Because of the socialization process that most of us go through, it is often the case that powerful feelings, emotions, and instinctual energies in general are blocked from moving out into the world. What happens then is that instead of providing us with power in the world, these energies turn sour, begin to fester, and over time become more and more potent and negative inside of us. Ultimately, this disowned mass of instinctuality becomes a killer energy that spills over onto another track, the Inner Critic track, and comes back at us. Thus the Inner Critic is infused with all the power and rage of these disowned instinctual energies.
We have used humor in describing the Inner Critic because we have found that humor is one of the best ways to separate from the Critics of the world. The fact is, however, that the way the Critic affects people’s lives is anything but funny. It can effectively paralyze us through the deep sense of depression and feelings of unworthiness that it brings to us. In the case of the Killer Critic, this paralysis can become very extreme and can contribute to suicidal feelings and actual suicides.
WHAT IS A KILLER CRITIC?
Critics vary in how powerful they are. We often refer to them jokingly as lightweight, middleweight, or heavyweight. A good heavyweight Critic starts to move into the two-thousand-pound range and can go much higher than that. To be quite honest, we have not seen very many lightweights. At some point in the heavyweight category the quality of the Inner Critic shifts and one must work differently. One cannot be humorous in relationship to it. One cannot talk to it about the underlying vulnerability or anxiety. Heavyweight Critics just hate us. They want us dead.
These Critics must be treated with the utmost respect. There are good reasons why they are as angry and vicious as they are. It takes longer to find out why they hate so deeply, and it requires a great deal of patience, strength, and skill on the part of the facilitator. Listen to the following Voice Dialogue conversation with Jean, a woman in her thirties who was the adult child of an alcoholic parent and who had been sexually abused by her father from the ages of six through nine.
FACILITATOR (to Critic): You seem to be very angry at Jean. Why are you so angry?
CRITIC: I hate her. She doesn’t deserve to live. She’s cursed. There’s no point in trying to do anything with her. She is just cursed.
FACILITATOR: It sounds like you don’t want her to be around.
CRITIC: I don’t! I wish she would kill herself. I can’t stand her.
FACILITATOR: Have you always felt this way or was there some point when all this started?
CRITIC: It’s what happened with her father. She ruined my life when she let her father touch her. I hate her! I’ll never forgive her for what she did.
Though the Inner Critic takes great pride in its rationality, once we separate from it we see just how irrational it is. In the case of the Killer Critic, we can often see the irrationality early in the game. Jean’s, for instance, blames a six-year-old girl for the incest and will never forgive her. A Killer Critic hates us and can sometimes be recognized in expressions such as: He’s cursed. She has poor genes.
There’s nothing there.
I want him dead.
She’s a shell—there’s just nothing inside her at all.
He’s just hopeless, absolutely hopeless.
The more severe the abuse we suffer in our early life, the more likely it is that we have one of these Killer Critics. One central point is worth stressing: It is absolutely possible to become aware of, to separate from, and to change a Killer Critic. It just takes a little more work. We are dealing here with the Inner Abuser that is responsible for the continuing destruction of the Inner Child and the continuing ignition of the shame and abuse on an inner level. With a strong Critic, and particularly a Killer Critic, separating from shame and reclaiming the Inner Child are more difficult tasks.
Jean’s Critic is particularly interesting because it blames her for everything. We can sense the deep shame, humiliation, and rage that this Critic experienced in regard to Jean’s father. It feels that its life is truly ruined. It expresses itself in this way because there is no Aware Ego, no separation between Jean and the Critic. How can Jean lead any kind of creative life with this kind of attack going on inside of her? The answer is that she cannot. How can she feel adequate in any intimate relationship? The answer again is that she cannot.
The Aware Ego, when it begins to emerge, allows us to hear the voice of the Critic. We can listen to the attack. We can feel the desperate quality of the energy. At first we can merely identify the voice of the Critic, but with time, and as it grows stronger, we can begin to make changes. Ultimately, we can recognize the deep pain, humiliation, anxiety, and vulnerability that lie beneath the Critic and begin to become parent to it. It is strange to think of becoming parent to the Inner Critic. It is particularly strange to the Critic, itself. Nevertheless, this is the process we must follow. (For more information on learning to parent the Inner Critic, see chapter 17.)
PARTICULAR DANGERS OF A KILLER CRITIC
Killer Critics can cause serious depression, suicidal thoughts, and actual suicides. I (Hal) remember many years ago seeing a man with a Killer Critic. This was in the very beginning of the work with Voice Dialogue. I recommended to him that he do some journal writing on his own at home between himself and the Inner Critic. This is not something that I would do again under similar circumstances because we recognize now that the Killer Critic is too powerful to deal with in this way. The man returned for his next appointment a few days later and reported a dream he had the night of our session, the same night he did the writing. He dreamed of a black heart dripping black blood. This is what Killer Critics do to us. They cause severe depression.
Severe depression frequently accompanies a Killer Critic. A person being attacked by a Killer Critic is often unable to deal with people, work, and life in general. Relationships suffer profoundly because we cannot relate to others when this level of attack is going on within us much of the time. Therefore, support groups can be very important when a Killer Critic is operating, because people tend to feel isolated and these groups provide the human contact that is so necessary. When a Killer Critic is operating, appropriate therapeutic help and possibly antidepressant medication may well be indicated.
WHAT FACTORS GIVE RISE TO AND SUPPORT THE KILLER CRITIC?
Many different kinds of life experiences give rise to a strong Critic in general and a Killer Critic in particular. Let us examine some of these factors now.
