Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.
— ROBERT BRAULT
One modern epidemic that plagues most people I know is the scourge of the judging mind. This is the constant negative self-talk that relentlessly reminds us we are not smart enough, not good enough, not enough in so many ways. This habit of negatively critiquing everything we do and say erodes our well-being and thwarts our ability to accept and love ourselves just as we are. This voice condemns our all-so-human foibles and fosters chronic low self-esteem and unworthiness.
Many people I work with don’t even notice the presence of the inner critic. They are so accustomed to that negative voice in their heads that it is part of their mental furniture. This means it gets a lot of airtime. Worse still, we tend to believe everything it has to say. We think it is the voice of truth, and we allow it to dictate what we do and what we believe. It alters how we view ourselves and our accomplishments, so that we focus mostly on our shortcomings and dismiss all the ways we are good, kind, human beings.
When we allow the inner critic to measure our worth, we don’t need to wait for St. Peter to pass judgment at the pearly gates of heaven. The inner critic banishes us to a hellish place right now. Listening to that judging narrative day after day, year after year, our sense of our own value plummets, until we feel worthless, without any goodness or merit. We question why anyone would like us or love us, and we doubt our own skills and smarts. We may develop the “impostor syndrome,” which is the fear that if people really knew who we were, they would fire us from our jobs or avoid any relationship with us. All this can lead to chronic depression, self-hatred, anxiety, and in the worse-case scenario, suicidal thoughts.
If all this is true, why would any sane person give the judging mind any attention whatsoever? Why would we listen to such an unkind, harsh, critical, and inaccurate self-perception, one that only makes us miserable?
One answer is that we are conditioned to believe this voice. For example, I met Jodie in England on a meditation course. She is a smart, accomplished doctor, working with children in poverty-stricken neighborhoods in London. She cares deeply about the families and children she works with, people who live on the margins of life and suffer hardship and malnutrition. On the surface she comes across as a naturally good person doing compassionate work in the world. However, that isn’t the story she tells about herself on the inside.
Jodie was born out of wedlock. As teenagers, her parents, both Roman Catholic, had a brief affair in the 1960s and never intended to marry. Both had plans to go to college and pursue careers in medicine. The pregnancy changed everything. Her mother abandoned college, and her father took a restaurant job so they could rent an apartment and raise their daughter.
However, this was not done with joy or openness. Jodie’s parents eventually married, but they felt bitter resentment for the way having a daughter impacted their lives and restricted their dreams. Unexpected, unwanted pregnancies are not uncommon, and in Jodie’s case, her parents never got over their negative feelings, and they did not mince words. They regularly and painfully reminded their daughter that she had ruined their lives, their careers, and their hopes of travel and what could have been a happy marriage.
Sadly, Jodie, like countless others in her situation, internalized the experience of being unwanted and turned it into a deeply held view that she must be unworthy of love. To make sense of marital conflict, children commonly believe their parents’ pain and unhappiness is their fault. This results in deep feelings of guilt and shame and a free-floating sense of wrongness. Planting such seeds in a child is like planting a virus that spreads and seeps into every part of their being.
When children are regularly blamed and criticized by their parents, this becomes internalized as the inner critic. As she grew up, Jodie’s inner critic repeated her parents’ cruel words, time and time again. This is a misguided attempt at self-preservation. The inner critic tries to minimize the threat of rejection from caregivers. It attempts to ensure their love by shaming us into conforming to their needs. For Jodie, her inner critic scolded her anytime she risked her parents’ disapproval, in the hope of trying to find morsels of kindness in a barren field.
Today, fifty years later, those words and their scars are still playing themselves out for Jodie. Despite a life of service, helping those who have been neglected and downtrodden, she still hears those tunes of unworthiness in her head. For years she lived alone, feeling unlovable and avoiding romantic relationships. She still distracts herself with food and overwork to try to drown out the negative voices. Fortunately for Jodie, she found meditation and has begun to address her feelings of shame, to cultivate a genuinely kind self-regard, and to gain an objective perspective on her goodness.
