Healing Your Emotional Self (14 page)

Exercise: Your Inner Critic/Your Parents

1. Take some time to write about what your parents wanted for you and from you. Who did they want you to be and why? How did they communicate this, and how did it affect you?
   

2. Explore the ways in which your inner critic or judge acts like your mother or father. How does the way you relate to yourself reflect how they related to you?
   

How to Disengage from the Inner Critic

The second step in learning how to disengage from your inner critic or judge is to observe yourself closely while you are experiencing an attack. This will not be an easy task. It will require you to stay present, paying particular attention to your body and your emotional reactions.

1. Pick a self-attack you have recently noticed or one that is very familiar to you (for example, telling yourself you are stupid when you make a mistake or judging yourself harshly in com- parison to someone else).
   

2. If at all possible, find a time and place to be quiet so you can stay with your inner process.
   

3. Focus your attention away from the outside to the inside— from the judge and its messages to your inner self and how the messages are affecting you. Observing your experience in this way will help you to expose more of the emotional layer of that experience.
   

4. Once you have become aware of the feelings that are trig- gered by the attack, either write them down or speak them out loud.
   

5. By staying with your feelings you may sense that feeling this way is a familiar experience; in fact, it probably has happened many times before. Staying with the feelings that come up will also tend to open you to associated feelings and beliefs about the situation. You may discover a different or deeper under- standing of the current attack as you recall earlier experiences. You may notice that you are remembering not only an incident but also an entire cluster of beliefs, body sensations, and other senses such as smell, sound, or visual images. These may all fit together to create a complete experience.
   

Externalizing Your Inner Dialogue

The critical voice can be activated in any situation in which you find yourself feeling vulnerable or exposed. Once activated, a shaming spi- ral is set in motion that has a power of its own. Therefore, it is imper- ative that you externalize this internal dialogue, because it is one of the major ways you keep yourself feeling bad about yourself. It will help you to make the internal dialogue conscious as well as take away some of its power over you.

Exercise: Exposing Your Inner Critic

The following is an adaptation of a Gestalt Therapy exercise. It was developed to expose the inner self-critical dialogue that many of us have going on in our heads without realizing it.

1. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Imagine that you are facing a mirror and are able to look at yourself as you sit in the chair. Notice how this image—this person who is facing you—is sitting. What are you wearing? What kind of facial expression do you see?
   

2. Now criticize this image of yourself as if you were talking to another person. It works best if you talk out loud. Tell yourself what you should and shouldn’t do. It will help if you begin each sentence with, “You should ” or “You shouldn’t .” Criticize yourself for sev- eral minutes, allowing everything you can think of to come out. Pay close attention to your voice as you criticize your- self.
   

3. Imagine that you change places with the person facing you—the image of yourself in the mirror. Become the per- son who was criticized and answer the charges. What do you say in response to these critical comments? What does the tone of your voice express? How do you feel as you respond to these criticisms?
   

4. Switch roles and become the critic again. As you continue this dialogue, be aware of what you say, how you say it, the tone of your voice, and how you feel. Pause occasionally to listen to your words and to let yourself experience them.
   

5. Continue to switch roles whenever you feel like it, but con- tinue this dialogue. Notice what is going on inside you as you do this. Notice how you feel both physically and emo- tionally in each role. Does the voice that is doing the criti- cism sound like anyone you know? What else are you aware of in this interaction? Continue this dialogue for a few min- utes longer and notice any changes as you continue.
   

6. Sit quietly and review all that transpired during this dia- logue. You may wish to write down your feelings and insights. For example, you probably experienced some kind of split or conflict between a powerful, critical, authorita- tive part of you that demands that you change, and another less powerful part of you that makes excuses, apologizes, or
   

   evades the issue. It may seem that you are divided into a parent and a child. The parent (or, in Gestalt lingo, the “topdog”) is always trying to get control to change you into something “better,” and the child (or “underdog”) is contin- ually evading these attempts to change. You may have noticed that the demanding, critical voice sounded like one of your parents or perhaps someone else in your life who makes demands on you, or another authority figure who controls you.
   

