How to Rewire the Way you Talk to Yourself

There's almost no one whom we treat as badly as ourselves.

Photo by Joseph Two on Unsplash

Self-compassion has an image problem. It sounds soft, vague, faintly embarrassing - the language of scented candles and inspirational posters.

So when the voice in your head says “that was pathetic, everyone saw it, you’ll blow the next one too,” you don’t try to be kind to yourself. You try to argue with it. You tell yourself it wasn’t that bad. You point out, correctly, that nobody else even noticed.

For a few minutes it helps. Then it returns, unchanged. So if the facts don't change anything, what is it actually about?

Self-criticism runs on the feelings of being judged by someone else

You can tell what self-criticism is from the feelings it uses. It runs on contempt, disappointment, and anger - the feelings of someone higher up looking down on you. Those are social feelings, the kind that pass between two people, and that is the clue: self-criticism is the mind's equipment for handling other people, turned on yourself.

This is in part because we never evolved a separate system for handling ourselves. We evolved continually piling on new abilities on top of old ones and one of the newest is an awareness of yourself: the ability to stand outside yourself and judge what you see.

But we have no dedicated system for managing that self, so the mind runs its inner life on the equipment built for dealing with other people such as:

• Ranking yourself against others: measuring up as higher or lower, stronger or weaker.

• Belonging to the group: being a valued member who contributes, shares, and pulls their weight.

• Caring for someone: protecting, soothing, and helping a person in distress.

• Being cared for: turning to someone for comfort, protection, and reassurance.

Self-criticism is the first of these, turned inward. A part of you takes the high position and ranks the rest of you as inferior - not measuring up and, in the old logic of the group, someone to be pushed out.

Your internal critic is usually a particular person you took in

You are made partly of the people who raised you. You took in their voices and a sense of yourself you never chose. For example, had you been taken as a baby into a violent gang and raised there, a different person would exist in his place.

So the critic usually sounds like someone - a parent, a teacher, an old boss. If the person you took in was contemptuous, that is the voice you now turn on yourself.

The fix is to switch which relationship you run

One of the borrowed systems we use to relate to other people is caring for someone in distress and the trick is you can turn that one inward too. And it runs on different machinery - the parasympathetic nervous system, oxytocin, the body's calming response.

That machinery evolved to calm the threat system: a parent settling a frightened child is one system switching another off.

How to run the caring system on yourself