Have you ever noticed how harsh you can be with yourself? Maybe you make a mistake at work and spend the rest of the day thinking about what you should have done differently. Or you have a conversation with someone and afterward you replay everything you said, wondering if you sounded stupid or if they took something the wrong way.
For some people, that critical voice is almost constant. You should have known better. Why did you say that? You’re going to mess this up. You’re not good enough.
And because it’s been there for so long, you may not even notice how often you’re talking to yourself this way. It just feels normal.
But here’s something I want you to consider. What if that critical voice isn’t actually trying to hurt you? What if it thinks it’s helping?
Why Would Your Inner Critic Think It’s Helping?
I know that sounds strange. How could something that makes you feel anxious, ashamed, or never quite good enough possibly be trying to help you?
Here’s how I think about it: our brains develop ways of responding to the world based on our experiences, especially the ones we had growing up. And those responses developed for a reason. They helped us navigate something at the time, even if we don’t understand what that something was.
Let’s say you grew up in a home where mistakes were met with criticism. Maybe you were embarrassed when you got something wrong, or you learned that getting things right was how you earned approval. Your subconscious brain may have learned that mistakes lead to something painful, and it developed a way to help you avoid that pain.
So now, as an adult, there’s a part of you that’s constantly looking for what you might be doing wrong. It reminds you of your mistakes, pushes you to do better, and makes sure you don’t get too comfortable with your successes.
Why? Because somewhere along the way, it learned that if it could catch your mistakes before someone else did, maybe you wouldn’t get hurt.
The problem isn’t that this part of you has bad intentions. The problem is that it’s still using a strategy that made sense at one point in your life, even though it may no longer be helping you.
Why Negative Thoughts Can Feel So Automatic
You may have heard the term Automatic Negative Thoughts, sometimes called ANTs. These are the thoughts that seem to pop into your head without any effort on your part.
I’m going to fail. They probably don’t like me. I always screw things up.
These thoughts can happen so quickly that you don’t even have a chance to consider whether they’re accurate.
Our brains are constantly making predictions based on what they’ve learned from previous experiences. If you’ve spent years believing that making mistakes leads to rejection, your brain may automatically anticipate rejection whenever you think you’ve done something wrong.
And because that response happens so quickly, it can feel like the truth rather than a conclusion your brain learned a long time ago.
This is why I don’t think it’s enough to simply challenge a negative thought and replace it with a positive one. You might be able to tell yourself, I’m not a failure, but if some part of your brain is convinced that focusing on your failures is what keeps you safe, it’s not necessarily going to believe you.
There’s a reason that thought keeps showing up. I want to understand that reason.
What Is Your Inner Critic Trying to Prevent?
This is where Parts Work becomes especially helpful.
In Parts Work, we recognize that we can have different parts of ourselves with different thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. You might have one part that’s incredibly critical of everything you do and another part that’s exhausted from never feeling good enough.
Rather than trying to get rid of the critical part, I want to understand what it’s doing.
For example, imagine someone who is constantly focused on everything they’re doing wrong. They can accomplish ten things in a day, but the one thing they forgot is what they think about all evening.
We could spend time reminding them of the ten things they did well. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. But what if the part that’s focused on the mistake believes that paying attention to everything they do wrong is necessary?
One question I might ask is, “What bad or scary thing would happen if you stopped focusing on everything you’re doing wrong?”
That may seem like an odd question. Most people would assume they’d feel better if they stopped criticizing themselves. But the part of the brain that’s doing the criticizing may have a very different answer.
Maybe it believes that if you stop paying attention to your mistakes, you’ll become careless. Maybe someone will be disappointed in you. Maybe you’ll be rejected, embarrassed, or criticized by someone else.
And maybe that belief developed when you were six years old and getting something wrong really did lead to something painful.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Because instead of fighting with the critic, we’re beginning to understand why it’s there.
You Can Understand a Part Without Agreeing With It
I want to make an important distinction here: just because we understand why a part of you developed a certain belief doesn’t mean that belief is true today.
If you grew up believing that being hard on yourself was the only way to succeed, it makes sense that you might still rely on criticism to motivate yourself. But that doesn’t mean criticism is the only way you can be motivated today.
Think about how you might respond to a child who’s learning something new. If that child makes a mistake, you could tell them they’re terrible at it and should have known better. Or you could help them understand what went wrong and what they might do differently next time.
Both responses acknowledge the mistake, but they create very different experiences for that child. The same is true for us as adults.
You can recognize that you made a mistake, take responsibility for it, and make changes without attacking yourself in the process.
But if your brain learns that criticism is necessary to keep you from making mistakes, simply telling yourself to be more compassionate may not be enough. We need to help that part of your brain recognize that there’s another way, and this can be done in therapy.
What If You Didn’t Have to Get Rid of Your Inner Critic?
People often come to therapy wanting to stop certain thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. They want to stop overthinking, stop being so reactive, or stop criticizing themselves.
I understand that. These patterns can be exhausting.
But I don’t approach them as things we need to eliminate. I want to know why they’re happening in the first place.
If there’s a part of you that’s constantly criticizing you, I want to understand when it learned to do that. What was happening in your life at the time? What did it believe it needed to prevent? And what does it think would happen today if it stopped?
Sometimes we discover that a part of you is still responding to the world as though you’re much younger than you actually are. It hasn’t recognized that your circumstances have changed, that you have more choices now, or that you no longer need the same strategies you once did.
And this is where change becomes possible. Not because we’ve convinced you to think more positively, but because we’re helping your brain update something it learned a long time ago.
The Next Time Your Inner Critic Shows Up
The next time you catch yourself being particularly hard on yourself, see if you can notice what’s happening without immediately trying to change it.
Maybe you forgot something important and your first thought is, I’m such an idiot. Or someone seems annoyed with you and you immediately start going through everything you might have done wrong.
Rather than arguing with the thought or automatically believing it, consider asking yourself a different question.
“What does some part of me think it’s preventing by being so hard on me?”
You may not know the answer. And figuring it out on your own can be difficult. You’re trying to understand something your brain has been doing automatically for years, maybe even decades. It’s hard to recognize something you’ve never thought to question.
This is one of the reasons therapy is so helpful: my training in Parts Work has taught me to ask questions that wouldn’t even occur to most people. I might notice something you haven’t noticed before or offer a different way of looking at what’s been happening. And sometimes, one question leads us somewhere neither of us expected.
There’s always a reason a pattern developed. And when we begin to understand that reason, we have an opportunity to change something that may have felt automatic for most of our lives.
How Therapy Can Help You Understand Your Inner Critic
If you’re tired of being your own harshest critic, therapy can help you understand where that voice came from, why it’s still showing up, and what it might take for things to finally feel different.
I offer individual therapy for men and women age 30+ in Norwood, Massachusetts, as well as online therapy throughout Massachusetts.
If this article brought up questions about your own patterns or experiences, I’d be happy to explore them with you. You can email or call me directly at (857) 891-0146 with questions, or book a session online whenever you’re ready.