strengthening Adult Self.

Separating feelings from behavior—stimulus from response—will become progressively easier and, as you’ll discover, nothing short of life-changing. With this shift in the paradigm, and the tools we’ll discuss in the coming chapters, your stronger Adult Self can turn your life around.