Part 2 – Your Critic In The Rough

(Text version below audio player)

As I outlined in part 1 – your inner critic is there for a reason. Its purpose is not to override you, block you, or harass you and make you feel terrible about yourself – although it spends a lot of time doing that. Your critic is hyper-focused on survival and it’s programmed to view anything out of the ordinary as potentially dangerous.

Since your inner critic’s job is to keep you safe from the unknown, it gets alarmed when you try anything new. Your scary mean critic is wired to guard the borders between the worlds of you and not-you.

The problem is that in order to grow – you have to venture outside of your known identity. So, “you” by its very nature, keeps getting bigger. For example, you might think that you’re not the kind of person who dances, then – for whatever reason – you try dancing and you actually like it, and you even find that you’re pretty good at it. Suddenly your identity shifts – from someone who doesn’t dance—to someone who dances. This whole process freaks your critic out, because it’s heavily invested in things staying the same.

You’ll know the critic is freaking out when it feels like you are freaking out – because your critic is attacking you to scare you and make you shrink back from venturing into any new territory. The critic protects your known identity through intimidation. In the dancing scenario, you might hear the critic terrorizing you with thoughts like, “What do you think you’re doing!? Are you crazy!? You can’t dance. You are not the kind of person who dances. You’re making a fool of yourself. And it’s too time consuming—you know you’re way too busy already. Dancing happens too late at night. You have nothing to wear. No one will want to dance with you. Remember so-and-so who thought they could dance and everyone just made fun of them?” And on and on… The critic is an abusive bully.

The critic knows how to push every fear button you have: your fear of non-conformity. Fear of going outside of your comfort zone. Fear of failure. Fear of being ostracized  – and possibly even a popular ultimate fear –  fear of being totally and utterly abandoned, penniless, friendless, and completely forsaken by society. Many inner critics use some version of this dying-alone-in-an-alley threat whenever extra-strength intimidation is needed. I think Annie Lamont must have been referring to the inner critic when she wrote, “My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone.” 

Well, luckily – as I explained in my last post – you don’t have to go into your mind alone, because there’s a whole committee in there waiting for you. Unfortunately, your inner critic probably has all your committee members intimidated and they don’t know how to stand up to the insults it continually hurls at them. In general, you’re likely so accustomed to the inner critic’s constant yammering that it might take some effort to consciously notice its nearly imperceptible (yet highly destructive) background chatter.

I bet you have noticed the long-term effects of your critic’s ranting – these constant put-downs and threats can cause you to feel scared, nervous, anxious, angry, hopeless, or just worn out. Sometimes these feelings creep up on you and suddenly you realize you’re in an unpleasant mood. You may not even know how you got depressed, angry, or hopeless – because like a fish may be unaware of the water it swims in – you have become unconscious of the atmosphere of self abuse that your thoughts are steeped in. It happens to all of us.

The good news is – you can change the pattern. And the important first step is awareness – like realizing that when you feel crummy it might be due to an inner critic attack. Some people try to just ignore the inner critic, hoping that it will give up or go away. But the critic doesn’t give up. Ever. If you try to turn your back on it, or throw it out, or dismiss it passive-aggressively with a snarky, “Thanks for sharing” – you’ll find that none of these tactics are sustainable, for three important reasons:

1. The critic will never completely disappear – and if it’s disregarded or snubbed, it just returns with renewed energy and sneakier tactics.

2. The critic is a part of your brain – part of your inner committee – that actually wants to keep you safe. And its message contains valuable and unique information that no other committee member can give you.

3. You can re-educate your inner critic – to communicate in a non-abusive manner. Then it becomes your ally, and even an indispensable member of your inner decision-making team.

A critic-in-the-rough uses nasty fear-inducing language that ends up shrinking your self-esteem and hampering any enthusiasm you might have had for exploring and expanding your life. I’m not justifying the abuse, but here’s what I’ve found: about 1% of the inner critic’s message contains valuable information.

The problem is that the other 99% of the message is simply abusively delivered, outdated, and bogus programming.

In part 3, I will focus on the steps to take if you want to re-program and tame that beast in your head – so that you can actually use the important and insightful information it’s trying to give you.

I’d love to know your thoughts after reading or listening to this blog post. Please consider emailing me with any feedback you have. And thanks so much for being here!