Training the Inner Critic
“The part that we create from is far stronger and deeper than the part that needs healing. The part that we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did or society did.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Growing up, Anneke loved science fiction and comic books. She was a huge fan of the X-Men, and looked forward to getting the newest edition every month at the local comic book store. Her talent for drawing and her reading interests naturally converged, and drawing pictures of fantastic female characters and superheroes became her favorite thing to do. She got great support from her mother, who would hang her pictures all over their small three-bedroom house. Other people, however, were a different story.
From the age of six to twelve, Anneke had the same teacher for art class: Mr. Stephens. A frustrated illustrator himself, Mr. Stephens was of the mind that drawing superheroes and illustrating comic books was an inappropriate aspiration for girls. Anneke’s sketches were often met with a furrowed brow and string of thinly-veiled criticisms disguised as helpful feedback as a result.
However, a decisive event for Anneke happened at summer camp when she was twelve years old. During an arts and crafts session, she drew a super-mermaid with long hair, muscular arms, and a shell bikini-top. She was extremely pleased with it. As she was admiring her handiwork and was about to show it to her best friend sitting next to her, another girl came up behind her, looked over Anneke’s shoulder at the drawing, and declared, “It looks like a frog.” Anneke’s first reaction was furious indignance. She played it tough and challenged the girl: “What?! What do you know? Can you even draw?” Inwardly however, Anneke was crestfallen. She thought to herself, “Maybe my artwork isn’t any good. Maybe drawing superheroes is too crazy for a girl to do, just like my art teacher said.”
Although she continued to draw after that, Anneke limited herself to the more “feminine” area of portraits. In high school, she moved into graphic design, and upon graduating, she took the safe route of going to school for commercial advertising design instead of following a curriculum in cartooning, comics, and illustration as her soul still yearned to do. In advertising school, most constructive criticisms from her instructors were heard as a repetition of the scathing commentary on her abilities that she had heard when she was younger. Anneke developed a habit of jumping in to point out the faults of her before anyone else could. She was never happy with her work, regardless of the positive feedback that she did receive.
After school, Anneke took on a job as a designer at a national upscale travel and leisure magazine, and her pattern of self-criticism continued. She spent hours coming up with ideas for layouts that never made it past the trash can. While she was trying to create, her regular internal train of thought was “You can’t do that; no one’s going to go for that,” and “Really?! Is that all you can come up with?” Anything that made it past her high wall of criticism was too bold and brash, the colors weren’t quite right, the flow was off, or didn’t have enough originality. Any comments from managers to guide her to see other options were met with the thought “See, Anneke? Your ideas suck.”
Now in her early fifties and stuck in a cycle of profound self-criticism that has extended beyond her creative work into the rest of her life, Anneke has a wistful nostalgia for the life that she could have lived, wondering how it would have been had she pursued becoming a comic book artist like she dreamed instead of letting an unsolicited, mean-spirited comment from a practical stranger turn her away from it. Unfortunately, she feels it’s too late in her life to pursue that course. To help her return to the happier creative self of her childhood, she sought my counsel.
When she relayed her stories to me, my heart went out her, but I had to stop her from beating up on herself about creativity. “Anneke, you’re bludgeoning yourself!” I told her, “put the self-criticism hammer down and back away!” Fortunately, she found that amusing, and she took it to heart. Through our work together, she has come to see just how strongly she has internalized not only early criticisms and all that followed, but how strong her habit of chastising herself has become because of it. She has also recognized how much she truly missed creating her superheroines, and she has given herself permission to start drawing them again.
Put the Hammer Down
How aware are you of your own tendency to self-criticize? See if you can relate to any of these scenarios:
You don’t like anything you come up with. You lack objectivity and are hypercritical of all your ideas and your creations.
You second-guess your ideas or your ability to make them happen.
You make boring, safe decisions.
You feel panic and anxiety at the prospect of creating for fear that you won’t be able to do your idea justice.
The Inner Critic can be sneaky, appearing as rational thoughts. Do any of these sound familiar?
“Everything I make is crap.”
“It will be boring and suck.”
“No one want to hear my ideas – they aren’t interesting and are irrelevant. I just go on and on.”
“I’m wrong.”
Does it feel like I’m reading your mind? It’s because I’ve heard scores of people describe these thoughts. In Chapter 2, I mentioned that I lead an exercise in my creativity keynotes and workshops in which each person writes down one fear that he or she has around creativity, crumples the paper into a ball, and throws it across the room. Then everyone picks up the nearest paper ball and takes turns sharing, reading aloud what was written down. The amazing thing is the sheer number of thoughts that people have in common – in fact, the ones you just read came from these very people! So trust me, you’re not alone.
Self-Criticism Constrains
“There is nothing noble or righteous about self-criticism – let it go.”
