By now you should be getting better acquainted with your critic. Hopefully you’ve improved at separating the critic’s voice from the continuous stream of self-talk that goes on throughout the day. This task is a little bit like tapping the phone of a suspected drug lord. You have to sift through a lot of innocuous conversation in order to hear him betray himself. You can’t stop listening, because at any moment he could say something incriminating.
Before you can disarm the critic, you have to know him. Secrecy is his greatest strength. So if you can get really good at hearing and identifying his voice, you will have won a major victory. Remember that every time the critic attacks, he is doing you real psychological harm. He is further wounding your sense of worth and making it harder to feel competent and happy in the world. You can’t afford what he is doing to you. It’s costing you too much.
Since it’s not really possible to stay on total alert every moment of your waking life, you need to know when you should be especially vigilant. In the last chapter, you were given a list of problematic situations—times when you have made a mistake, been criticized, or dealt with people who might be disapproving. But there’s another time when you need to watch for the critic. That’s when you are feeling depressed or down on yourself. These emotions are usually triggered by the critic, and their presence indicates that he is at work. In order to catch the critic in the act of making you depressed, you need to do four things:
If you follow these four steps each time you feel depressed or down on yourself, you’ll become much clearer about the specific content of the critic’s attacks.
If you did the exercises in the last chapter, you are now more aware of the basic themes of your critical voice. As you analyze your critical thoughts, determining what they help you feel or help you avoid feeling, you’ll begin to see a pattern to the attacks. One person may find that his critic’s primary function is to help him atone for guilt. Someone else may experience a critic whose main effort is to provide achievement motivation. Another person’s critic may help desensitize her to the fear of rejection. Or a critic may harangue you to stay on the straight and narrow path. When you become aware of the theme or themes your critic uses, you are ready to fight back.
Disarming the critic involves three steps: (1) unmasking his purpose, (2) talking back, and (3) making him useless.
There are few things more effective for winning arguments than to suddenly unmask your opponent’s ulterior motives. A classic example is tobacco company “research” that finds no link between cigarette smoking and heart disease. Since the ulterior motives of the tobacco industry are clear, few people take its arguments seriously.
When you unmask the critic, you expose his true purpose and functions. Here are some examples of ways you might unmask your critic:
Getting clear about the critic’s function makes everything he says less believable. You know his ulterior motive. No matter how he rants and raves, you’ve exposed his secret agenda and therefore feel less vulnerable to him. Remember that the critic attacks you because his voice is in some way being reinforced. When you are able to identify the role your critic plays in your psychological life, when you are able to call his game, you are beginning seriously to undermine the credibility of his message.
The idea of talking back to your own critical voice may seem strange to you. But in truth much of this book is about talking back: learning to refute and reject the old negative programming you received as a child. While growing up, Wanda received literally thousands of devaluing messages—first from her father, and then from her own critical voice. Whenever her father was angry, he would call her stupid. In particular, he ridiculed her for doing things “the hard way” and for getting only Cs in high school. All of her life, Wanda has believed her father’s judgment. These days, her critic constantly berates her for doing things “the stupid way.” Wanda’s self-esteem can’t improve until she stops these messages by learning to talk back to the critic. She needs a psychological cannon to blow the critic away so that he finally shuts up.
What follows are two methods for talking back. Properly delivered, they will render the critic speechless for a few minutes. Experiment with each of them; try them singly and in combination. Find out which one work best for you.
Poor self-esteem was costing the sales representative a great deal in every area of his life. When the critic attacked, he could now talk back by saying, “You make me defensive and afraid of people, you cut my income, you lose me friends, and you make me harsh with my little girl.”
