When the negativity of the Inner Critic is finally neutralized, the ideas of the Inner Critic become an important part of your inner support system. They are now an aspect of your objective, discerning mind. The transformed Critic also helps to keep you safe. It gives you authority, objectivity, and the ability to set appropriate boundaries. This kind of support is like having a good internal parent who protects you and protects your creative process. In this way, you are freed to lead a creative life.
We are coming to the end of this particular journey together. It has been a pleasure for us to share with you the knowledge and experience we have gained from our many years of observing the Inner Critic—both our own and others’. As you may have noticed, the Inner Critic has been a never-ending source of amazement and fascination as well as a real challenge to us.
Our own attitude toward the Inner Critic has changed over the years. In the beginning, we treated the Critic as a wily and dangerous opponent. We tried to disempower it in whatever way we could. We joked about it, we played with it, we spent hours and hours exposing its cruelty and its contradictory demands, we exhorted people to do battle with it. Now we try to understand it. We look for its anxiety and ally ourselves with its underlying concerns rather than listen to its superficial complaints. Our aim is to help people to develop an Aware Ego that can assume responsibility for directly dealing with these concerns and can neutralize the destructive aspects of the Inner Critic as well.
What happens to the Inner Critic when the Aware Ego takes over this job of driving your psychological car? Just like in the fairy tales, it transforms. When your Aware Ego assumes responsibility for your life and your Inner Critic no longer has to feel so anxious, it has a chance to use its many talents in a new, and fully supportive, fashion. It actually develops within itself an awareness of your needs and takes these into consideration when it gives advice. It protects you and it protects your creativity. Those of you who are familiar with Jungian psychology may note some resemblance between the Inner Critic and the animus. In this particular transformation, the negative animus turns into a positive animus.
THE OBJECTIVE MIND
The Inner Critic has always had the ability to analyze—everything! Its intelligence is remarkable. As the Critic transforms, it retains this intelligence and the ability to analyze everything, but its analysis and evaluation no longer sound judgmental. It is now objective, and its observations are discerning rather than condemnatory. The key here is that you no longer feel dreadful when the Critic finishes its comments. You do not feel that you are always making mistakes or are beset by symptoms. You no longer fear that you have lost your last opportunity to succeed in life. The transformed Critic now looks at you, your life, and your work objectively and feeds you information about what it sees.
The Inner Critic now has the quality of a discerning, objective mind; you might even wish to rename it the Objective Mind. It is ultimately rational and will help you to think clearly and to make appropriate discernments. It can review a piece of work and, without judgment, point out what was good and what was not good. It can show you what is missing or where you might have done something differently. It can help us in editing this book. It will look over what we have written and suggest changes. It will not take us to task for being stupid or for making mistakes; it will merely show us how things could look better.
In a similar fashion, your Objective Mind can help you in whatever it is that you do. It tends to be quite impersonal. It can even take issues that are usually emotionally loaded and analyze them. It can deal with your looks: What are your better features and which ones do you wish to play down? It can help you immeasurably on your job or in your profession. It will review your reports, do a last-minute check on something that you have built or repaired, or evaluate what changes are needed in your department. If you are a therapist, it can point out that your last set of interventions did not work and perhaps you should try something else. In sports, it can monitor your performance and make suggestions that will help you to improve.
This transformed Critic can even assist you in your personal life. As your Objective Mind, it can help you to figure out your own motivations and to observe your own behavior and its effect on others. It can provide unbiased information to your Aware Ego about many aspects of your interpersonal relations, including dispassionate observations of the significant people in your life. It can help you in child rearing. It is invaluable in setting limits or protecting your own boundaries.
Just as the Inner Critic was able to operate in every arena of your life, so can its transformed counterpart, the Objective Mind. Its clear vision can help you make discernments whenever and wherever these are necessary.
FOCUS
Another gift that your transformed Critic can bring to you is the ability to focus your attention. Its perceptions are clearly focused rather than diffuse. Remember how it could concentrate on every detail? Now this ability can work in your favor. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with you, it can bring you this capacity to concentrate on even the smallest details in all areas of your life and work.
The Critic, because of its basically rational approach to life, is not distracted by feelings. Therefore it can maintain its focus despite distraction. With its ability to focus, the Critic brings patience. The Critic had unending patience in the past in its search for what was wrong, and it can now put that patience to work for you rather than against you.
DISCIPLINE
Your Critic’s aim was to have you do your best so that you would be safe, loved, and successful in life. As an ally, your transformed Critic continues to pursue this goal. It will not settle for shoddy work or halfhearted attempts to deal with the challenges that life brings to you. If you try hard and do your best, it will be pleased; if not, it will continue to pressure you to do better.
However, this pressure is not the relentless, cruel pressure that it was previously. As the Critic transforms, it becomes conscious of your limitations and vulnerabilities. Therefore, its demands will be reasonable. There is one area in which its demands are particularly helpful. It admires, and insists upon, discipline. In this way, it acts like a good parent, helping you to achieve appropriate discipline in all aspects of your life.
