Should You Embrace Or Reject Your Inner Critic?

This is an excerpt of a blog comment I just wrote on a beautiful blog post. I thought it may be helpful for you. See original comment.  And please leave me a comment or send me a private message on the SelfLoveU Facebook Page telling me how this work is affecting you (I am the only one who sees it and your message will be confidential, unless you give me permission to share). I love hearing from you. It keeps me going.

Embrace the negative or eject it? I know it’s important that we embrace our whole selves, however, I feel that parts of us that are divided against the well being of the whole (even if they’re trying to protect us), should be kicked out, separated, banished, shoved against the wall, kicked to the moon.

That Imago Interject is the voice of the abuse. It’s insidious. When you are hurting inside and in pain because of something your subconscious is telling you… things you were taught about yourself as a child, under all the layers, keep repeating themselves over and over and repeating the trauma. We’re programmed to do it to ourselves. The pain our wounded child feels is the result of these false messages. It’s despair.

There is no power in despair. But, there is power in anger. Even the body response is different, more alert, upright and ready for action. Tapping into our anger inside against the false messages that are inside. Getting mad at the injustice our own hearts spew without conscious awareness. Standing up to the Inner Critic has helped me to access my own power and given me the ability to set boundaries within and without against criticism and conditional love.

My Inner Critic is never sad, confused or angry. It is just cognitively and constantly saying that I’m not good enough. It doesn’t go that deep, however, it wounds deep. My Inner Critic is not in my limbic, it’s in my Cerebral Cortex. It’s the judgment piece, which takes critical thinking, which is higher level, more cerebral than the wounds of my inner child (the emotional part).

I love the way Peter Walker, MA Psychotherapist explains how to deal with the inner critic. I’ve read it many, many times.

http://www.pete-walker.com/shrinkingInnerCritic.htm

Once I started rebelling against the negative inner voices, I stopped hurting. There was no hurt in that area for the inner child to be hurt. It feels like I embraced the hurt not by holding onto it, but by kicking butt internally. Stopping the bleeding. Standing up to the Inner Critic has made all the difference. 1000s of little hurts, but one at a time.

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Self Love Videos - Inner Child Healing

Those Who Harmed You Cannot Heal You

This is a really good post by Wounded Child Coaching. So good, in fact, that I decided to share it with you here. Take care, Jenna


"The wise among us realized that the acceptance will never come, and that this is a death that we have to accept, the death of a relationship. When we hold onto it, we are holding onto a corpse. There was never any life in our relationship with our abuser. We were asking for souls in the soulless."

Post by Wounded Child Coaching.

THOSE THAT HARMED YOU CANNOT HEAL YOU

Yet this is the justice that we long for in our souls: to be suddenly loved by those who abused us. We hold onto that hope. This is what we did as children. We forgave and forgave, always in the hope that this time, we would do the “right thing” to please our abuser so that we would be welcome and the abuse would stop.

Often, things got better for a while. We let our hopes up that finally we had done whatever manner of atonement required to be forgiven of what we knew not, so that we could be received with love and care and safety. Those times were short-lived. The abuse would resume with a vengeance, so we always lived with our guard up. The attacks would often be random, so we were always on edge.
Yet we kept going back to our abuser, hoping to be forgiven, hoping to be loved. We sought our healing through their acceptance. For most of us, that acceptance has never come.

The wise among us realized that the acceptance will never come, and that this is a death that we have to accept, the death of a relationship. When we hold onto it, we are holding onto a corpse. There was never any life in our relationship with our abuser. We were asking for souls in the soulless.
Yet even as adults, we still seek healing from them, and end up taking the same abuse from them in adulthood that we suffered as children. Only now it’s more subtle, and deeper into our minds and souls. The punishment is in words that we allow to pierce us. We allow it because we willingly step into range of our living abusers’ arrows.

We look to them to heal us, and they return fire with arrows that dig deeper than when we were children.

