Mindfulness, compassion and the critical voice

[Happy Buddha]

Dear all, it has been a while since posting on this good site so apologies. I have been finishing my book on mindfulness and compassion which i have done...phew!

One of the common problems that people seem to have is a critical voice in their head, so thought I would share this - below.

The critical voice

Many of us have a critical voice inside telling us we are stupid, selfish, weird, ugly, lonely, or unlovable. In some cases, it can make our lives a misery. It sits inside our head all day long, giving out its opinions about everything we do. I remember times in my life when the critic was almost unbearable. I didn’t dare speak at dinner parties because I believed that nobody would find me interesting. The critic would use slightly different methods at different times to get me to behave. Initially, it would just be a subtle feeling of I shouldn’t do this or They will just laugh at me. One of my critic’s favourite lines was: They will just laugh at you, don’t show yourself up. Other times, if I dared to disobey, it would start shouting at me or even screaming: You idiot, they are not interested in you, sit down and shut up. What the hell have you got to say that is interesting?

The critic left me feeling cut off from the world around me. It would criticize me for not being generous enough, then when I did something generous it would criticize me because I was making a fool of myself and people would just take advantage. It would even enter into my meditation practice. You are not trying hard enough, everybody else on retreat is getting somewhere. It would fill my head full of thoughts then criticize me for having a headful of thoughts. The consequences of having a strong inner critic were that I felt unlovable and rather useless at almost everything – except sport. For whatever reason, it didn’t seem to enter into my sporting life. I played tennis, squash and badminton and was rather good at them. The critic didn’t seem concerned with that area of my life. It was more concerned with my relationships to other people and how they viewed me.

It’s very easy to be both very successful in life and completely miserable. They often go together – not always, of course, but often. The reason for this is the spectre of the inner critic. The inner critic is an impostor, but ignoring it and the emotions it generates by pretending it isn’t there doesn’t generally work. Nor does criticizing yourself for being that way, as we know whose voice that is. The critic can paralyse you, then criticize you for being that way.

Your inner critic sometimes means well, but often does not. In my one-to-one work with people, I have met some critics whose purpose is to make the person miserable. I say the critic is an impostor because it normally arises in childhood or in teenage years. We are not born with a raging critic. We can struggle for years against it and get nowhere.

The results of the critic vary. One person’s critic may drive them into low energy depression, another might push them into being a successful business person. But no matter how successful we become, the critic will not stop because its job is to criticize, and like all of us it doesn’t want to be out of a job.

So how do we free ourselves from the critical voice? The dilemma of how to work with the critic has been a long-term endeavour for me. I think a lot of us would rather it just disappeared off the face of the earth. Many of us try ignoring it and the emotions it generates, or maybe even arguing with it. I haven’t found these methods very useful, however. In fact, I haven’t come across a sure way of dealing with the inner critic that suits everybody. For some, meditation is sufficient and that is the way I mainly worked through it. Other people I know have explored what the critic wants and have managed to placate it. Others still have attended workshops where they have drawn the critic, created a clay image of it, and dialogued with it, which has helped them.

One way to approach the issue is to learn the beautiful art of unhooking yourself from your thoughts. If you have never been fishing yourself, I am sure you have watched people do it. The fisherman or woman baits a hook and throws it into the water, where it waits for the fish to bite. Along comes the fish, which gobbles up the bait, then bites into the hook. What happens next is interesting – the more the fish struggles, the deeper the hook goes. The fish wriggles and flaps, but the hook goes deeper still.

Thoughts are like hooks. They come along, we ‘bite’ on them and they hook us! The more we struggle against them, like the fish, the deeper the hook goes. We often struggle with thoughts such as ‘I hate thinking like this’, or we argue with the critic and try to convince ourselves the voice is not true. All these thoughts are just more hooks and reacting like this just strengthens the critic. The real reason the critic stays around is that we believe what it says. If we stopped believing it, the critic would lose its power.

If you just let yourself off the hook, there’s no need to get into arguing with the critic, or trying to convince yourself its voice is not true. The thoughts the critic generates are not real, they are just opinions that have been around for a long time. When I say ‘unhook yourself’, I mean let your thoughts drift away and come back to the here and now. Come back to what is real. All those stories in our heads just create distress. Learn the art of letting go and coming back to whatever you are doing. If you are meditating, then come back to the breath; if you are chopping a carrot, come back to that; if you are listening to a friend, come back to that. We come back to the activity we are engaged in because it is real – but the stories in our heads take us to somewhere that doesn’t really exist.

The thoughts I am talking about are the ones that stampede through our heads with views, opinions and judgements. However, we don’t need to treat all thoughts like this, as some are useful. The useful thoughts we can, of course, listen to, then decide to act on them, or not. These I call functional thoughts and the way to identify them is that they do not create emotional upset. The more confident you are in your mindfulness practice, the easier it becomes to tell the difference between the thoughts of a critic, for example, and thoughts that are useful. What I suggest here is to notice the tone of thought. The critic’s voice has an edge to it, and is normally absolute – it thinks it knows and tends to repeat itself. Ask yourself: ‘Does this voice feel kind?’ If it is the critic, you will tend to notice a corresponding feeling or contraction in the body. Basically, we can see that this whole show is going on in our head. This is what I call ‘false emotion’ – the emotion the critic creates is false because whatever it is saying is not actually happening. Thoughts that are useful or functional will not have the same emotional charge. 

[Practise this]
Counting your thoughts

This is very simple, but can have a big impact. Counting our thoughts tends to stop them, giving us a second or two of head space. Try it now – just count your thoughts as they come along. This works because when we count our thoughts, we have a perspective on them rather than being caught up in them. In a sense, we step off the wheel of unconscious thinking. Don’t be surprised here if you do have a blank mind for a few seconds.

[Gareth]

Hi Suryacitta!

Great to see you back!

I hope that writing the book has been a rewarding experience for you, and I really hope it does well.

Is the stuff about the inner critic an excerpt from it? We could run it as a blog with some links to your book if you'd like. You are added as an author on the site, so you can put an article up directly, when you are ready. Email me if you want any help.

I'm very lucky in the fact that I've never had much of an inner critic. Perhaps just the good fortune of my genes, or maybe something I should thank my mum and dad for.

I used to good at racket sports myself. In the days before this dastardly disease.

[KathleenH]

My inner critic can get quite vocal, I try to be rational with it but when I'm tired it does get a hold. I was very tired last night and it was chattering away, telling me I was fat and unloved which is untrue on both counts but I started to listen as my defences were down. I shall give this piece a read when this happens next time to bring myself back to reality.

Thank you Suryacitta

[Happyogababe]

A really worthwhile read. I like the image of thoughts hooking us (or us hooking thoughts) it creates a vivid image that helps to remind myself not to struggle against them next time they're present. I tried the exercise (at the end) and my mind was blank momentarily before a steady stream of random thoughts appeared. When I numbered them they faded, much like if I face them with curiosity (they fade).

Thanks