Why We Don’t Try To ‘Reason’ With The Inner Critic

Along the self love path, many of us are going to start to realize that we have a part of ourselves that isn’t totally caught up to our adult reality.

In fact, many of us are going to come to see that we have MANY parts of self that are operating from a place of feeling helpless, feeling like we can’t figure things out on our own, feeling that we’re trapped in any hard or uncomfortable circumstances we may find ourselves in and that feels like if we are to be disliked or abandoned that this will mean being alone and lost forever.

As we do our self love work, we will slowly be helping ourselves to shift into a state where we’re able to nurture and nourish our inner child parts into a state of safety and believing that we’re going to be there for them, that we are going to love them and that we’re going to support them no matter what - and this will slowly start to help us shift out of being in a state of fear to being in a state of relative empowerment.

This work will of course take time, and also a lot of patience and kindness towards those inner child parts.

It can be relatively easy to identify our inner child parts when they are expressing ourselves in ways that feel and seem really childish. For instance, when we are going into a state of trigger and responding to people from a place of deep fear of being abandoned. When we’re highly emotional and struggling to see how life may actually be safer or more secure than we think it is right now. When we’re repeating patterns that we know we picked up in childhood such as fawning or people pleasing.

We can often get really good at recognizing our inner child parts so long as the inner child is acting like a child - but where most of us struggle to make the connection that we’re working from an inner child place is when our inner critic voice is taking over our lives.

For most of us, when the inner critic takes over we tend to feel like this voice is 100% true and real.

For most of us, when our inner critic takes over, it feels like we are listening to a very adult voice that is seeing reality clearly and telling us the exact truth about everything.

But the reality is that this voice is actually the ULTIMATE inner child voice.

Our inner critic is actually the least mature part of us, that’s working from the most intense fear of rejection, the deepest belief that if we aren’t loved we can’t be safe and is believing the scariest version of reality possible.

Which is why we’re not going to be able to reason with the inner critic. We can’t convince the inner critic to be nice to us when it’s in that spiraling state of self hate. We can’t make the inner critic stop being mean to us by putting a hat on them.

Rather, we need to treat the inner critic like the scared, vulnerable and in need of love child part that it is, so that we can move ourselves out of that fear state and into a state of safety - which is ultimately what’s going to give us the capacity to step back into our actual adult perspective so we can move out of self hate.

Why Is The Inner Critic Actually The Inner Child?

In order to understand why having compassion for this inner critic is so important, and in order to understand why trying to reason with, ignore or otherwise invalidate the inner critic is actually going to drive us deeper into self hate, we first have to understand the true mechanics of the inner critic.

You see, just as we’ve talked about many, many times around here, the inner critic was born in our childhoods as a way of trying to protect us from the very real threat that our childhood selves believed being abandoned, rejected, shamed, blamed and guilted was.

Remember, in our childhood experience, we were fully and completely dependent upon our caregivers for everything.

We depended upon our caregivers love, understanding, affection and empathy in order to be seen, heard, validated and understood in our needs, our wants, our pain, our emotions, our desires and our genuine expression.

WIthout their care, without their support, without their understanding and guidance, we weren’t able to meet our own needs. We weren’t able to provide for ourselves. We couldn’t make ourselves safe and any feeling that our caregivers were rejecting us, pulling away from us, abandoning us or if they were outright criticising, judging, harming or abusing us, put us in a deeply painful, existential fear place.

From our childhood perspective, to be rejected, abandoned, abused or otherwise made to feel that we weren’t be loved or empathized with, was to feel that we were going to die. It was literally THAT scary to us because again, these were the people we depended upon for everything.

Losing their love, losing their approval, losing their empathy and guidance, to us at the time, was akin to losing safety altogether.

At this time and from our perception, we couldn’t rationalize or reason. We couldn't understand that caregivers could be flawed and perhaps that their behavior had nothing to do with us. We couldn’t see that caregivers could be wrong about what they were expressing as acceptable and not acceptable in terms of expression and ways of life. We couldn’t see that caregivers could sometimes simply not have access to what we needed or wanted. We couldn’t feel ok if they couldn’t meet our needs because outside of them, there was no other way to meet our own needs.

