The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.
—PEGGY O’MARA
No matter how you try, you can’t please your inner critic.
There is no fooling it. The critic knows your every move, every trick up your sleeve, every bit of your past. It has been right there with you throughout your life. You shower with it. Take it to work. It sits next to you at every meal and even sticks around for dessert. It’s there during and after sex. And yes, it’s definitely there when you are dying.
It compares, praises, devalues, diminishes, invalidates, blames, approves, condemns, and attacks your appearance, job performance, the way you conduct relationships, your friends, your health, your diet, your hopes and dreams, your thoughts, and your spiritual development. Pick something, anything, as it is all interchangeable. Let’s face it: in the critic’s eyes, nothing you do is good enough.
The critic is the enforcer, demanding compliance to an acquired set of standards and moral codes. It’s the voice that says, “My way or the highway.” And it wields brutally its chosen weapons of fear, shame, and guilt in order to get you to do what it wants.
Often in our most vulnerable moments, when we would benefit from tenderness, we club ourselves with self-judgment. Even near the end of life, it is common for people to look back with regret, to become obsessed with “if only” conversations, or to tell themselves that they aren’t doing a good job of dying. Friends and relatives add to the pile of guilt by projecting their own inner critic’s voice onto the person who is dying, suggesting that he should fight harder or she should let go more gracefully.
The inner critic is ambivalent about change, shifts in identity, creativity, and inner work, and it is downright terrified of anything bubbling up from the unconscious. The judge prefers status quo, the familiar, the predictable. It insists on homeostasis. “Don’t rock the boat,” it advises. “It’s not safe.”
That’s why focusing on self-improvement or making any attempt to fix what the critic views as “the problem” never works. In seeking the approval of others, conforming to an external standard, and trying to please, we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Praise and blame are symptoms of an infectious disease. And as with any illness, we need to do more than treat the symptoms; we have to address the underlying causes. We need to go to the heart of the matter. We need to see how the habit of constant self-judgment diminishes our life force, steals our inner peace, and crushes our souls.
The pursuit of perfection is learned early on and, for most of us, becomes a lifelong addiction. It is an ego-based quest that easily can eclipse the soul’s journey to wholeness. This is why, in order to bring our whole self to the experience, we must address the often unconscious, corrosive voice of the inner critic. It is the primary obstacle to self-acceptance, trust, and the expansion of our dynamic potential. It stops all growth, arrests inner development, steals our power, and makes negative self-talk the norm. Furthermore, the judge impedes our ability to connect and empathize with other people. Chances are if you’re extremely critical of yourself, you’ll be a harsh critic of others. You may think it even if you don’t say it.
When we bring our whole self forward, we include our brokenness. We make room for blemishes as well as purity, strength as well as vulnerability, success as well as screwups. Judgment focuses on what’s wrong; it feeds an “either/or” mentality. Embracing wholeness is a loving act of reclamation, a “both/and” way of meeting life.
To free ourselves from the inner critic, we have to understand something of its origins, how we are impacted by it, and how we can successfully disengage from its negative influence. In short, our treatment plan includes the application of wisdom, strength, and love.
* * *
When my son was seven, he built a fort behind a small desk in his bedroom. He often would crawl into this private place when he was upset, disappearing for an hour or more after one of our disagreements or when I was nagging him.
A few years later, we moved. When I pulled the desk away from the wall to dismantle his fort, I got quite a surprise. The back panel of wood was completely covered in swear words, profanity, angry rants, and cusses at his sweet old dad.
It’s natural for a child to experience aggressive energy like this toward a parent. But usually, it feels too dangerous to express, and so we repress it. Once I had recovered from my initial shock and bruised ego, I laughed. I felt relieved that Gabe had found a way to vent his anger with me.
When all of us were children, our parents and grandparents, older siblings, teachers, spiritual advisors, and other responsible adults in our lives did their best to show us right from wrong. By and large, they were well intentioned. Their goal was to foster our development and protect us from harm. Without a doubt, we needed some guidance or we wouldn’t have made it to adulthood alive and healthy, nor would we have been able to successfully enter into a society that relies on certain codes of conduct.
