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Jennifer Valentine provides this edition’s “Enhancing Life”. Jennifer is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who has provided EAP services to more than a dozen American Fortune 500 companies over the last decade. Jennifer takes a great interest in strategizing with individuals and corporations as they promote and maintain wellness in life and in the workplace.
Of all the popular self-care techniques available, the one strategy that many people do not easily employ can also be one of the biggest challenges, as the culprit is very elusive.
Without realizing it, and hundreds of times each day, many of us bear the burden of a very negative critic inside our head. This critic attacks our looks, our attempts, our intelligence, our worth, our past, our present, and certainly our future. Our inner critic maintains our self-doubt and fuels our depression and anxiety. While the critic, in moderation, can keep us creative and can help us excel, too much critic can keep us fearful and hold us back from getting what we want from life.
The main reason that deciding to address our inner critic can be so tricky is that this critic maintains her power through remaining covert. By remaining just under the surface where we can’t easily identify her, the inner critic can manipulate us without us even knowing it. The “boy, you’ve gained weight” or the “you can never accomplish that” happen so easily. With repetition, these messages become second nature. Before we realize it, we say something negative to ourselves out of habit. Only the fortunate few of us will get the wake up call alerting us to the fact that we have become skilled in beating ourselves up without appearing to move a muscle.
Negative self-talk is a nasty habit that can be broken. Movement in the right direction means becoming aware and replacing the negative words each time they happen. For many, making a journal of these negative messages and transforming them can be helpful. Often getting it all down on paper can show just how plentiful and powerful these dark messages have been. Once you identify the negative self-talk, your next task is to turn it into a statement that is more positive (and usually more true that the negative one.) For example, if you are able to deliberately remind yourself of some past success when your critic claims “you’re a failure,” then you reclaim your power, and for many your spirit.
Through getting in the regular habit of replacing these negative messages with more realistic ones, you’ll see progress. By keeping your inner critic in check where she belongs, you’ll find a whole untapped resource – you.
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Keeping your Inner Critic in Check |
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Spring Issue 2008 |
