Almost all of us have that little voice inside of our heads
that is constantly judging and criticizing us.
It's constantly telling us how we're messing up,
how we're falling short
what we're doing that's bad and wrong,
and how we are unacceptable.
Most people mistake this little voice
for all of who they are,
instead of just a part
of the complex system of their psyche.
Disclaimer (pause to read):
The Inner Critic is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy
Because this self-critic can cause so many problems
and can make your life so miserable,
it's easy to see this inner voice
as an enemy that lives within your own skin.
Because of this, the world is full of methods
for dealing with this inner critic.
Methods like fighting against it,
methods like negating or minimizing it,
methods like ignoring it
and so on and so forth.
The problem with these different methods
is that they don't work.
In fact, they never will work.
The reason they will never work
is because the inner critic is not actually your enemy,
quite the opposite.
The inner critic is powerfully for you.
It is trying to protect you.
And until you understand this
and deal with your inner critic in a different way,
you're going to be increasing your own suffering
increasing the atmosphere of self-hate within yourself,
and enhancing the war that is occurring within your being.
In order to understand the inner critic
the first thing you have to understand
is that all organisms that belong to the animal kingdom
and this includes humans,
find pain that is out of their hands,
out of their control and therefore unpredictable,
so terrorizing
that they find it better
to be able to control their own pain by harming themselves,
than to sit there at the mercy
of the pain inflicted by others.
You see this clearly with studies done relative to self-injury.
When injury is inflicted on animals
in a setting where there is no way to get away from that injury,
such as electroshocks they will begin to
self-injure
this restores a sense of control over pain.
So, the principle is
self-inflicted pain is safer and more tolerable
than pain inflicted by someone else.
Especially someone upon whom your life depends.
As a child,
if you want your needs to be met,
survive in society
and have a chance at feeling things like love, belonging,
contribution and safety,
you only have one option:
To adopt the values rules and standards
of the family and society you are born into,
and to hold yourself to them.
To understand this, I'm gonna give you an example;
Let's imagine that when you were younger
you grew up in a family and culture
that believed that anger was bad and wrong
and shouldn't happen,
so you shouldn't get angry.
Now, let's imagine that you get angry.
In response to you getting angry,
your parents would have turned against your anger.
Of course they would do this
as a part of the process of socialization,
to discourage the behaviors that come along with being angry.
To discourage the emotion itself.
They might do something like send you to your room for a timeout
or immediately become defensive
and shame you for being angry,
or to dole out a consequence like taking away one of your toys.
This experience of disapproval
is painful enough for a child
whose survival and every need they have
is dependent on the adults in their life,
that the child wants to avoid this experience in the future
at all costs.
In response, what you would do
in order to be able to control avoiding it in the future,
is that you would adopt the social value
of not getting angry
and you would make it your standard for yourself.
You internalize societal values, rules and standards
and begin to police yourself
so that you stay in alignment with them.
After that day, anytime that you feel anger creeping up
or if you get angry,
you will begin to police yourself
before anyone else has the chance to do so.
You remind yourself of how bad and wrong your anger is,
you remind yourself how subpar it makes you as a person,
you beat other people to the punch
and disapprove of yourself first.
In the best case scenario,
this method of self policing
makes it so that you disapprove of whatever you're gonna do,
fast enough, that you never follow through
with something that might actually
be met with disapproval.
In the worst case scenario,
what this self-policing does
is it means that you might follow through
with something that causes you to meet with disapproval,
but not to the full force of that disapproval.
Because you will clearly demonstrate
that you are aware of how bad and wrong it was
and you don't stand by what you did
and so it probably won't happen again.
So it decreases
how extreme
those consequences that you meet with, are.
This part of you that takes on the role
of this internal police officer
that keeps you in line so you don't align with anything
that could lead to disapproval
and the painful societal consequences of disapproval,
is your inner critic.
It is a part of you that is trying to protect you.
And so, you could consider it your most inverted advocate.
Your inner critic
is a protector personality
within the complex system
of your own psyche.
It is there
because it thinks it's going to save your life.
I should say, you created this aspect of yourself
so as to save your life,
keep you away from consequences,
make sure that your needs keep getting met,
make sure that you're in alignment
with the people around you.
Just like a police officer
serves to keep people in alignment with human society,
the inner critic is trying
to keep you in alignment with other people.
It is trying desperately to uphold your values and standards.
Both those that are true to you and those that you adopted
from other people in your social environment.
The inner critic is the one that holds the truth
of what matters most to you.
For example,
imagine that what somebody in your life rejected you for
was the fact that you are so sensitive.
This is disapproval.
And it's painful enough,
that your inner critic is gonna try to protect you
by making sure
that you aren't so sensitive.
It's gonna constantly remind you of how bad being too sensitive is,
it's going to try to discourage you from being too sensitive.