And so these grown-ups imbued us with their values and standards. They taught us the basic rules they believed we would need in order to cope in the world. This natural socialization process only becomes problematic when it spills over into a forced attempt to align a child’s behavior with the adult’s view of life. Most grown-ups are not ogres, yet inevitably they pass along their unconscious assumptions, unskillful strategies, prejudices, and biases from their own unexamined lives. Maybe your parents were embarrassed by your fascination with your sexual impulses, or exhausted by your unstoppable energy. Perhaps your teachers and spiritual leaders used warnings and reprimands to control your behavior, manage your emotions, and keep you from doing things that made them uncomfortable. Or maybe your mother or father wanted to get you to do things you didn’t really want to do, like go to sleep when you weren’t tired, dress a certain way, have different friends, or eat what was offered, whether or not it looked and tasted good to you.
When we were small, the adults had all the power. We were completely dependent upon them for our budding self-perception and, more importantly, for our survival. To a young child, such approval or disapproval often feels like a matter of life and death.
Out of self-preservation, we learned to get and maintain approval and avoid shame and punishment by bending to adults’ wishes. Along the way, we internalized their voices of authority, adapted to their values, or rebelled against them. This conditioning—the “should” and “should nots,” the message that something was “wrong” with us—formed the basis of our inner critics.
As we come into adulthood, the harsh, coercive voice of the judge outgrows its usefulness. But it continues to live on in us as a powerful psychological structure that wants to protect us by managing our lives. It’s a bit like our wisdom teeth: once, when we existed on a diet of raw meat, nuts, and roots, these teeth were necessary for our survival. Yet as we evolved, we learned how to use tools, cutting and cooking the food we eat, and as a result, we no longer needed our wisdom teeth. Similarly, as we mature, we have access to a less reactive and more discerning wisdom that is objective, positive, and can function as a reliable and creative guide in our lives. We don’t need the critic’s constant appraisal and attacks, its humiliation, repression, and rejection, or the suffering it generates.
But mostly we still think we do.
Recently, the topic of the inner critic came up in conversation with a friend and neighbor. Beth is about the same age as I am, healthy and fit, and most would view her as highly successful, living a well-balanced life in which she is happily married, close with her children, and enjoying retirement.
When I mentioned how important I feel it is for us to tame the critic as we journey through life, Beth argued, “But what would I have left without the voice of my inner critic? Who would I be? A lazy, miserable person who had never gone after her dreams? Without it, I wouldn’t get anything done. The critic tells me the truth about what I’m getting right and wrong. It is the reason why I want to be my best self. It motivates me toward productive change.”
“Does it?” I asked her. “I find the inner critic berates me more than it motivates me. It is neither a conscience nor a reliable moral guide, and it isn’t the voice of wisdom. Yes, there may be some kernel of truth wrapped up in the critic’s commentary. It may have a useful tidbit of information to offer. But I certainly don’t need its delivery system. It has a particular tone of voice that is often mean, dismissive, and manipulative. I’ve been with many wise spiritual teachers over the years, and none of them has ever transmitted their wisdom to me in such a nasty tone.”
“But sometimes my inner critic praises me,” Beth replied. “It congratulates me for working hard to get the job done.”
I nodded. “It’s true, the critic can offer praise. And that tone is far stickier because we like it; we crave approval. However, not all praise is equal. We should question the critic’s motives. Upon closer examination, we find that we only receive praise for gaining a narrow set of outcomes or displaying the few qualities approved of by the critic.”
“It’s true,” Beth said. “I realize I’ve been getting pushed around by my critic for fifty years. I’ve been so busy trying to earn its praise and prove my worth by trying to be smarter, younger, stronger, and more successful. I’ve started three profitable companies, and I still feel like an imposter.”
Some of us, like Beth, have a mistaken loyalty to our critic. We think it keeps us sharp and leads to more critical thinking we need in our jobs or to understand the world. Looking closer we see that the mechanism of the critic is pretty simple and unsophisticated; after all, it was formed when we were children.