   Talking Back to Your Inner Critic
   

   Your self-esteem has no chance of improving as long as you are constantly being bombarded by the negative messages from your inner critic. One of the most powerful ways of quieting and counter- ing your inner critic is to talk back to him or her. Literally. Just as you would not allow a bully or tyrant to relentlessly criticize you or put you down, you cannot allow your inner critic to continue to wear away at your self-esteem.
   

   Most people are very uncomfortable with the idea of talking back to their inner critic. Because the inner critic is usually created by their parents’ messages and may actually take on the form of one of their voices, it may feel as if they are talking back to their parents. If you are still intimidated by your parents, this can be a frightening prospect indeed. If the idea of talking back to your critic scares you, start off slowly, doing it only when you feel particularly brave or strong.
   

   The following phrases have proven to be particularly powerful in silencing an inner critic. Choose the ones that feel good to you, that empower you, that make you feel angry.
   

   • Shut up!
     

   • Stop it!
     

   • This is poison. Stop it!
     

   • Get off my back!
     

   • This is garbage!
     

   • These are lies.
     

   • These are the same lies my mother told me.
     

   • I don’t believe you.
     

   • No more put-downs.
     

   • Go to hell!
     

Catch the critic just as he starts—before he is allowed to weaken you or do much damage. Internally scream at the critic so you can drown him out with your anger. If your inner critic screams back, yell even louder. You may even need to yell out loud. Profanity is perfectly healthy and may empower you further. If you do this whenever you hear your critic’s voice, you will find that his attacks will diminish in frequency.

When Your Inner Critic Becomes a Saboteur

Sometimes it almost seems as if there is a part of us that is bent on sab- otaging anything good that comes our way. It especially rears its ugly head when we are trying to make changes to our lives or to break old, negative patterns. I have struggled with a powerful inner saboteur all my adult life. Most recently, it appeared as I began to work on chang- ing the resistance to physical exercise I’ve had most of my life. After I joined a health club and began swimming regularly and taking aqua aerobics classes, I found that I loved exercising in the water, that in fact it touched something deep in my soul. This encouraged me to step up other types of exercising, and I began to feel better and bet- ter about myself. But my inner saboteur wasn’t so happy with this turn of events. The following dream shows how it is at work on me, even in my sleep.

In my dream I was with a supportive group of people having fun. I decided to take a shower, which was in the same room. I took off my clothes and got into a glass-enclosed shower. The people around me weren’t looking at me and I felt safe in their presence. I was loving the feeling of the water on my naked body, the sensuality of the feel of my

skin. I felt very young and very innocent. Suddenly, a preacher came into the shower and started grabbing at my breasts. (I was clearly an adult in the dream, although a younger version of myself.) I was appalled and recoiled away from him. He continued to try to grab me, and I yelled at him to stop. He had a wicked smirk on his face and seemed to be taking pleasure in upsetting me. I continued to back away to get as far away from him as I could, but he kept grabbing at me. The others called to him to stop, but this did no good.

My dream was a clear depiction of my current struggle. The peo- ple in the dream represented the support I was receiving from the people at the health club and my personal coach. The shower repre- sented the swimming pool and jacuzzi at my club. And the preacher was clearly my inner saboteur.

Because I was a child of a narcissist who emotionally battered me with criticism and rejection from an early age, I developed what is commonly called a powerful negative
introject,
or
inner saboteur
. Normal parents tend to accept their child even when she does wrong—they condemn her bad behavior without rejecting her. But children of a narcissistic parent (and often those who were highly crit- icized, manipulated, or rejected) develop a more negative inner critic or negative introject, which is actually an inner representation of the rejecting parent. The negative inner parent or introject lives on in the mind of the adult who was emotionally abused as a child, even when the real parent is absent. The introject embodies the demands the child is supposed to meet in order to gain parental approval, and it reinforces childhood roles and behaviors that were acquired for sur- vival. The introject still threatens to withhold love if the child does not do as he or she wishes. It also embodies the parental rage toward his or her child for failing to meet his standards.

