Imagine what it would be like to have someone constantly following you around, telling you how bad you are, especially if you believed what they were saying. Unfortunately, many of us actually have this experience, although our critic exists inside of our own head.
Perhaps you can recognize an inner dialogue that sounds mean and judgmental, always focussing on your supposed mistakes and flaws. We have a part of our psyche, sometimes referred to as the “inner critic,” which undermines our confidence and limits our potential. This judgemental part of our mind can always find a reason to make us feel ashamed.
If you are accustomed to listening to your critic and believing what it says, you might think that it’s trying to help you improve yourself. You may believe that you need the critic to motivate you or help you know right from wrong. But if you pay careful attention to its messages, you’ll find that they are not accurate, consistent, or logical, and they don’t actually support you. The critic just wants to pick you apart.
Of course, it’s important to be able to self-reflect and recognize your mistakes and limitations, but you need to be able to do so accurately and with compassion. Unfortunately, the critic’s role is only to find faults and to exaggerate and generalize them, leaving you feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
In addition, the critic tries to regulate what you feel and think, preventing you from being yourself and creating a barrier to self-exploration. Judgments about how you “should” be prevent curiosity and shut down openness to your real feelings. When a self-critical person comes to therapy they usually believe that they need to be “fixed” according to the demands of their inner critic.
I try to challenge this dynamic by encouraging these clients to notice the critic’s messages and to recognize how mean and inaccurate they are. Self-judgements sometime happen quickly and automatically, outside of conscious awareness, if you are not paying attention.
One way to become more aware of critical thoughts is to keep a log of them for a certain period of time. If you try this exercise, you may be surprised to see the abusive way you talk to yourself. Things like: “That was stupid! No one likes you! You’ll never be any good!” When you see these cruel judgements, hopefully you’ll realize that you would never speak this way to someone you care about, which helps break the illusion that the inner critic is playing a helpful role.
When you recognize what your critic is really doing, you can start changing your relationship to it. Instead of just accepting what it says, you can try to defend yourself from it.
A key part of the process is to learn to stop identifying with the critic – it doesn’t represent the truth and it isn’t who you really are. It’s just a mental mechanism that you developed as a child to try to protect yourself. As kids, we all start criticizing ourselves in order to try to control our behavior and by extension, how other people respond to us. As we grow up, our inner critics usually become stronger and continue trying to make us “better.”
Likely, the critic contains internalized critical figures from the past, such as shaming parents or bullies at school. It may also draw from experiences in which we were hurt or abused and learned to blame ourselves for what happened.
When we understand where the critic comes from and the role it is trying to play, we can start to free ourselves from its control. Sometimes it can be helpful to feel angry at the critic, which can provide the energy needed to push back against it and refuse to listen to it.
Liberation from the critic does not mean losing your moral compass, lacking motivation, or giving yourself license to behave irresponsibly. Nor does it mean only thinking positive thoughts about yourself, which would be fake. It’s about freeing yourself from toxic self-criticism and distorted beliefs, and opening up more of your life force and potential.