People often imagine that the negative, grating voice in their heads is helping them. But it’s not. The critic doesn’t believe in our basic human goodness. It only believes in rules and moral codes. Psychologically, the critic is the protector of ego. It denies everything else. It doesn’t know your soul. It doesn’t trust your heart to know how you feel, to be empathic and compassionate in relationships. It doesn’t have faith that your intuitive gut sense can guide you in situations you’re encountering for the first time. The inner critic only wants you to heed its advice. It doesn’t trust in your ability to reason and evaluate as a way to navigate through life’s dilemmas.
* * *
There is an alternative to the critic. It’s found in the movement from judgment to discernment. Judgment is the harsh, aggressive habit that shuts down the conversation, binds us to the past and old behaviors, and closes off our access to other capacities. Discernment makes space, helps us to have perspective, and allows more of our humanity to show up. Discernment helps wisdom to emerge and enables us to choose a more beneficial future. Our innate discriminating wisdom is a kind, more objective voice that is available to all of us. It can differentiate, discern, and intelligently guide us forward.
The critic may have served a purpose back in kindergarten, but it’s time to trade in our old model.
I was teaching a workshop in central Italy and had an insightful exchange with a student named Stella. She was a doctor, a warmhearted and attractive woman in her late thirties. After my talk about the inner critic, she approached me and said quite seriously, “I don’t have a critic.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, I can’t find one,” Stella said. She told me how successful she was at work, how she had achieved her goal of becoming a doctor at a young age, how proud her parents were of her.
Now, in Italy there remains a strong cultural bias, or we might say a cultural critic, that places significant pressure on women of childbearing years to have babies. Italian women often find it daunting to balance work with the traditionally demanding expectations for mothers. Increasingly, many are opting not to have children at all. Yet the conditioning and beliefs run deep and are often the cause of considerable internal conflict.
I said, “Do you really want me to try to help you identify the voice of your critic? It could be quite painful.”
Stella was insistent. “Yes, yes, please. I want to understand.”
So I took a guess. In a very calm tone of voice, I asked, “How come you haven’t had any babies yet?”
Immediately, Stella burst into tears. I didn’t have to add anything to that one line, nor did I need to speak it harshly. I knew my words would pass through her inner critic and the judge would make my question sound like an accusation. “You’re right!” she cried. “I hear that voice all the time … not just in my head. From my parents, my neighbors, my co-workers, even taxi drivers—and it always upsets me.”
Identifying her critic shook Stella to the core. She cried as I held her, yet she wanted to keep inquiring into her experience to help surface more of the story. I suggested to Stella that she might want to explore this issue with the support of a good therapist.
In fact, the incident did inspire Stella to go into psychotherapy to work on this issue. She came back to the workshop a year later and announced that she was very happily pregnant. She’d told herself that she had written off children because she had been so wrapped up in her career, but in truth, her critic was telling her that she wouldn’t be a good mother and would never find a partner to have children with her.
Thanks to therapy, Stella confronted her judge. She acknowledged a deep part of herself that wanted badly to be a mother—and always had. If the nasty, demeaning voice that called her a “loser” for being single at thirty-seven and “incapable” of raising kids had gotten its way, Stella never would have discerned the best path forward. She had to tune in to the far quieter voice of her soul. Then and only then was she able to figure out a plan for how to have a successful career as a physician and be a mother.
Our essential nature has certain attributes that are innate, meaning they already exist within each of us, and we all have access to them. One of these innate qualities is wisdom. People don’t usually think of wisdom as innate. They believe it is something you must acquire over the course of a lifetime through experience. It’s true, there is an analytical wisdom that needs to be trained and developed over time. But we also have an innate wisdom. Buddhism refers to a self-revealing wisdom-nature that we can attune to through meditation. As with Stella, we all have access to this inner wisdom, if only we listen carefully to what it has to offer.
