Kate's Nuggets

How to Disarm Your Inner Critic
Episode 8

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk a little bit about the parts of your inner psychology that probably feel like they're getting in your way.

You may have heard people talk about them in words like inner critic, inner judge, saboteur, or gremlin. There are lots of ways that people talk about this aspect of ourselves.

We have these voices in our head or behavior patterns or thought processes, and you will experience it uniquely for you, but there's a part of you that somehow gives you a message to not do something.

Often when we have the experience of a goal that we're not making progress on, we have an inner experience that there's a part of us that is ready to move forward and a part of us that is getting in our way of taking action.

And today I want to talk about the part that gets in the way or the parts, because you may find that there are many different approaches to stopping yourself from taking action that you have developed over the years.

These are self-protective parts of you. They are defense mechanisms.

They are your friends. They're just not very good at being your friend.

Let me unpack that a little bit.

Each part of ourselves that we feel like we are encountering when we hear these inner voices in our heads is actually a pattern of neural processing that wired together at some point in response to some set of patterns of things that happened in our lives or something that happened that was incredibly emotional.

One of the things that happens is that really emotional situations lay down a lot of what is called myelin, which is what makes neuronal messages travel fast in our brain. And because we are needing to learn from things that are particularly good or particularly bad, especially particularly bad, faster than we learn from average things, we lay down pathways under extreme stress, good or bad stress, faster than we lay down pathways when there's less stress.

Those pathways are connected to all of the things that are similar to what was going on at the time that we laid them down. If it's something we developed over the course of years in response to something that we ran into habitually, like somebody that we ran into every day as we walked to school, that gets connected to a huge number of things in our memories and lights up a lot.

Each of the voices in our head is a pattern of firing. They're alert and online for a little bit, and then they're replaced by another pattern. And then they're replaced by another pattern and they're replaced by another pattern. And this is actually discontinuous. We experience each of those patterns, we notice the thoughts that are part of our consciousness and that's how it feels like it's a part of us.

And then the next one lights up and it feels like it's another part of us and so on and so forth.

Our whole self incorporates all of the parts of ourselves.

To be integrated or functioning from our wholeness we need to be functioning from the part of ourselves that recognizes and sees that we are this collective sum of all our parts and that no one of these parts is "us".

Some of these parts feel great to have in charge.

Some of these parts feel like they're ambitious and motivated and energized and optimistic.

Some of these parts are wary and cautious and want us not to do things that might cause us harm.

These are all "us". They are all looking out for our best interests. They are all one way that we are trying to accomplish our goals.

The reason some of these get in our way is that they are active at times that we don't need them

. Most of the time there's some form of the following developmental pattern. We are missing a skill to handle some situation or we are lacking the power to handle some situation. And so, in that moment, we do the best we can at the time and we survive.

The next time a situation like that shows up, we are more likely to do the thing we did that worked the time before.

Each time we do it, we lay down more myelination. We reinforce that as a behavior pattern and we reinforce that as a way of thinking.

Now, the relationship between our conscious mind and our behavior patterns is that sometimes we behave first, in which case our conscious mind rationalizes to us, "Here's why I behave that way." And sometimes we rationalize first and then behave.

Often with our most pronounced defense mechanisms, we are so fast at doing the thing that we used to do that we don't even have an opportunity to break the pattern. And then we have to figure out how to break that pattern. Sometimes we hear the voice in our head, "Don't do that. That's dangerous." And sometimes there's a part of us like it's like, actually it's not really dangerous.

These inner parts of us protected us from a danger at some point in the best way that part of us knew how.

In order to move forward, we have to do a couple of things.

One is we have to get that part of ourselves to metaphorically stand down.

We have to activate a more active and motivated and optimistic part of ourselves in order to take the behavioral action.

The other thing we need to do is develop the skills that we were lacking in that original situation so that we don't need that particular behavior to survive. This is very, very common to find that these defense mechanisms protected ourselves from our lack of skills.

If we had someone on the playground at school that we couldn't have good relationships with unless we made them laugh, we figured out how to be funny or we figured out how to avoid the person.

If we had certain behaviors we had to do in order to avoid triggering a parent or a family member, we either learned how to not do those behaviors or we learned how to remove ourselves from the situations in which those behaviors were going to trigger our family members.

As we grew older, we developed new skills.

