One of our deepest and most troubling issues is how to get some perspective from the continual and often crushing attacks of our inner judge.
Perhaps we’re not so aware that we are being attacked by this part of us inside because we may have become accustomed to feeling that we’re wrong, that we’ve done something wrong, or believing that we’re just not good enough. Or we are judging others, not recognizing that this is a reflection of our inner judge.
So often, we are trying to live up to an ideal idea of who and how we should be in so many aspects of our life and the result is that we feel inadequate and deficient unable to relax and trust ourselves.
It is like a constant inner pressure to be different than how we are or how we feel. It may seem like no matter what we do it’s never good enough.
Neither the ideal nor the deficient sense of ourselves holds the truth. The truth lies in connecting with our essence; recognizing and valuing our unique gifts and also our limitations.
Let’s explore some of the most obvious ways that we experience an attack from our inner critic.
1) Low energy, tiredness, no motivation or a tendency to give up and sabotage ourselves. Or we might feel irritation and disturbance when people are not how we want them to be.
Here are a few examples:
Nathan is an intelligent 45-year-old man who runs a company and is respected by his employees as competent, efficient, and considerate of others. Yet, he often feels hopelessly inadequate, and is convinced that no one appreciates or respects him. Because of his crippling low self-esteem, he can’t set limits, allows others to take advantage of him and pushes himself to exhaustion to try to live up to his high standards.
Manfred is a 32-year-old psychologist in training. He has been studying for eight years in different programs, but he can’t find the courage to actually start working with people. He feels that he’s not competent enough, needs to learn more, and hasn’t healed his own wounds sufficiently to be in a position to help others.
2) Another way that our inner judge may show itself is in our need to hold onto strict rules and guidelines with which to live our life and give us direction.
When we have no or very little confidence in our own wisdom, we may feel we need this kind of direction to live our life.
For example, Anna has been following an Indian guru whose spiritual approach includes strict ideas about sexuality, diet, physical activity, and appearance. Not only does she follow these guidelines, very often going against her body and her own feelings, she also torments those close to her with continual advice about how they should live their lives. She doesn’t trust her own feeling and intuition and needs to hold onto these ideas to give her some sense of right and wrong.
It’s important to understand that the purpose of the guide is to guide us and protect us. However, the problem is that the judge doesn’t see us and feel our particular situation and our fears and insecurities. It holds us to a certain standard and is very rigid and unforgiving. The other problem is that it’s coming from the past and is not seeing the present as it is. Furthermore, it doesn’t support us to begin to trust our own feelings and doesn’t give us space to experiment and make mistakes as we learn and grow.
3) The judge attacks us more strongly in those areas where we feel insecure and vulnerable. When we are more confident in a certain area the judgements don’t affect us the same way.
4) Sometimes we project the judge onto other people, so they’re judging and criticizing us. As a result we may regress and become either obedient and apologetic or rebellious…or a combination of both.
When we are rebelling there is some energy that can be used in transformation. When we’re obedient, trying to satisfy the judge, the energy is often collapsed and it’s harder to access the energy needed for transformation. Because of this, it’s often a good step to begin to feel some anger in response to the judgement or criticism. However, even in our rebellion the judge still has the power.
5) Our inner judge shows itself powerfully in the ways we compare ourselves with others. As soon as a comparison arises in our mind, we not only feel a collapse of energy but we also lose ourselves. Yet, it is amazing how pervasive our comparing mind can be, especially if it’s coupled with a rejection or a criticism from someone. If a person has left us, even if the relationship was short-lived or even if it was clear even to us that the relationship was over, it can take a long time to recover. We may obsess about the other person’s new partner or their new life. Or we may obsessively critize ourselves for how the relationship ended or that it ended.
6) And finally, one of the most obvious ways that our inner judge shows itself is through guilt. The whole purpose of our judge is to try and keep us safely within the bounds of our conditioning; behaving and even thinking the way we were taught. Whenever we stray even the slightest bit from the rules, values, behavior, and thoughts that we were imprinted with, we will receive a powerful attack from our inner judge.
This attack can produce so much guilt and fear, that we might want to retreat back to the safety zone of being and living how we were taught to live.
