“It’s not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life,
its what you whisper to yourself that has the most power.”
– Robert T. Kiyosaki
We all have an inner critic. For some of us, the messages of the inner critic are so harsh that it causes tremendous pain and prevents us from moving forward in our lives. The critic’s messages usually originate in childhood when we developed strategies to fulfill our emotional needs, including feeling worthy of love from others and from ourselves. The underlying goal of the critic is to protect us from feelings of harm that arise during times of vulnerability and oversensitive reactions to life situations. The way the inner critic provides us this protection is destructive and punitive. The critic is usually protecting us from failure or rejection. To avoid failure, the critic pushes us to achieve and excel so that we do not fail. Achievement becomes equated with worth. The inner critic pushes us to act as pleasers, behaving in a manner which avoids setting boundaries with others so that we are not rejected. Care-giving becomes equated with worth.
The underlying message of the inner critic is that we are not good enough and need to be “doing” something in order to improve. It makes absolute statements that sound like the truth. They include, ‘You are a failure, a loser, too fat or too thin, too lazy or too much.” According to Hal and Sidra Stone, “The critic must have us always in control, doing things right, feeling right, eating right, learning right, mothering right. Then maybe we can be safe.” The more we believe the messages of the critic, the more eroded our sense of self esteem becomes and the less connected we are to our innate worthiness.
By the time we are adults, the critic is no longer useful. It is up to us to develop awareness of our critic and its voice. The more we continue to listen to it’s message, the stronger it is integrated into our neural pathways. Neurons that fire together wire together. We need to start to understand the fears and motivations of our critic. As we get to know our critic, we can start to see it’s painful messages and we can do inner work to relieve our critic of it’s extreme role. The more we are subject to the critic’s judgments, the more power it gets.
Change always begins with awareness. We start by noticing the voice and its messages. One way of doing this is to begin journaling the internal negative messages you tell yourself. Pay attention to the tone of the voice, and imagine what the critic looks like. As you do this, the critic’s messages will become clearer and more easily recognizable. You increase your awareness of these thoughts the next time they arise. This allows you to then work with these thoughts from the perspective of your inner wise self.
I work with my clients to help them gain freedom from the inner critic. This gives them the opportunity to make decisions from a place of balance and wisdom rather than from fear and reactivity.
Please message me at vanessalifeandrecoverycoach@gmail.com for a free discovery call.
