Ep2 - The Inner Critic
Welcome to the Rebrand Revolution. In this episode Sidonie tackles the Inner Critic. Whether yours looks like a gremlin or one of the Real Housewives, chances are, it's trying to ruin a few good things for you. Sidonie talks about where the idea of the Inner Critic comes from and then walks us through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the term. She proposes a rebrand that involves a bit of a mental restructure and asks what would happen if we retired our Inner Critic and replaced them with an Inner Council?
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In this episode, I reference the following:
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This podcast is recorded on Kaurna Country. We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Kaurna people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land.
I'm Sidonie Henbest, and you are listening to Rebrand Revolution, a podcast where we take today's pop culture cliche and turn it into tomorrow's empowered call to action. It's like a 15 minute makeover for your head, not your face.
Welcome to episode two. The Inner Critic. Well, I'm just going to jump right in here and ask you what yours is. Is it a gremlin with tiny little ears that lives behind the sofa and pokes up its head at really inopportune moments? Or is yours more like some kind of grizzly, Real Housewife before her first green juice of the day? Whatever your Inner Critic is like we are talking about that voice or those voices that diminish, demean, criticize and generally treat us like trash.
All right, I figure to keep this in some sense of propriety. I'm going to start with a definition, and for my definitions, I'm going to be consulting Wikipedia, because I am old enough to remember when encyclopedias were made from paper and took up an entire bookshelf, and also young enough to have no patience for looking that sort of thing up at all. So here we go. If you don't like the definitions, please feel free to rewrite, rewrite the Wikipedia page. "The inner critic, or inner critical voice, is a concept used in popular psychology and psychotherapy to refer to a sub personality that judges and demeans a person, a concept similar in many ways, to the Freudian super ego as inhibiting censor or the Jungian act of imagination. The inner critic is usually experienced as an inner voice attacking a person, saying that they are bad, wrong, inadequate, worthless, guilty and so on". Sound familiar? Everyone has one. Well, we think everyone has one. In fact, more to the point in this day and age, I think we could go so far as to say, if you don't have an established first name basis kind of relationship with your inner critic, then, who even are you? Mine's called Gladys, by the way, if you were wondering. And she is something else.
But before I assassinate the character of the Inner Critic, I thought I should do the right thing and consider whether or not, in fact, there are any redeeming qualities of the Inner Critic? And the answer is, well, there are. And let's start with the most obvious one, in a way which is maybe, just maybe, sometimes we do things that deserve a little bit of a critical response, like and these are somewhat confessional, not letting someone in in traffic, or losing my call with a colleague or a service provider, that is the kind of thing that could reasonably warrant a not your best work, Sidonie, kind of response, and rightly so. I was reminded this morning when walking with a friend that there is another form of self criticism that is, in fact, really important. If you are a creator or an innovator, then you will often have to engage in in the act of critique in order to make your idea better. It's a really important part of the process, and that is the kind of inner criticism that serves us all. In fact, the other thing that the inner critic does that's good is help us reflect on past behavior and potentially help us realize that we could have done better or should have behaved differently. And this is the kind of inner criticism that is good and makes us good human beings. The other part, and you know, the number one job of any organism, and certainly of the human organism, is survival. There are a series of inbuilt inhibition controls that keep us from doing dangerous life threatening things like fighting wild animals or, I suppose, even getting too close to the edge of cliffs, and we need those to stay alive. Then there is the other kind, and I think this is kind of the specialist domain of the inner critic, and that is behavioral modification for societal or tribal acceptance, in other words, making ourselves likable. And useful in the eyes of others to ensure our ongoing safety and potentially elevate our position within the group and at all costs to avoid rejection. And this careful listener is where good and useful, I think, starts to turn bad and ugly.
So that's enough of the good. What about the bad? Well, I suppose if the function of the Inner Critic is to inhibit potential risks to our survival, then anything that makes us stop and think twice is surely a good thing, right? And possibly even taking responsibility, that seems pretty healthy and pretty useful, but when that looks more like complete fear or the complete inability to act because of that Inner Critic, that's when we've got a problem. And this is the inner critic, I think, that we speak about in pop psychology terms. It's this extreme version where a character, if you like, within us, has the power to severely limit or even stop us dead in our tracks, what starts out as a bit of name calling can and does end up having an absolutely crippling effect, preventing people from living, loving and experiencing life the fullest. I think this turns from bad to ugly when the persona of the Inner Critic assumes so much power in our mind that we find ourselves in the kind of territory where we're saying things like, "I can't control my Inner Critic", or "My Inner Critic calls all the shots". And that is when we have something that is wildly out of control.