1. Abusive parents give rise to abusive Critics, as we said in the previous chapter. But there are some parents, one or both, who never wanted children or in some cases wanted to abort the child but could not, or simply were overwhelmed by the enormous demands of child rearing once the child was born. Their inability to cope with these demands often causes much stress and anxiety. It is to be expected that these overwhelmed parents are frequently going to blame all their difficulties on the child and wish that the child was not there. They are very likely to tell this to the child. They make comments like:
If it weren’t for you, everything would be OK.
I never wanted to have you in the first place.
Sometimes I wish that you never had been born.
I had a life before you came along.
Sometimes the parents move in the opposite psychological direction. For instance, an overwhelmed young mother might shift to acting like a totally devoted mother and repress the part of her that hates the child and really does not want to raise it. This underlying, unspoken attitude, together with the behavior and feelings that would accompany such child rearing, would naturally fatten up a Critic to killer proportions.
2. We frequently discover that serious physical or sexual abuse during childhood led to the development of a Killer Critic. This is illustrated in the conversation with Jean’s Critic, which shows how a Killer Critic can develop in relationship to abusive sexuality in a family. One of the things that feeds the power of the Critic in these situations is the extended period of secrecy with its accompanying shame and guilt. The longer the secrecy and silence of these situations, the stronger the Critic will become.
3. The abuse that is committed through silence and withdrawal can also be devastating to a youngster, and the Killer Critic thrives in this kind of environment as well. Some people have an amazing capacity to punish with silence and withdrawal, and this creates fertile ground for Critic growth.
4. The overall lack of awareness in a person supports and maintains the power of the Critic. The Critic thrives on secrecy, on doing its work without our realizing it is there as a separate self. Any kind of therapy, self-help, or consciousness work that we do that enhances our awareness is going to help to neutralize the Critic at some level.
5. We often talk to the Killer Critics of people who spent their early lives in boarding schools or certain kinds of religious schools. These are very painful Voice Dialogue conversations because the persons experienced so much suffering in the growing-up process. In these settings certain people become the scapegoats of the teachers and students, and later in their lives the Killer Critics of these individuals take over this job of scapegoating with great authority.
DISOWNED INSTINCTUAL ENERGIES
The final factor that we are going to consider in the development of the Killer Critic is the disowning of our instinctual energies. Each of us is born with the capacity for certain kinds of feelings and certain kinds of behavior. These capacities are part of a genetic predisposition to act and behave in certain ways. We call them psychological instincts. Some instincts are totally physical in nature. Hunger, thirst, and sexuality would be examples of this. Other instincts tend to operate between the physical and the psychological. The capacity to behave aggressively in the world in order to get our needs met is an example of this. A more fully psychological instinct would be the capacity for parenting or higher wisdom.
Let us imagine that a youngster grows up in a family where aggression is not allowed to be present either in action or in thought. What happens to the child’s anger? What happens to aggressive impulses? They are, after all, energy, and energy does not disappear. Blocked aggressive energy goes into the unconscious. It becomes a disowned energy system. At a certain point in the buildup of these negative energies we give them a different name. Instead of just calling them disowned instinctual energies, we now call them daemonic energies. We use this term to indicate the fact that these energies have shifted in a very special way. They have now become sour and destructive. Natural aggression becomes destructive aggression. Natural sexuality becomes destructive sexuality.
In our book Embracing Our Selves, we reported the dream of a spiritually oriented man in his midforties. He dreams that he is trying to wrestle a drunk penis into a cold shower. His penis stands for his sexuality, which in its natural state was not drunk and out of control. Several decades of renouncing his instinctual energies had distorted his natural sexuality. It grew out of proportion, becoming more and more powerful, and soon it was out of control as though drunk on alcohol. More and more effort was needed to keep his sexual energies under control. They had become daemonic and now presented a real danger to him in his life.
To the primary parental selves, these feelings seem to become more and more dangerous and much more energy must be spent in keeping them unconscious. However, the disowned and possibly daemonic energies want redemption. They want to rejoin the family. They come to us in our dreams. They are the bad men who are chasing us, the criminals who are trying to break into our house, the dangerous adolescents who are trying to rape us, the monsters who frighten us, and the wild animals who prowl the canvas of our dreamscape.
It is then that a very interesting thing begins to happen, and it happens at quite an early age. These powerful feelings and emotions that are blocked from reaching out into the world begin to shift to another track. They were initially on the aggression track, and if allowed to operate they would be part of our power and forcefulness in the world. Instead they spill over into another track, the Inner Critic track, and then the Inner Critic is infused with all of the power of our disowned aggression and emotional energy.
With all of this daemonic energy available, it is no wonder that the Critic can easily shift over into Killer Critic. Such a Critic sounds absolutely daemonic in the way it attacks us. “I hate her! I despise her! I detest her! I detest everything about her! She is so weak it’s pitiful!” This daemonic rage, this daemonic condemnation is in large measure the disowned instinctual energy of our lives.
Therefore, an important part of the healing and weight reduction program that we must put the Killer Critic on requires us to get in touch with our instinctual energies and learn how to use our aggression and power in the world. Unintegrated power feeds the Critic like a banquet. Dealing with the Inner Critic forces us ultimately to claim this power back. The Critic does not give it up easily.
THE KILLER CRITIC AND THERAPY
A Killer Critic may well require special help. Many of the self-help programs are valuable here because they give people support and insight and a community in which to do their work. These might include any of the Twelve-Step programs such as A.A., A.C.A., O.A., Al-anon, and CODA. The spiritual base of these programs, plus the sense of community they provide for people, can provide a strong support to people who are trying to wrestle with these powerful Critics.
Sometimes psychotherapy may be needed as well, and we urge you to seek this kind of help when necessary. It is important to do whatever you need to do to get out from under the domination of the Inner Critic. To have someone as a guide who knows something about the terrain of the Critic may serve you well.