Most of the people I know have an inner critic. It is a constant partner people will experience as a thought process that transforms their well-being and interrupts their awareness.

It usually is the experience of an inner critic that will judge them, assess their behavior, or react to their feelings. And depending on that inner critic’s worldview, they’ll experience it as one blaming them or as one trying to motivate them.

What is rarely seen is how that inner critic is on a mission to support them. It will either, in a rather harsh way, seek to motivate its listener to overcome the imagined wide gap toward the self one should be. Or it will seek to reduce the perceived gap with who one should be by trying to calm things down or turn them into something positive.

Discussing the inner critic with clients, quite a few will describe themselves as having been able to manage their inner voice.

However, what has rarely changed is the presence of tension between how people want to see themselves and who they experience themselves to be. It’s a tension that contributes to how stressed a person is.

This presence of stress is a consequence of the presence of the inner critic and is what makes it difficult to assess one’s experience, thoughts, and feelings clearly. The inner critic prevents this from happening. The stress resulting from the inner critic makes it hard to feel comfortable with the discomfort of the tension.

An attitude allowing us to feel comfortable with some discomfort is the very ability that allows us to assess the tension for what it is and enables us to see what the inner critic believes it needs to protect us from. It doesn’t know, that what it once helped us to deal with, now is from the past.