Dealing with Self-Criticism (Stop Hating Yourself)

What is unhealthy self-criticism? How can you tell if this is something that's holding you back? In this episode we discuss unhealthy self-criticism in depth, how it may have come about and how it may be holding you back. In addition we discuss six practical steps that can be taken to address it.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

If you would like to enquire about an online psychotherapy appointment with Dr. Alex, you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com

Intro Excerpt from: Lost in Translation (Directed by Sofia Coppola)

The meditations discussed can be found here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6JKqFI7DCvBjzcvDEK5RSG?si=afa00ab39d78495f
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01JExbQcJMLNttjxu11I5L?si=22abeae913864ad6

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Transcript

Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist and on today's episode will be discussing self-criticism, self-loathing, how it may have come about and what you can do about it. 12s As we all know, self-criticism is something that's very common. We've made episodes for about perfectionism and imposter syndrome, which relate to this idea. And many people, an excess of self-criticism is so embedded in their psychology that they're not even aware of it. 1s Self-criticism is very important to overcome in order to improve your effectiveness in life, but also your overall quality of life. Without an excess of self-criticism, you'll find it's easier to make decisions that benefit you, decisions that derive more from your own values, and you'll find it easier to navigate the world and relationships and to simply be happier. So in this episode, we'll be discussing how to know if self-criticism is something you suffer with, how it may have come about, and what you can do about it. So firstly, how do you know if self criticism is getting out of hand for you? How do you know if this is a problem that you're actually facing? Firstly, see if you can pay attention to the quality of your thoughts. Most people have a lot of self referential thoughts, meaning most people refer to themselves when they're thinking they're having a conversation with themselves. Most people think in language rather than images. So one question might be how do you refer to yourself, generally speaking? Do you refer to yourself with kindness, compassion? Rationality? This becomes especially pertinent when things are either going really well or really badly. For example, when something is going really well, I'm able to be happy for yourself. Or do you subtly discount yourself in some way? If you get a promotion at work, are you able to give yourself credits for that, or do you find some reason to explain what happened in a way which avoids giving yourself any credit? Similarly, when things go badly due, primarily blame yourself. In psychotherapy, it's generally encouraged to take responsibility for things in your life. But responsibilities, of course, different from blame. Self-critical people often default to identifying themselves as the cause, the sole cause of anything going wrong in their lives. The tone of self-criticism tends to be unhealthy, and it tends to be disproportionate. Global. Irrational. Non-specific. For example, if you get a bad result on an exam, you might think, wow, my life is really going down the drain. A healthier form of self-criticism might look like, okay, you didn't get the result you wanted on this exam. Let's look at things and see what we can do to improve our result next time. What specifically went wrong in this instance, which we can correct and avoid repeating on the next occasion? Next, you can look at your emotions. When you look at your emotional life, do you find that you're easily triggered to feel things like guilt and shame and regret? Obviously, these are all emotions which imply that we've done something wrong. Either something that's betrayed our own value system, or maybe the value system of the group that we belong to. So one question might be how easily did these emotions come about? Do we feel that they always come about in situations which are proportionate, in which it makes sense to be experiencing these emotions? For example, do you feel these emotions when you've done something which you would find perfectly acceptable if someone else did it, but you apply a different, higher standard to yourself? Often people who have an excess of self-criticism formed partnerships, be it friendships or romantic relationships with people who can take advantage of that. Do you find that you feel a lot of guilt and shame or regret when you fail to do something which someone has asked to view, which objectively is a little bit unreasonable, like someone who's taking up a lot of your time. Last, you can look at your behavior. Do you have difficulty accepting a compliment? Deal. Withdraw from situations very quickly. Do you find that you can lash out at others? Do you find close relationships difficult? Do you find that you have a tendency to either overly attach yourself to people who you perceive to be stronger or better than you in some way, or to withdraw from people who give you affection because it makes you feel uncomfortable. These are the kind of indicators which might suggest that self criticism is an issue for you. 2s So how does self-criticism come about? Like most things in our psychology. Many factors are going to be at play. Firstly, in terms of our personality. People who are high in a trait called conscientiousness are at higher risk of being overly self-critical. Traits. Conscientiousness is all about having a very strong regard for duty, for what's right, for rules, for the future, for delaying gratification. So, as you can imagine, the higher you are in traits conscientiousness, the more likely it is that you're going to be judgmental of yourself and of other people as well. And the more likely you're going to hold both yourself and other people to high standards. So if you're high in trait conscientiousness, it does