Rather we were learning deep in our nervous systems - in our emotional parts of self - that to lose their love, to lose their acceptance, to lose their approval was to be deeply unsafe. We were learning that in order to make ourselves safe again, we needed to change and manipulate the one thing we thought was causing the lack of connection and the one thing we felt we had any control over - ourselves.

In this temporary codependent state of relating to our caregivers, we needed them for everything. And losing their love felt like losing safety altogether. We could not understand that our caregivers could be flawed or incapable - all we could see was that if they weren’t meeting our needs or if they were rejecting a part of us or if they were harming us in any way that meant that WE were doing something wrong and that WE needed to change.

THIS is where the inner critic was born.

The inner critic was born as a protective mechanism. It was born as a way of trying to control, manipulate and change our behavior in whatever way we thought we needed to in order to be loved, approved of and accepted by those around us.

Because from our childhood perspective, this WAS the one way to survive. This was the one way to get our needs met. This was the one way to be able to be safe.

The inner critic was born as a way of trying to help us understand what our caregivers/other authority figures wanted us to be, and as a way of trying to control our behaviors and ways of being to match that expectation, in the hopes that if we did this enough we would finally be loved the way we wanted to be loved and we would then we SAFE the way want to be safe.

Then as we grew into adulthood, our inner critic would have evolved and grown with us. It would no longer only be seeking the approval of our caregivers, but also our peers, other authority figures, siblings and the world at large - because it would still be operating from the fundamental assumption that the only way to be safe is to be loved and approved of by others.

THIS is what the inner critic is all about.

It’s working really hard to try to make you SAFE by making you ACCEPTABLE to whatever conditioning you got from your caregivers and culture at large.

It’s a child part of you that believes that the only way to get your needs met, the only way to be safe and the only way to be in a state where you can eventually express yourself is to be loved, validated and approved of by those around you.

THAT is really what the inner critic is doing, it’s how they were born and it’s what their true identity is.

The Inner Critic Isn’t A Logical Part Of You

From here, we can start to understand that the inner critic isn’t actually a logic based part of you.

The inner critic isn’t able to see that now you’re an adult who is capable of meeting your own needs, that is capable of figuring things out for yourself, that is able to be rejected and misunderstood by others and who can still be ok.

Your inner critic still doesn’t see that safety no longer comes from being approved of so that others will understand you and meet your needs, but rather safety now comes from YOU understanding you and YOU working with reality and those around to to get your needs met.

Your inner critic still believes that rejection = death - and it believes this on a deeply EMOTIONAL level.

It’s not a rational, reasonable part of you.

This is a part of you that was developed long before your rational, reasonable self was developed and this is why trying to rationalize or reason your way out of criticizing yourself isn't’ going to work.

This is why invalidating your inner critic isn’t going to work either.

The inner critic is really a delicate, sensitive child part of you that is in desperate need of feeling loved, feeling safe, feeling validated and feeling secure.

The inner critic is a part of you that truly believes right now that if you are rejected, if you don’t live up to the conditioning of your caregivers, that if you don’t follow the rules that it learned or that it invented based on the conditions of your early childhood and young adulthood - that you will be cast out, abandoned and left to suffer alone for the rest of your life.

The inner critic is scared that if you express yourself in any way that got you rejected in your childhood that you will die.

The inner critic is scared that if you don’t do what your caregivers expected you to do - even if not doing that feels better and is better for you as an actual individual - that you will die.

The inner critic believes that if you aren’t loved by those around you - your friends, family, coworkers or anyone that you perceive to have authority over you - that this means that YOU are wrong, bad and shameful and MUST change in order to be safe.

The inner critic believes that when you are in pain, when you’re lonely, when you are struggling and don’t know how to solve your own problems, this means that you’re trapped unless someone outside of you comes and rescues you. The inner critic believes that the only reason you could be in pain is because you’re ‘doing something wrong’ which is leading to you being rejected and abandoned and thus you must figure out how to FIX yourself so that those around you will understand you and get you out of the pain you’re in.