As we move through the vicissitudes of daily life, our essential nature passes through cultural, familial, and societal conditioning. These innate qualities bump up against our personalities, our belief systems, and the hindrances of our very human minds. As that contact occurs, the qualities of our essential nature go through a process of constriction. They become twisted. Then, instead of being expressed in a free, open, and natural way, the various qualities appear distorted. Strength gets tangled up in desires or expectations and gets expressed as frustration, anger, and destructiveness. Compassion passes through fear and shows up as pity or an obsessive need to fix others and protect ourselves from pain.
The critic is particularly fond of distorting wisdom. In fact, the critic likes to substitute its own voice for the softer, gentler guide of our inner wise person. The critic says, “Trust me. I know you so well. I’ve been through this before.” Wisdom says, “Relax into your experience. You can trust yourself to know what to do.” Instead of telling you what might appear to be true, as the critic does, wisdom teaches us how to discover what is really true.
It’s important to realize that even in its twisted expressions, the fragrance of our essential nature remains. We tend to view distortions as obstacles blocking our way home. We feel defeated and give up, or we wage war against our anger, our fear, and our inner critics by trying to overcome or get rid of them. Instead, we might see the obstacles as doorways. We could move toward them, gently and persistently, in order to understand what they are all about.
Once, a leader of a spiritual organization used me as a scapegoat to push forward a plan without considering the community’s readiness. As a result, I was forced to leave the community and part with the people who were most central in my life at the time.
Some years later, I was reflecting on the incident and became overcome with hatred toward my accuser. In my mind, I kept replaying my version of the story of how I was wronged, imagining it to be completely true. As I did, I noticed that my right hand was making a chopping motion into my left hand. The hatred grew in intensity. Wanting to understand this obstacle, I allowed myself to imagine my darkest and most bitter thoughts. I let the hatred rip, feeling the full range of emotions as I fantasized about how I might cut this man out of my life. My hatred felt cold, calculating, indifferent, and temporarily powerful. My right hand was like a knife, slicing and destructive.
Just then, I recalled the statue of Manjushri, an iconic, archetypical form of Buddha that is often found in Zen meditation halls. He wields a sword in his right hand. It is known as the sword of discriminating wisdom. The sword is said to be able to cut through ignorance and the entanglements of deluded views.
In that moment, I realized that wisdom was true power. Within the hatred I was experiencing, there was a flavor, a fragrance of that wisdom, but it had been distorted. When I could see more clearly, I understood that my hatred was only impersonating power; it was a counterfeit version of power.
With the emerging wisdom, I saw that while my anger at the rejection had seemed to be only outwardly focused, it had been eating at me inwardly for years in the form of obsessive self-hatred. I had this inner narrative going about what I should have done years ago. My critic had been on my back for over two decades, wanting me to change what had happened or to get over it, to stop being such a baby. It became clear how my drive toward self-improvement, as with so many other people on the spiritual path, had a religious zeal to it. I never left myself alone. I was constantly comparing myself to others. I was never good enough.
I thought of the American Buddhist nun and bestselling author Pema Chödrön, who wrote, “The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.” That doesn’t mean that we ought to condone wrongdoing, abandon plans and goals, or resign ourselves to being stuck in our old stories. It means that we should do our best to hold our imperfections with kindness. We can bring self-acceptance forward, befriend ourselves, and get curious about the twists in our innate qualities rather than trying to beat them into submission.
* * *
In order to stop the pattern of self-betrayal that occurs when we are at the mercy of an unchecked inner critic, we have to stand up for ourselves. We have to act on our own behalf. I find it helpful to remember how you reacted as a child when your parents didn’t approve, or when an authority figure imposed rules on you that you didn’t think were fair. What was your automatic response?
Karen Horney, the German psychoanalyst credited with founding feminist psychology, wrote about three human coping strategies for dealing with basic anxiety. They are applicable both to how we reacted to criticism as children and to how we continue to respond to the inner critic today:
• Some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, collapsing, keeping secrets, and silencing ourselves. We avoid conflict. Maybe you went to your room, perhaps you quietly watched TV as you tried to absorb the judgment or simply endure it.
