Your Inner Critic is Not You
Do you have an inner critic? And if so, whose voice is it?
The inner critic tends to be a combination of personal and transpersonal voices; that is, a combination of a person or people in our lives, usually from when we were very young, alongside an expression of the predominant socio-cultural conditioning that us humans are inherently deficient (when the exact opposite is Truth.)
Today, a brief look at the personal voice.
Mine used to be particularly punishing. It was the unmistakable voice of my mother, internalized and absorbed from infancy throughout my nervous system, until it became a (false) identity layer, tyrannically dominating my self-concept. This voice that was not mine, that was itself a distorted expression of my mother's own wounding, had become a part of my personality. And for a very long time, I believed every word it said about how irredeemably bad and wrong I was, to the point of being driven to OCD as a form of pre-emptive self-punishment, and then on to various addiction and substance abuse issues - all manifesting physically via inflammation and autoimmune expressions.
Nowadays, that inner critic is unrecognizable. It’s quieter, and feels more spacious. It’s encouraging and supportive. It doesn’t compare me negatively (or positively, for that matter) with anyone else. It’s playful. Its penchant for shaming has dissolved. And most importantly, it has what seems to be an infinite well of love for and trust in me, which in turn keeps me resourced, nourished and rooted in a healthy and nurturing inner soil. No more inner inflammation = no more outer inflammation and its various physical expressions.
Bharatnatyam // Classiccal Indian dancer Indrani Rahman
Except of course those occasions when the ex-inner critic reverts back to its old ways - albeit few and far between these days. This usually happens when I feel energetically and physically depleted, when my capacity for life is low. When I’m abandoning my Self in some way, saying yes when I mean no, or vice versa. When I’m should-ing on myself. It reverts back to its old ways when I’ve become identified with the constrictions in my nervous system, because the inner critic is also essentially a state of constriction and wounding. When this happens, the body sends me pretty immediate signals in the form of inflammatory responses and symptoms. I’m able to let these messengers track me back somatically to the inner critic, and tend to that part instead of becoming it. In its own time, it reintegrates. Their work done, the symptoms subside.
My ex-inner critic and I didn’t get here from me suppressing its vitriol (aka pushing it further into my nervous system, organs and cellular structure) in favor of “positive thinking” and bludgeoning myself over the head with affirmations, while it cackled with malefic glee from deep within me at my futile efforts.
(Don’t get me wrong, those methods, which I’ve come to understand as the way of the hero’s journey, the ol’ slaying of the dragon, do work for some. But for those people who’ve experienced big ‘T’ Trauma and its resulting complex post-traumatic stress impact on the aura-nervous system-body, they don't even come close to cutting the mustard. Except when used as 'tracking devices', to help somatically locate the inner critic.)
The gift in all of this is that it compels us to go deeper. It’s answering the call to take the heroine’s journey and dive into the depths to meet the dragon, befriend it, to allow the constrictions of its wounding to resolve and dissolve in its own time, leading to an organic integration and evolution.
(It’s worth remembering here that the word ‘integration’ has its roots in integrity, without which our inner foundation has no resilience.)
Throughout this, a natural space of witnessing arises, where we experience the embodied realization that we are not this wounding. The potency of this is that it gives this inner critic-punisher part the autonomy to undergo its own alchemy without us forcing or controlling the process.
This is the way of animism, the way of decoloniality, the way of liberation. It’s the way of dismantling structures of power-over and evolving into structures of power-with, from the inside out.
The dragon becomes our powerful ally, rather than our bounty (and if you’re familiar with the divine feminine iconography of the dragon, you’ll know that this is a radical act.)
For me, the process of integrating and evolving my destructive and wounded inner critic-punisher has taken me down the paths of trauma-informed somatic experiencing, alongside potent Self-directed compassion and meditation practice from the ancient Vedic tradition in India.
In collaboration with these wayshowers, you’re invited to meet, integrate and evolve your inner critic in The Light Gets In working with the inner critic throughout January and for the first two weeks of February.