Mindfulness practice is an invaluable tool for working effectively with the inner critic, as it gives us the capacity to know our experience just as it is. Without that clarity, we will be unable to know our own minds and identify what is helpful and what is harmful.
When we bring that laser quality of awareness to our judging mind, we see how unconstructive and painful those thoughts really are. Awareness identifies when judgments occur and gives us the choice to release them or shift our attention to something more constructive. We can also track the impact judgments have on our heart and our well-being. Once we see the harm they cause, we are more likely to release such patterns. However, being aware of this process is not enough. A compassionate response to the pain is also required.
In my own journey working with a harsh and punishing inner critic, one thing that helped me find space from it was feeling the hurt those judging thoughts caused. Feeling the bruising of my heart each time a negative thought landed helped me realize how painful it was to talk to myself like that. This fostered a sense of self-care, a warm tenderness to both ease the pain and thwart the impact of such words. That flowering of self-compassion, the shift from self-harm to kindness, eventually allows us to shift away from supporting and engaging with the cruelty of self-judgment to relating to ourselves as we would to a loved one, with care.
The desire to free ourselves from the inner critic is the same self-protective force we draw on to protect a child who is being harmed. That compassion can be fierce, refusing to listen to or tolerate the inner critic’s harshness. Such healthy defensiveness allows some inner space or distance from the wounds caused by judgments. Once that space is established, we can inquire into whether such critical comments are useful, accurate, or true. When we examine them in the clear light of awareness and see their folly, they begin to lose their grip and we can let them go more easily.
From that more spacious place we can cultivate a more positive and appreciative attitude toward ourselves. We can take note of our strengths, good qualities, and other positive attributes. This helps balance the ledger that has been skewed by the negative lens of the inner critic.
Over time these expressions of kindness establish a sense of worth and authentic value as a human being. They provide a genuine bulwark against the years of negativity from self-judgment. Such a warmhearted embrace of ourselves is what allowed Jodie to slowly find a way back into her own heart. You can do the same.
• PRACTICE •
Shifting from Judgment to Kindness
Transforming judgments is key if we are to truly find peace. To do this, we must become aware of how we meet these painful thoughts and how they affect our heart and body. We can shift away from listening to these harsh critiques to sensing the pain and negativity of such words. The next time you are self-critical, hearing self-judgments, register how this is experienced in your heart. Reflect on these questions:
• How does it feel to talk to yourself this way?
• Do you feel the residue of those judgments in your body?
• How does your heart feel in response to such criticism?
• What is the emotional repercussion of the judgments?
• How do they impact how you perceive yourself?
When you notice the impact of judging thoughts, feel into the tenderness for the pain self-criticism causes. Transformation comes when we are vulnerable enough to open the heart and feel the impact of the inner critic. Also notice the pain that is driving these critical thoughts. Judgments of the inner critic are often a misguided attempt to help or protect, but they do so in a hurtful and often destructive way.
From this soft but strong place, sense the voice that lovingly but firmly says no to these judgments. Find the compassionate strength that cares for you and for the parts of your psyche that feel young, vulnerable, or overwhelmed. When you do, you are less likely to feel like a victim. Instead you can begin the slow but important work of self-protection, which is an expression of love for yourself.
Finally, an important antidote to the critic and a powerful force for developing self-compassion is the practice of loving-kindness. A simple way to develop this practice is to wish oneself well. So each time you hear your critic’s judgments you can replace them with a phrase of loving-kindness for yourself, a phrase that expresses your deeper aspirations. Such phrases could be: May I be happy. May I be peaceful. May I be free from self-judgment. May I love and accept myself just as I am.
You can also do this as a formal meditation, in the same way you offered yourself phrases of self-compassion in the previous chapter’s meditation. You can offer yourself these wishes of kindness, repeating them slowly and meaningfully to yourself. As simple as this practice is, when cultivated over time, such expressions of self-kindness can have a profound impact on our well-being and be a truly effective counterpoint to the negative messages coming from the critic.
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