• Some of us move toward by seeking to please and accommodate, negotiate, persuade, and explain. Maybe you did extra schoolwork, tried to be helpful around the house, or always were well behaved in order to earn approval.
• Some us move against by trying to gain power over others. We rebel or fight back. Maybe you talked back, yelled, acted with hostility, slammed doors, or snuck out the window and did what you wanted.
Here is the problem with all of these strategies: they still give the inner critic all the power. We remain caught up in reacting to authority instead of creatively choosing our own path. To undo this old habit, we need strength.
Essential strength comes from repeated encounters with our basic nature, through which we develop confidence in its presence and wise guidance. That becomes the foundation on which we stand, the essential strength that we carry into action. When our strength gets distorted, for example, by righteousness or resentment, it takes shape as anger. But we can harness the energy of strength that lives in our anger. We can tap into its vitality, intensity, and aliveness.
Suppose you brought awareness to a negative reaction as it was first arising within you. As I did when I examined my hatred toward the spiritual leader whom I felt had wronged me, you might contain the hurtful expression of your anger before acting out, focusing instead on the visceral physical experience within your body. Perhaps then you could channel that energy honestly into protecting yourself from the attack.
There are a dozen books out there offering myriad strategies for defending against the critic. For me, it boils down to this: summoning the courage to face a powerful and coercive force head-on. I side with the poet e. e. cummings, who wrote, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
Once when I was teaching about the inner critic, a woman raised her hand and asked to speak. Her frustration was palpable, her face turning red and her whole body trembling. “I can never defeat the inner critic!” she said. “It always gets the best of me. Why am I so weak?”
I pulled a chair right up next to her and stood on top of it so that I was a good four feet taller than she was. Then I pointed my finger down at her and said in a firm, loud tone, “You are bad!”
She burst into laughter. “Oh yeah, look at that!” she said. “That is what the critic is like when it has the best of me. No wonder I feel weak. I couldn’t fight back against that adult voice when I was a small child. It was too big, too powerful.”
Then I asked the woman to stand up on the chair so that she was a head taller than I was. I guided her to breathe deeply, feel her way into her body, center herself in awareness, and think about her innate goodness. “Now how would you respond to the inner critic when it tells you that you’re bad, you’re weak?” I asked.
“Don’t speak to me that way,” she said, her voice strong and confident. “It hurts me when you talk to me like that. And it doesn’t help me do any better.”
Telling the emotional truth, expressing disinterest in the critic’s advice, using humor, staying connected to your physical center, harnessing your strength—all these strategies are meant to restore our contact with the dynamic expansiveness that is our essential nature. When we have successfully defended against an attack and disengaged from the critic, we may feel a shift in physical energy, perhaps a release of tension, a free flow of breath. Emotionally, we may feel increased confidence and compassion for what hurts. Mentally, we may have more clarity and less confusion. However, be prepared for residual feelings and sensations, questions and doubts to linger for a period of time. In other words, don’t expect to feel warm and fuzzy right away.
Defending ourselves against the inner critic is tough work. It takes practice.
* * *
Matthew was a gay man and a longtime Buddhist practitioner. Hospitalized with pneumonia related to his HIV diagnosis, he was running a high fever, occasionally crying out, and constantly writhing and wriggling in his bed as if he wanted to crawl out of his own skin. Matthew was also battling the inner critic, who, in his case, was dressed in the robes of a spiritual authority. He had been overtaken by anxiety, fearing eternal damnation, as well as shame at how he had lived his life.
Matthew had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. The commandments of a punishing god had literally been beaten into him by his fire-and-brimstone preacher man of a father. Now, believing he was close to death, he felt certain that God would condemn him for eternity to hell due to his sexual orientation.
It is not uncommon for long-buried cultural mores and early religious training to suddenly resurface at the time of death, even if the person has deliberately left those beliefs far behind. I tried to support Matthew by orienting him to the mindfulness and compassion practices that he had studied and loved for many years. We created an altar at his bedside with his beloved Buddha statue and a healing thangka, a traditional Tibetan painting. When that failed to calm him, I held his hand, massaged his feet, and played him his favorite chanting music. Still no change. Finally, the doctor ordered a sedative. Even that didn’t work. Matthew was spinning in a world of confusion, shame, and dread.
