Turn Your Inner Critic Into an Ally

An inner critic seems to be a function of being human; everyone I know has one. And every recovering perfectionist I know seems to have a particularly challenging relationship with theirs.

The thing is, I believe our inner critic is there for a reason and a season. When we are out of sync with our cycles and doing our best to ignore our inner critic, it turns up the volume until we start to pay attention.

For a while, I've been noticing my inner critic most active in the Autumn - the Contain and Complete - phase of my cycles.

The Autumn phase of any cycle is an invitation to start completing after the busy creative and productive focus of Summer. Ideally, our attention starts to move inwards. We can use this time to bring things to an end, even if it’s for the briefest of pauses. It’s a time of harvesting all the fruits of our labour and letting go of what no longer serves us to be composted for a new cycle.

This shift is challenging for many of us who have so much of our identity defined by what we do or who we are in relation to other people. It’s particularly challenging for perfectionists because we come face to face with the gaps between our aspirations for the cycle and reality. Our mistakes, our imperfections, the things we neglected to finish or even get started on all come into focus.

Often in the form of an inner critic.

This internal voice is usually harsh, brutalising and belittling. It can be painful to hear this voice speak to us in a way we would never dream of speaking to others — and yet, this internal criticism can often leak out attacking those around us without us even realising.

I believe one reason our critics are so aggressive is that we are so resistant to hearing what they have to say. We resist the end of the cycle, preferring to stay in Summer or jump straight back into Spring. We certainly don’t want to admit that we’ve fallen short of our own impossible standards.

And yet our critic has an important role to play in the Autumn of any cycle. It’s there to help us learn. To look critically at the intentions and plans we had in the Spring and our resulting actions. What worked? What didn’t? What can we be proud of? What could we do differently next time?

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then perhaps our inner critic is here to keep us sane.

When we start to listen to what our inner critics we have to say, we start to learn from their wisdom. Even if it’s painful. That process starts by connecting to our inner critic.

A Way to Connect to Your Inner Critic

Here’s a guided meditation that you can download to get to know your inner critic in a different light. Below, you’ll find some questions to journal on afterwards (or separately if guided meditations aren’t your thing).

• Where does your critic live in your body? Where and how do you sense it?
• What is it trying to protect you from?
• When did it come into your inner world?
• What purpose does it serve?
• Does it mirror someone else’s voice?
• What would it like you to know?
• Is there anything that it needs?
• How can you work together in a healthier way?
• Could it protect you differently?
• Does it have a different name that it would like to be known by?

You’re very welcome to email me with any reflections or insights you get from this process. I’d love to hear how you get on. I guided this meditation on the last round of my Reimagining Resilience programme and every person found they had a shift in their relationship with their inner critic.

Originally published at https://vixanderton.com on December 9, 2022.