Thanking The Negative Inner Critic
One of the things I’ve come to read and hear a lot about over the last few months and years of my ‘journey’ (or quest, or ramble, or whatever you want to call it), is the ‘negative inner critic’. I’m referring of course to the voice inside your head that tells you that you can’t do that, you’re ugly, he/she wouldn’t like you, wow that pimple on your forehead is huge, you’ll probably never get the job you’d really like to have… and any manner of other things that you think without realising you’re really thinking them. The more you delve into meditation, living consciously and awareness, the more you notice this voice, and the more incongruous – but also insistent – it becomes.
It’s even more insistent and obvious if you have something like depression or anorexia. That constant stream of thoughts, telling you you’re fat, you need to lose more weight, do more exercise, that you’re ugly, that nobody will ever love you, that this situation is hopeless is basically your inner critic speaking. The strange thing is, it’s actually trying to help you. I’ve spent a year or so trying to get rid of all my negative attitudes towards myself and my life, and it’s rather puzzling to sit on the phone to a life coach and have him thank your inner critic for being so incredibly helpful. Since it’s held me back in so many ways, you’d be surprised. Anybody reading this with their own sense of negativity may be feeling equally puzzled.
He has a point though. The voice isn’t actually an alien bully come to destroy your life in some heinous manner. All those thoughts aren’t actually something dreadfully wrong. It’s actually a sort of internal program, a mechanism of the brain intended to protect you. It’s utterly convinced that it’s doing what’s best for you, weird though that sounds. There’s a lot of stuff out there at the moment about getting away from ‘negative thinking’ and moving towards positive thinking, but I’ve always found that incredibly difficult. It helps to remember that all of those negative thoughts are part of an internal program designed, strange though it may seem, to keep me safe.
Programs like that aren’t actually that difficult to deal with, once you know they’re there and can start undoing what they’re trying to do. It starts with awareness, knowing that it’s there. There are a large number of techniques out there that help, but I suddenly found that recognising the reasons why I think the way I do about my life, being an aware and observing without reaction or becoming involved emotionally in what I’m thinking, has gone a long way to releasing the problem.
