The Inner Critic

Have you ever felt that your mind is constantly judging you? Maybe you experience thoughts like, “I’m such a failure”, “ I’m not good enough,” or “why do I always mess things up…If so, you are not alone. Many people find they can easily provide support, advice or guidance to a friend that is filled with compassion, care and understanding, yet when it comes to themselves, they are not able to extend that same grace. Instead, thoughts, emotions and behaviours can become driven by a strong and critical internal voice that drives perfectionistic standards and keeps an individual looping in cycles of negative self-talk.

Developmental Roots of the Inner Critic

The critic often develops as a protective part in childhood in response to interactions with caregivers, teachers, friends and peers. The messaging a child receives from these interactions becomes the internal dialogue with which they speak to themselves. When these experiences are filled with criticism, judgment, conditional acceptance, high expectations and/or rejection, this can create internal beliefs that fuel a critical internal voice that remains persistent in adulthood.

Internalizing Messaging

• Children view themselves through the lens through which others view them. When caregivers are consistently critical and judgmental, the child internalizes these experiences, and this critical voice becomes their own inner dialogue, affecting confidence, self-esteem and self-worth.

Unpredictable Environments

• Unpredictable and chaotic childhood environments can also develop the critic. In an attempt to establish a sense of safety and control, a child may be driven by perfectionistic tendencies, feeling that if they can just be perfect and they don’t make mistakes, this will keep them safe. This often persists into adulthood and shows up as over-functioning, hyper-independence, people pleasing and unrelenting perfectionistic standards.

Conditional Acceptance

• In childhood, affection and attention that is tied to achievements or “good” behaviour can also develop the critic. The child who only receives attention, praise and care when they are ‘successful’ and/or ‘well behaved’ learns their worth is tied to their achievements, driving unrelenting standards and a highly critical internal dialogue in adulthood.

Emotional Invalidation

• Children need adults to help them regulate their emotions. A child who is repeatedly told, “you're too sensitive”, “you always get so upset about things," “you need to toughen up”, learns that it is not safe or there is no space for their emotional experience. In adulthood, this can present as an internal voice that says, “I’m too much”, “my feelings don’t matter, “I need to just get over it”, creating difficulties with being able to express needs, emotional vulnerability, or being able to identify and understand their emotional state.

What can help?

Awareness of Thought Processes

• When the critic comes on strong, it can be difficult to establish thoughts from facts. A helpful technique can be to use a thought record to write down the critical thoughts that occurred and then take some time to evaluate these thoughts for accuracy. Evaluating thoughts in this way can help you to see if the story the critic is telling you is accurate, or whether reframing the thought in a more balanced way would be more helpful.

• Another helpful technique is to ‘diffuse’ from the critical thoughts. For
  example, when the critic starts the internal dialogue of, “I’m such a
  failure”, try shifting this to “my mind is telling me the story that I’m a
  failure”, or “I’m having the thought that I’m a failure”…a subtle shift, but
  this creates some space between you and your thoughts, reducing their
  power over your emotional response.

Self-Compassion

• Self-compassion is a huge antidote to the inner critic, but challenging, I know! Think to yourself, “Would I say this to a friend in this situation?” If the answer is no, try to respond to your internal dialogue with the same gentleness and compassion you would give to others. It may feel unnatural at first, but over time, learning to reframe the critic's voice helps build this self-compassion.

Challenging Perfectionistic Standards

• The inner critic loves to hold you to impossible standards, driving perfectionism. In therapy, we explore ways of moving towards more gentle and balanced mindsets, away from perfectionistic standards and towards being “good enough”, away from rigid all-or-nothing thinking and towards cognitive flexibility and increased self-compassion, away from unrelenting standards and towards more realistic and balanced expectations.

If you can relate to experiencing a critical internal dialogue, please know you are not alone. Therapy can provide a space to help you increase understanding around the roots of the criticism and learn new ways to manage and respond to it.