I’ll start this post with a couple of caveats. First of all, don’t try this at home folks unless a) you live alone or b) your housemates or loved ones are willing to put up with it. Also, there are quite a few expletives involved so, if you don’t like those, maybe go elsewhere.
As to the question of why I put my inner workings out in public like this, there is a story to go with that. But that is not today’s story. Today’s story follows from talking to a friend about anxiety and self-recrimination and the idea that it might be helpful for her to hear, or read, about my journey with my inner critic. So here we go.
Some people say that we all have an inner critic. I’m not sure if this is true. A quick Google brings up web pages such as:
A lot of people say everybody or nearly everybody has an inner critic, but I don’t see any data backing it up. Is it true?
and
The Myth About Your Inner Critic (And What You Need to Know)
So it’s not a given that everyone has one, but many people do. I haven’t really engaged with the topic outside of my own mind before and what follows are my personal thoughts on the matter: not a theory, just a way of thinking about it that has helped me make peace with my own inner critic.
As I mention elsewhere, I am very interested in minds. Not so much brains or neuroscience but the live state that exists within each one of us. That being said, I did read a certain amount about neuroscience a few years ago. I wasn’t in a great place and was trying to figure things out when I happened upon, or deduced, what I then referred to as “the fractured consciousness”. I think it was while reading Stephen Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” that I suddenly had the thought that we are not a unified consciousness: that there are a whole range of different sub-personalities within us and that these could be in conflict with each other. When we speak of indecision as “being in two minds about something”, it can literally be that two different parts of our mind want different things and we are unable to resolve the difference. We can simultaneously want contradictory things. Given where I was at the time, I immediately stopped reading the book because I didn’t want to deal with that idea. However, the cat was out of the bag, the horse had already bolted and I began the journey of getting to know my inner selves.
So, what is an inner critic? Mine, at least, is not a critic in the “judges the merits of literature or artistic works” type of critic. It is definitely of the “expresses an unfavourable opinion of something” sort of ilk and that something is myself. And the word “unfavourable” is definitely an understatement. I don’t think that I experience it sub-verbally, as an inner voice. I think it just puts pure knowledge / opinion my way and uses it to try and punish and control me. It is certainly not collaborative in attempting to gain its ends. It just uses pure brute emotional and psychological force to achieve its ends. As I’ll get to later, I’m inclined to think that that is incompetence rather than maliciousness but the end result is pretty much the same.
It has been said to me (today) that some people try to find the voice that the inner critic is speaking in and disable it or reason with it. That voice could be a parent or a teacher or someone else from the impressionable years. I haven’t thought of this previously and it perplexes me a bit, possibly because of my aphantasia, but it is curious that it quite relates to my process of making peace with mine.
To me, the critic is a sub-personality. It is an independent part of me that is nonetheless part of me. And I think that it has its own little purpose within the greater scheme of my mind. Along the way, I have found that the critic is a different part of me to my conscience and my conscientiousness. It is quite separate from my sense of guilt, my sense of right and wrong and my more considered sense of how I should behave. I think the purpose of the critic is to stop me losing status and being ostracised for doing stupid things.
As humans, we are a social species. In our lives of yore, living on the savannah or in the rainforest, being part of a group was a prerequisite for survival. Being ostracised was death and being of low status was a danger. The critic’s job was to ensure the ongoing safety of being in the group and also of being “a someone” in the group, considered valuable and co-operative by others so that they would co-operate and look after our interests in return. I think that that is it. It has a function and that function can be in conflict with our other wants – most particularly the want of us being nice to ourselves. Now, of course, we find ourselves in very different circumstances socially. We live in communities with far larger and looser groups where the opportunities for making idiots of ourselves are presented far more often. And our languages have developed far more nuance than they likely had back on the savannah (although that is not a definite given). So our inner critic is adapted to a type of lifestyle that most of us no longer live. Perhaps it has become a bit dysfunctional in relation to the society in which we find ourselves? As ChatGPT said, when reviewing the essay:
It’s like having a smoke alarm that goes off every time you toast bread — sure, it’s trying to save your life, but it’s absolutely not calibrated for reality.
So far, so imaginative and theoretical but why I really started writing this was to tell of my own journey and how I have made peace with my own inner critic. I’ll get there with just a few more diversions, I’m sure.
