On Attachment

#203: How to Soften Your Inner Critic and Forgive Yourself for the Past

• Stephanie Rigg • Season 1 • Episode 203

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If you struggle with a harsh inner critic — whether it shows up as perfectionism, relentless self-judgment, or shame about the past — this episode is for you. We’re unpacking the roots of that punitive inner voice, how it tries to keep us safe, and the real cost it can have on our self-worth, our nervous system, and our ability to grow. We’ll also explore what it looks like to relate to ourselves differently: to meet our inner critic with compassion rather than fear, and to begin the process of forgiving ourselves for the things we wish we’d done differently.

In this episode, we’ll cover:

  • The role of the inner critic and what it’s really trying to do
  • Why punishing yourself doesn’t lead to growth (and what does)
  • Why self-forgiveness can be so difficult
  • How to hold responsibility without collapsing into shame
  • Practical ways to begin softening your inner critic and making peace with your past

🔥 Save 40% on my Healing Anxious Attachment course for 72 hours only! 🔥

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Speaker 3:

You are listening to on Attachment A place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships, and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge, and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I, I'm your host relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Speaker 2:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about how to be less self-critical, or how to befriend your inner critic. Now, I think this is something that so many of us struggle with no matter where we sit on the attachment spectrum, frankly, I think self-criticism is a burden that many of us are very well acquainted with carrying through our lives. And you know, in thinking about today's episode and how to frame it, I was reflecting that so much of the time, the language we hear around self-criticism and our inner critic is like, how to silence your inner critic and. I very deliberately steered clear of that framing because as with anxiety and, and the way I teach about that, I would never say like, how to get rid of anxiety or how to eliminate your anxiety. Because I don't think that anxiety is the problem. I actually don't think that your inner critic is a part of you that you need to silence or dominate or erase or destroy or get rid of. Really I see the inner critic as a part of you that is playing a role that is protective in some way. And that might sound a little funny as with a lot of our protective parts that engage in behaviors that we label wrong or bad, or inconvenient or unwelcome. Ultimately, there's some reason if you are moving through life, moving through the world with this voice in your head, that is constantly being hard on you, being judgemental, telling you that you're not good enough, telling you you need to do better, pointing out your flaws, all of those things blaming you for everything that goes wrong, there's a reason for that. And. As we'll talk about today, a big part of shifting that internal environment is actually turning towards our critical parts and seeking to understand their purpose and what they're trying to protect us from, rather than turning our back on them or trying to hit the mute button or overpower or over rules them. So that's what we're going to be talking about today, what it means to develop a different kind of relationship with your inner critic, how to forgive yourself, how to be more self-compassionate, and how shifting that relationship can actually be much more facilitative facilitative of change than the approach where we self-flagellate, punish ourselves, blame ourselves because oftentimes we can have the story that we need to do all of those things in order to make changes when I find that the opposite is true. Before we get into today's episode, just a quick reminder, if you are in or around London and you would like to come along to my upcoming event on the 13th of September, I'm only gonna be in town for a couple of days and I'm so looking forward to gathering with an intimate group of like-minded folks to share about all things secure relationships and most importantly, how to build a secure relationship with yourself. So if you are interested in coming along, I would so love to see you there. You can purchase tickets, either link in the show notes, or by heading straight to my website. Okay, so let's talk about self-criticism and the inner critic and what it takes to really shift our internal environment into a more self-compassionate one. So, as I alluded to in the introduction, self-criticism is not just a bad thing that we need to get rid of. I think that kind of mindset is wildly unhelpful because it fails to acknowledge that all of our parts, even the ones that we would rather not be there, are serving some sort of purpose. And for a lot of us self-criticism is serving this role. If we were to sit down, you know, pull up a chair and sit down opposite the part of us, that is highly self-critical, our inner critic and sort of project them outwards and sit down and have a conversation with them and say like, we. What are you trying to do here? When you are constantly in my ear telling me all of the ways that I've messed up or I'm not good enough, or people don't like me, or