There is a Wikipedia entry for “inner critic,” defined as: “a concept used in popular psychology to refer to a subpersonality – universally present in at least some form[1] – that judges and demeans a person.” Sounds familiar, no?
Of course. We all have one.
What I’ve discovered this past year, though, after a fair amount of reading and talking to other people, is that the “inner critic” is in the background most of the time. Sure, it pops up now and then to chastised when something goes wrong, but for the most part, for most people, the “inner critic” is kind of like an annoying fly, buzzing around so you take notice now and then, but also capable of being tuned out and swatted away.
I have had the opposite problem.
For me, the “inner critic” has dominated. It has been described to me as “a toxic, hate-filled inner critic that has been running her life.” Before, I would have called bullshit. That’s just complete nonsense. Everyone has an inner critic. So what if mine is more vocal and a bit toxic. It’s mine, no? Maybe it has to be toxic and hate-filled in order for me to do shit, you know? If it’s running my life it’s cause it has to, for my own sake, own best interests.
This year-long personal big data project has revealed a hard truth: the toxic, hate-filled inner critic is a dictator hell bent on ruin.
Because it has been the dominant inner personality, I haven’t noticed. I operated under the belief that “it is what it is” and “that’s the way it is” so “that’s how it always will be.” As Surviving Survival demonstrated, though, that is not the case. Neurons that “fire together, wire together” yes, but they can also be rewired. I was captivated by the concept of survival, its application to my own life so I set out on this personal big data quest.
I created an Evernote Notebook and started keeping notes of thoughts that ran through my head during any situation, be it a meeting at the office, a response to an email, an at bat or a defensive play on the softball field. I slowly learned that my “inner critic” shares my intelligence. It’s smart, like me, and deploys certain tactics to twist and filter information to feed its ruinous desire, and turn thought into action. Something as simple as a single RBI was filtered and twisted into a shameful, “not good enough” tirade that lasted the entire game. If I was lucky.
Through a lot of work, using Surviving Survival as a guide, I struggled to step back and view it from an objective standpoint. I read over Notes each week, making additional notions and started to notice patterns, ways of thinking and something else hidden, buried deep below. I now called that hidden, buried aspect Code.
My “inner critic” may have been the dominant personality for most of my life, constantly educated, fed and spurned because that is all I knew, but there was something else beneath, buried deep and shielded, that has struggled to break free and communicate.
To get through, it has developed its own Code, easily passed through, unencumbered and unfiltered by “inner critic,” and until recently, unbeknownst to me.
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