make it more likely that self-criticism may be an issue for you. Next is your upbringing. Usually, self-criticism comes about when you have a parent or caregiver who is very critical. And this process becomes internalized in our psychology. So in Freudian terms, that's what I've been called the superego. So we would have internalized the harsh superego in the language of transactional analysis. Another kind of therapy that would be called internalizing a critical parent. This is not to say that these are bad parents or caregivers, but that they focused a lot on the child's performance in individual situations, giving them praise when they performed well or criticism if they perform badly. This is normally coming from a place of good intentions. And often parents are simply anxious that their children won't do well in life. Of course, rewarding a child when they do something well or exerting criticism on some level, or discipline when they do the opposite, isn't necessarily always a bad thing, but it can be harmful when a child feels a more total sense of invalidation as a result of not doing well in some individual situation. Ideally, a child should feel some basic sense of security and unconditional acceptance. And then within that come to learn that some behaviors would bring them rewards and some will not. This is by no means an easy balance for the parents to strike, and ideas like these promoting psychological health are only just now breaking into the mainstream consciousness. And that's why it's not really about blaming parents, but more coming to understand how the subtleties of relationships between parents and child can influence someone's psychological development. 2s Next we can think about adverse life experiences and trauma. Often when children encounter some sort of difficult experience, they can be quick to blame themselves. And we all know this when parents are getting divorced, often the main thing they say to their child is to not blame themselves because they're aware of this tendency. But why would this be the case? This can happen because when disruptive events are happening in a child's life, it can actually, on some level, be easier for the child to blame themselves, to think there's something wrong with me that's causing this problem, because for the child, it's less scary to think that than to think that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world and that the world is unsafe. One of the functions of parenting, in fact, is to cocoon a child as it's growing up from some of the harsh realities of life. But this doesn't always happen. So when children do face these harsh realities, one school of thought is that children blame themselves as a coping mechanism, because it's actually less frightening than thinking that there's something wrong with the external world. One extreme example of this, in a case report I read a few years ago, is regarding a patient who had an argument with their father and said some things to their father that they regretted, only for the father to die of a stroke a couple of days later. And as you can imagine, this resulted in a huge degree of self-criticism and self-loathing for the patient, because he felt, on some level, that he was directly responsible for his father coming to harm. So it might be worth looking at your own life experiences and think when you were younger, when you were a child or a teenager, did any really bad things happen to you which at the time you took responsibility for? Perhaps by default, which you still take responsibility for, perhaps unconsciously, and which now that you're an adult, you're in a position to to alleviate that responsibility, to look at the situation more objectively, to look at it more rationally, to give yourself a break. Culture is, of course, a very important factor when it comes to the development of our personalities. You can look at Japanese culture, for instance, which has a strong cultural emphasis on self-discipline. Hard work and achieve meant striving for improvement. In Japan, they have a concept called kaizen, which refers to continuous improvement, and it's deeply ingrained in Japanese society. But you can also look at Western individualism, which is not exclusive to any one culture, but Western societies as a whole, particularly the United States, which often promotes the idea of individualism and personal achievement. You can see that both of these examples, you can see that both of these cultural examples put a strong burden on the individual to constantly be striving for something better. And there's no doubt that in both of these examples, this has helped individuals to achieve more. But it carries this dark side of an excess of self criticism. 1s So now that we've discussed what self-criticism is and how it may have come about. One question might be how the self-criticism relate to other similar concepts like confidence and self-esteem. Discussing unhealthy self-criticism helps us to understand the difference between confidence and self-esteem. Self-esteem we can think of as a basic feeling that you are a valid and valuable person, and that you have a place in the world and that you belong in the world. Confidence is generally situation specific. Confidence is a sense that you're capable of executing certain behaviors in order to achieve a specific goal or result, and you're confident that if you execute those behaviors, they will have the desired effect. We just interviewed Professor Ian Robertson on an episode which came out last Friday, and he says confidence is a combination of can do and can happen, meaning I can do these behaviors. And if I do these behaviors, if I follow through, this result can happen. Confidence is achieved through repeated action practice and getting the results that you want. And I do think that if a person manages to learn to be confident in a few different areas of their life, they can achieve what you could call core confidence or meta level confidence. Meaning a person can say, I am confident that I can learn to be confident in whatever area I apply myself. So ideally, we should be moving towards a situation where we both possess confidence and self esteem rather than one or the other. 