It’s time for you to evaluate the cost of your own critic. Make a list of ways in which your self-esteem has affected you in terms of your relationships, work, and level of well-being. When you’ve completed the list, combine the most important items into a summary statement that you can use when the critic attacks. Fight back by telling the critic, “I can’t afford this; you’ve cost me…”
Affirming your worth is no easy task. Right now you believe that your worth depends on your behavior. Metaphorically, you see yourself as an empty vessel that must be filled, drop-by-drop, with your achievements. You start out essentially worthless, a body that moves and talks. The critic would have you believe that there is no intrinsic value in a life, only a potential for doing something worthwhile, something important.
The truth is that your value is your consciousness, your ability to perceive and experience. The value of a human life is that it exists. You are a complex miracle of creation. You are a person who is trying to live, and that makes you as worthwhile as every other person who is doing the very same thing. Achievement has nothing to do with it. Whatever you do, whatever you contribute should come not from the need to prove your value, but from the natural flow of your aliveness. What you do should come from the drive to fully live, rather than the fight to justify yourself.
Whether you’re a researcher unlocking the cure for cancer or a guy sweeping the street, you have known hope and fear, affection and loss, wanting and disappointment. You have looked out at the world and tried to make sense of it, you have coped with the unique set of problems you were born into, and you have endured pain. Over the years you’ve tried many strategies to help you feel better in the face of pain. Some of your strategies have worked; some haven’t. Some have worked short-term, but in the long run brought greater distress. It doesn’t matter. You are just trying to live. And in spite of all that is hard in life, you are still trying. This is your worth, your humanness.
The following affirmations are examples of things you might say to yourself to keep the critic at bay:
One of these may feel right to you. Or none of them. What’s important is that you arrive at a statement that you believe and that you can use to replace your critical voice.
Take time now to write your own affirmation. If you are having difficulty writing an affirmation that’s true, chapters 4, 7, and 10 on accurate self-assessment, compassion, and handling mistakes will help you generate affirmations you can believe.
Remember that you need positive affirmations to fill in for the critic’s voice. Try to use an affirmation every time you have successfully shut down an attack from your critic.
The best way to disarm your critic is to render him useless. Take away his role, and at last he will be silent. Understanding how the critic works isn’t enough. You may now be aware that your critic’s function is to push you to achieve or protect you from the fear of rejection or atone for your guilt. But knowing that function doesn’t change much. Those same needs must be met in new and healthy ways before you will be willing to forgo the services of your critic. This book is about new, constructive ways of taking care of your needs without relying on the critic.
What follows is the list from the previous chapter of needs that the critic may typically help you meet. After each listing is a brief discussion outlining healthy alternative strategies for meeting the need that do not rely on the critic. You will also be directed to chapters in this book that can give specific help.
The second step involves learning to evaluate your goals to determine if they are appropriate for you. Is it you who wants to own this house, or is it your father or your spouse or some ideal of “the good provider”? Chapter 8, on shoulds, will once again provide help in evaluating your goals. You will explore your goals in terms of short- and long-range consequences to determine if they are right for you. An honest exploration will inevitably reveal that some goals simply cost too much. Chapter 9, “Acting on Your Values,” will help you reveal your values and put your values into action.
The last step toward meeting your need to achieve in healthy ways is to find new motivators. Your old motivator was the critic, who attacked if you didn’t work hard enough toward your goals. A healthier form of motivation is to visualize the positive consequences of success. When you see yourself reaping the benefits of an achieved goal, when you can imagine each detail of your success, and when you can hear the approval of friends and feel the satisfaction, then you have created an extremely powerful motivational force. Chapter 14, on visualization, provides detailed instructions for using imagery to motivate desired behavior.
If you find that your rule is an unhealthy one, you can fight your guilt by beginning to question your old value. This is easier said than done, but chapter 9 will give you a step-by-step method for revealing healthy values and putting them into action to enhance your sense of worth.
The following chart is a guide for using the rest of this book. On the left side of the chart is the list of needs that your critic helps you meet. Along the top of the chart are chapter titles that offer specific alternatives for meeting these same needs in healthy ways. The X’s indicate which chapters offer help appropriate for a particular need.