Finding Harmony with the Inner Critic

Our internal house can sometimes harbor different voices, different perspectives on the same circumstance.  When we are at war within, how can we truly know how we feel?

How are we to deal with our internal landscape, when we can have differing opinions and emotions towards the same circumstance?  It’s difficult enough to deal with external feedback, let alone be split into opposing teams within ourselves.

I’ve come to call this more fearful part of myself the “inner critic," or sometimes, my “inner skeptic.”  This is the part of me that has internalized messages, likely from a young age, of fear and lack of safety from the broader cultural landscape, or from personal experiences.  What I notice about this part of ourselves is that the worst-case fears rarely ever come to fruition, while the internal anxiety gears keep you in overdrive in anticipation of a non-event.

It’s interesting to note that this internal curmudgeon seems to be a relatively common feature of the human experience. Why is this? 

When we zoom out to the cultural foundation for our ways of thinking, we find that we are influenced in so many different directions: media, institutions, books, tv, others’ opinions.  I call this our "collective consciousness."  It’s sometimes hard to step out of a collective box when you’ve only ever experienced what’s inside the box, with no context for what’s outside.  It’s hard to strive for higher versions of yourself, when the cultural landscape only gives you specific models of ways to succeed or live.  In a spiritual context, this is the age-old struggle between our personality and conditioning and our Spirit or Self.

How we express ourselves is often a creation of our environments, a collection of personality traits we have identified with and strengthened over time as we learn to fit into the roles society expects us to play, you know the ones: socially acceptable pathways for working, living, dating, raising children, etc. So in this sense, the inner critic was created with a positive purpose in mind: to be the signaler when you were getting "off-course," when you were in danger of losing approval from significant others around you.  And let’s face it, even in the most loving and forgiving of upbringings, we live in a culture that’s been built on specific messages of right/wrong, black/white, winning/losing, and concrete gradations of performance for individual achievement.

So what’s to be done?  If our inner critic was created for such a useful purpose of creating safety and social harmony in our younger years, how can it wreak such havoc upon us in later years, when we attempt to take risks or break away from linear decision-making, or sometimes even in every day decision making?

It can create the grey cloud that separates us from the spiritual aspects of ourselves, blocking higher levels of spiritual or life clarity.  It's hard to move forward with certainty of purpose and confidence when there is glaring spotlight on all the things that could go wrong. Often the inner critic may even be fearful of expanding into our own states of higher consciousness or adopting new belief systems, as this can initiate personal change, which is disruptive to the self as we’ve always known ourselves to be. 

So what’s to be done?

The secret (the only one I’ve found so far) to shifting oneself beyond the inner critic is to acknowledge and accept this part of ourselves for its service to the whole self.  It’s the part of ourselves concerned with safety, with fitting in, with comfort and known variables.  Of course it will kick up a fuss at the slightest hint of change or self-growth, as it's more than likely to bring its fair share of risk.  When we can actually acknowledge and thank this internal voice for the slice of wisdom it brings and has brought, even when counterproductive, it often tends to retract, finding solace in the knowing that it has been seen, even if you choose not to buy into its stories of recrimination or certain doom.

The inner critic, I find, is just like you and I.  No better or worse.  No more or less a part of the whole.  It just wants to be seen, to be loved, and to be received rather than rejected.  So at the end of the day, it's not really a battle that can be won, only a battle to be one.