If you think talking to yourself is the first sign of madness or that you don’t even have conversations with yourself then you need to read this fascinating book ‘What We say When We Talk to Ourselves by professor Shad Helmstetter. He says up to 75% of the daily conversations we have, is to ourselves. So, the good news is, if you thought this was a sign of madness, it’s not and you’re doing okay. Having conversations with yourself is entirely normal, it’s how we rationalise the world.
The nature of these conversations is, however, something which may be out of control. While there are people in this world who seem to sail through life with no challenges, positive in their nature, see nothing but the good in everything. They don’t get bogged down in that self-imposed oppression of the daily grind.
There’s few of them, and if you look hard enough, they’re there. Given the opportunity to sit with these people, there is something they all have in common; they had amazing childhoods and isn’t that something?
This comes down to amazing parenting, something most parents can only aspire to. Parenting labelled good enough by clinical psychologist D.W. Winnicot in the book The Child, The Family and the Outside World said children just need parents to be consistent with their love and affection. Children don’t need their parents to be perfect because nothing in this life is perfect; well, my dog, Bella is, and this is another story.
Being good enough is, well, good enough.
The only consistency I experienced as a child was emotional abuse with a smattering of violence; love and affection from my childhood is something so alien for me to contemplate. My sense of not being liked was overwhelming.
A child in a cherished and loving family knows that making mistakes doesn’t make them the mistake. Doing things wrong as a child and being guided healthily by a parent who wants nothing but the best is the most natural thing in the world. The moment the parent uses a negative narrative and punishes the child excessively, outside social norms; the seed of perfectionism will have already been sown.
Most of us are driven by an inner critic which prevents much of us to succeed and creates a swirl of emotions such as fear, inferiority, reclusion, and isolation. My inner critic behaves as though it’s not my friend, like the monkey on my shoulder always pulling me down, telling me I’m not good enough, or I’m too fat, too ugly. The list is endless.
When we discuss to others about our inner voice, it’s often tinged with humour. We knowingly say, ‘the voices my head told me to do it,’ or, ‘I’m such a klutz, I always spill my coffee, my mother always said I was clumsy.’ The latter comment is the inner critic reinforcing what your mother always told you; you are clumsy and therefore that’s what you are. But there is nothing funny about the inner critic. It’s disabled you for most of your life, held you back, brow beat you into a place where you don’t belong. Let me give you a glance into my inner critic and how it affects me through the day.
We moved house recently, and it was a tough time. There is nothing nice about moving house, especially when you must keep working while you’re doing it. My wife, Sam, pointed out that I was absent from the beginning. Her comments were constructive, and necessary to get her husband on the same hymn sheet so we could get through the move as harmoniously as possible. Bottom line was, I needed to be present and give her the help she needed to make this trauma work.
But what I heard was, you’re lazy, you don’t help and you’re no good to me.
I instantly iced Sam out of my life. Biting down, I was angry, the inner critic was in overdrive and had a foothold in my psyche. It went full frontal attack on my character. I dialled into the voice and analysed what it was saying, it wasn’t pretty.
You are a nobody, no one loves you, look even your wife hates you. Listen to what she said about you, you’re no help. She’ll be better off without you. You don’t deserve a new house, even though you work all the hours God sends, you can live on the streets and be homeless. And one day your son will walk past you with your grandchildren, your son will recognise you a chuck you some coins. Your grandchildren will stand and laugh at you. You might as well kill yourself. You’re fat anyway. If you got in your car and left your phone at home so they can’t track you and drove to the sea, drowned yourself, no one would care, just f**k off and die…
This dialogue was the aftermath of a three-minute conversation with my wife. While we speak tongue-in-cheek about this inner critic, the above dialogue is far from funny. What followed was five days of isolation and shaming. The inner narrative building. I wanted to die; I wanted to kill myself. I physically felt oppressed, unable to breathe in my skin which caused me to abuse myself further with food because the food was the only thing which loved me, clearly my wife no longer did.
I had to speak with my therapist urgently.
Through therapy, we isolated the cause of my rift. This was the home I built protecting my family, away from my abuser and I was now losing it. For twenty years, this house was my castle, and the little boy was struggling to see the benefit of moving. He was digging his heels in which caused me to isolate from the process. When this was highlighted in a none threatening way with my wife, the little boy in me dug his heel in further and activated a full-blown inner critic attack.
It zones the imperfections we have which makes our world vibrant and different. It runs a psychological highlighter over these none-things making them something they aren’t. Fertilising it with b******t negative tones, allowing it to grow like a gargantuan oak tree of defeatism and subservient nonsense.
It can be so unkind in its vernacular, cruel even. My inner critic had taken on the voice of my abuser which makes my inner critic a doubly worse interaction with me.
A segue — how would the world have looked as if humans hadn’t been gripped with fear listening to the inner critic leaving the world to rely on the few to advance our civilisation. This would make the premise of a brilliant book, don’t you think? Imagine how our world would look.
Did Christopher Columbus listen to inner doubt and not bother pointing his ship into the abyss of nothingness before discovering the Americas? Or Neil Armstrong at the door to Apollo 13 after landing on the moon said, ‘ooh, it looks awfully dark out there.’