AUTHORITY
Remember the unquestionable authority of the Inner Critic? We are talking here about the ring of authority that made all its pronouncements sound like absolute truth. When your Critic transforms, this authority is now available directly to you. giving you greater power in the world. This gift of the transformed Critic supports you in every aspect of your life. Your new authority enables you to present yourself without doubts and hesitations and to convey the impression that you know exactly who you are, what you think, and what you want.
You do not have to be a know-it-all or an objectionable bully. The authority is just there naturally. If you recall, it was never necessary for your Inner Critic to shout and threaten; it only had to whisper and you listened.
CONSCIENCE
A transformed Inner Critic has as its attributes not only objective thought, focus, discipline, and authority; it also has attributes that we have traditionally thought of as related to conscience. It is quite discriminating in its concern with questions of morality, of right and wrong.
In its negative state, the Critic often torments us with references to our basic “badness,” sometimes suggesting that we are irrevocably flawed or unredeemably sinful. It seems as though we can never be good enough to please it. Even if our actions are worthy, the Critic can judge us on the evil of our thoughts or motivations. A transformed Inner Critic can objectively evaluate our actions in moral or ethical terms and thereby contribute valuable information to our decisions in life.
We each have a set of values and a sense of rightness and wrongness. Most of us would like to live up to certain moral standards, although we are not always clear as to what they are. We just do not feel good inside when we have gone against them. The transformed Critic can help us to clarify and then to live up to our own moral standards. It can bring to our attention the ways in which we might have behaved differently. Again, we do not mean that it berates us and makes us feel terrible about ourselves. It simply is straightforward and objective in its evaluation of our thoughts and actions. After all, at times we really need this help, especially from a supportive authority within.
FREEING YOUR CREATIVITY
Last, but certainly not least, you will notice that when your Critic is transformed your creativity is freed because the Inner Critic is no longer blocking it. You are in a position to listen to your own intuition and to allow your creative impulses to flow. You can live your life creatively and enjoy your own creative process.
We have always viewed the Inner Critic as a major interference to this creative process. How can any of us expect to live a creative life, to change, to come up with new ideas, or to take risks when the Inner Critic is telling us that nothing will ever work? How can we try to do something that nobody else has done when the Inner Critic is waiting to comment upon our mistakes? How can we finish a piece of work while the Critic is looking over our shoulders, showing us all the things that are wrong with it?
A powerful Inner Critic undermines our courage by pointing out our inadequacies and weakness. It terrorizes us. We freeze into mediocre imitation and cannot trust ourselves and our own creative process. When the Critic is strong, the only safe way for us to be in the world is to be exactly like everyone else and never to try anything new or different. This way it will not become anxious because it can find no faults in us.
Similarly, when the Critic is strong, it is almost impossible to engage in any creative or artistic activity. When we write, the Inner Critic has something negative to say almost before we can put the words on paper. It chokes us up so that we cannot sing or play instruments. Our painting or sculpting is subjected to its merciless and endless anxious critique. We become so self-conscious that almost nothing can move through us freely or with grace.
When the Inner Critic transforms as we have described, it can be used to support our creativity. It provides the focus, the form, and the discernment that is such an important part of shaping the creative process. It can provide the discipline that so often is necessary. We can listen to our intuition, create our own artistic products, and develop new ideas. Then the transformed Critic can help us look these over objectively and make the proper adjustments and corrections. It can also support us with its authority. It acts much like a good parent with an imaginative and creative child.
LIVING LIFE AS AN ENERGY DANCER
All is energy. Energy is neither good nor bad; it just is. The Inner Critic is an energy pattern that vibrates in a particular way. Each of the selves that we have spoken about is also a form of energy. Each vibrates in its own particular pattern. Each has a good side and a bad side.
You have seen how the energy pattern we call the Inner Critic can work against you, blocking everything that you try to do and making your life miserable until, in some instances, life almost does not seem worth living. You have followed with us, and together we have journeyed down the path of transformation. First you learned how to hear and to recognize your Inner Critic, then how to understand it, and finally, with your newly developed Aware Ego, you learned how to “dance” with it, not to master it. As a result of this, your Critic has begun to transform and the attributes that have been destructive can begin to be supportive.
Let us take this opportunity to remind you that this change is neither totally irreversible nor irrevocably permanent. At times of increased stress and vulnerability, the Inner Critic has been known to revert to its old ways. Please do not be discouraged. This is not a disaster nor is it a sign of failure; it is a completely natural occurrence. Just repeat the separation process. You know how to recognize your old pal, the Critic, and how to dance with its energies. Just remember that he or she has become frightened and is asking for help.
Using the Inner Critic as a teacher, we have shown you how to become aware of a self, or energy pattern, then how to separate from it, and finally how to dance with it. As with all energies, once you know about them, you are in a position to deal with them differently. They no longer need to take over and run your life. The gifts these selves bring you can be used and their negative aspects can be transformed, minimized, or avoided.
We began this book by welcoming you to the land of the Inner Critic. We end it by welcoming you to the land of the Aware Ego and to a new way of living in the world with your own natural creativity—as an Energy Dancer.