If it criticizing and shaming you for being sensitive
doesn't work to change your behavior,
this inner critic's then gonna escalate.
It's gonna become more and more abusive,
It's gonna become more and more intense
in the way that it goes after you
for those things cause you to meet with disapproval.
And this could escalate all the way
to what we call this dynamic of shame,
whereby you are creating an internal triangulation
against the entire part of you that is sensitive.
Your inner critic does this
because it thinks that if it gives enough disapproval for this thing
preemptively, before anybody else gets to,
you will be motivated to change it and fix it
and you will stop doing it.
Whatever that thing is
that causes you to meet with disapproval or a painful consequence.
And this will get you
that sense of belonging and safety that you want.
In this example,
the truth that the self-critic holds
is how important belonging and safety are to you,
and how much you need those things.
It's tempting to think that the inner critic is self-sabotaging.
It makes sense at face value, right?
But the thing is is that there's actually no such thing
as self-sabotage in this universe.
If there is any part of you that seems to be self-sabotaging,
it's actually thinking
that what it's doing is in your best interests.
It may just not be particularly aware
of what the negative consequences are,
or whether they're worth it.
To understand this concept in depth,
you can watch my video titled:
There Is No Such Thing as Self-Sabotage.
You will get nowhere
relative to the inner critic
when it comes to getting the inner critic to see
how what it's doing isn't working
or may actually be against you,
relative to getting this inner critic to maybe change the way
that it's functioning within your internal system,
unless you put dedicated focus
into understanding your inner critic.
What does it mean to understand the inner critic?
It means to understand how
and when and why it was created
within your system.
It means understanding what its genuine motivations are.
It means understanding clearly
what its intentions for what it's doing are.
It means consciously examining
those standards and those rules
and those values
that are upheld by your inner critic.
It also means consciously examining those consequences
and the reality or lack thereof of them
that your inner critic is constantly trying to keep you away from.
For this reason, the best thing you can do
is to do Parts Work directly with the part of you
that is your inner critic.
To learn how to do this, watch my video titled:
Parts Work (What is Parts Work and How To Do It)
When you work in this way, directly with your inner critic
you're going to become aware of how truly benevolent
this aspect is,
and just how well intentioned it is.
You will be able to show it
how the way that it's going about things
is actually not in alignment with your best interests.
Maybe it was at one time,
but it isn't today.
You can end the adversarial relationship
you have with that little critical voice inside your own head.
You can end the adversarial relationship
that it has with any other part of you
that it thinks is gonna lead
to you getting disapproved of, as well.
The outcome of this allied relationship with your inner critic
is the true inner peace you were looking for.
A sense of internal support, alliance and self-esteem,
instead of internal war,
judgment and criticism.
Your inner critic actually needs to be
and deserves to be understood,
respected, loved, recognized
and valued for what it's trying to do for you.
And this understanding, respect and positive recognition
will be necessary in order to create any pliability
within this part of you,
regarding its willingness to change its perspectives and methods.
Whenever your inner critic is being noisy
or whenever you want to work with it directly,
you're going to specifically have to get in touch
with those values and needs
that are being carried
by that voice in that moment.
So what values and what needs
is it arguing for?
What consequences is it arguing against?
From there, you need to examine
these values in these needs, consciously.
Are they something that with your conscious mind
you can stand by?
If so,
you want to find ways to get those values and needs
in a direct way.
And, from the people and in the places
that you can actually get them.
Also, you need to examine those consequences.
Are they real,
or are they not real?
The reason that I'm asking "are they real or are they not real?"
is because when we have parts of our being
that are created based off of past experiences,
we may actually be in a situation in our adult life
where those consequences don't actually exist
and our inner critic just hasn't realized it yet.
However,
I want you to pay close attention
because your inner critic has oftentimes
a better feeling for what is an actual consequence
than the rest of you does.
And I never want you to tell the story
that disapproval from other people doesn't lead to consequences.
It absolutely does.
The question is:
what is your conscious relationship to those consequences?
Does it change anything
in terms of the way you wanna go about doing
whatever it is that you wanna do?
Do not ignore, stand up to,
fight against, negate or minimize the voice of your inner critic.
By doing so, you are turning against
a protector within yourself.
You are causing pain to a part of yourself
that is fighting for your well-being.
You are missing the opportunity
to find out what value or standard or need
your inner critic is fighting to keep you in alignment with.
You are remaining ignorant
to what consequence it is trying to help you to avoid.
Whenever you resist a part of yourself, like this,
you are creating rigidity
instead of flexibility or pliability
within that aspect of yourself.
And you are treating a part of yourself
like an enemy,
rather than what it is
which is a friend.
Have a good week.
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I wanna thank you personally
for the bravery that you have to step into awareness.
I'll see you in the next video.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com