While we acknowledge the inner voice who behaves like someone who isn’t your friend, paradoxically, it’s the opposite.
The inner critic is a means of self-preservation making you feel flawed, worthless and inadequate. You say things to yourself such as ‘I can’t do this,’ ‘I will be crap at it,’ or ‘I’m always clumsy,’ ‘I shouldn’t be trusted with anything,’ how about this one, ‘I don’t know why people give me any time of the day,’ or this heartbreaker, ‘why do they love me?’
These negative comments you tell yourself take their toll but they’re a well-trodden neural pathway to keep you safe.
Let me explain.
As a child exposed to trauma, be it sexual, violence or emotional. This behaviour goes against the grain of the child. Children, from the day they’re born are emotionally wired to be loved, nurtured, and cherished.
This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. Failure to thrive or FTT is a well-documented medical condition which causes a whole gamut of medical ailments in children. In infants, it increases mortality by a significant factor.
When new-born babies came into the world. They were separated from their mothers for fear of infection. They left the babies crying in a ‘cot room.’ The parents could coo over their child on the other side of a window.
Infant mortality went through the roof.
FTT in young children is also well documented, and I would have ticked several boxes growing up in retrospect.
In the hands of an abuser, love, nurture and being cherished doesn’t sway. The abuser is far too selfish. As a child, nothing you do is good enough.
I was stupid, thick; I had the characteristics of a slug. Adjectives my abuser would regularly use to describe me. My life was a continual barrage of criticism with a low threshold for violence. To make matters worse, I had no control over my continence. I would literally s**t myself or wet the bed in the presence of my father which augmented his behaviour towards me. Humiliation was just the ticket. A beating for this or wearing my soiled underpants over my head.
In today’s world, we know this is just plain old abuse.
But as a young boy, perpetually frightened of the ogre in my life, my brain had to think things up quickly to protect me.
My brain knew there was nothing I could do to change the man's attitude. Synapses fired and wired hard into my brain with the inner critic slowly developing into a means of adjusting the level of abuse I would have to face.
We become disassociated from our feelings because of the abuse and abandonment developing a sponge for other people’s emotional states. Empathic understanding to nuanced changes in atmospheres and how you perceive people is arguably the only benefit of my childhood trauma. Paul Walker describes it as soul murder; toxic shame lays a fertile ground for an inner critic to develop, working synergistically together, like the gears on a car, seamlessly driving you to oblivion.
Perfectionism resulted.
Now, we all know perfectionism is an impossible aspiration to attain especially for a child which is where the dichotomy of inner critic comes into play. As children, we don’t have to be perfect to be loved by our parents. Being a child is all about development.
Children will fail and this is okay; they have to make mistakes. Part of growing up is understanding risks and benefits. This should be encouraged to debate their opinion in order to learn about the wider world. When the child face’s a constant barrage of criticism, emotional abuse, violence and sexual assault, the child’s neuroplasticity wires itself to protect the child, creating boundaries which the child lives by. An inner narrative which can become so vicious governed these boundaries and affects the very nature of the child.
Replacing the narrative with something that can be used in your favour can be difficult but not impossible.
Acknowledge you’re now safe. Remember the inner critic developed in the presence of an abusive parent. As the adult, that parent is no longer in charge of your primary care. So right now, you’re safe from harm. Verbally acknowledge this statement.
Attached to the inner critic is a low self-worth and low self-esteem. These undermine any good we want to do for ourselves, and a low self-worth prevents you from believing in yourself and claiming what is yours. Low self-esteem creates a sadness difficult to shake. With my wife, she needed to me to be by her side, and this was a mental shift. A simple ‘I am here, I am now going to be by your side as your partner,’ was all that was needed.
The next step is gratitude. A simple reflection on the life I have now, free from abuse and filled with love is something to celebrate, right? With a constant line of communication with my wife and checking into how I was feeling at each stage of the move took effort. But it was far easier than experiencing the discombobulation of making my wife sad and shouldering the burden of the a*****e in my head.
I won’t lie, addressing the inner critic is not just a daily thing; it’s by the hour; by the minute and by the second of every day. The chatter is always there, waiting to start with an innocent berating from slamming the door too hard, forgetting to put the dishwasher on the night before; not taking the dog for a walk in the morning. The list is exhaustive.
If you choose to make this life fruitful and plenty, stick to your moral codes and address the critic in your head every step of the way. It’s a constant process of inner evaluation of how you’re feeling right here and now. How you’re feeling right now can change on a six-pence and easy to miss, which is why dialling into your feelings is critical.
I know it seems difficult and in a lot of the cases, you can’t find the answers in the pages of a self-help book. Speaking to a professional for me is the only way you can find yourself out of the mess. Remember, in my earlier post, I have been in active therapy for nine years and Jane is as much a part of my life as the rest of the people in it who love me for the person I am supposed to be. I simply wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for this amazing human being.
Next week, we tackle the toxic shame we all feel which is the building blocks of maintaining the inner critic.
Stay frosty.
Jon
