Perplexed

Why would someone like me seem to discover something new?

Your inner critic is not you. It’s an empty facsimile of a frowning parent – a cardboard bully -- whose usefulness you outgrew by 17 years old.

These two statements have fascinated and plagued me for several years. I have boiled down my job as a personal coach to opening my clients to the possibility of these two truths.

When I’m sure of these two statements, my worldly anxiety plummets. The same thing happens to my clients. That alone fascinates me. Other rewards appear, including an increase in intimacy – with the world, things, and people. It’s fun to let go of your inner critic, see it as an obstacle rather than a motivator.

What plagues me is the absurdity that this is news. If something is that surefire a winner in the hearts and minds of my clients, and that easy to find for yourself, why does it feel so fresh and original to them? Most of my clients are middle aged or later, and have taken classes in psychology or relationships, been in therapy, or have spent years in spiritual groups. To a person, they blurt out, “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”

I am not a researcher. I don’t even have a psychology degree. My academic credentials are liberal arts, poli sci, and Eastern classics. My job credentials are journalism, corporate management, and executive coaching. What am I doing presenting a new way to bust anxiety?

Here is the only thing I bring to the table: About fifteen years ago in a therapist’s office I stumbled on a practical way to disengage from the inner critic, what Freud called the superego. I used this tool during my years in a spiritual school called Diamond Heart that front-ends a lot of superego work on its cumulative path to enlightenment. More recently, I refined the tool with my clients, and wrote my book Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic so others could learn about it and critique it.

The tool is simple: You listen for the voice, identify its location in your body, pull it out and hold it in your palm in front of you. It appears, and you interrogate it for a while. For every single one of the hundreds of people I’ve observed doing this, the inner critic has these exact same qualities:

• It has a face

• Its default expression is scorn

• It answers a series of questions the same way as every other inner critic

• It talks to you like you’re a 6-year-old

• It bullies

• When asked to reason, it spouts bumper stickers

• It is more worried about its own survival than your success

• It is no more moral than your authentic self, which has its own narrator

• It is a fearmonger

• It is tired of running the show, but doesn’t want to be annihilated

• It is not compassionate and has no soul

• It prefers to be concealed as a subvocal bully; like a vampire it cannot survive in the light of day

• It is fake, and doesn’t want you to know that

In other words, your inner critic is not a part of you, but a parasite. A sidenote to people who are involved in Internal Family Systems work: IFS is incredibly great stuff. Keep doing what you’re doing. But this is different in what you might see as a significant or a trivial way. In this theory, the inner critic itself is not a part of you, is not real, and does not deserve your love. Which doesn’t mean you hate it or argue with it. The inner critic curates all your conflicts, so fighting with it just amplifies its voice. My process asks the client to notice it when it’s talking. I tell them to think, “That’s you,” and go on with their life. (That bit I learned from Diamond Heart, by the way.) If you can authoritatively address the inner critic ten times a day, I guarantee your anxiety will drop dramatically.

So why hasn’t this technique been out there in the therapy community for decades? Why are we all graduating from high school still believing that our inner critic is our conscience, our ethical compass, our motivator out of laziness, when we have clearly outgrown it by seventeen? Worst of all, why do we think it is a part of us when it’s so clearly a parasite?

Other than Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism, I don’t know of any popular system of life management – religion, philosophy, or psychological framework – that denies a seat of reality to the curator of my suffering. Buddhism attributes all emotions to imagination; they’re all made up by the mind. Hardly anyone wants to take that notion to its limits. We all want to sympathize with elephants that seem to grieve over the loss of their babies. Modern Buddhist teachers tend to avoid talking about the idea that all emotions are made-up fantasies.

Likewise, I don’t talk that way with my clients. But I don’t hesitate to tell them that their inner critic is a thing, a facsimile of a frowning parent, that it served a great purpose when they were six and learning how to cross streets without an adult around, and that they might not need to be followed around by a scary frowning parent anymore.