As difficult as it is to escape an outer abuser, it is even more difficult to escape one who lives within. The Inner Critic’s abuse occurs in the privacy of your own mind, and the Inner Child is devastated when nobody else can see or hear or help.
One specific aspect of the Inner Critic’s activities is particularly interesting, and that is its role in the cycle of child abuse. It is well known that adults who were abused as children are likely, in turn, to abuse their own children. In a similar fashion, the Inner Critic echoes the criticism or abuse of the outer parent and continues the cycle through the abuse of the Inner Child.
INTRODUCING THE VULNERABLE CHILD
The Inner Child, which includes the Vulnerable Child that we spoke of in chapter 1, has been receiving a great deal of attention recently. We are very glad that it has, because for a long time we have felt that the Inner Child, especially in its vulnerable aspect, is one of the most important players in our inner cast of characters.
Who is this Vulnerable Child? It is the vulnerable little creature we all were when we were first born. This child was and is exquisitely sensitive. It responds to energies rather than to words. It feels what is going on around it in the world at large, and it does not try to make sense out of it. It feels everything that is going on inside of us as well. In this way, it is tuned in to all the subtleties of our emotional interactions, both the outer interactions with people on the outside and the inner ones with our very own selves.
This Inner Child has many aspects. In addition to the Vulnerable Child, who carries our deepest feelings, sensitivities, and vulnerabilities, other aspects of the Inner Child carry major portions of our spontaneity, shyness, neediness, fears, joy, magic, our ability to be unselfconscious, our playfulness, and our adventurousness. The Inner Child can be extremely angry with us or with others when we neglect or mistreat it.
It is the Vulnerable Child who is one of the major players in making intimacy possible in relationship. We speak about this in our book Embracing Each Other. When the Vulnerable Child is present in relationship you can actually feel it. There is an almost palpable warmth between you and others and the air feels full between you. When this Child is not there, you feel empty and alone.
This Inner Child, and all its aspects, is usually buried pretty early in our growing-up process. The world is not safe for someone of its sensitivities, so it goes underground and the other selves take over in order to run our lives as successfully and efficiently as they can. These are the primary selves we talked about in chapter 1. But just because we cannot see it does not mean that the Child is no longer there. It is present always, hiding somewhere in the back of the closet, up in its treehouse, or deep in a cave. From its hiding place it sees, hears, and feels, but we are not aware that this is happening.
THE CRITIC IS A CRUEL AND ABUSIVE PARENT
What happens to this exquisitely sensitive child when your Inner Critic is operating? It gets abused. Badly! This abuse can range from mild to vicious, depending upon the circumstances of your upbringing. But the abuse is always present to some degree.
Your Inner Critic was born to protect your Inner Child and to keep it from harm. Its role was to help you fit in, to conform to the world around you. No matter how gently this is done, the message is clear: your Child’s natural behavior is unacceptable, and something is wrong with its natural instincts. Because of the Vulnerable Child’s acute sensitivity, this criticism is very painful.
Now let us think about what happens when your parents have actually been insensitive or, worse yet, abusive. The Critic models itself on the outer authorities, so, in this case, it will model itself on your abusive parents. If your parents abuse you, your Critic will abuse you in a similar fashion. If your parents live shame-based lives, they will shame you and your Critic, in turn, will pick up their messages and shame you. And the Inner Critic usually increases the intensity of the abuse just to be sure that you will be adequately protected and prepared for what might come in from the outside.
Thus, in our conversations with the Inner Critic, we often hear the echoes of the abusive parents:
He’s an idiot.
She’s a bother and a pest. Even her mother wished she’d go away.
She’s a whore.
I wish he had never been born. There’s something wrong that I can’t seem to beat out of him.
She’s nothing but trouble.
He’s useless.
Success is out of the question. Nobody in this family succeeds.
He’ll never amount to anything.
There’s only one thing she’s good for …
She’s ugly and nothing will ever help.
Nobody ever really liked her.
He’s disgusting.
She’s too bossy.
If he didn’t get beaten, he would do terrible things.
If nobody disciplined her, she’d bring shame to the family.
Nobody could love a person like that! Even her mother told her that.
He doesn’t deserve any better.
People have to force themselves to be nice to him.
At some point, usually fairly early in the developmental process, the abusive Inner Critic has grown beyond its original boundaries and takes on an uncontrollable life of its own. It forgets its original purpose, which was to protect you from the outer abuse, and it just abuses you because that is what it does. It knows that you are bad and that you deserve all the vicious comments that it is making. Worse yet, it is likely to be convinced that there is something very wrong with you, that you are basically evil or flawed, and that its criticisms are therefore justified. In addition to all this, it sounds infallible, as we discussed in chapter 3.
Now you have within you an abuser, and a major part of you that is being battered by its endless, and seemingly justified, abuse is your Inner Child. This creates intense psychic pain. Sometimes the Inner Critic will arrange for actual physical abuse to be added to this psychological abuse. In these cases, the Inner Critic is actually unable to rest until some punishment has been received; some actual physical suffering or great emotional pain is required. Then the Critic is relieved, it knows that it has done its job, and it knows peace for a short while.
THE DIFFICULTY IN ESCAPING THE ABUSER
As difficult as it is to escape from an outer abuser, it is even more difficult to escape the one who lives within. The Inner Critic’s abuse occurs in the privacy of your own mind, and the Child (or any other self) is hurt when nobody else can see or hear. The picture is a very touching one; it is as though your Inner Child is locked away with your Inner Critic and there is no way in which you or anyone else can rescue it.
