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Lesson 4: Formation Of The Inner Critic Everyone has an inner critic. It's how we survived to adulthood. When you were an infant you depended totally on the giants in your house for your food, warmth, health, for your every move... rolling over, sitting up, moving your head so you could breathe. As your skills developed, being very sensitive to the expressions, tones, and body language of the giants around you, you began to notice that certain of your actions got negative responses from them. This was a very dangerous thing, since your life depended on them, so you learned to avoid doing some of the things that caused the negative reactions, if you could. As you reached an age where words became a part of your life, and you started to connect words to the other signs of reactions in your giants, you learned to anticipate the negative words and to tell them to yourself, to remind yourself, before they had a chance to say them. This all happened in the service of staying alive, maintaining your only access to food, shelter, safety, and love. The giants must be apeased at all cost. As you grew older, this voice became more precise and expanded it repertoire. Beyond 'Don't touch that!' and 'Stop!' you found things like 'Your face will freeze that way.', 'Stand up straight.', and gems like 'Who do you think you are!?' Now, unbeknownst to you, the giants were being influenced by their own inner critics at the same time, and were not always able to recognize that. In an effort to spare you, out of love, from making 'mistakes' that they perceived themselves as having made, they passed on to you some of the messages that their own critics gave to them, whether they had anything to do with you or not. 'Don't try that. It's too dangerous. You might get rejected, and that will hurt.' was a popular theme in this category and could be applied to nearly anything in life, from school, to sports, art, writing, dancing..... These messages became more succinct and efficient as time went on. 'You're too stupid to write.' ('There, that'll stop him from taking that risk! Now he won't get hurt like I did.') Meanwhile you were storing up all those messages and feeding them back to yourself to save yourself from dangers of all sorts... real ones, imagined ones, ones imagined by other people... Then teachers joined the fray. They had whole new dangers to save you from, and the other kids in school all brought along their own weird collections of messages gleaned from their own giants, which they in turn inflicted upon one another, partly as a test of verity, and partly to affirm their own ability to stay safe. You keep adding refinement and nuance to your aresenal of warnings inside your head. And there you have it. By the time we're grownups, we've been doing this thing that once upon a time was required for our very survival, for years and years and years. It has become a habit so deep that we hardly notice it, but it effects every move we make all day long. Try this: Look in a mirror and notice the first thoughts that come into your mind. Notice them when you are about to make a phone call, or step through a door to enter a room full of other people. Be especially watchful for the ones you've turned outward, but that were really meant for you when you first formed them. They're really tricky. Watch for those in traffic. 'That idiot. What does he think he's doing?' And watch them when you're about to hit the send button on a piece of writing destined to be read by a group of people. The more you notice when the critic's voice is speaking, the easier it will be to recognize it. Somewhere along the line, try writing a letter to this critic voice of yours. Thank it for keeping you alive, for watching out for you all these years. Honor it for it's noble efforts to make sure you would be loved and cared for in this life, and never ever get hurt. And then renegotiate the job description. Now that you're an adult you may notice that many of those messages are no longer relevant, and perhaps not even true! Imagine that. Try giving the critic some new, more adult assignments. You'll still need it to keep you from pulling out in front of a mack truck, or stepping off the curb into traffic, and you might need its marvelous powers of discernment to help you make useful decisions. My guess is that you probably don't need 'You're too stupid to write.' anymore, but it might be helpful at sorting out the really good parts of your writing from the parts that still need work. :-) Hope that's helpful. Oh, and if a critic is just having too much of a field day, and you're walking into a situation where it would run amock, try sending it on a pleasant vacation, something a critic would really enjoy, like hanging out in congress, or going to the beach to judge people's bodies in bathing suits. Then when that voice comes up you can remind it how much more fun it could be having on vacation. ;-) Verlie Hutchens
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