Trauma and The Inner Critic
For anyone, silencing our inner critic can be very difficult, but for those that have past hurts or traumas, this can feel impossible. Believe it or not, there’s a good reason for this. Our brain’s job is to predict and all day long it is analyzing situations and asking two questions. 1) Have I been in a similar situation before? And 2) Was it safe or dangerous?
If the answer is that it was dangerous, fight or flight, freeze, or even shut down can happen as our brain assumes we may not be safe again. But what does that have to do with being self critical?
Well, “the critic,” if you will is a prevention strategy that was originally to prevent you from repeating negative patterns, but it can take on a life of it’s own and become how you see yourself or we can even convince ourself that being critical of ourselves is how we know we are a good person.
However, this results in feeling awful about ourselves and often increases our anxiety and depression. So what can you do to change this?
At it’s core, this is an issue of lacking the ability to have compassion for yourself, self love, and nurture yourself.
So what are some good ways to practice self love, compassion, and self nurturing?
1) Acknowledge your inner voice is trying to help and keep you safe. This often reduces the intensity of the feelings associated with the thoughts.
2) Address the thoughts from a more rational, grounded, and caring place. Remember this part of you is trying to help, it’s just misguided as it is based in the past. Then replace those thoughts with more helpful positive beliefs or if that feels too hard, neutral ones. You can also start a belief with “I’m learning to believe . . .” such as “I’m learning to believe I am good enough.”
3) Practice exercises like breathing or mindfulness while breathing in compassion, love, peace, and comfort while letting go and breathing out the criticism, judgement, shame, sadness, anxiety, etc.
4) Practice good self care and ways of nurturing yourself by doing things that soothe your body. This may be things like getting a massage, sitting in a hot spring, or everyday kinds of things such as resting when you need to, listening to soothing music, or soothing your five senses with soothing images, sounds, smells, flavors, or textures.
5) Try to work toward giving yourself grace when you make mistakes and try to work on forgiving yourself for past mistakes. This usually requires repetitive practice. Forgiveness is not a one time event, but a process.
6) Talk to a trauma therapist about ways to work on past traumas that are contributing to the pattern and to work more deeply on your self criticism.
I hope this information helps you understand how to work with your inner critic in a different way. I also hope it helps you feel like trauma therapy could be helpful to help you work on this more deeply. If you are interested in learning more about trauma work or EMDR in general you can find out more about the EMDR or other approaches I use here. If you are interested in the EMDR Intensives I do you can find out more about them here. If you are just feeling stuck and have questions, please feel free to call me at (707) 954- 7060 for a free 15 minute consultation. I’d be happy to hear about what is going on for you and to help direct you to the right person to help you.