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Key points
- Your "Inner Scrooge" is an attitude that says you are never enough.
- You may think your Scrooge helps you get things done, but you really don’t need him.
- Charles Dickens suggests three ways of dealing with the inner critic, and they sound a lot like schema therapy.
Do you think you have an Inner Scrooge? The Inner Scrooge, at its worst, is a voice who puts you down, criticizes you, always expects more, makes you feel deprived, bad, and even like an emotionless object. It’s an attitude toward yourself that you just aren’t enough. We all have inner critic thoughts that can ruin our day and make us feel flawed, or like we aren’t good enough, especially around the holidays when we feel more family, relationship, and social demands.
The good news is we can follow the same three steps Scrooge himself did in A Christmas Carol to cope with that inner critic, find self-compassion, and open up to others. (Spoilers ahead if you aren’t familiar with this 178-year-old story.)
In the story, Scrooge embodies some of humanity’s worst character traits, and he’s such a caricature, that it’s easy for us to project our own worst traits onto him (while we safely follow his misfortunes as we follow the story). At the ending (“You there, boy, what day is it?”), we also feel the joy Scrooge feels at his transformation to being joyful and kind. So how does he get there?
As a therapist, whenever I read it, I’m struck by how A Christmas Carol captures the bizarre otherworldly anxiety and obsessive worrying that comes with insomnia. You are worried about something and can’t sleep, but you also don’t get out of bed, and are in a half-awake state with thinking that isn’t quite logical, and a little weird, and always seems worse than when you’re fully awake. We usually feel a ton of relief when we get out of bed in the morning when nights like that are over.
The audience first meets Scrooge during the workday on Christmas Eve, and we get a brutal sense of how cold and mean and, well, Scrooge-like he is. It’s clear he’s a terrible person, he rejects his nephew’s saint-like efforts at a dinner invitation, acidly rejects people asking him to donate to charity (“decrease the surplus population,” anybody?). He berates his employee Bob Cratchit about taking Christmas Day off, and returns to a lonely, cold drafty house and his grim isolation.
The rest of the night, as we know, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts (plus the enchained ghost of his deceased business partner Jacob Marley, who is like the evening’s MC), each taking him by the arm and dragging him through therapeutic insights in different contexts, with the same unsettling, moving, emotional, panicked ways that come with real worry and insomnia. I like to think that, leading up to this fateful night, somewhere deep down, Ebenezer knows something is very wrong and he needs to change. That may just be me.
To put it like a schema therapist, Scrooge lost contact with his core emotional needs a long time ago, giving in to coping skills that made him mean and unapproachable: his inner critic. He became inhumanly demanding, free of pleasure and love, and only focused on money. His experience with the ghosts (therapeutically) helped him re-connect with his need for love and open up to others. Each of the ghosts took him through a step that helped build self-compassion, self-awareness, and a sense that if he doesn’t change, he will lose what is most dear to him.
To get over our own inner critic Scrooge, I suggest we can also go through the same three steps Scrooge did in the story (but maybe without the ghosts).
Every holiday season is an end-of-year opportunity to review your life, your hopes, aspirations, disappointments, and check in with how well you are providing for your emotional needs—or whether an inner Scrooge is getting you down.
Scrooge’s visits from the three ghosts are stories about time travel and move Scrooge through a process of re-connecting with his needs and becoming a three-dimensional human again.
First, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back to childhood losses and hurts, and the people he once valued. We see him as a lonely child at boarding school, with a distant father and no family willing to have him for the holidays, and how he coped by getting lost in reading. (I see this as a profound wound, which would cause Scrooge to later turn punitive as a way of coping with the pain.) We later see him as a young man, with a generous, kind boss, friends, and a girlfriend who loves him. We then see her reject him as he becomes more joyless and greedier. (She moves on to have a family with one of young Scrooge’s colleagues.) Old Scrooge witnesses all of this standing in the wings with his ghost escort and is brought to tears for the pain and loss he sees his past self go through.
Next, the jolly green Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge people all over England finding a spirit of joy and pleasure together, while also showing Scrooge how his nephew is enjoying a warm fun evening with his wife and friends, mocking Scrooge. The Ghost also shows Scrooge the brutal effects of ignorance and hunger via the image of two neglected little children (these are the stakes of Scrooge’s corporate greed).
Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears as a gothic grim reaper figure, in a sequence that is most like a horror story. Scrooge is shown the spectacle of his own future—should he choose to follow the path he is already on. He will die a lonely death, his bed-chamber robbed by the staff he treated poorly, no one missing him. Just try really imagining your own death in this context, and you can feel how terrible this image is.
Simply put, I see this as a deeply therapeutic story, depicting how Scrooge’s punitive side pushed him away from people, lost him opportunities for love in the present, and set him up for a scary, lonely death. In one night, he makes profound realizations that help him understand that the more he lets go of his mean inner critic, the more he approaches love, the warmth of others’ company, and a sense of meaning to his life.
In schema therapy, the client travels in time escorted by the therapist, just as Scrooge is accompanied by the spirits. This happens when the therapist does imagery work with the client, using their imagination and images to return to memories, explore alternate presents, and visit possible versions of the future.
Inspired by the schema therapy approach, this holiday season you can use Scrooge’s three steps to get more in touch with what gives you a sense of meaning and self-compassion.
Set aside some time for reflection and journaling on these questions. If you really want to get into it, play spooky music in the background, and by the end of the exercise play some church bells ringing, or "Ode to Joy." I’m serious.
Step 1: Christmas Past
Ask yourself how much your inner critic may have taken the joy out of your life and driven you away from others. If you think this is a major theme in your life, consider when you developed this inner critic. Was it to compensate for an insecurity or loss? Then focus on the role your inner critic played this year, and finally, think about how the inner critic affects you every day.
Step 2: Christmas Present
Do a reality check on yourself in your present daily life. Is your inner critic driving you away from people and creating distance in relationships? Imagine what would the people in your life would say about you when you aren’t present to hear them. What feelings does this bring up?
Step 3: Christmas Yet to Come
Now that you know more about your inner critic, where it comes from, and its effect on your life in the present, think about the future. Suppose you kept living your life with the inner critic as it is. What would your future look like? Will you be the person you hope to be? How much may the inner critic interfere with your ability to do the things you long to do? Now think of three changes you can make to turn away from the inner critic and get closer to your own self-acceptance, your real desires, and your loved ones.
I don’t think anyone captures the joy of human compassion and kindness the way Dickens does on Christmas morning in this story. So every year, why not tweak your holiday spirit with some tips from schema therapy and get in touch with your Inner Scrooge? Otherwise, you may find yourself getting visited by some ghosts in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve.