— Eric Maisel, Toxic Criticism
It’s truly sad that Anneke lost her sense of self and gave in to the criticism of her work. But it really wasn’t about the comment that the girl at camp made, or her teacher for that matter. Their early critiques only reflected back her own self-doubts and fears that something was wrong with her drawing skill and what she wanted to draw to Anneke. Anneke had so thoroughly internalized those early criticisms and had repeated them to herself so much that they became the loudest part of her own internal dialogue about her creativity. And being the loudest part of her self-talk and ensuing self-perception, these criticisms and the beliefs they produced colored and guided all of her actions.
Anneke, like so many people, may feel that the way her career played out is “just life.” Sometimes it’s just life that we don’t always get to do the work that we love or get our dream jobs. Some of us are just destined to show up and get our paychecks. And if we are able to do something even remotely creative, we’re lucky, right? Wrong. It wasn’t “just life” that killed her dreams, preventing Anneke from doing the creative work she was meant to do. It was the Inner Critic in the form of High Self-Criticism that banged the nails in the coffin of pursuing a life doing the kind of visual art she loved.
High Self-Criticism is the archenemy of creativity and the killer of ideas. It’s High Self-Criticism that causes us to censor ourselves, pushing us to barricade any ideas from coming through us for fear of them being criticized. For the few ideas that do make it through, it’s High Self-Criticism that makes us so critical that we squeeze what little bit of life was left out of these ideas, leaving them emaciated and colorless.
But high Self-Criticism is not only dangerous to our creativity, it hurts our well-being. Habitually thinking highly self-critical thoughts paralyzes us and keeps us stuck in unproductive ruts. Highly self-critical people are not only more prone to rumination and procrastination; they are also more likely to struggle with depression their whole lives. Being mired in High Self-Criticism makes us regularly criticize ourselves strongly, revi
sit things that we’ve done or said in the past, frequently put ourselves down, and feel that others are constantly reacting negatively to us.1 Furthermore, high self-criticism is associated with fewer positive life events,2 as high self-criticism dashes hopes and obliterates aspirations. Whether it comes from other people or we generate it ourselves and direct it inward, harsh criticism damages our self-confidence and can steer us completely off course, causing us to live lives that don’t fit who we truly are.
Many of us are in a stupor from our high self-criticism. Self-criticism sits at the core of the Inner Critic’s workings, giving rise to the self-doubt that underlies our fears that we aren’t good enough, the anxiety that causes us to compare ourselves with others, and the inability to see ourselves clearly that compels us to deny that we are creative at all. High Self-Criticism dissolves the foundations of our creative self-esteem like acid.
But as the opening quote suggests, our inherent self – the Creative Self – is more resilient than the internalized criticisms that we’ve aggregated over the course of our lives. To move away from the censoring of our ideas and who we are in order to share both with the world, we need to break the habit of being highly self-critical. And because High Self-Criticism is such a cornerstone built into the mistaken beliefs that fuel all inner critical thinking, we will need to employ a wide range of approaches to dismantle the habit and the thinking patterns that support it at their source.
To get at these roots, we need look no further than how we learned to talk to ourselves and how our inner self-talk has contributed to High Self-Criticism. We’ll find that managing our self-talk is the key to banishing the Inner Critic: it can mean the difference between emotional breakdown or personal breakthrough.
Attend To Your Self-Talk
“Almost nothing does more psychological damage than criticism.”
— Eric Maisel, psychologist, creativity coach, and author
Everyone engages in self-talk to some extent – some more than others. The current popular thought is that talking to yourself a lot means you’re a genius. Whether this is true or not, talking out loud does help us solve problems, enabling us to run through different scenarios and alternative strategies. Talking to oneself makes the brain work more efficiently, helping to spark memory and better organize thoughts. In fact, experts consider self-talk to be a subset of thinking,3 because self-talk helps us to stimulate and direct our actions, evaluate them, and then deliberately shape our behavior for the better.
Although we may not all talk to ourselves out loud, each of us engages in inner self-talk. Whether we are aware of it or not, we constantly produce an internal running commentary about ourselves and the world. Self-talk, then, is a key component to building self-perception. All is well when self-talk is positive or neutral, but when it becomes harsh and shaded with negativity, that’s when we need to pay attention and take action.
Self-talk starts during the early childhood years. Children talk out loud as a way to better learn and make sense of the world. In her article “The Voice of Reason,” writer Pamela Weintraub calls self-talk at this age “a kind of instruction manual, a self-generated road map to mastery,”4 and suggests that the self-talk actually influences and affects the task at hand. As children, talking our way through a skill enables us to focus, improves learning and information assimilation, and imprints the problem-solving into our minds. At this age, self-talk actually informs and guides behavior. As the tasks increase in complexity, so does the quantity and quality of a child’s self-talk. As we age and our mastery grows, our self-talk becomes internalized, but remains an important part of our ongoing internal dialogue.