1s And this will help us to a achieve what we want in life, while be still feeling a basic sense of okay ness through the ups and downs, which of course are inevitable. This idea is mirrored in the paradoxical Theory of Change, an idea from Gestalt psychotherapy. That idea says change occurs when you accept yourself. It suggests that people are more likely to make positive changes in their lives when they fully accept and embrace whoever they happen to be in the present moment. Acceptance creates a foundation of self-trust and self-compassion that is conducive to personal growth. This idea says that, paradoxically, when individuals focus on changing themselves, forcefully denying their current state, they often encounter resistance. The resistance can manifest by stress. Frustration can lead to self-sabotage and an inability to make lasting changes. This dichotomy, I think, is mirrored in the self-development community, where you have a lot of literature that's focusing on increasing your confidence, hustling and doing a lot and a lot of literature that's focused on accepting yourself no matter what happens. And this is a false dichotomy. I believe you should be embracing both of these ideas at the same time. You can also think of this neuro biologically as the difference between dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated more with progress achievement. Getting some rewards from the external world and serotonin is more about feeling safe and content. A lot of self-critical people are trying to fill a serotonin hole with dopamine. In other words, they have a lack of feeling of basic safety and contentment and equanimity. But they don't realize that that's what's missing. So as a result, they go about seeking happiness through the only means they know how to performance, through achievement, through dopamine. So what can you do about all this? There's a number of practical things you can do. And what these things center around essentially is a getting a greater awareness of what's going through your mind, a greater awareness of your mental life, and then secondly, developing a different relationship with yourself. One of the things that self-criticism exposes is that you talk to yourself. You have a relationship with yourself. And once you realize that, then you get to choose consciously. What kind of relationship do you want to have with yourself? Do you want to have a relationship where you berate yourself, where you're a tyrant to yourself? Or do you want to have a relationship where you're a friend to yourself? So the first thing you can do is journaling. And there's two ways you can journal. Firstly, you can journal in a more spontaneous way when you journal spontaneously, just like when you speak spontaneously. You start to expose things that are happening in your mind which you're not necessarily conscious of. So journaling spontaneously is a really good way of identifying self-critical thoughts if you're not sure that you actually have them. In addition to journaling spontaneously in a kind of free creative writing way, you can journal in a more deliberate way. That's when you can choose to deliver actual messages that you want to yourself. You can choose to deliver yourself advice, and you can imagine when you're doing this, that you can do it in the same way that you might talk to a friend or someone else that you care about. The second exercise you can do is very similar to journaling, but rather than writing, you can actually speak. So when you encounter a situation in life which you find is particularly difficult, you can pull out the voice Memo app on your phone. Most people now have a voice memo app on their phone, and you can speak whatever you happen to be thinking. So let's say you're in some difficult situation and you feel like you're mentally berating yourself. You can speak into your phone and record. What do you automatically think about the situation? Then you can listen back to that and then you can consciously judge it. You can judge it with a more objective lens. Are these thoughts fair and proportionate or rational in this situation, or am I being disproportionately self-critical? And then if you are, you can then rerecord what you think about the situation being more deliberate with how you think. So if you fail an exam and then you record your spontaneous thoughts, and those thoughts might be such a terrible person for failing this exam, this is going to lead me down a really bad path. I can't believe I did this to myself again. I'm such a bad person. Etcetera. You can record that. Listen back to it with a more objective, rational ear. And then you can rerecord in a more clear minded adult way and think, okay, how do I actually want to handle this situation? What can I learn from this situation? What parts of the situation am I responsible and not responsible for? And what actions can I take to prevent this from happening again? Maybe I need to study harder. Maybe I need to prepare a bit more thoroughly, which is a self critique, but is not a self flagellation. The third possible solution I'm going to suggest is, unsurprisingly, psychotherapy. Why am I suggesting this? Just like journaling and just like recording your voice. Psychotherapy is a process where you're constantly talking in a spontaneous way and getting a clear understanding of what you think and feel. Except with psychotherapy, you have the advantage that you have another person in front of you, another person whose job it is to be objective and rational and proportionate. So even though psychotherapy is more expensive and harder to access, in many ways it's a lot easier. And there's also more accountability because we tend to be more accountable when we invest money in something and when there's a third party there who is also participating in the process. With psychotherapy, there's also a built in regularity where generally you're doing it once a week. Some people even do it more than once a week. And so there's a natural