Such is the case of Leonard who was conditioned to take care of his depressed and demanding mother. Lately, he has felt that he doesn’t want to call or visit as regularly as he has in the past. But the guilt he feels if he takes even a little more time for himself is very strong, as well as the fear that she will take revenge by pulling away and criticizing him for being selfish.
If we begin to observe ourselves more closely, we may begin to notice how much of the inner judge tyrannizes many aspects of our life. This part of us may be sending us subtle or not so subtle messages all the time and about different aspects of our life. It’s quite universal and depending on how we were raised and on our inner temperament, we may respond to this with either rebellion or compliance. Either way, the judge is still in control.
To avoid attacks from our inner judge, we may try all kinds of compensations to prove to ourselves (and to others) that we have worth. Or we may be the good boy or girl that we were taught to be. As we go deeper and begin to see the futility and exhaustion of trying to prove ourselves or of always saying “yes”, we may find ourselves in a gap.
Who are we when we’re not trying to prove ourselves or being the nice compliant person? We might start to wonder how anyone could love us, we may feel that we’re basically a fraud, or that we don’t have any real value. Add to that all the unconscious things that we may have done or said out of fear, jealousy, or shame and we can become enveloped by shame and self-doubt.
Furthermore, when we start to become more authentic, we open ourselves to more attacks from our inner judge and more shame, guilt, and fear naturally will come up.
How can we get some space from these constant attacks from this condemning inner judge?
Let’s explore the different aspects that can help us to shrink the power of our inner critic.
We teach four aspects.
a) One aspect of taking back a positive sense of self is realizing that the tyranny of our inner judge came as a result of negative conditioning. When our home, school, or cultural environment that we were raised in doesn’t support us to discover and develop a deep appreciation of who we are by giving us loving nourishment, support, and guidance, we learn to become critical and harsh with ourselves and others. We begin to see ourselves with the eyes of those who were around us as we grew up.
Instead of being supported to trust ourselves, most of us learned to push or collapse, to compare, to compete, to condemn ourselves, or to feel isolated and unworthy.
Perhaps we have some understanding for how we received this negative conditioning, how we were distracted from ourselves, and how different kinds of abuse, neglect, and disrespect caused us to create an extremely harsh inner judge.
This understanding slowly helps to develop deep compassion for ourselves and for what we went through. We begin to wake up a healthy mother and father inside of us that can give us the love and support we missed and in that process, we naturally begin to be kinder to ourselves.
b) Another aspect of gaining space from our judge is realizing that when our energy collapses, when we push ourselves, or compare ourselves to another person, it is only because our judge has taken control. As we bring this awareness to our life, we can begin to notice that it’s the judge talking inside, and to actually become aware of what it’s saying; perhaps even writing the voices down.
This helps us get some space, some perspective, so that we don’t just believe the voices or ideas without looking at them more closely and questioning them. We can realize that these voices don’t have our best interest in mind, they’re not helpful, and even if they sound convincing, they don’t speak the truth if they are not kind, loving and supportive.
c) Still another helpful way of getting space from our judge is by moving our life energy either with creative projects or physical activity. This helps us to feel the natural flow of life. It’s when we allow our life energy to stagnate that the judge grips us the worst.
d) The final step is what we call, “changing channels.” This step involves “learning to listen to our inner wisdom.” To take this step, it can be helpful to imagine that we replace the voice and energy of the judge with love and support. This new loving energy can help us look at the situation in which we are under attack in a different way. We can recognize that it’s the inner wisdom talking when we feel the love and expansion inside.
It’s softer, kinder and much more forgiving than the judge. Because we’re so conditioned and familiar with listening to the judge, at first it takes some awareness and practice to begin to listen to the loving wisdom instead. And sometimes we may need the help of a good friend or a therapist to help us find the words of our inner wisdom.
Learning to take space from the inner judge is one of the most important ingredients of recovering from the wound of shame and unworthiness.
With more space we begin to feel the freedom of following our own truth and even have the courage to make our own mistakes rather than following ideas or rules from other people. We begin to have the courage to really discover what is true for us and to own it.
This helps us to become more grounded in our own being, trusting ourselves and our own inner wisdom.