Is It Time to Relegate Your Inner Critic?

When we listen to ourselves we hear an internal chatter that never stops. Even when we are asleep we become aware, through our dreams, that the talking goes on. It is as if there are people in our head constantly advising, guiding, opinionating, reprimanding, consoling or warning us. Acknowledging and paying attention to these people is not a sign of madness – at least not for the vast of majority of us. On the contrary, it indicates a sensitivity to the complexity, intelligence, and mystery of our psyche and is an important step towards dealing with our inner conflicts.

Inner People

Most of our inner people¹ emerge in early childhood as adaptive responses to help us cope with specific problems or challenges. So, for example, my people-pleasing person might have developed as the best response to deal with playground challenges and my hyper-competitive person might have enabled me to stand up to a high-achieving older sibling.

As we grow and are increasingly ‘socialised,’ many of our people are exiled because our developing ego cannot – or does not want to — see a role for them in the external world. Our ego is the part of us that we call 'me' and it is concerned with how to adapt and conform to social norms and values. However, our ego, while doing a vital job, is only a partial expression of who we are.

When we ignore, dismiss, deny, or repress our other people we experience inner conflicts often in the form of anxiety, depression, anger, disengagement, and dissatisfaction. However, when our people are recognized and included in our lives they become a resource offering insights and intelligence that our ego, preoccupied with 'fitting in,' misses. When we pay attention to and draw upon the diversity of our inner intelligence and experience we start to feel more authentic in our relationships and make more choices that align with our deepest values.

Not all our inner people are hidden or in exile. Some are very vocal and their unmanaged presence can end up interfering in and disrupting our ego’s attempts to survive and thrive in the world. A particularly problematic inner person is our critic who can get in the way of us hearing and benefiting from the diverse perspectives and wisdom that we hold within.

Misunderstood and unmanaged, our critic controls, punishes, berates and belittles, making us defensive and doubting our self-worth. And, if that were not enough, our critic also seeks to extend its influence over the external people and relationships in our lives. Research shows that those of us with a strong critic tend to be very critical of others too. Understanding our critic is the first step in being able to manage it.

Understanding Our Critic

Our critic emerged to help us survive the social world into which we were born. To survive we needed to quickly learn the family and cultural standards of right and wrong that would secure our protection and belonging among others. Our critic listened out for and was a constant reminder of who we should and shouldn’t be, according to those standards. Thus our critic is the internalised voice of early authority figures whose survival solutions seemed most effective when we were young.²

For some the critic is a benign figure, firmly but fairly reminding us how we should feel, think, and behave. This gentle critic emerges in childhood environments that are secure, safe, and free from conflict, fear, shame, and anxiety.

However, for many of us our critic is dictatorial, punitive, unforgiving, and at times tyrannical. It is a hyper-vigilant protector who is fearful of life and believes that we must fight, defend, compete, manipulate, and overachieve in order to survive. A forceful inner critic believes that other people are fundamentally hostile and that resources – material and psychological (such as love) — are scarce.

Where did our critic learn such things? Sometimes from our parents, but more often from the pervasive cultural symbols, messages, and dictates that tell us what is good and bad. Many of us grow up and live in cultures that are hyper-competitive, evaluative, acquisitive, and judgmental, and our critic, on the lookout for how to survive this culture, learns that to do so we must be driven, perfectionist, ruthless, conformist, and so on. Our parents are the messengers of culture and are not solely to blame for the social values and ideals of our time which we hear, see and feel everywhere.

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Our critic had — and probably still has — good intent. When we were children it guided – sometimes pushed us – into the world. You will survive, it said, because I have taught and will continue to teach you how. Back then we needed our critic to be alert to and to remind us about important survival strategies. However, as adults we are no longer utterly dependent on others for our survival which means the way we survive can change. We no longer have to adhere to the narrow set of 'shoulds' and 'oughts' prescribed by our critic and formulated when we were young children. We can find new ways to approach life's challenges. If we don't then we continue to live as if we were still three or four years old and still wholly reliant on a child's rule book of life.

However, when our inner critic is loud and controlling it can be difficult to develop a compassionate relationship with it, or to find it a new role and place in our inner community.

Relegating Our Critic

Relegation or retirement is never easy, especially when the incumbent has become used to a certain degree of power, status and authority — like our critic. Getting into arguments with our critic or attempting to 'slay' it doesn't work, because inner conflict of this kind keeps us in threat brain and makes our critic even more fearful and aggressive. And anyway we can't kill off any of our people; they might disappear for a while but they always return and the more we have denied and repressed them the more they appear in the form of inner and outer conflict and disturbance.

Productive dialogues with our critic require us to be in a calm safe brain state and also that we have had some experience — even a flickering glimpse — of our other people. If we only experience our self through our controlling people then we won't have sufficient alternative resources to effectively challenge them.

Thus the process of entering into 'relegation dialogues' with our critic starts with us cultivating safe brain states that enable us to meet our other people, to discover what they need and can offer, and to sustain a centred approach to difficult conversations, for our critic will not step down willingly.

In a centred, safe brain state we soothe the critic by appreciating the role it has played in our life. It did, after all, get us out of childhood alive. Then we ask it to help us further by taking a break so that some of our other people can step forward. For this to happen the critic needs to learn and to feel reassured that we are OK and that our survival strategies can and will evolve. It also needs to feel it is still part of our lives. The British author Jeanette Winterson goes walking with her critic for an hour a day so that it can vent its feelings while she listens. The rest of the time she doesn't listen. For Winterson spending an hour a day with her critic represented a significant positive shift from the constant inner criticism she experienced when her critic was out of control.

Hal and Sidra Stone, known for their work in identifying and working with our inner people, observe that the sense of authority, purpose, and meaning that we lack in our life is often carried by our critic. Thus, if we could find those people in us who are the true — or at least the more skilled — carriers of authority, purpose, and meaning we would find it easier to relegate our critic.

Without the involvement and support of our internal others we remain enthralled or enslaved by just one of them — our demanding critic.

In part two we will look at other ways in which we can soothe our critic and start to meet our other people.

Notes

1. Calling the different parts of our self 'people', 'characters' or 'selves' can help us to recognise and to work with the distinct personality, needs and perspectives of each part of us.

2. Remember, to survive does not mean to thrive and many of our early solutions are rooted in very basic fight-flee-freeze survival responses to life challenges.