When Will We Stop Beating Ourselves Up?
“If anyone else spoke to you the way you speak to yourself, you’d punch that person in the face…” says our teacher at the Enneagram Institute, Russ Hudson. Why are we so hard on ourselves? What is the consequence? And what do we do about it?
I regularly coach clients who wonder about these questions and look for guidance on how to handle the tyrannical internal reign of the Inner Critic. I suffer from the same affliction and questions as they do. It’s an ongoing struggle, but it does get better if we invest the time and energy into understanding what’s actually happening and where our power lies to change things.
For example, I had one client express how stressed she is in her job as a health care professional in the midst of the pandemic and how she is rough on herself about it, which only makes it worse. She deeply desires to help people more than she’s able and also wants to be calm and grounded while doing so. The stress makes her feel less adept in her life and in her role of caretaker for others. But with a few steps that we’ll look at here, she is beginning to be kinder to herself and create more spaciousness for others.
Our Inner Critic is the mouthpiece of our ego. Our ego is the identity of who we think we should be, rather than who we are. When we don’t live up to our fanciful identity, our Inner Critic comes to the rescue to let us know! Do we ever live up to our fanciful identity? No. Why? Because it’s fanciful! It’s not us. So the Inner Critic has a full-time job keeping us on the treadmill, working our butts off to become something we’re not and can never be!
That taskmaster and evaluator that lives in us has different flavors and imperatives according to our Enneagram Type, or the needs of our unique ego personalities. We’re never satisfied. It’s always that we need something more and then we’ll be okay. We’re never enough. We always have to become something we are not.
Whether I’m toiling for a prestigious promotion or financial security or a sense of calm or the best friend award or otherwise, I can never be truly at peace with myself. That is the consequence of our often hidden self-flagellation. And it leaks out onto others.
I hurt people because, in that moment (at the very least), I don’t have compassion for myself, so I have no compassion in me to offer anyone else. When I react, raise my voice, self-isolate, or send any subtle or not-so-subtle message to someone that they’re no good right now in my eyes, it’s because my Inner Critic has gotten the best of me.
The challenge is that we don’t often hear it. We don’t even know it’s happening. Our unconsciousness makes us the perfect prey. So we need to become conscious of our Inner Critic. We need to hear its voice. That is the first step.
That’s something we create experiences around and drive home in our Working With Your Inner Critic workshop. We must become attuned to its voice. Any time we’re feeling negative, trace the feeling to the voice. Hear what it must be telling you that accounts for the down-trodden emotions. Now you’re present, connected to reality, and you know what’s happening, so you’re ready to take action.
In Nonviolent Communication (NVC), the framework developed by Marshall Rosenberg, we learn that behind every feeling is a need. Those needs are either met or unmet, or somewhere in between. If we’re feeling something positive, that indicates a need has been met. And if we’re feeling something negative, vice versa. Emotions also communicate the degree to which the need has been met or unmet. We have intense emotions for needs intensely met as well as unmet. We have temperate emotions for the more moderate meeting or lack of meeting our needs. This is vital to understand because when our Inner Critic is at the helm triggering us, we have to know what need it’s blasting us for not having met.
The need is the purer form of the ego’s drivers. Needs come from our real self – who we actually are – and get refracted through the ego as fixations. Those fixations are a distortion of our natural needs that now cease to serve us and create tension with others.
We generally work in a self-absorbed way to meet the demands of our own egos and simultaneously try to keep enough good will with one another to feel morally upright and not disturb our lives…until someone steps on one of our internal landmines. Those triggers then summon the Inner Critic to the scene.
So we want to be something that we’re not and we want to be seen in this way by others to reinforce that we are in fact this identity. And when others don’t see us that way, we get triggered. Our Inner Critics thus fire at the other person and fire at us for not being unassailable and self-evidently the identity we think we should be. It should be obvious that I am this and if anyone doesn’t see it, that means you’re not good enough, is the message.
And the need is buried in all of this mess. It is our mission to dig through and uncover the pure need. That will help us create clarity and stability in the chaos. Moreover, we’ll begin to understand ourselves better. And when we understand ourselves, we can feel for ourselves. We can recognize that we’re going through a lot and need care. We are never above that need for care. All of our needs boil down to the most intrinsic and ultimate of all – to love and be loved. So we’re never beyond that need for care. And charity begins at home.
We have nothing to offer others if we don’t carry it ourselves. We can’t offer a gift that’s not in our possession. So we must stop to check in with ourselves and give much needed empathy that will offset the madness our Inner Critics muster.
I will close with a step-by-step simple process:
Recognize you’re triggered and pause
Listen for the voice of your Inner Critic
What are you feeling right now?
What is the pure need behind that feeling?
Stay with the beauty of your need and give yourself empathy for its not being met
Even without trying to meet the need, that self-empathy will do wonders for you and the people in your life. Then from there, you can try to find better strategies to meet your need (a step 6 for another time). And you can offer empathy for what anyone else involved in the situation is going through and needs (a step 7 for another time).
What does this look like in practice? This is an inner dialogue that can serve as a model to coach us from the pain of starvation for our needs to self-acceptance and continuing growth:
I just showed up to a meeting and didn’t get to share anything meaningful
My Inner Critic is telling me I’m useless and I don’t have anything to offer and I’m not good at my job or good with people and others are much more adept than me
I feel ashamed and sad
I have a need for contribution, effectiveness, belonging, and deepest of all, to matter
I know that to matter is something vital to my being, otherwise, what am I doing on this planet? It is painful not to feel like I matter. Deep down, I know this need is coming from a pure place of the real self and deserves to be honored. I allow myself to feel empathy for myself and my unmet need, such that my Inner Critic isn’t the dominant force. My own self-empathy becomes more real, present, and impactful. There are lessons from this experience that I’m committed to learning, and there are countless more opportunities to meet my need to matter in different arenas.
If we don’t have this self-empathy, our Inner Critic barks more loudly at us (and we often still will not hear it, but merely feel its effects). When we actually hear the woundedness within us, patiently, it doesn’t need to yell anymore. When someone is trying desperately to get our attention and feel heard, ignoring and neglecting typically exacerbates the situation. What you resist persists. With presence to what’s happening inside us and self-empathy for the suffering, we rise in consciousness and courageously show up more fully as we are. Then we can also be far more understanding and connected with others, as our hearts crave, and as our world craves.