The inner critic is how we criticise ourselves. Most of us have an automatic “oh, I’m an idiot” running somewhere in the background when we drop something or make a ‘simple mistake’. I hear it all the time. If we don’t call ourselves idiots then it is quite likely to be something else.
The inner critic is a trap for a simple reason. You are a human being, so you will always make mistakes. Take a person, give them something simple to do, and have them repeat it all day long: of course they will make mistakes as they go. That isn’t a character flaw. That is what it’s like to be human.
When it happens, we need to be compassionate with ourselves. Ideally we should speak to ourselves like we would to a good friend.
This is where compassion practice really helps. We need to start by giving ourselves permission to be compassionate to ourselves and then from there we can replace our unhelpful inner dialogue with a more constructive one.
There are also a few more traps. They are less obvious and noisy than the inner critic, but can be just as unhelpful.
Beware the evil of “should!”
You may think, what could be wrong with “should”? You use it all the time. But should is how our culture shames another or ourselves.
This is not quite the inner critic. You are not directly criticising yourself but ‘should’ implies failure.
“You should have done this, and instead you did that”. “You should not have done that, and you didn’t”. Should, could, would. Should have, could have, would have. We can build a mountain of unsatisfactoriness just by using this language.
It’s helpful to use helpful and unhelpful
The words helpful and unhelpful solve a great many of these problems.
“It would be helpful if I did this”. That phrasing comes with a built-in question: helpful in what way, and to whom? Should closes the door. Helpful opens it.
That implication of a benefit or a threat if something is unhelpful unwraps the language so we have to think more about an outcome.
Positive and negative
There is another pair of words worth being careful of.
The way the mind works here is caught in a piece of research I would put in the top five most useful psychology studies of all time. Unfortunately, deeply buried in the literature. It is entitled The Neural Processes Underlying Self-Agency, by Nahab and colleagues, published in Cerebral Cortex in 2011. The pattern we learn from it is that to help us navigate complexity and uncertainty, human beings tend to choose an extreme rather than navigate the ever changing nature of the world we live in.
Take positive and negative. Generally speaking, anything labelled positive has something negative in it, and anything negative has something positive in it. These are what we call false dichotomies, something is all bad or all good. “You’re being negative” is a very common but unhelpful comment. We can use it on ourselves too. It is far better to unpack what is actually meant, and to swap those words for some constructive language.
You can do the same with a lot of other pairs of extremes. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Fair and unfair. Remember that every cloud has a silver lining, and every silver lining is attached to a cloud.
If we are not careful, we can adopt these labels such as “being a negative person” or “being a positive person” as identities. It is very easy to decide you are a positive person, or a negative person, and then live there.
It’s a probabilistic world
Unfortunately, most of life is a collection of grey areas, but our brains like the certainty of black and white, especially when we try to predict the future.
We often don’t know which outcome will occur. There may be a probability that something will happen, but there is always at least a small probability that something else will. That is the nature of physics, and the nature of life but our minds will try to make it a certainty.
Just, simply, only
Then there is a set of words used to diminish a threat. Just. Simply. Only.
I hear this a great deal from meditation teachers. “Simply sit quietly and follow the breath.” “Just be aware of the present moment.”
There is nothing just or simple about it. The mind is a very powerful thing, and if it decides to intervene in your quiet present moment, you will need to spend a lifetime building a set of skills that let you intervene in the mind intervening in your calm, quiet present moment where you are following the breath.
So the diminutives are every bit as dangerous as the shaming words. They tell you that a hard thing is easy, and when you find it is not easy, there is only one place left to lay the blame.
What to do with all this
Notice the language you use. That is the entire practice.
Notice if you are self-critical or you are using ‘just’, ‘simply’ and ‘only’ to diminish threats. Notice when positive and negative are standing in for a real thought or planning. And beware the evil of should, because it can arrive carrying shame.
This is the language of the mind. It is also the language we use with each other, so we need to take care. Becoming aware of our inner dialogue and learning to moderate, manage and curate it is one of the greatest benefits of mindfulness.
Stick with your practice, you will notice this all happening and you will have the tools to make the changes you need to create a better life and relate in more helpful ways.