progression which tends to take place. The fourth solution is, unsurprisingly, again, meditation. There are many different kinds of meditation, but in general, meditation is going to be really useful because again, it helps to expose the subtleties of your psychological life, the thoughts and emotions which pass through your mind all the time. And you also learn through meditation how those thoughts and emotions influence your behavior. And you're going to get a grasp of the general theme of your thoughts and your emotions. And then there are some meditations which are specifically geared at self-compassion and compassion towards others, and they can be very helpful. The fifth solution I'm going to propose is more about your external relationships, your friendships, romantic relationships, family relationships, and to begin to audit them and to begin to understand what kind of feedback are you getting from different people. To understand the distinction between constructive and non constructive feedback. Who are the people in your life who generally have your best interests at heart? Who are the people whose criticisms of you seem to be more to make them feel better about themselves because of their insecurities? 1s In general, you want to surround yourself with people who do challenge you. Who do critique you, but from a place of wanting the best for you. So you don't want to mollycoddle yourself with people who only say yes to you, or people who only say the things you want to hear. But you want to have an understanding that the people who are closest to you want good things to happen for you, and as a result, might tell you something harsh to achieve that goal, which is ultimately what you want to do for yourself. 1s And the sixth and final solution I'm going to propose is to start to experiment with a new kind of decision making, and to see how that makes you feel about yourself by a new kind of decision making. I mean, beginning to make decisions from a place of what you feel you ought to do, what you feel you should do, rather than what the inner critic feels you should do. See if you can begin to make decisions based on what you want. And I don't mean impulsively doing whatever you want all the time, but rather decisions based on your values. This can start a feedback mechanism whereby the more you act on your values, the more you can refine and understand and get clarity on what your values are. And then that makes it easier for you to act on your values in the future. For example, if on some level you value your mental clarity and you value your ability to make good decisions and you value having a lot of energy, then you might decide to take a break from drinking alcohol. The less you drink alcohol, and the more you get to experience mental clarity and the ability to make good decisions and having good energy levels, the more you might come to value that and then the easier to be in the future to not drink alcohol. In this example, you're making a decision to go against the grain because of course it's a very socially conventional to drink alcohol, to do something which you think is better for your life ultimately. So you're making your doubling down on what you think is correct. What all of these solutions ultimately will allow you to do is to tell yourself a different story, to create a different narrative about your life. Keep me in mind that all stories and narratives are filter and that they overflow on some information and they aren't there, emphasize or totally leave out other pieces of information you want to tell yourself a narrative. Tell yourself a story which is definitely reality oriented, but also has an underlying tone of compassion, because ultimately it's that combination which is going to help you move forward the most. 1s So to conclude, an unhealthy degree of self-criticism is yet another way that he can become disconnected from reality. And many people feel a self criticism is like the fire or the fuel that helps them move forward in life. But even though that can be the case to some degree, it has a very clear ceiling where it stops working because too much self-criticism causes a basic level of unhappiness and a lot of emotional turmoil, which robs a person of their ability to keep working at something for the long time that it takes to accomplish something. And most goals which are worthwhile do tend to take a long time to accomplish. Too much self-criticism is a problem because it inclines a person to make decisions to impress or appease the internal critic or other people, rather than themselves. This means you're not making decisions based on your own values, which is going to lead you astray. You must understand that because there are different parts of you, you have a relationship with yourself. And once you realize that the onus is on you to decide what kind of relationship you wish to have with yourself, just like in your relationships with other people, and often just by treating ourselves the way we treat someone else, that we care about, we can achieve a huge amount of progress. Disavowing an unhealthy degree of self-criticism is not saying you shouldn't challenge yourself. You should critique yourself to improve. You shouldn't pretend that he never do anything wrong, but rather, this is all about challenging yourself in a healthy way that sustainable by forging a compassionate relationship with yourself and having a good relationship with others, you can have a foundation of self esteem. And then by challenging yourself in different areas, you can start to develop situational confidence. Once you've achieved a reasonable amount of mastery in a few different areas, you can start to develop core confidence or meta level confidence. Thank you for listening. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, self-development and related topics. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can share it with the friends. Follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Give us a rating or if you want to help us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks very much for listening.