By two in the morning, I was exhausted and, feeling ineffective and powerless, chose to go home and get some sleep. On the drive there, for some unknown reason, I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocents into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of mementos I hold dear. Here, I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus surrounded by lambs and little children.
Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. As Matthew continued to moan, shout, toss, and turn in agony, I took down the thangka and replaced the Buddha statue with this small plastic Jesus.
Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, a cleaning woman named Deana came into the room and spotted the figurine. Setting her mop to one side, she said with great enthusiasm, “Merciful Jesus! When his kindness is with us, everything is all right.”
At once, Matthew’s eyes locked onto Deana. An angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted toward the altar to gaze at the plastic Jesus statue and then back in Deana’s direction. His entire body relaxed. In that moment, the punishing God of Matthew’s childhood, the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment had made him feel like a terrible person, was transformed into the merciful God he also knew and loved. The one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called faults and flaws. A kind, forgiving, all-accepting, and benevolent God.
Deana’s faith in God’s love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed to defeat his inner critic. I left them together there. They didn’t need me.
When I eventually returned to the hospital later that afternoon, Matthew was sitting up in bed, smiling and eating a bowl of Jell-O.
Most of us have notions from our childhood religious experiences about how a “good spiritual person” ought to function in the world. I’m a Buddhist, so I’m not supposed to get angry. Matthew had been raised an evangelical Christian, so he wasn’t supposed to be gay. But really, these ideas are just our inner critics projecting themselves onto every dimension of our lives. The voice of the authority figure who lives in our heads can just as easily come from cultural conventions or religious canons as from parents or teachers.
Matthew was able to release his spiritual superego. In the final days of his life, he was able to truly accept himself as the kind, giving, beautiful man he had become. He could see clearly that the delivery system of his youth, the hellfire and brimstone and judgments, was the cause of his self-rejection. He had always felt, on some level, that he was “wrong” for being gay. But finally, letting go of his inner critic, he realized that he was all right.
How did this happen?
With love. Love is what helps set us free. Love is the ally that makes acceptance possible.
However, we often confuse acceptance with approval. Acceptance is a loving act of an open heart. Approval is generally tied up with judgment. Our hunger for approval is partly why we are so easily hooked by the critic. We try to fend off unworthiness by seeking our value from external authorities whose voices we long ago internalized. We try to satisfy the enormity of our wanting through accumulation. We hope that if we get enough, do enough, change enough, one day we will finally be enough.
We worry that acceptance means conformity and mediocrity. We wonder if it puts us in danger of becoming a doormat for others. But here’s the truth: We can’t change something that we haven’t accepted. So first we need to accept. That doesn’t mean we won’t shift behaviors or skillfully intervene when necessary. Acceptance gives us the opportunity to know ourselves and our inner voices, to examine our relationships with them. Then we can use our discerning wisdom to determine what is useful and what isn’t. And then we can decide our course of action.
With acceptance, what emerges is a deep trust in what is. We release ourselves completely from the comparison, assessment, and rejection of the inner critic. We stop blaming ourselves for having desires and wants, and instead accept these desires as a flavor of love, one that expresses our hearts’ deepest longing for what is true and real.
True acceptance begins an alchemical process. The undesirable can be changed into the desirable by mindfully embracing our flaws, shortcomings, warts, and all those rejected, painful, and scary aspects of ourselves. Even the seemingly unlovable pieces are loved because they are seen as part of the whole. We expose our imagined imperfections to the fierce fires of wisdom, strength, and love, and in so doing, we learn to turn lead into gold. Confusion dissolves into clarity. We discover courage in our vulnerability. We melt internal enemies and transform them into friends. This process reveals the real treasure, which is the pure potential that exists in everything, the glimmering properties of our essential nature.