Your pesky inner critic.

Do you have a pesky inner critic? A voice that whispers little barbs at you like ‘you’re not good enough’ ‘or ‘you don’t fit in’ or ‘you’re not worthy’.

Your inner critic will be your internal judge & jury and it will often be…

• Harsh and mean. 

• Tell you what you’re not.  

• Persistent.  

• The voice of body or image perfectionism. 

• The voice of comparison.  

The inner critic keeps us playing small and it certainly doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves. It creates an internal battle as it overwhelms us with self doubt, imposter syndrome or anxiety, and it blocks us from achieving what we really want.

So how do we get rid of the pesky Inner Critic?

Often we hear people talk about silencing the inner critic and while this can be helpful in the short term, shame flourishes in silence so I’m not fully convinced by this approach…

Let’s say Peter isn’t confident and has no self belief. When these feelings arise, he tries to push them down because they feel icky and shameful. Then when he hears about a promotion at work, his inner critic roars, ‘no way’, ‘you could never do that’, ‘you’re not good enough’ so he doesn’t even bother applying. Poor Peter is being sabotaged by his inner critic, and ignoring or repressing his feelings of unworthiness hasn’t helped. You see, the feelings or thoughts we push down will only rise up again further down the line.

Instead, I think we need to make friends with our inner critic, we need to understand its origins and where it came from.

The inner critic is part of us, part of our history and who we are. Even if it’s incredibly negative, it is part of your story about who you are.

As a therapist, I’m interested in what your inner critic tells me about YOU, and your own unique journey through life. Where did it come from? When did you first feel this way? The inner critic comes from the ways we’ve been made feel bad about ourselves in the past and will often show up when we’re most vulnerable.

Get curious about this.

When did I first start to have this thought about myself? Does it sound like someone I know? When does my inner critic shout loudest?

If you can reframe your inner critic as a part of you that shows up in times of stress or vulnerability, and if you have some sense of where it came from, it will begin to shift and loose its power.

It changes from something we just believe is a truth, to something we’ve been made FEEL, about ourselves not WHO WE ARE.

Most often it’s just an old wound that needs to be healed. When you bring the inner critic out into the open, and make friends with it, some of the shame attached to it can disappear.

The inner critic needs to be understood in order to be quietened.