I'm not attractive enough, or I need to change these things about myself, or, you know, people always leave me like all of the things, all of those little voices that can just be playing on repeat these really harsh, punitive, unkind messages. You know, what would be the purpose of that? And being genuinely curious around like, what is this part of me trying to achieve by being so self-critical All of the time. And a lot of the time if we dig a little deeper, of course it will be personal to each individual. But a lot of the time the inner critic is operating from this belief that. If I don't keep you in line, something bad's gonna happen. So if I'm constantly telling you to do better, I am carrying this belief that people won't love us unless we're perfect, for example, or if I'm always trying to point out to you where you've messed up. I'm trying to keep you accountable to not make those mistakes again.'cause maybe those mistakes led us to a lot of pain and suffering in the past. So if I'm telling you like not to be too needy or that you're too sensitive and that you've just gotta suck it up and not let someone know that you're upset and you know, really kind of being quite harsh in that respect, maybe that's coming from a deep fear that if you take up too much space, someone's gonna leave you right. And so when we start to dig a little and scratch the surface, we can see that there is always some sort of protective intent behind even the most hardcore inner critic. You can always find your way to, to some thread of needing to prove yourself, needing to compensate for a perceived inadequacy, needing to be perfect, in order to be lovable. Trying desperately to prevent disconnection, trying to avoid a repetition of a past mistake or a past pain. And when we can see that, we can start to empathize and recognize that actually our inner critic is doing a really important job and that is to try and keep us safe. And it's only when we turn towards that and we can actually recognize And even voice gratitude to that part of us and say like, I see what you're trying to do. I see how you're trying to keep me safe. I know how much you care about me and care about this, whatever this is, whether it's your job or your relationships or, or whatever else. Right away we start to feel this softening, right? Because we stop being at war with ourselves, we stop being in this constant state of wrongness and resistance, making ourselves the bad guy. And you know, we're experiencing this internal dialogue of shame and blame. And then in response to that, we're making ourselves wrong. So we're adding more shame and blame to a system that's already carrying a heavy weight and a heavy burden. So when we can actually lift that weight off our shoulders and instead go, okay, I'm all ears. I wanna understand this part of me and really approach that part of ourselves with genuine curiosity and a desire to befriend and support. You will notice that it almost straightaway shifts the internal environment. So extending that olive branch of self-compassion, both towards ourselves more broadly in terms of the things we struggle with, but specifically to our inner critic and any other parts of us that we find hard to accept is a really, really important first step. Now what can be a little tricky there and something that I know a lot of people have resistance to is what I alluded to earlier around like. I need to keep myself accountable to do better, to do differently, and just being nice to myself and being kind to myself isn't that tantamount, to letting myself off the hook, right? So our inner critic can be, you know, pretty firm and can grip pretty tightly to this sense of I need to keep us in line. And just being nice and being all warm and fuzzy there can be parts of us that have a lot of resistance to that, and that's totally valid, and we wanna recognize and acknowledge that and the reassurance that I wanna offer. If you are sitting there and having that resistance of like, yeah, I'm not just gonna let myself off the hook here because maybe I've made real mistakes or maybe I have acted out of integrity, or there are things that I'm really deeply ashamed of, or that I really feel a lot of regret and remorse about. What I'd offer to you is that it's actually only in being self-compassionate. So in recognizing the humanity underneath whatever we did, you know, or whatever, we've struggled with, recognizing that we're always all doing our best. And that, you know, whatever you might have done that you are so hard on yourself about there's always some sort of reason, right? Like, you were trying to get a need met, or you were trying to avoid pain, or you were acting from fear. Like there's always something really valid that sits underneath whatever it is that we do. Even if the thing that we do is not, you know, something that we're super proud of. It's only in. Bringing self-compassion to that, that we can start to actively, meaningfully engage with and learn the lessons of whatever the thing is that we've experienced. Whatever, you know, we're trying to shift away from. If we adopt a shaming and blaming approach, I promise you there's no meaningful growth that comes from that because it's just, as I said, leads to more collapsing, more contraction, more shame and blame, and we spiral downwards and that. Means that we have lower self-esteem, lower self-worth, and from that place, we're much