However, self-talk is not done in a vacuum. Adults guide children’s learning, helping them to build skills that they can then use on their own. As a result, self-talk becomes a “...social act, an embrace and reinterpretation of teachings picked up from knowledgeable elders,”5 as children parrot back instructions through their little-kid filter. In other words, as children we not only talk ourselves through a task, but we mimic how the teaching adult talked us through the task’s steps. This is where the process can go wrong.
As highly impressionable students, if a child is learning from an adult who is impatient, abrupt, or regularly punctuates instructions with angry outbursts or disparaging comments in response to the child’s confusion at not knowing the next steps of a task or at making mistakes, the child will use the harsh language of the instructor as her or his template for self-talk. The internalized toxic criticisms then become incorporated into the child’s own internal dialogue and self-talk. People then take this early childhood template of self-talk into adulthood. When you witness children admonishing themselves with comments like “why can’t you figure this out?!” you’re not only seeing them mimicking the criticisms that they received, you’re witnessing the beginnings of the Inner Critic in the form of High Self-Criticism in action. High Self-Criticism is self-talk gone awry.
But it goes much deeper than merely a question of internal self-talk. When a person experiences a lot of harsh criticism early in life and is thus prone to highly critical self-talk, the original criticisms will subconsciously drive their behavior as an adult.
Release Outdated Expectations and Shake Off Shame
“Shame...is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we’re supposed to be. And it’s a straitjacket.”
— Brené Brown, “Listening to Shame” TED talk
Gladys feels she needs to “solve the problems of the world” – or at least solve the problems of the people in her world. She spends a lot of her time traveling from one family member to another to help out when they are in a jam, keep them company, and generally be supportive. But trying to be everything to everybody all the time is taking its toll on her. She’s been feeling increasingly put-upon and taken for granted, which she is – mainly because giving of her time is such a large part of how she operates that people don’t recognize and appreciate the huge amount of effort that she puts forth. Instead of giving Gladys a sense of satisfaction, these days her efforts are leaving her burned-out and emotionally exhausted.
Despite this, Gladys criticizes herself for the times when she can’t do more for people and mentally scolds herself when she feels the need to take care of herself. She used to wonder why, until one day, a deeply buried memory bubbled to the surface. She was eight years old, and excited to go to the movies to see “Little Women.” Her mother had promised to take her and a friend to the Saturday matinée. However, when Saturday arrived, something came up, and the movie plans were canceled. Gladys remembers bursting into tears. Feeling lied to and betrayed, she let go of being the accommodating child that she had always been and decided to stand up for herself for once. “You promised to take me!” she insisted to her mother. In response, her mother said something that cut her to her very core:
“Gladys,” she said, “you’re a very selfish little girl.” Gladys now sees that for all of these years, she’s been terrified of being seen as selfish again. Helping everyone is largely driven by her feeling of being a bad person and a disappointment, elicited by this early comment.
The criticism Gladys received from her mother is an example of the countless comments we each receive during childhood. Regardless of whether they were accurate, we’ve internalized these messages and they have been driving our self-perceptions and behavior ever since. Again, we can look to our negatively biased brains as one of the causes.
We make an implicit deal with our parents and caregivers: in exchange for their love, acceptance, and protection, we will be what and whom they need and want us to be.6 It’s through criticism that we receive the specifics of their expectations and the parameters of the behavior and conduct that they desire. It makes sense at a biological level why criticism is an effective corrective measure: humans, in fact all animals, “learn faster from pain than pleasure.”7 This has been deemed the “oops! res
ponse” by researchers at Vanderbilt University, in which the part of the brain that is in charge of the fight-or-flight facilitates learning from mistakes.8
Harsh criticisms from those whom we learn from and trust the most register instantly. Their words imprint directly upon the more primitive part of the brain, where emotional memories are stored. The experience of being criticized goes into implicit memory – the type of memory that helps us to remember things without thinking about them, and accordingly creates automatic reactions. Unfortunately, the more negative experiences a person has, the “darker” their implicit memory bank becomes9 – and the more negative experiences unconsciously direct our behavior subconsciously.
This may be why psychologist and creativity coach Eric Maisel asserts that “almost nothing does more psychological damage than criticism.”10 We quickly learn to fear criticism and automatically work to avoid potentially stressful situations, particularly those where we could make mistakes. We become motivated by the desire to meet expectations and to live up to the standards established by our caregivers so as to avoid feeling the strong emotion that comes up when we fear that we have not lived up to expectations and thus have disappointed them: shame.
It’s shame that we feel when we are threatened with or actually receive insult or ridicule, or experience humiliation, rejection, or even abandonment by others.11 Getting shamed starts early in our childhoods, with strong comments accompanied by a look of disdain, such as, “I expected better from you,” or “you know that’s not right,” or far worse coming from our caregivers to push us to do the right thing. This process is actually a part of our development. In the proper context, being shamed teaches us resilience and helps us to develop the ability to deal with feedback and criticism. Growing up, each of us, some more than others, experienced some form of shaming to guide us to modify our behavior.
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 13