Do you feel like you’re your worst critic? Do you find yourself criticizing your body, intelligence, clothes, ability to do your job, and just about anything about yourself? We all have that voice inside,
one that can take anything about ourselves or something that we did and make it into something terribly wrong or bad.Some people have stronger inner critics than others, but most people at one time in their lives have struggled to believe positive things that are said about them, and to ward off internal criticisms.
Many events conspire to make us question and criticize ourselves. From little things to big things, there are lots of people who knowingly and unknowingly put us down. Family members, peers, teachers, and religious leaders can all play a role even if they they think they’re helping us.
Parents often try and correct “problems” they think they see in us, and say all kinds of things in an attempt to “fix” us. They let us know their concerns about our looks, body, hair, clothes, way we walk and talk, and so on. All of these accumulate to make us feel less than adequate, less than whole, less than what we “should” be.
Overt and covert criticisms, emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and bullying all lead to our internalizing negative beliefs. They leave us feeling hurt and ashamed, sometimes hating everything about ourselves. While overt abuse certainly leads to creation of an inner critic, so do many other, often more subtle, forms of criticism.
The inner critic can lead to all sorts of problems including low self-esteem, self injurious behaviour, eating disorders, avoiding situations that require us to be centre of attention or to shine, and feeling like we are profoundly unlovable and unwanted.
The Inner Critic was Formed to Help You
The inner critic was originally formed to help you, to help you avoid pain and shame. The thinking goes like this: “if I create within myself a voice that is just like my parents, and anyone else I want to please, I can more easily know what they want from me, how they want me to be, and I can more easily avoid their disapproval and ultimately win their approval and love.”
The inner critic wants us to do well, to succeed, and to be liked, but operates on thinking level of a child, and a child who thinks that what other people think of her/him is not only important but correct.
In order to do its job properly, inner critic needed to curb your natural inclinations, and to make you acceptable to others by criticizing and correcting your behaviour before other people could criticize and reject you. In this way, it reasoned, it could earn love and protection for you as well as save you much shame and hurt. (Stone and Stone, 1993)
The problem is inner critic doesn’t know when to stop. It may grow until it is out of control and criticizes you on a regular basis causing some real damage. The inner critic can make you feel awful about yourself. With inner critic watching, you begin to watch your every step, you become self-conscious, awkward and ever fearful of making a mistake.
Recognizing and Separating From Inner Critic
The first step in reducing power of inner critic is to recognize when it’s speaking and to separate from it. You are not your inner critic, it is a part of you, but it is not who you are. When you are able to separate from your inner critic, you are in part of your self which is sometimes called aware ego, internal witness, higher self, or observing ego.
When you are able to step back, and observe inner critic, you are separating from it and moving into aware or observing ego. Being in aware ego takes sting out of inner critic.
Some ways to get to know and separate from your inner critic include:
* Write out all things that you inner critic says to you at different times of day, in different situations, and with different people and notice what patterns are. For example, does your inner critic get stronger when you’re tired, hungry, or stressed? If so, taking breaks, unwinding, having snacks, and relaxing can all reduce power of your inner critic.
* If writing out inner critic’s messages leads to your adding more and more criticisms to your list, stop writing and try to step back from being in inner critic. See if you can simply observe that there is a part of you that thinks this way, and that not all of you thinks this way. You don’t need to argue with inner critic, just be aware of it.
* Talk to other people about their inner critic’s messages and compare similarities; you may be surprised to hear that inner critics sound pretty similar from person to person and your inner critic’s messages are not specific to you. For some people, doing this would not be helpful and could backfire. If you have a particularly strong inner critic, this could lead to it finding other critical messages to give to you. Again, if this happens, or you suspect it will, don’t do it and concentrate on stepping back and being aware of inner critic as a separate voice or part.
