The Inner Critic

How does the Inner Critic show up?

There are a few signs that tell us the Inner Critic is active inside us. They don’t always show up at the same time. Do you recognise your own Inner Critic here?

• Our Inner Critic can be brutal. It often tells us things we would never say to another person.
• It plays the same thoughts on a loop, and we get stuck chewing them over.
• We know a thought is irrational, even false, and yet it stays with us.
• These thoughts feel out of our control, as if we didn’t come up with them ourselves and they forced their way in from outside.
• We feel we have to explain or justify ourselves in advance, before anyone has said a critical word, as if admitting our fault first will make the person we expect to judge us go easier on us. This sometimes surprises the other person, who never meant to criticise us at all: we have simply put the face of our own Inner Critic on them.
• We often feel shame, guilt, sadness, hopelessness, disappointment in ourselves and anxiety, along with a sense of low self-worth and low self-esteem.

What does the Inner Critic ‘look like’?

So-called ‘introjects’ form the skeleton of the Inner Critic: beliefs, attitudes, ways of relating, traits or ways of living that we took on from people who mattered to us. Together they make up a rulebook of ‘shoulds’. The thing is, we swallowed all these ‘shoulds’ whole, without ever questioning, thinking through or examining them, and so they became an inseparable part of our inner world. Such messages are everywhere: in our upbringing, our schooling, religion and culture as a whole. They are in the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. One introject can hold up a whole system of beliefs, and a whole system of beliefs can be built to hold up a single introjected belief. Through introjection we absorb other people’s psychological material without digesting it. It’s like learning a text by heart without understanding what it means.

Many of the difficulties we face are rooted in beliefs about how we ought to be in the world, beliefs we have never questioned. So we keep living by a prescription someone else wrote, one we now write out for ourselves.

The Inner Critic is the part of us that keeps these beliefs alive and keeps reinforcing them. This can make our character very rigid.

Taking in the beliefs of the authorities in our lives is part of learning to live in society, and in itself it is neither good nor bad. Introjects help us take on important social rules and function in different social settings. Early in life they were a foundation: they gave us security, kept us safe, made growth possible and were the best way we had, at the time, to adapt creatively to the world around us. They include all the norms and laws of society that we need to respect and follow if we want to keep living in it peacefully. That is why many of them are useful, even necessary.

How do we deal with the Inner Critic?

Once we become aware of our Inner Critic, we automatically feel the urge to confront it, along with the rules we have taken in. That can also feel uncomfortable, because we are turning against something we have gone along with until now, something that has been part of us all our lives. And simply wanting to get rid of it may well put us right back in its grip.

The critical attacks are actually signals: they lead us straight to our deepest values and inner rules.

How can the Inner Critic become the Inner Nurturer?

By working on ourselves we can turn the Inner Critic into a loving Inner Nurturer who cares for our wellbeing and helps us thrive. The critical attacks are actually signals: they lead us straight to our deepest values and inner rules. That gives us the chance to take responsibility for them and to choose which ones really belong to us and which don’t. This is when we ‘chew over’ and digest the norms and rules we once took in from outside.

Being willing to wait patiently for this change is key. Just deciding to give ourselves the inner freedom to go through the whole process of change is already a step towards breaking free of the Inner Critic. After all, the Inner Critic only ‘carries’ other people’s beliefs. Sorting through them creatively and turning them into beliefs of our own is where the Inner Nurturer begins.