THIS is what the inner child/inner critic truly believes on an EMOTIONAL level.

‘When I am in pain this means I’m being rejected/misunderstood/bad. The only way out of pain or the only way to get my needs met is to be loved, understood and empathized with by someone outside of me - and that’s why it’s so vitally important for me to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with me all the time, why it’s so vitality important to be loved by others and why feeling alone, abandoned or rejected feels like a death sentence.’

This isn’t logical or reasonable. It’s emotional and it’s a deep nervous system program that can only be addressed via the nervous system and making ourselves feel safe emotionally.

The Actual Way To Soothe The Inner Critic

As simple as this may sound, what the inner critic actually needs is COMFORT.

The inner critic doesn’t need to be told that it’s silly.

It doesn’t need to be invalidated or reasoned with.

We’re not going to ‘convince’ the inner critic to see things differently or to hold a different opinion of us or our lives via mental gymnastics and long drawn out conversations.

The inner critic doesn’t really care what you’re actually accomplishing, what you’re doing, what you’re not doing or what is happening in terms of you actually ACTING things out in real life.

The inner critic isn’t actually concerned about the size of your body, your job title, your relationships status, your accomplishments or your place in life.

Your inner critic isn’t comparing you to everyone else because it really believes that having what others have is going to make you happy or is actually important.

Rather, the inner critic cares that you’re going to be safe, that you’re going to be loved and that you’re going to get your needs met.

Your inner critic just wants you to be in a place where you finally get that secure connection it believes will lead you to having all of your needs met, being who you want to be, expressing how you want to express and living a life that feels fulfilling for you because you’re ALLOWED to be YOURSELF.

The inner critic is shaming you, blaming you, looking for the flaws in your behavior because somewhere inside you’re not feeling SAFE.

Because somewhere inside you have a need that isn’t being met, you have something you want to express that you don’t feel like you can express, because you have pain you don’t know how to address or a desire you don’t know how to fulfill or because you are wanting to express something that got you shamed, blamed or guilted in your past that you now fear to express because your body believes this will lead to you being genuinely unsafe.

The inner critic is sensing that pain, and it’s going to it’s one coping mechanism - look for the ways in which I’m not living up to expectation so I can fix myself, and therefore my caregivers/those around me will see me, empathize with me, understand me and then meet my need.

THAT is really what’s happening.

The inner critic is hurting, feeling scared, wanting something or wanting to express something and feeling that the ONLY way for that pain to be remedied is to be loved by someone else.

Even if there’s no one around, this is a DEEP nervous system program that we are dealing with.

It’s not logical. It’s not coming from your linear, adult mind.

It’s coming from a much deeper, more primal place in you and this is why reasoning and logic aren’t going to get you to a new place.

Rather, what’s going to get you to a new place is that feeling of being LOVED, validated and made to feel like you’re SAFE.

THIS is why compassion is the key.

When the inner critic is coming up, what it REALLY needs is for you to say:

“I see you. Your pain is not your fault. There’s nothing wrong with you. How can I SUPPORT you/What do you need right now?’

THIS is the path towards shifting that inner critic into a state where it can stop beating you up, and where you can then go on a journey of figuring out what you’re actually feeling, what you actually want, what you actually need or what’s harming you that needs to be shifted.

When you can have COMPASSION for the inner critic, when you can give them the LOVE that they so deeply need and want, this is going to shift them OUT of that fear state - and THIS will then open the door for you to do a deeper investigation into what’s happening in and around you.

This compassion is the KEY to finding what’s REALLY going on, so you can actually show up for yourself in the ways that you need.

So this compassion step is step one. It’s not the end.

But it’s a VITAL step to take if we ever want to get to a place where we can actually address what’s going on for us.

Thus, I invite you to give this a try.

What happens when you show up for your inner critic with this love, compassion and care?

What happens when you LOVE the inner critic into a state of safety?

What emotions come up?

What fears?

What desires?

What needs?