Instead of acting as a healthy monitor, as in the case of a healthy inner critic, the negative introject acts from within as a punishing enemy. It creates such severe anxiety that it paralyzes, producing such powerful guilt that the person feels totally worthless (shamed). Depression, guilt, shame, and inner conflict tear the person apart. It may cause a person to actually victimize himself in much the same way that his parent victimized him—attacking his weaknesses with the same hateful anger and disdain.

There is nowhere to run, no hiding place to get away from this harsh inner voice. But there is a way to quiet this voice. With careful examination, it is possible to root out the influence of the inner sabo- teur and talk back to it.

As Elan Golumb stated in her book
Trapped in the Mirror
, the

negative introject first enters our reality when we are children who desperately need our parents’ love. If they are critical or unloving, their disapproving eyes and angry mouths start hurting us from within. As we continue to grow, the negative introject imposes limitations on us. Our true selves may attempt to disagree, but they are inevitably trounced upon by the negative introject. Remember, the negative introject wants to be topdog and, unlike a conscience that leads to comfort through security and limits, it removes security from the self. Despite its negative effect, we believe that by listening to the negative introject we will be able to gain our parents’ love.

How to Identify a Negative Introject (Also Called Your Inner Saboteur)

A negative introject or inner saboteur feels like a foreign, attacking entity, because it is partly the voice of your attacking and restrictive (narcissistic) parent whose thinking took up residence in your mind. Little escapes its quest for control. It criticizes you with such com- ments as “You’re a failure” and “Why try?”

Sometimes the saboteur takes the form of a cruel voice inside your head, but usually the cruelty is more silent—and deadly. It is a cruelty that echoes the out-and-out hostility of a narcissistic parent as well as the anger your inner child feels when she is frustrated. This cruelty can cause depression. It can make you discount compliments and distrust affection. Its punitive demands and paralyzing arguments can stop you from trying to change and can cause you to fail at what- ever you try to achieve.

The child inside still clings to the hope, however futile, that she will someday be able to gain her parents’ love. Because of this, our inner child clings to childish ways and, in many ways, takes over. It can cause us to be addicted to sugar, to procrastinate, to be continually

late, to indulge in childhood needs and pleasures while our adult lives fall apart. This is what began happening to me. The more I exercised, the more I began to crave carbohydrates. I had been on a low- carbohydrate diet and had lost quite a lot of weight. I also felt better when I restricted my intake of carbs. But suddenly I was craving them again and not having the willpower to say no.

The normal experience of having an inner critic is that its negative messages can cause us to modify our behavior, but the negative intro- ject or saboteur is indifferent. It doesn’t necessarily come in the form of negative messages that can be heard and identified. If you have a saboteur, you may only be able to recognize its influence by carefully noticing what happens whenever you experience pleasure, love, recognition, or success. That’s when the saboteur is likely to rear its ugly head, because it feels threatened whenever you experience these things. Your inner saboteur wants to cripple you, keep you from hap- piness, or even destroy you. It cannot tolerate your feeling or experi- encing anything good. What happens when you do experience the good feelings of acceptance, the joy of spontaneity and pleasure, or the pride of accomplishment? Your inner saboteur will find a way to destroy the moment. In my case it was causing me to stuff myself with carbohydrates after experiencing the sensuality of the water while I swam, the connection with my body after I exercised, and the pride in accomplishment when I continually increased my endurance as I learned to swim. It insidiously attacked me by causing me to crave car- bohydrates and by quieting my more positive inner critic, who might have reasoned with me to limit my intake, and the healthier part of me, who would signal to me that I was sabotaging the benefits I had gotten by exercising.