Negativity seems contagious. It’s easy to catch someone’s smile and share a smile with the next person. And, if someone is negative about something, it’s unfortunately easy to also take on the judgments about whatever the subject matter was.
In the same way, oftentimes, our criticisms didn’t originate within ourselves on their own.
When we find that we are being negative and self-critical on repeat, it’s helpful to ask two questions:
“Whose voice is this?”
Often, if we slow down and sit with the words being said from our mouth or circling in our heads, we find that the tone and the words being used are familiar. We picked them up from when we watched Mom looking at herself in the mirror, or when coach screamed the same phrases at you letting you know you weren’t performing his right way, well enough.
Notice if the tone and words in your critical script are from one person or a collage of critics from different time periods or the same, which takes us to:
“How old is this?”
Sometimes we’re hard on ourselves with the same words and phrasing we’ve been hearing for decades. At that point it’s habit.
When we grow up hearing criticism first and/or most, it’s hard to break away from it and believe that we’re actually generally lovable and doing well enough at life, and that at moments we could be doing better. The script is turned around. And it takes longer to bring in new data to correct those self-beliefs because they are weighted by the bias of our original criticisms.
It’s important to be able to date the origin stories of critical thinking. If you have an exact date, that works, it can also be, age 4 or 2nd grade or middle school basketball team, or summer camp.
By identifying when and who these criticisms came from, we create distance to observe it from our compassionate, more rational Adult Selves. We can look at the experiences rather than being fully identified by and with them.
We can then explore their relevance in our lives today. Sometimes, we inherit or take on criticism that was never meant for us, never served us well at all. And sometimes in examining the criticisms, we can find that it helped encourage us to make some changes we needed in our lives, but that we can soften the tone and language to motivate us with the type of support that will continue to encourage richer externalized behaviors from us, being most aligned with our True Selves.
Often that comes from reparenting work, and sometimes EMDR or a deep trauma-focused therapy can be helpful in the process of restructuring our internal dialogue and susceptibility to others’ judgements, whether said or implied through nonverbal.