Anyway, the background to this particular peace process is that I had sent one of “those emails”. Due to a series of unfortunate events, an ongoing dispute, an absolutely sleepless night and being in receipt of what felt like the most patronising communication I have ever read, I sent an expletive-ridden email to my Chair to vent about what I had just read. Except, I didn’t. Due to the series of unfortunate events, I was using an online interface for my email instead of the usual desktop app and hit ‘reply’ instead of ‘forward’. And it was a real humdinger, directed at a funder and, so, with potentially disastrous consequences. I have always had a rule, “If you don’t want the person you’re writing about to read it, then just don’t write it”. I broke the rule, I think for the first time ever, and then sent the email right back to the subject of my ire.
The management on the other end were most understanding about the matter, I must say, and my Chair was far more concerned about my own wellbeing rather than the repercussions that might flow from what I had done and, years later, the whole episode does rather give me faith in humanity. I have been on the receiving end of such emails myself, have been shown them by colleagues and had to coach my own staff through the consequences of having done similar things. “Shit happens” as modern Stoics would say.
That being said, I was quite distraught and my inner critic took the opportunity to go on a rampage. I think it took advantage of the incident for the best part of a year. I needed to do something about it.
I don’t really remember the thought process that led to my solution but, me being me, I’m sure there was plenty of thinking involved. I’ll diverge again for a while to show how the thinking process works.
For most of my life thus far, I used to not make eye contact with people. This had been pointed out to me a couple of times for different reasons so I was in some way aware of it but I had a conversation with someone one day in a noisy room that required being very close in which there was fairly constant eye contact with which I was really comfortable. Probably just a really nice person. But it struck me that this was not at all usual for me and I began thinking about it. For about six months, I’d say, intermittently. I didn’t go back to talk to my inner child because I am highly sceptical of Freudian psychoanalysis and have a nodding acquaintance with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy so I tend to start from where I am now.
And after that time thinking, I came to a solution. I had decided that I wanted to change that way of interacting, to habitually make eye contact, and I thought up what turned out to be a very effective way of changing. Simply, if I found myself talking to someone and noticed I was not making eye contact, I would have an imaginary hand (my own right hand attached to my imaginary right arm) raise up and align itself between my own nose and the nose of the person I was talking to. Side on, in case you are wondering so that there was a straight line between our noses and, in following that line, I would make eye contact. The first time I did that, I did the imaginary thing consciously. The second time, my subconscious just did it for me without my having to think about it. I quickly found that there were some people I didn’t want to make eye contact with. In my case, the eyes are not so much windows to the soul as they are doors to step through and come directly into contact with someone’s mind. Intense! However, I persevered and gradually grew accustomed to the feeling. It feels like there is a lot going on and my brain is using up energy at a very fast rate. Putting my glasses up on top of my head and using blurryvision is a definite help in that. Six months or so later, I began to notice those who did and did not make eye contact and the fact that some people were definitely avoiding my eye contact. At that stage, I suspected that I may have been coming across as a psychopath so I stopped trying and just let my mind do what it wanted from there on in.
So that’s the type of self-work cognitive and practical process I engage in in order to change something within my mind and my interaction with the external world. Back to my inner critic. I gave it my voice.
And this is where the “don’t try this at home folks” comes in. I live alone which is probably a necessity for giving a voice to an inner critic like mine. Apparently, my next-door neighbours fight for hours, get physical and smash up the furniture on a regular basis. This, according to another neighbour who lived on the other side in a house that had been divided with a wooden partition. I never hear a thing. The two-foot thick walls that lie between us, with similar on the other side, are quite impervious to high-volume voices and smashing furniture. And just as well, because my inner critic, being given my voice, likes to shout. Very loudly. Its favourite term of endearment for me is “stupid fucking cunt” although it does have a variety of other terms also. I’m not even quite sure if that is the voice of the critic or the reaction of some other part of me to what the critic is doing to me. What the critic does to me is grab me with moments of intense emotional and psychological pain and punish me for something stupid that I have said or done. As I mentioned, it had quite good ammunition at that time.
Like learning to make eye contact, it was quite intense. In fact, it was so intense at times that I had to withdraw privileges and just shut it down when I felt the whole show was getting decidedly on the unhealthy side. Curiously, or maybe not, my decision to let the critic have my voice when I was at home did not really affect me in the world outside of home. I would get moments when the critic took a swipe when at work or walking down the street and there was an automatic suppression mechanism that meant I didn’t let fly in public. I think, possibly, we are used to using this suppression mechanism, possibly even the critic itself is part of that to not have us make idiots out of ourselves by randomly shouting expletives in public. Which is, of course, much frowned upon where I live and generally taken to be a sign of something wrong upstairs.
