Working With Your Inner Critic Instead of Fighting It

Because just under the surface of the inner critic is a kid who is hurting, missing care, who needs love. You need each other.

You may just believe what it says. Or maybe you get fed up, and argue with it. But it’s hard, because it can feel strong and correct. The inner critic is a compelling voice to have in your head, and can be one of the most challenging aspects of therapeutic change.

So maybe you’ve even interrupted this harsh inner voice mid-sentence and tried to talk back. “Shut up!” You try arguing the criticism isn't true, isn't fair, isn't kind. Maybe you've read the books and learned to spot the cognitive distortions. And still, the critic keeps coming! In fact, it can even get louder the harder you push against it.

If this feels like you, don’t worry, it’s very common. What makes the critic so tough to deal with is in fact that feeling in your gut that it’s right. How does this work? The inner critic is a part of you that's trying, in its own mean way, to protect you. And parts that are trying to protect you don't stop when you fight them. They fight harder.

Starting here, with the idea that the critic is trying to help you, changes your relationship dynamic, moving from fighting to starting a dialogue.

Why fighting the critic backfires

When you feel like the inner critic is an enemy, you’re setting up a war inside yourself. It looks like this: the inner critic attacks, another part fights back, and then a third part watches the whole thing and concludes you must be broken for going through this at all. Nobody wins, you're more exhausted than when you started, and over time it gets heavier and starts having a real impact on your quality of life.

Internal Family Systems, or IFS, offers a different, kinder starting point. It assumes you're made up of many parts, and that even the harshest one has a good reason for doing what it does.

The inner critic usually formed early, often in a relationship or environment where being hard on yourself felt safer than the alternative. It may have felt like what you had to do to survive. Maybe self-criticism got you ahead of someone else's anger: “If I can be hard on myself first, I can prevent the other person from getting mad at me.” Maybe it kept you small enough to stay out of danger: “You don’t deserve to need anything, you’re lucky to get what’s handed to you, don’t complain.” Maybe it was the only way you knew to stay in control when everything else felt out of control: “If you don’t get this right, no one is there to help you.”

If you can start to see your inner critic in this context, you can actually develop sympathy for both it, and for the young part of you that the inner critic was trying to protect. Because just under the surface of the inner critic is a kid who is hurting, missing care, who needs love. You need each other.

Why the critic formed in the first place

There's a useful way of understanding where this harshness comes from, and it helps explain why it's so stubborn.

Paul Gilbert, the psychologist who developed compassion-focused therapy, describes the mind as running on a few basic emotional systems. One is a threat system, built to keep us safe by scanning for danger. Another is a soothing system, the one that lets us feel calm, safe, and connected. For people who grew up under stress, criticism, or trauma, the threat system learns to stay switched on, and the soothing system gets very little practice. Self-criticism, in this view, is the threat system turned inward. It's an internal alarm that learned to treat you as the danger.

That's why being hard on yourself can feel weirdly safe, even helpful and useful. It's the threat system doing the only job it knows. This is also why telling yourself to “be kind to yourself” doesn’t register in your brain. You can’t talk yourself into using a self-care system that you never had practice developing.

Once you are able to build some initial trust and respect with the inner critic, you can start to add skills for self-soothing, self-respect, and advocating for yourself. Go with baby steps, show the inner critic that actually this way works, and they can let go of some of the pressure.

You’re showing the inner critic that the world isn’t going to blow up if you take care of yourself.

Getting curious instead of combative

The shift IFS asks for is small to describe and kind of hard to do: instead of arguing with the critic, you get curious about it.

You might notice where you feel it in your body. You might ask, internally, what it's afraid would happen if it stopped. (To be honest, it’s hard to do this on your own, and you often need the support of a parts work therapist to do it.) The answers are often surprisingly young and vulnerable. A critic that sounds vicious on the surface is frequently terrified underneath. It is really scared that if the inner critic fails, the stakes are really high. It feels like terrible things would happen.

So the trick here is that, when a part feels understood rather than attacked, it doesn't need to work as hard. We’re working toward helping the critic feel less defensive, so that it can share its concerns with us.

This is also why the famous IFS slogan “no bad parts” is so powerful. In this model there are no bad parts, only real parts, in hard roles, with real histories that are part of you.

So our therapy is to help the part learn to trust that a steady and grounded version of you underneath all the noise, can start to take care of things.

What change actually feels like

People often expect that healing means the critical voice goes away. Again, remembering that there are no bad parts, what we actually do is work with the inner critic to have a more defined role you can agree on, one that doesn’t cause more harm in your life.

Because the silver lining of having your inner critic in your life is, yes, it actually did help a lot when you were growing up. You were doing the best you could. But now, as an adult, things are different. What if it could still help you but in a different way? Let the inner critic be a stickler for detail. Let it really embrace ambition. Let it make sure you do a good job, remind you of the high standards you value. Let it show you how to achieve your goals. We love it for all those things! But now we need it to get to a place where it respects that you can actually be trusted to be the adult in charge, draw the line, and provide a good life for yourself, without living in fear and distorting things. Show the inner critic you’re an adult who’s got this.

If you're ready to stop fighting yourself

If you recognize yourself in this, and you've already done enough work to know that arguing with your inner critic isn't the answer, you might be ready for an approach that works with it instead.

I help adults heal complex trauma using IFS and EMDR-informed care, online and in person in San Diego, and online across California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan.

You're welcome to schedule a free 20-minute consultation to see whether this feels like a fit.

Photo credit: pexels-pavel-danilyuk