What is Outer Child?
Outer Child is the part of the personality that breaks your diet and gets attracted to all the wrong people. Outer Child acts out your Inner Child's abandonment issues in ways that sabotage your relationships.
Take your 200-item Outer Child Inventory
Send me your Outer Child Patterns
Are you an Abandoholic — Attracted to the Unavailable?
More about Outer Child:
Outer is the impulsive, obstinate, self-centered ten-year-old within all of us.
Outer wants what Outer wants NOW, and will overrule you, the adult, to get its way. For example, Outer prefers to binge on candy when you are trying to stick to a diet. Outer will say yes to the third glass of wine when you, the Adult, had decided on a two-drink limit. Outer lounges around watching TV when you, the Adult, had decided to go to the gym.
Outer Child patterns developed as automatic defenses and knee jerk habits for reducing stress and increasing pleasure.
Download Overcoming Outer Child video
Read Taming Your Outer Child book, audiobook
Attend my Abandonment/Outer Child workshops
Unresolved abandonment from past or present wounds fuels Outer with uncomfortable primal emotions. For example, when your Inner Child feels lonely for love, Outer foils this need by chasing the unavailable, or by aiming its neediness and desperation at the person and scaring them away, or by emotionally shutting down and running away. or by starting arguments.
Outer Child is a revolutionary self-awareness tool featured in my books, articles, workshops, and recordings. Keeping tabs on your Outer Child, empowers you to overcome your self-defeating patterns, improve your relationships, and become more self-possessed.
Take your 200-item Outer Child Inventory and circle the items you recognize in yourself. This helps you undertake an in-depth self-reckoning — you begin to own up to character defects most people prefer to deny. Your increased Outer Child awareness helps you deal with behavioral patterns that until now formed an invisible infrastructure of self-sabotage deep within your personality.
Outer Child Hates Change
Don’t expect Outer to take being exposed sitting down. Outer fights change – especially change initiated by you, the Adult. Outer will continue to balk at doing the right thing and prefer to do things that are bad for your health, figure, or bank account. By bringing Outer out of the bunkers and into the daylight, you get to subvert its mission, rather than let it subvert yours.
Outer Child and Anger
Outer is fueled by emotion. Take anger. Outer either overreacts or under-reacts to anger. For example, abandonment survivors tend to be too insecure to risk expressing anger or assertiveness directly to someone because they fear it might break the connection. Outer takes advantage of this fear by getting you to take out your anger on yourself, instead, damaging your own self-esteem.
Outer also tends to displace your anger onto innocent bystanders (such as friends or family), oftentimes creating unnecessary conflict with the very people you need for support and validation.
Outer is the “yes but” of the personality
Your Adult Self knows what you need to do to improve, but your Outer Child always comes up with excuses to postpone, delay, not do. Outer’s favorite time to accomplish constructive things is “later.” If you let it, Outer will continue to tie up your future goals in knots.
Outer in relationships
Outer Child likes to play games, especially in relationships. It wears many disguises including "hard to get" and "Florence Nightingale" (where Outer panders for ‘love-insurance’ by over-caretaking). Outer swings on an emotional pendulum between “fear of abandonment” and “fear of engulfment”. In the first instance, you become super-insecure. In the second , you become turned off and hyper-critical.
Outer Child is undercover
Outer poses as your ally but is really your gatekeeper. Its covert agenda is to maintain your patterns – albeit your most self-defeating ones. By deconstructing your Outer Child defenses – by becoming aware of them – your Adult Self has the opportunity to guide your behavior, rather than remain driven by your hidden nemesis.
Is your Outer Child an Abandoholic— attracted to the unavailable?
Audiotape
Beyond awareness, there are effective hands-on exercises that do the actual work of overcoming Outer Child patterns and achieving your long unmet goals.
The tools of Abandonment Recovery are practical and effective. The program treats the primal source of abandonment fear and shame and involves an active program of behavior changes that promote real change. Doing Outer Child work empowers you to finally move forward in your life. Ultimately you help transform your Outer Child from being your nemesis to your ally.
Would you like to contribute to my Outer Child project?
I’ve been collecting anecdotal data on Outer Child for over twenty years to help people help themselves. Self-sabotage in its many forms is widespread and manifests in many ways. It holds both the individual and the whole world back from reaching human potential.
Please send me your own Outer Child’s behavioral traits, and if possible, share the impact these stumbling blocks have on your life. Your submission will be kept confidential.
Send me your Outer Child Patterns.
Download instructional video “How to Overcome Outer Child Self-sabotage”
Download audio “What is Abandoholism?”
Take your 200 item Outer Child Inventory
Order my audiobook and book: Taming Your Outer Child: Overcoming Self-Sabotage and Healing from Abandonment
Sign up for my workshops: “Abandonment Recovery; Overcoming Outer Child Self-Sabotage”