After a while of putting up with this, I started to get rather annoyed with the critic, hearing more openly what it had for all my life being doing somewhat surreptitiously on the inside. As I said, I don’t think I experience the critic sub-verbally, so hearing it berate me so brutally through my voice was quite unpleasant. I started to respond to it verbally. This again, as a result of thinking and the possibilities of how my mind might work. Having read the rather fascinating experiments in Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis (caveat – he has mostly disowned the final conclusions), and particularly about the concept of ‘alien hand syndrome’, I realise that different parts of the mind may in fact have no way of communicating with each other. If I responded aloud in words to the critic, the act of forming the words and speaking them and the fact that the words then come back in through my ears and auditory processing system, there was a better chance that the critic might actually hear what I addressed to it.
My words were, “So! Are you quite finished? Have you had your say? Right! Fuck off!”
Not shouted back at it like it used my voice to shout at me, but loud enough as if I was telling someone else in anger exactly what they could go and do with themselves.
It felt empowering. It felt good to talk back to my inner torturer. And with those words, I would let go of whatever it was using to beat me with and get on with whatever I was thinking or doing before it interrupted me. And the pain would be gone. Just like that.
After a while of this, my attitude began to soften. Being empowered and not at the mercy of the critic, I began to consider that it was just trying to do a job. It didn’t exist inside me solely for the point of torturing me emotionally; there was a purpose to its actions. It was really overbearing and really rather bad at what it was doing but it was incompetent and insensitive rather than malicious and Machieviellian. I began to make peace with it rather than fighting back. I learned that if I acknowledged what it had done to me, it would pass just as quickly as it had come and that the recriminations it used would be gone just as quickly. It was at this point that I started to see clearly the difference between my conscience and the critic. My conscience is concerned with my sense of right and wrong, justice, fairness and decency. If I do something I consider to be wrong, deliberately or, more often, through lack of attention and understanding, then I feel guilt and have a clear choice of whether to apologise or try and fix whatever it is. Within reason: there are times when it’s just better to leave the past float off into the distance. When I do something embarrassing or stupid, the critic kicks in and goes for the jugular. Often wrong and stupid come together but I now have a real clarity between the different emotions or states of mind that they induce and that gives me a lot of choice in how I respond. I’m unafraid to look stupid by addressing something and apologising. This has indeed happened but, in such instances, the critic can go swing. I’ll do my best to do what’s right and put up with the consequences.
So now I am at peace with my inner critic. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight occasionally but it is sitting in its correct place in my life. It grabs me at random moments and inflicts the intense emotional and psychological pain, often about something stupid I said to someone thirty or forty years ago. Those things often seem to have no relation to where I am, what I am doing or what I am thinking at the moment of the attack. It seems to have a store of embarrassing moments and, as often as not, just picks one at random to punish me with. I acknowledge the moment, feel the feeling, and then I move on and it is gone. Completely.
I think the reason the feeling disappears is that I don’t give it attention other than the moment in which it is happening. I spend a lot of time thinking, whether sitting or walking or whatever, but I don’t allow the critic to hijack my thinking for any longer than the moment that it takes to acknowledge what it has done. I suppose it helps that I accept a certain amount of self-idiocy: that appears to be a universal human condition. And I am very clear on the difference between wrong and embarrassing. I don’t let go of wrong easily if I feel I can or should do something to fix the wrong and therefore it is easy to let go of embarrassing. I have met people who are too self-forgiving in life, such that they leave wrong unfixed, and that’s not me.
So, the inner critic is me. It’s a part of me, not all of me. I’ve heard it said that, “Our thoughts are not ourselves” and this is a very good case of that. The inner critic has a job to do and its job is to keep us in line, to stop us from doing stupid things that would have us lose status or be ostracised and, thereby, die out on the savannah. It takes on that job through punishment and control and maybe the modes of modern life make it more cruel than it was designed or evolved to be. Or maybe it’s always been that bitch because the costs were so high and our lives depended on it being so harsh. My feeling is that, in my case at least, it was far too overbearing and needed to calm its jets a bit. But maybe it was just that I gave it too much attention and now I just don’t. Happy days!