Often what happens is that in one part of our lives we have skills that we want to transfer to situations that trigger old patterns. It would be more useful to use the more mature skill than the one that we use habitually. This is so typical.

How many times have you gone to visit someone you knew from a long time ago, this happens particularly with our families, and started behaving in a way that you haven't behaved for years?

One of the things that happens quite a lot with adults when they go and visit their parents is that they revert back to the behavior patterns they had when they were living at home.

Quite often this means that 40-, 50-, 60-year-old people go home, visit their parents, and they start acting like teenagers with the level of irresponsibility and talking back and resentment and all of that good developmentally appropriate when we're teenagers stuff.

Stuff we would never bring to work because we have ways of being cleanly assertive and asking for what we need and doing what is needed and saying, "No, I don't have the capacity for that." And keeping boundaries and courageously asking for what we want. Then we go home and we trigger all of those old patterns.

That is the world that we're working with inside our heads.

How do we change these patterns?

How do we interrupt these patterns and stop acting so defensively when we've got other skills that would serve us better?

There are a couple of different things that you can do.

The first is you can see if simply by noticing, "Oh, that's an old behavior pattern. I have other skills I can bring to bear on this," you get access to the skills. In some situations that will be enough. In other situations, it will not be.

Another thing that you can do is you can ask yourself, "What situation in my adult life is similar to this that I handle well? And what skills do I use there that I can use here?" The lovely thing about that way of inquiring is you start making a connection between the neurons that are part of the pattern of the behavior that you want to change and the situation in which you skillfully navigate.

Once you start making that connection, then when the situation that used to trigger the old behavior happens, it's more complex.

It doesn't go straight through the automatic processing that it used to because it's connected to this other world where you have other skills and it starts waking your brain up. And your brain going, "Is this situation that I'm in right now more like the old one where I was unskillful or more like the more recent one where I was skillful? And how can I bring the skills to bear?"

Slowly you start reinforcing your ability to make different choices. That changes how you behave in situations that used to be your behavior was patterned based on what was successful when you were unskilled.

If neither of these approaches work, another thing that you can do is you can start doing some internal dialogue between the parts of yourself. The part of you that sees that there's more than just this defense mechanism, that there are other skills. And a really neat trick is if you thank your defense mechanism for all the work that it's been doing, and then tell it what skills you have that it didn't have, because that defense mechanism solidified as a behavior pattern, when you didn't have some skills.

And if you imagine, use your imagination to personify these different parts of you as different segments of you and you actually have a conversation between them. And you can do that talking out loud, you can do that as a journal, you can do it as an imagination exercise. There are all sorts of ways that you can actually facilitate that.

But if the part of you that sees the whole, the more mature part of you that has access to all of your skills, thanks the more immature part of you. Recognizes that there was some part of you that it was trying to protect, some experience it was trying to stop you from having. And then you explain to it what skills you've got that are going to either protect you from having the negative experience it was trying to protect you from, or that you've got the skills to handle the situation even if the negative response happens.

Sometimes we have defense mechanisms where we say, "Okay, I am not going to approach that person that I find attractive and try and tell them that I find them attractive or flirt with them or explore the possibility of whether they find me attractive or not, because it gets hurtful when I feel rejected. If I express my interest and they are not interested, I'm going to feel sad or bad in some way."

One way to convince the defense mechanism that says don't even bother going up and talking to them that you can handle it is to say, "You know what? Yeah, it'll suck for a moment, but it won't suck forever. I'll get over it. I know how to handle it. And I've learned that I want a relationship. And in order to have a relationship, I need to be willing to suffer rejection and I can handle it."

And when you start making those connections, convincing the part of you that is defending you that you have other skills that you can use in the situation.

The inner experience is that it backs off and it gets a little more quiet and it doesn't show up and put itself in the way of you taking action as much.

The neuronal thing that's happening is that you're rewiring your brain, you're putting new pathways in. Over time, it becomes habitual.

Now, the pathways that were already laid down take a long time to go away unless you get dementia, in which case all kinds of pathways go away. But the way the brain works is there's a lot more additive than there is things breaking apart in terms of connections.

There will probably be things for the rest of your life that run under the chance of triggering that particular defense mechanism.

Part of what you are strengthening is actually the habit of dealing with that defense mechanism effectively.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.