Many of you who have been abused work hard to escape the outer abuser but then cannot escape the abuser within. We feel that working with the Inner Critic is extremely important. When you are unable to separate from an abusive Inner Critic, you are kept in victim status. With the Critic criticizing you, you feel flawed, as though you deserve the worst that the world has to offer. You cannot protect yourself. This makes you a victim, fully available to anyone on the outside who would hurt you. As a victim, you will draw abusers to you, and you will accept their abuse.
There is an amazing irony about this inner abuse. All of this can be going on inside of you and you do not even know about it. All you know is that you feel pretty rotten about yourself and you seem to keep getting into hurtful situations. Thus, the abuse of your Inner Child is a secret even from you and if you do not see it you cannot do anything about it. One thing we can say for sure. If you keep drawing abusive people into your life, you may be sure that the Inner Critic is operating in you in an abusive way.
THE SECRECY OF THE INNER CRITIC
There is an interesting catch-22 in the way that the Inner Critic operates. In order for you to work with your Inner Critic, you must expose it to someone on the outside, much as the victim of child abuse must bring outside attention to the abuse before anything can be done about it.
If you are aware of your Inner Critic’s voice, the Critic itself will tell you that it would be simply dreadful for you to let anyone know about it. After all, if you tell others about it, they will listen to its complaints and then they will see things wrong with you that they might not otherwise have noticed. So you try to keep it a secret so that nobody will ever hear the terrible things that it knows about you. After all, it is probably right!
The more that you think of the things the Critic has to say, the more embarrassed you get and the less likely you are going to want to expose it—and your deepest, darkest shortcomings—to the world.
If this need for secrecy blocks you, then the entire cycle of (inner) child abuse remains out of reach. You cannot let others hear your Critic so that they might help you. You cannot gain access to your Aware Ego, which might be able to see things differently and would most certainly have other tools at its disposal. You are left alone with your shameful secrets, which grow ever more fetid in the dark closets of your psyche, and a Critic who keeps reminding you how truly disgusting they are.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE INNER CHILD AFTER A CRUEL CRITIC HAS BEEN TALKING
Let us hear how the Inner Child feels after it has been listening to an Inner Critic. The facilitator had been talking to Anna’s Inner Critic for quite some time. This Critic sounded a lot like Anna’s mother who was abusive to her when she was young. Suddenly Anna burst into tears. The facilitator realized that the Inner Child, who had been listening to all this abuse, had broken through. She asked Anna to move over and then began to talk to the Inner Child as follows:
FACILITATOR: You were listening, weren’t you?
CHILD (sobbing): Did you hear what she said? I can’t stand it anymore. I just can’t stand it. Sometimes I just want to stay in bed and never get up. It’s awful. It’s just not worth it.
FACILITATOR: What’s awful?
CHILD: I’m so alone. So alone! So alone! (She sobs more.) I never get to feel okay about anything. I’m always scared. She (meaning the Critic) is always screaming and screaming at me. Whatever I do, it’s no good. No matter what I look like, I’m ugly. It’s no use! I can’t do anything right. I’m stupid and clumsy and nobody ever helps me. My mom really doesn’t like me either. She used to punish me a lot. She didn’t want me to play with other kids. She said I was bad and that people didn’t like me and that’s true. I never had any friends.
FACILITATOR: It’s dreadful to be so alone.
CHILD: You bet. I don’t have a single person I can turn to. I’m really afraid. Every time I want to make a friend, she (the Critic) tells me they won’t like me anyway once they get to know me, because I’m not nice, so I don’t even want to try. Besides, nobody would really want me for a friend. I think there’s something wrong with me. She says there is. And so if people ever really saw me, they’d run away. Everybody has. (Sighing) I’m just a pest and people don’t like me. Don’t you think I’m a pest? I’d better be quiet now.
This conversation gives a picture of what happens to the Inner Child after years of abuse. It is alone and afraid. It thinks that there is something wrong with it. It is terrified that if it speaks out, it will be rejected. Although it desperately needs others, it cannot reach out.
BREAKING THE CYCLE OF CHILD ABUSE
Once you become aware of the Inner Critic as a child abuser, you can move in and treat it in much the same way that you break into the outer cycle of child abuse. The Inner Critic learned how to parent you by listening to your own parents. If they were abusive, it repeats their abuse “for your own good.” It acts just like a real parent who abuses the child because the parent, herself or himself, has been the victim of abuse.
The key to breaking the Inner Critic’s cycle of abuse is to separate from the Critic’s voice. As you separate from your Inner Critic, you will be able to take over the role of parent to your own Inner Child. Up until now. the Inner Critic has been the parent to the Inner Child; it has been an abusive parent because that is the only way it knew how to behave. Oddly enough, you can become a parent to the Inner Critic as well because you are in a position to deal with the underlying anxiety of the Inner Critic and to stop the Critic from its endless abusive chatter. You will be surprised to find that you have a wide range of knowledge and can make choices. The Inner Critic knows of only one way to cope with life—it knows how to criticize and how to abuse. (For more on learning to parent the Inner Critic, see chapter 17.)
When we work with the Critic as an inner abuser we have a way in which to enter into the outer cycle of abuse as well. Until you separate from the abusive Inner Critic and are no longer dominated by it, you will be kept a victim to everyone around you. As a victim you will draw abusers to you. As a victim you may actually induce the abuser in almost anyone that you meet, even in people who are not normally abusive. You will be unable to protect yourself from their abuse because your Critic will be telling you that you deserve all that you get. Thus, you will forever carry a “fifth column” within yourself, someone who will cooperate with the enemy and betray you to him (or her). As you become more aware of this, you gradually can learn how to silence your Inner Critic and no longer be a victim to the abusers of the world.