They cannot heal us. They are only capable of harm. We do not have to put ourselves in range of their arrows. We couldn’t be free from them when we were children, but we can be free from them now! They will do harm to us as long as they have breath in their lungs. They can be fathers, mothers, ex-spouses, and even one’s own children.

When we turn our backs on them, they will attack us with guilt and obligation. But we’ve never been malicious. We are guilty of nothing. To heal, we must walk away from them and no longer allow them to harm us.

We may take huge losses in doing so. I have taken mine, and it is the greatest loss of my life. I know the pain of malice, and of malice that follows you. I took my loss and moved towards healing. For to not take the loss, and to still bleed from it, I would never have healed.

We can choose to bleed from emotional wounds. Or we can choose to not be wounded.
We, as Wounded Children, have to reach that place where we seek our healing over and above all things, including relationships. We must choose to no longer go to have our wounds tended where we received them.

This is the message of Wounded Child Coaching. I tell the story of a “Journey” that everyone must take to heal. I call it the “Wounded Child’s Journey.” It takes you from the place of being a victim to a place of true thriving, a place of growth, peace and self-love

Visit http://woundedchildsjourney.com

How to Find Your Core Truth

Group Member asked: "I still don't know what my truth is though. How do you get in touch with your core truth? One 'truth' to me is just as true and another 'truth'. This is where I am stuck in my recovery."
My Answer: Your core truth is the core of who you are. It is that part of you that no one can ever take away. Your truth is beneath your wounds, your false beliefs, your codependency, your symptoms. It is the truth of who you are, connected with the source of life, your higher power. Your truth is all knowing. Inside your heart you hold the answers to everything you need to function. Your core truth is pure love, pure joy, pure bliss.

This truth can be hidden, but it cannot be destroyed. This is the hope of recovery, to find this truth buried on the inside of you, beneath the pain, the maladaption, the addictions and mental illness. The goal of healing is to find this truth in all its forms and manifestations and to live from it, rather than attaching to outside sources or from your wounded layers. 

Those of us who suffer from codependency have not been taught to access our truth. We were taught to hide our truth, that our truth is nonexistent, that our cognitions and view of reality is wrong. We were invalidated. We were taught to mistrust ourselves and to give our power over to our caretakers (who were likely taught the same faulty way).

You can find your truth by being aware that you have a truth, and trusting that you do have truth inside of you. Your True Self. You may need a therapist to help you figure this part out, that is, how you feel, what you believe and whether your feelings are based in now or are pent-up emotions that are frozen inside.

When I did this process, that of unfolding my true self, it was one of the most magical part of my healing. I could literally picture my true self buried in the treasure chest of my heart, beneath the pain, anger, hurt and confusion. I pictured the real me banging on the sides of the box that held me down. I imagined myself unfolding and coming to life... which means, expressing and feeling my authentic truth for the first time.

It is an ongoing endeavor to locate your truth when you've gone through the things we've gone through. I learn new parts of myself every day that I never realized I had. Your truth holds things that you need to function appropriately in all facets of life. When you release bits of your truth from the captivity of hiding, suddenly you find that you're able to function in areas that you never could before.

As you go beyond your initial awakening and move into proper functioning you encounter lots of bleeps along the way. I now know that any issues or difficulties I'm having stems from my disconnection from my own truth. Lately I'm learning (through mindfulness) to listen to the voice inside myself. Not only to listen, but to HEED, validate and honor my gut instincts.

Outline of Personality Modes

I love this graphic! How helpful. Getting to know yourself, becoming aware of your different moods, thoughts, feelings and behaviors is the pathway to self love. This diagram stems from Transactional Analysis, a way of defining different modes and schemas that people follow when they've gone through hurt, pain and/or trauma in childhood, or been raised in any type of dysfunction. A great preface to this chart is the book, "Games People Play: Handbook of Transactional Analysis" by Eric Berne. Excellent book! I've read it a few times. Highly recommended.

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