Resilience Begins With Compassion: Understanding the Inner Critic (S20E10)

So that idea of the inner critic being here to do a job, do a job that it thinks it's here to do, that we're able to turn toward it with kindness and with compassion, it can seem so counterintuitive.

and you know and and it can seem ridiculous at times with some of the voices or the words that might be inside us um and some of the things that we say to ourselves some of the ways in which we put ourselves down or limit ourselves or ridicule ourselves And yet, and yet, if we hold the premise that there are no bad parts, which is also the title of a fantastic book by Richard Schwartz, if we hold this premise that there are no bad parts, then we can step back from the inner critic and have a look and go, OK, well, if there are no bad parts and you're a part of me, then maybe you too are not bad.

And then that makes me ask the question, what is good? What is bad? You know, fundamentally, when we think about parts, we're looking at, you know, these ways of being in the world that these parts have learned somewhere along the line, maybe when we were very, very young.

And, you know, they've grown to understand that this is a job that they're here to perform.

And perhaps what they don't yet know is that there is more than one way to keep someone safe.

There's more than one way to stop someone making a fool of themselves.

There's more than one way to correct a mistake.

And often that's really what the inner critic is actually seeking to do for us.

So I've sort of dived in here about the inner critic because this is the aspect of resilience that I'd really love to talk to today.

If you've been following the podcast for the last few weeks, you'll know that resilience has been a theme that has been running through so much of what we've been talking about.

And also, in the conversation with Adam Lind last week, I heard myself say to Adam, oh, you know, resilience and boundaries, I think that they are like, they're so important.

interesting for me personally.

They're something that I return to again and again.

And I think it's because they are really sort of fundamental aspects of compassion.

of how we express compassion toward ourselves and therefore how we're able to express compassion toward others.

And in correlation with this idea of the inner critic, I think that's very interesting.

So I'm just going to read to you something that I shared in, I think it was the episode about three weeks ago where I was talking about, you know, resilience can appear in many different forms.

And there were three key themes that came out of that.

And This one about the inner critic is the third and final theme that I'd like to unpack a little bit more with a little bit more detail, really, or a bit more expansiveness.

I love that word.

And so let me just read to you what it was that I said in that episode that that sparked this episode here.

So if you're worried that you need to be more resilient or that you shouldn't be feeling so tired despite the energy grief or worry is taking from you, or if there's a voice telling you that you need to buck up, remember...

Listen to it all with kindly.

Listen to it all kindly and let it know you understand this drive to get on and that you won't always feel this way.

Hold the tiredness, the sadness, the worry with compassion and remember this too shall pass.