Taming Your Outer Child. Susan Anderson
an uncomfortable feeling, Outer needs to find somebody else at fault.
Outer enjoys making the other person wrong. Sometimes Outer makes the other person pay (even though he may be entirely innocent).
Outer talks about your friends behind their backs. Outer hates it when your friends talk behind your back.
Is a master of disguises
Outer acts pure and innocent to show other people up.
Outer will use almost any diversionary tactic, no matter how convoluted or unattractive, to keep your vulnerability out of sight. For instance, Outer hates asking for either help or directions. It would rather get you frustrated or lost.
Because your Inner Child so fears abandonment, your Outer Child developed a pleasing persona—but the only reason to please anyone as far as Outer’s concerned is to prevent them from rejecting you. Outer finds someone who is easy to take for granted and then treats her badly since it no longer has to worry about being abandoned. When this fear is dormant, your true personality can emerge; you no longer have to charm and seduce the other person.
When Outer does something mean or selfish, it hides behind altruism, moral superiority, righteous indignation, and benevolence.
Outer can express your anger by becoming inconveniently passive.
Outer has a favorite disguise: compliance. Outer uses compliance to confuse others into thinking it doesn’t want control. But don’t be fooled—Outer Child is a control freak.
Outer has a split personality—it splits its personality between home and office: nice at office, a tyrant at home . . . or vise versa.
Outer is an award-winning actor that believes its own act. This makes it challenging to recognize the true face of your Outer Child or anyone else’s. Since other people’s Outer Children are so well disguised, you may have thought you were the only one with an Outer Child.
Outer tries, but the truth is, you can’t hide your Outer Child from your spouse or children. They get to see the real you—bad habits, tirades, and all. In fact, we could redefine intimacy as the mutual exposure of our Outer Children.
Is demanding
Outer is a people pleaser with ulterior motives. It will give others the shirt off your back. But what does it expect in return? Everything.
Outer seeks emotional salve from others.
Outer can’t stand waiting, especially waiting for that special someone to call. It loves to test new lovers to the limit. One of its favorite games is hard-to-get. Rather than endear you to your lovers, though, Outer’s games leave your partners confused, agitated, and fed up.
Outer is always looking for love insurance and refuses to believe there is no such thing. For instance, Outer might chase after someone who is very hard up and become his “caretaker” in hopes of becoming so valuable that the poor slob will never want to leave you. But this strategy backfires like all of the others; you wind up abandoned again.
Wants it, and wants it now
Outer is highly principled, but the only principle it obeys is the pleasure principle.
Borrowing from author Elizabeth Gilbert in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, when heartbroken, the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.
When it comes to self-improvement programs, Outer wants to skip the work and get straight to the benefits. Outer prefers to learn in pill form rather than have to do something constructive, like go through the steps of a linear process (like this program). Outer lies back, holding out for the next magic pill.
Loves the getting, not the having
As one workshop attendee so cleverly put it, Outer is an environmentalist when it comes to pursuing women (or men)—it just likes to tag them and then throw them back in.
Outer can be very cunning and put its best foot forward when pursuing a new lover. It seems the picture of altruism, decency, kindness, and tolerance. It becomes seductive, funny, charming, full of life, deeply interested in the other person’s life. But once it catches its prey, it suddenly clams up, becomes cold, critical, intolerant, irritable, and sexually withholding. Outer makes us pity the person willing to love us.
Outer can’t resist the emotional candy of pursuing an emotionally challenging lover. Outer thinks unavailable people are sexy. This goes against what’s good for your Inner Child, who needs someone capable of giving love, nurturance, and commitment. But then, since when does Outer Child care about what’s good for Inner Child?
Is all about surface
Outer can’t commit because it’s always “looking to trade up.” It is plagued with bigger-is-better syndrome.
Outer is attracted to people’s form rather than substance. Outer finds status and external beauty more attractive than integrity or kindness.
Outer tries to get self-esteem by proxy—it tries to attract someone higher than you in the pecking order.
Outer identifies with Groucho Marx: It would never join any club that would have you as a member.
Thinks it’s my way or no way
Outer doesn’t obey the golden rule. Outer obeys its own Outer Child rule: Get others to treat you as you want to be treated, and treat others as you feel like treating them.
Outer is never wrong and must never be told so, or it will break something.
Outer keeps up an endless protest against any reality it doesn’t want to accept. It can stay in protest mode no matter how hard you try to let go. It sustains a tenacious protest against loss, homework, annual checkups, taxes, rejection, global warming, and death.
Outer believes laws and ethics are for everybody else. It obeys rules only to avoid getting caught.
Outer doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice intimacy in search of satisfying its own desires. In fact, it does its best to defeat the two major tasks of intimacy: Task one is to get your Inner Child to become friends with your mate’s Inner Child. Task two is to make sure you don’t take each other’s Outer Children too personally. But Outer prefers to beat up on your mate’s Inner Child and goes head-to-head with her Outer Child.
To borrow from Elizabeth Gilbert again, Outer believes what it wants to believe. It has a wishbone where it should have a backbone.
These and many other Outer Child issues will be explored in depth in the chapters to come. But let’s highlight a few of them now to look at some of the triggers that set them in motion.
OUTER WANTS EVERYTHING THE EASY WAY—IN PILL FORM, IF POSSIBLE
Your Inner Child could be feeling hopeful about the possibility of having a better life (as a result of reading this book) but also impatient, helpless, worried that it might never happen—all normal Inner Child feelings. In the Adult Self’s hands, these feelings become motivation to create positive change. But your Outer Child prefers to act out these feelings by seeking quick fixes. Outer balks at having to go step by step through any process that takes time. It tries to convince you that awareness is enough—that insight alone is magic, that it’s not necessary to have to actually do anything differently. You just have to sit and read and think and feel about yourself and you will have a breakthrough and your behavior patterns will spontaneously change for the better and your life will turn into a bowl of cherries.
Your developing Adult Self realizes that you resolve long-standing issues not by thinking or talking your way out of them, but by doing your way out. In fact, learning to tame