The Outer Child and Your Self-Esteem

12-im-nov

by Susan Anderson

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.

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, self­possessed, 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 as­if 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 self­esteem was. But then something might happen, like me getting laid off at work, and I’d hit bottom and come face­to-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.

Psychotherapist Susan Anderson is the author of Taming Your Outer Child and The Journey from Abandonment to Healing (over 125,000 copies sold). The founder of the Outer Child and Abandonment Recovery movements, she has devoted more than thirty years of clinical experience and research to helping people resolve abandonment and overcome self-sabotage. Visit her online at www.outerchild.net. 

Excerpted from the book Taming Your Outer Child © 2015 by Susan Anderson. Printed with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com