Silence Your Inner Critic

What is an inner critic? You have probably heard people reference this before. An inner critic is the part of your inner voice that fixates on criticism or shame in an effort to “protect” or “motivate” you to avoid pain and hurt. However, it’s not very good at its job because it often leaves people feeling more isolated and defeated. In general, we all use language as a way to reflect on life. If you can talk, you have the capacity to activate the voice inside your head, which is called your “inner voice”. Here is an example of your inner voice: think about the last time you met someone new. You say hi, exchange names, and you continue talking for 15 minutes. You get in the car later that night, and you think "what is that person’s name? I know they told me. I spent 15 minutes talking with them, and I can’t even remember what they said their name was". That is your inner voice. You’re using language and details from your experience to try and help you remember what happened in that scenario. This is an example where the inner voice is helpful, it’s focused on finding the answer (the name) and it’s recalling information. 

Now let's imagine the inner critic appeared in that situation instead your inner voice. The dialogue in your head would sound something like this, “you are such an idiot. I can’t believe you spent that much time talking with them and have no idea what their name is. This is why you don’t have any friends. You’ll never make friends if you can’t remember people’s names. What’s wrong with you?”.

The brain engages in the inner critic when it believes that berating yourself is going to hurt you so much that you’ll never want to feel that way again. It thinks that surely you’ll remember the person's name next time if you call yourself an idiot enough times. This often happens if you experienced verbal or emotional abuse in childhood or young adulthood. Your brain learns to speak to you the way your attachment figures (such as parents or significant others) did. In those situations you were often dependent on those people for a certain level of survival, so you had to listen to them, you had to survive to get your needs met and to feel loved even if it meant conditional love. Now as an adult, you’ve adopted talking to yourself in the same way that those attachment figures did. 

So how do we reshape the inner critic back to the inner voice? We have to remember the purpose of the inner voice. The inner voice is not to shame/berate/victimize us. Its purpose is to help us plan, create meaning, motivate, and control.  When you are going through a situation where you’re ruminating, looping the same thoughts over and over, or stuck criticising yourself, give structure to your thoughts. Rather than letting them run wild in your mind, give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Structure:

Beginning

• What happened: go through the experience/details--planning

  Middle

• Why/How did that effect me the way that it did--meaning making

• What action do I want to take (and is that action in alignment with the type of person I want to be)--motivation

  End

• Hold yourself accountable and if you need to take action (like stop scrolling your phone or go for a walk, do so)--control

This is the difference between using negative or challenging situations productively vs. unproductively through the inner critic/rumination. If you allow the inner critic to run the conversation in your mind, you will sink. You’ll become distracted, you’ll freeze and be unable to make decisions, you’ll overshare and rehash the same situation when talking with friends/significant others in your life which will lead to them naturally pulling away from you, and the list goes on. Instead, utilize the structured format of processing the experience with your inner voice so that you have a beginning, middle, and end to the story. Even if the ending “isn’t what you want”, create the ending.

It’s important to have tools ready to go if you find that your inner critic is stuck ruminating about the same issue or experience. I encourage you to use the prompt above and go through planning, meaning making, motivation, and control. Make sure that you have an end. Other tools that can help refocus your mind are sensory shifters like music, taste, or scent. You could have a playlist of songs that help you relax, scents, or tactile tools like structured journaling, weighted blankets, or engaging in breathing techniques/stretching. The goal here is getting to a place where you can have an inner dialogue that is productive and helps you learn more about yourself so that you can build self-awareness and in turn have more fulfilling relationships with others. Remember that reshaping your inner voice is a process. Be patient with yourself and celebrate your progress!