In less than a second, Google find more than 27 million articles linked to the “inner critic.” Wikipedia describes it as a concept in popular psychology. It’s a concept that describes how people deal with situations in which they experience a need to self-criticize.

The inner critic then acts as an inner voice that impacts how they perceive and experience themselves in situations of uncertainty. Being uncertain about their ability to deal with a situation, they seek a way to gain certainty and use the inner voice to help them experience themselves as not good enough.

The more experience they’ve developed in listening to their inner critic, the more authority that voice gains. It becomes their way to see who they are or how they are.

That makes it a challenge to accept the idea that thoughts and emotions come and go without any ability to control that flow. That one may not be one’s thoughts and emotions.

Discovering who one is, may take the ability to observe these thoughts and emotions while being detached from them.

Being attached to one’s thoughts leads to being one‘s thoughts as one is immersed in them and incapable of seeing them as thoughts.

Being detached from one’s thoughts is the ability to observe one’s thoughts as thoughts. That ability first creates an observer of one’s thoughts. Then it becomes an observer having the freedom to decide how to react to these thoughts and the situation.

It takes practice to move back and forth between being immersed in one’s thoughts and observing them. The objective of that practice is to enable oneself to choose who one is.