# The INNER CRITIC



## Rozanne (Feb 24, 2006)

http://www.innernet.org.il/article.php?aid=461

Sigmund Freud said that within each person there are two conflicting drives: the urge for survival and a death wish. The latter drive is responsible for a person's self-destructive behavior. Being a non-believer, Freud could not account for the origin of this death wish. That a person should have a survival instinct is understandable, because that appears to be inherent in all living matter, vegetable as well as animal. But a death wish? Why? 
The Talmud says that a person's "yetzer hara" tries to destroy one anew every day (Kiddushin 30b). I believe that this is the origin of the negative self-evaluation and self-destructive behavior. Humans were instilled with a yetzer tov, a drive for life, and a yetzer hara, a self-destructive drive. Moses states this explicitly: "See, I have set before you the life and the good, the death and the evil" (Deuteronomy 30:15). By causing a person to think poorly about himself, the yetzer hara seeks to destroy him. The yetzer hara is cunning and wily, and will use anything it can to achieve its goal of destroying a person.

Of course, the "inner voice" is not audible. It consists of negative ideas. It is an "incessant inner critic," and our aim should be to change this inner voice from being a destructive critic to being a constructive guide, to acknowledge the good within us and to criticize only when there is honest, constructive criticism.

The inner critic may find fault with everything you do. It tells you how inadequate you are compared to others, who always do things so much better. It never compliments you for doing something good. It tells you that your friends are bored with you and wish you would go away. It tells you that you weigh too much even when you are at optimum weight, or that your appearance is unattractive when you are in fact rather handsome.

When you were a child, you had no way of differentiating right from wrong, good from bad. It was your parents' duty to teach you, and this required discipline. It is quite likely that when you did something inappropriate, your parents may not have said, "What you did was wrong," but, "You are bad." Or they may have said, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

They may have exaggerated things, like your accidentally dropping and breaking something, commenting, "Why are you so clumsy? Can't you even walk straight?" and reacted as though a broken dish or a spilled bottle of milk was a calamity. They may have shouted at you, which made you feel bad. They may have reacted with disappointment at your report card, conveying the message that by not excelling at school you were letting them down. Even good parents who care deeply for their children may say unwise things.

You may have had difficulty in arithmetic, such as doing word-problems, that other kids seemed to have understood. Your teacher might have said, "What's wrong with you that you can't get this?" If you could have dug a hole in the ground and jumped in, you would have. The feeling "There's something wrong with me, I can't understand things," is grist for the mill for the inner critic.

All kinds of things can happen in childhood, at an age when one does not have the capacity to correctly understand things, and therefore one may take them as indications of personal deficiencies. A parent may be absent from the home because of illness or other reasons. Young children may interpret this absence as, "Mommy went away because I was naughty." If parents fight or there is a separation, children often feel that they are to blame.

The yetzer hara is not going to let such opportunities go by. Many things that happen to us are stored away in our subconscious mind. The yetzer hara will dig these things out, and even if you do not recall the specific incident, it will resurrect the feelings that accompanied such incidents. The feeling "I am bad" will, of course, result in having little regard for oneself.

There is a small but extremely important difference between guilt and shame. If a person has done something wrong and feels guilty because of it, that is a healthy feeling. The discomfort of guilt discourages people from doing wrong and motivates them to make amends and to rectify the wrong. The feeling of guilt for what someone has done can, therefore, be constructive.

But if instead of feeling that one did something bad, a person feels that he is bad, inadequate or unlikable, there is little corrective action one can take. The feeling "I am bad or inferior" constitutes shame rather than guilt. Or to put it another way, guilt is the feeling that "I made a mistake," whereas shame is the feeling that "I am a mistake." Keep this definition of shame in mind. Once the feeling of shame occurs, it can haunt one for life.

The achievements we make are primarily of an intellectual nature, hence we may logically know that we do have value. However, the feeling of shame, that we are bad, lazy or inept, is of an emotional nature. As a rule, emotion is more powerful than intellect, and if the two conflict, emotion usually wins. That is why even people of international acclaim may nevertheless have low self-esteem. Rabbi Shneur Zalman in Tanya states that it is possible for the intellect to dominate emotion, but this requires much effort and strength of character. Achieving intellectual dominance is one way in which low self-esteem may be overcome.

Note that I said "intellectual dominance;" not "intellectual acuity" or "intellectual brilliance." Paradoxically, very bright people may harbor extremely low self-esteem. Perhaps the reason for this is that the "inner voice" that puts you down is the yetzer hara, and the Talmud tells us that the yetzer hara is particularly powerful in highly gifted people (Succah 52a). It is only logical that God will not give a person of meager personality assets an overwhelmingly powerful yetzer hara. However, a gifted person has the strength to cope with a more powerful yetzer hara, which exerts great pressure to crush the person. Intellectual dominance means that one puts his intellect to work to defeat the wiles of the yetzer hara.

