Quieting the Relentless Inner Critic

by Juliane Taylor Shore

Maya’s tears were falling fast from the first moments of our work together. She was from Argentina, slight with dark curly hair. Her voice was slight too, almost like a bird song. When she’d made the appointment, she’d told me that work as an art director at a big advertising firm was hard and she wanted to talk about handling the stress. Once in my office, she’d barely sat down before she was sobbing, her breath caught in chokes in her throat.

“Can you tell me something about what’s happening right now?” I asked gently. “When you called, you said you wanted to talk to someone about job stress. I’m open to us going a different direction. What’s happening behind the tears and overwhelm, Maya?” I hoped my voice was both welcoming and tentative enough to allow her space to show up however she needed to in that moment.

“I’m a disaster,” she wept. “There’s pressure from every direction at work, and I feel like I’m always—I mean, I never let this out at work, or with my girlfriend, or I try not to—but I can’t seem to—.” She paused repeatedly. “I’ve been to therapy before, and I don’t think it helped. Maybe I’m unhealable.”

“When you feel overwhelmed, how do you talk to yourself, Maya?” I asked gently.

“It’s terrible in my head, even when I’m not overwhelmed,” she replied.

I took a breath, letting myself feel the seat under me as Maya went on to describe a vicious self-critic who berated her from the moment she woke in the morning to the moment she fell asleep. She walked through the world with a continual sense of dread, aware that anything she did, or didn’t do, could lead to an intense bout of self-hatred, in which she’d feel awash in shame, her stomach knotted up with nausea. She was walking on eggshells in her own mind.

This self-hatred, I noted to myself, is the sticky symptom. Because sticky symptoms are inextricably tied to the subconscious mind, they stay put and feel unmovable even with big interventions focused solely on shifting them. I tag this as a sticky symptom so that I remember to help us discover how this symptom makes sense to her inner landscape but not to make it the focus of the work. With clients, I try to home in on the subconscious emotional learnings that keep the symptom stuck.

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