Why Eliot Spitzer's Outer Child Acts Out

The real story isn’t about Eliot Spitzer and the prostitute, but about how shocked everybody was – those big looks of surprise on everyone’s faces.  Even the most know-it-all media pundits admit they didn’t know what to make of it, even his enemies were speechless, his allies utterly taken aback.   The reason everybody body’s had such a hard time processing it, is that they’re lacking a tool with which to understand it.  That tool would be Outer Child.   Yes, Governor Eliot Spitzer’s outer child went on a rampage and acted out his most urgent, hidden needs and impulses.  This can happen when your mind aims one way and your feelings another – the two can be quite out of touch with each other – as is evident in Spitzer’s straight-arrow, all-business, steamroller personality.  Being disconnected from your internal feelings creates fertile breeding ground for your Outer Child – the self-sabotaging nemesis of the personality – to gain a foothold.

What is Outer Child? You've heard of your Inner Child – the emotional core of the personality.  Outer Child is the behavioral core – the part that breaks your diet and gets attracted to all the wrong people.  Outer child acts out your inner child’s suppressed needs and feelings in primitive, impulsive, compulsive, repetitive, automatic, unconsciously-driven ways.  In Freudian terms, the outer child would roughly resemble the id – especially the aspect of the id that seeks to gratify its need for pleasure and tension reduction.  Outer Child has a penchant for doing things that feel good now, but hurt your bank account, reputation, health, career, or marriage in the long run.

If you are success-driven enough, you can train your cognitive mind to ignore your vulnerable inner child feelings, like fear, neediness, compassion that might get in the way of ambition.  The highly developed brain can take a position against prostitution, for example, and become a fierce prosecutor of such activities, and yet neglect the conflicting needs, impulses, and desires raging within.  You suppress, repress, deny, displace, disown, and forsake these feelings in order to steamroll ahead to succeed at your goals. You become all head, no heart, leaving your primal urges and needs to fester on their own, out of your surveillance. You have unwittingly set yourself up to become a walking reaction formation. As you gain power, this power fuels your id-driven outer child to act out in opposition to your rationally intended agenda. 

Power in the hands of someone disconnected from his feelings can be a dangerous drug, bathing the brain and body in a potent wash of neuro-chemicals and hormones.  Power goes straight to your outer child’s head, emboldening it to gain control of the personality, overrule your rational judgment, and satisfy its urges.  Power boosts Outer Child’s drive-energy, intensifying its urgency for tension reduction and instant gratification.  You behave like an addict as you go on a reckless campaign to satisfy the needs of an unrecognized part of your personality – the outer child part – a part that seems to have a mind of its own and that, in spite of your attempt to quash its impulses, keeps putting your higher goals at risk.
 
Although we all have an outer child, hopefully we’re not as top-heavy (head-heavy) and disconnected to our own emotional core as Spitzer seems to be.  Right now, though, he probably IS connected to his feelings because his fall from grace has brought him to his knees.  He appears poorly equipped to administer head-to-heart with such powerful emotions.  What would really help him is the outer child framework.  Without understanding the hidden dimensions of the personality, any attempt he makes from now on to accept and love himSELF for his human frailty will be contaminated with self-anger and shame that hereafter attach itself to that sense of SELF.  To free himself from the self-hatred, he needs to grab hold of his outer child and understand how this hidden, self-sabotaging nemesis got drunk on power and got the upper hand.  If he gains access to his long forsaken feelings and grapples with the human dynamics at play, he can place his behavior in a perspective that allows him and his family to heal. 

There is another reason people were aghast at Spitzer’s behavior.  It struck a personal note of fear.  In him we recognized our own potential for self-sabotage.  Outer child’s behavior has unconsciously-driven forces behind it.   It can strike at any time, especially when we are not paying attention, and overrule our better judgment – like when we go for that third glass of wine after having already decided on a two drink minimum. 

It is hard for us to recognize all of the facets of our own outer child, but it shows itself to others – because they can see its imprint in our personality through our outward habits, mannerisms, attitudes, and tendencies – even when we can’t.  Our friends see us from the outside, which is why we call this part of the personality the OUTER Child.  It encompasses the behavioral warts, scars, and habits that show on the outside.  We can’t observe ourselves from the outside, but we see evidence of our outer child every time we sabotage ourselves or when we ask “What was I thinking?”  “Why did I do that?”