Of course, a person may experience adversities, and it is only natural that these may depress a person's feelings. However, even adversities should not cause a person to lose self-esteem. It is a sharp blow if the company's downsizing results in the loss of one's job, and one feels depressed. But why should the company's downsizing reflect on one's feeling of worthiness?

The Midrash states that King Solomon ruled over a huge empire. He was cast from his throne by the king of demons, the Ashmidai. He wandered throughout the country, and when he said he was King Solomon people regarded him as insane. The Talmud states that whereas he had previously been king over a huge empire, he was now king only over his walking stick (Sanhedrin 20b). Although he had lost everything, he did not lose his feeling that he was in fact a king, although his only "subject" was his walking stick.

Adversity may be depressing, but it should not reflect on one's self-concept.


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## CECIL (Oct 3, 2004)

Agreed. I've felt both forces at various times in my life and they are very powerful. The self-destructive drive is very dangerous and it works like a positive feedback loop - the worse you feel the more powerful the drive to destroy yourself is. It becomes very hard to resist as you relish in it. I used to call it "The Divine Darkness" or "Divine Destruction" and I'd write about "drinking deep of the river of hate". Scary stuff :shock:

Conversely the positive drive is very powerful too. I've felt it as a deep undercurrent throughout my life that's been masked by the negative intent. Though at times I get overwhelmed with the positive force and it is very uplifting. So far I haven't been able to hold onto it for long, but I'm working on it.

I really like the distinction that article made about the difference between guilt and shame. It makes a lot of sense actually. I think its a prime example of how powerful language can be. If you tell someone "You are acting like an idiot" it has a vastly different connotation to "You are an idiot". If someone is accused of lying and they say "Are you calling me a liar?", you can reply with "No, but I am saying that you are lying about this". Instead of labelling them as a whole you are describing a single action, which doesn't put them in a box and limit the way they feel about themselves.

The same applies to how we think and talk about ourselves (the inner critic). If you do something stupid its very desctructive to say "I did that so I am stupid" (Something I do a lot). While it is less limiting to say "It was a stupid thing to do".


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## flat (Jun 18, 2006)

I dunno. Why would a "loving" god instill (let alone create) something like a yetzer hara? Just to make the lives of his children miserable? As if we haven't got enuff of our own problems to deal with :roll:

Also it's easy to link our self-worth with losing a job. What if you are older and may not find a similar job that easy? Or if you do, you have to start at the bottom and work up again? Meanwhile bills are piling up and the kids and wife are starting to feel the pinch. What if you lose your house? All your past material achievements (yetzer tov) go down the drain if you can't replace your lost high-paying job that easily. Thank god I'm not married and haven't went thru that :shock:

No, I think these positive and negative forces are just normal reactions that are part of our human psyche. And sometimes we lose control of them. And sometimes they may have a biological basis that can be helped with medication.


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## ihavemessedupdreams (Apr 19, 2007)

no i think where doing that to ourselfs, self manipulation (for whatever reason) mine is still keep mysself from recovering if its to scary and i wanna take a small step back


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

I have a big problem with the inner critic, my understanding is that it has a lot to do with the harshness of your parental conditioning and identifying with your parents as you develop and is closely aligned with your "ego ideal", so the inner critics job is to try to get you to live up to your ideal image and punishes you when you dont, which is why psychologists say there are two ways of raising self esteem: either raising your ability to live up to your ego ideal by raising confidence etc, or by lowering the standards of your ego ideal - or do both

I read a book about this recently and it said that in some people their superego can be so harsh that it can "drive the ego to death" which could be what is happening to some people with dp. Also Freud talked about the source of energy of the inner critic and says "the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his ego. It is like a displacement, a turning round upon his own ego"

So the way I see it is that if you dont feel a lot of emotions or you are dp'd you probably have an overpowering superego/inner critic which is too strong in you which has taken your anger and aggressive energy and directed it towards yourself so you are at civil war with yourself. 
So one way out is to reclaim your aggressive angry energy from the superego and direct it away from yourself so your inner critic loses its source of energy so emotions start to flow again and you raise your self esteem.


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## CECIL (Oct 3, 2004)

I can relate to what you are saying about being at war with yourself as I have experienced that myself. The super egoic voice literally became a torturer and slave driver which allowed me very little room to move. The good news is you can slowly break it down so its less harsh 

And yeah I agree with the "ego ideal" thing - putting so many expectations on yourself so that nothing you do can be good enough. I do this a lot too. I think it helps to learn to just accept what you do and realise that you are learning and can't be expected to be perfect all the time. Or more to the point that there's no such thing as perfection so you do the best you can as you go, learn from it and do it better next time.


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## DRyan (Jan 19, 2008)

thanks for sharing, I'll have to finish reading this later.


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