Does your inner dialogue sound mean and judgmental? Do you frequently focus on your supposed mistakes and flaws? We all have a part of our psyche, sometimes referred to as the “inner critic,” which interferes with our ability to feel content and realize our potential. This critical part of ourselves gives us messages that we aren’t OK and undermines our confidence.
Imagine how painful and debilitating it would be to have someone following you around, telling you how bad you are, especially if you believed what they were saying. If you have a strong inner critic, this is what is actually happening.
If you are used to listening to your critic and believing what it says, you might think that it’s trying to help you improve in some way. You probably believe that you need it for motivation and decision making. But if you pay careful attention to its messages, you’ll find that they are not accurate, consistent, or logical, and certainly not supporting your well-being. The critic just wants to pick you apart in any way that it can.
Of course, it’s important to be able to self-reflect and recognize mistakes and limitations, but you need to be able to do so accurately and with compassion. Unfortunately, the critic’s role is to constantly find faults and to exaggerate and generalize them, leaving you feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
The critic also wants to regulate what you feel and think, preventing you from being yourself and creating a barrier to self-exploration. Judgments about what you “should” be like 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. It’s essential that therapists challenge this dynamic. I often start by encouraging these clients to notice their self-rejecting messages so they can stop and look at how mean and inappropriate these thoughts are. Critical self-talk can sometimes happen quickly and automatically, outside of conscious awareness, if you are not paying attention.
One way I help people become more aware of self-critical thoughts, is to ask them to keep a log of all their judgmental thoughts during 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 will ever like you. You’ll never be any good.” When you see these cruel judgements, you hopefully realize that you would never speak this way to someone you care about, which helps challenge 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 accepting what it says as the truth, you can try to challenge it and defend yourself from it.
A key part of the process is to learn to stop identifying with the critic; to see that it is not really who you are. It is actually the internalization of critical and rejecting figures from your past: for example, shaming parents or bullies at school. It may also stem from experiences in which you were hurt or abused and learned to blame yourself for what happened. Often times 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.
Another approach is trying to empathize with the inner critic. Even though it is hurtful and limiting, it originated as an effort to protect you. As children, people start criticizing themselves in order to try to control how other people respond to them. As they grow up, their inner critics continue trying to make them “better” in order to get love or acceptance. When you understand this, you can appreciate the intentions of the critic but decline to accept the “service” it’s trying to provide.
Becoming free of the critic does not mean losing your moral compass or giving yourself license to behave irresponsibly. Nor does it mean only thinking positive thoughts about yourself – that would be inauthentic. It’s about freeing yourself from toxic self-criticism and distorted beliefs, and opening up more of your life force and potential.