Because of our current preoccupation with self development and things that might be perceived as our weaknesses, we have developed a particularly ugly obsession, I think, with an idea of an all powerful force within us, this sort of Jekyll and Hyde, kind of character that takes us over and we are powerless in its wake. And this is wild, right? Because Inner Critic started out as a notional concept to help us understand ourselves better, to understand the way our mind and our behavior operates. And as soon as it was given a name, it would seem, and people started writing books about it and talking about it in certain terms. It has just slowly but surely started to gain power, and somewhere along the way, started to take on the characteristics of a real person, a real person that not only has the right to exist, but somehow resembles, I don't know a rampaging demagogue from your favorite TV series. You know, God forbid we set it off by being too confident or too excited about something new. There are certainly different approaches out there, and people who will advocate different ways of dealing with the problem of the critical voice in our heads, some people espouse the taming of your Inner Critic, which sounds like it might need a whip or a ring from a sorcerer. And I don't know about you, but I have read enough storybooks to know that subjugation or control through willpower alone is likely to cause the raising of a dragon or something. The other way, and this is obviously my preferred approach, is to encourage acceptance and dialog with the critics. And this is the sort of approach that is seen in therapeutic frameworks like I.F.S. or Internal Family Systems where there is a relationship or an endeavor to humanize rather than to demonize.
So we've discussed the good, the bad and the ugly of the Inner Critic. And, you know, have seen how something started out. Well, it's a part of of natural behavior, but the description of it as an Inner Critic in itself was not a problem. It was just a way of describing a thing right? And some point along the way, and as it's intersected with, you know, a fascination with self development, a trend towards sound bite isms from influencers who aren't necessarily equipped with the complete context and the professional skills to to use this language. Somewhere along the line, the Inner Critic has gone from being just a notional idea of self or an aspect of self, to taking on real life human qualities. And as it's taken on those qualities, it has become the kind of personas that we're afraid of, that we give more power to that we allow to be something mightier than the rest of us, which is wild, if you think about it, it's only ever an aspect of self, right? So how on earth can it be more powerful than the rest of us put together? And that made me realize where the opportunity for a rebrand was, and it's less of a rebrand in the sense of a coat of paint kind of rebrand, although it could definitely be that too, and it's more one about a restructure, in fact, if you like.
And it is this: Consider a Council. Now, depending on what your pop culture flavor is, it might be a Parks and Recreation Style council, or it might be a Star Trek Style council. It doesn't matter. They all count. They're all councils. But imagine, if you will, a council, and by that I mean a group of people, a group of people with different needs and wants, but all are there because they represent an aspect of what is important, and they are a voice that deserves to be heard. So we have our council, and we have one real noisy person on that council, and we have, let's call him, I'm going to call him Gary, right? And apologies to all the Gary's out there in the world that you know and love or are, I'm sure you're great. I'm sure they're great, but Gary is the chair of this council, and Gary, quite frankly, has gotten a little too used to the sound of his own voice, right? Gary has been allowed to hold the floor, probably by accident at first, or probably because he initially said something kind of useful, and then all hell broke loose, and he decided he was the only person who ever got to speak. And that, in a way, I think, is how a lot of people's Inner Critics present at the moment one very noisy old white guy who doesn't realize that he does not represent the rest. So what if we reminded our minds, our councils, that they are in fact, all deserve a voice, and that it might be time, in fact, to I don't know, we all Gary out to pasture, right? So the old white male, stale dude could be thanked very much for his service and sent off to play golf or, you know, I don't know, fish or something, go somewhere else, do something else, and be invited to step down from the council, really, that's the that's the main point, and in doing so, it might allow the rest of the voices a chance to be heard, and what great things might come if the rest of the Council could be heard. For starters, I think they're just going to be relieved because it'll be a lot quieter in there and be a lot less yap yap, yap, yap yap, a lot less mansplaining. The world is always better with less mansplaining, that's for sure. And well, who knows, some revolutionary new ideas might be possible.
So my proposal to you is this, Let's ditch the chairman of the board, and let's turn this back over to the Council of many voices representing many different people and opportunities and see what happens if they all get a go. Now, you know it is possible that another critic will rise from within the ranks, but hopefully we can remember that our job is to work together as a council, not to allow one voice to have dominion over all the rest. What a concept. Hey, you might love my idea for a rebrand of the Inner Critic, and you might hate it. You might have your own idea, and that's really the point of all of this. I hope it sparked some curiosity in you. I hope you've enjoyed having a little bit of a fun look at what might be possible in terms of turning around something we take as a given, like the Inner Critic. And I hope it's made you think of some other things that could deserve a makeover in your life.
Remember, this is all about making over your head, not your face. So thank you for joining us on Rebrand Revolution. If you liked what you heard, don't forget to click your subscribe button so that you can hear other episodes as they drop weekly. And if you feel so inclined, please do write us a review if you have any particular pet hate words that you would like to put forward or a conjecture to the rebrand, I've offered be delighted to hear from you. You can get in touch with us on Instagram, at rebrand revolution and at www.rebrandrevolution.com.au, thanks for listening. See you soon.
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