Self-compassion and self-criticism

Your suffering isn’t just because of recurrent unwanted intrusive thoughts, chronic worry, a depressed mood, or another uncomfortable private experience. The interpretation that you shouldn’t have such an experience and that there is something bad, weak, or crazy about you for such experience creates, maintains, and intensifies your suffering too.

This type of self-criticism hurts. Perhaps it started as the voice of a critical parent or some other significant person. Sometimes you continue to receive criticism from that person and that hurts. Self-criticism, though, is you against you. The critical voice is no longer someone else’s. Now it is yours. You aren’t on your own team. The game isn’t fun and none of you is going to win.

You might criticize yourself as an attempt to control a thought or feeling that you don’t like. I suspect it “works” every once in a while, especially if by “working” you mean that you can avoid your thoughts and feelings to get relief from them for a short amount of time. It doesn’t work to alleviate suffering long-term for anyone ever. Trying to make thoughts go away will make them more likely. Suppressing feelings will make them bigger and stronger. Some people who avoid their thoughts and feelings don’t report having anxiety or depression, but they are just suffering differently.

Numbing out our undesirable thoughts and feelings also numbs out desirable feelings like joy, trust, connection, compassion, affection, playfulness, and creativity.

You might criticize yourself because you think the best way to learn is through criticism. This is just an old theory. Many of us were educated this way. It isn’t true. The best way to learn is to have the safety, time, space, and motivation to try. You have to feel safe to have the courage to put forth effort and risk “failing.” You don’t need criticism when you make a mistake while trying to learn. You just need enough safety to keep trying.