more likely to engage in further fear driven, scarcity driven you know, dysregulated behaviors because our system is under so much stress. So really in order to. Engage meaningfully with regret, with past mistakes. In order to actually forgive ourselves and take responsibility and do something differently, we have to have a level of self-compassion. Criticism and punishment is not the way to go. I mean, we know this now in. Parenting. We know this in like the, the world of discipline, that that's a very old school approach to try and overpower and intimidate and criticize and punish someone into behavior change. That is just not the most effective way to elicit behavior change. It just tends to be a very high stress, fear driven system. And that's not the way we wanna be approaching our inner relationship. So really in. Bringing more self-compassion where we are not condoning behavior, we are not letting ourselves off the hook. We're not saying like, okay, now it's totally fine. Everything that I might have done or the mistakes I might have made. That is really not my approach at all. I'm so big on self responsibility and honest reflection and engagement with owning our staff. But we can only do that when we've actually taken some of the charge out and shame just doesn't allow us to do that. So, offering that by way of reassurance to any parts of you that might be resistant to the idea of self-compassion, the idea of approaching ourselves with a gentler, more curious way of relating rather than one that is intensely self-critical as a way to kind of spur on change or growth. Now last but not least, I wanna talk a little about self-forgiveness because again, I think that this is kind of the way that we complete the cycle because when we're just stuck in the self-critical phase, we tend not to go deep enough to actually get to the place of forgiving ourselves. So, we might just feel the shame about the thing that we've done or, you know, what we lack or, or whatever other judgements we're making. But we don't get to those deeper layers of reflecting and learning the lesson as I just said, and then forgiving ourselves. So in my mind, self-forgiveness is really only something that we can do when we've created some accountability and there's enough trust there that we can say like, I am not gonna do this again. Here's what I'm gonna do differently next time. Like in a relationship, any relationship, you know, an apology where someone just says like. I'm sorry. It doesn't really land on a deep level. We wanna see someone engage with the mistakes they might have made, the hurt they might have caused, and to show some recognition and acknowledgement of what they're going to do differently next time, what the commitment is so that we then trust in that apology and we can, you know, feel a sense of resolution and repair. The same is true for our own inner relationship. And again, this is not possible when we're just in this really heavy state of self-criticism and shame and blame. blame. So it's only when we can, you know, detach a little from that, soften a little, really reflects deeply on, where we've mistepped along the way. The things that we regret, the things that we might feel ashamed of. The choices that we've made, the ways that we've conducted ourselves you know. Engaging with that and going, yeah, that wasn't in alignment with who or how I wanna be. That wasn't me being my best self. Maybe that did not reflect my values. Maybe I was being very reactive from a place of fear. And it's not about trying to then frantically unravel or un undo all of that and go back and apologize to people and explain yourself and do all of the things. It is just about being able to hold it within yourself and see it within yourself and go, okay, knowing what I now know, having the clarity and the self-awareness that I now possess, what would I do differently next time? And what safeguards might I put in place in order to support myself to choose this new way over the old way that might be my habituated response. In those conditions of stress or fear or overwhelm. So that is what really allows you to, to feel this sense of completeness and resolution around self-forgiveness and the mistakes that you've made in the past so that you can really make peace with the past and feel like you don't have all of these open loops there. All of these things that you're still holding a lot of heaviness and residue around. Because I think for a lot of us. We do that, we just turn our backs on the things we regret or we obsess over them, but from a place of rumination rather than, true engagement and reflection. So I hope that that has given you a different way of relating to self-criticism, to self-blame, to self-responsibility, to self-compassion. These are all absolutely. Crucial in nurturing and fostering a really positive relationship with ourselves that allows us to then go out into the world carrying fewer burdens, from a more open-hearted place. A place that does allow us to be more deliberate and intentional about how we show up because we. Owned our staff. We've gotten clear and we've got a plan on how we're going to do things differently next time. And, you know, we're really ready to commit to ourselves and honor ourselves in that way rather than just doing the old thing out of habit or out of reactivity or out of shame because we're in that spiral that can so easily happen when we're, inhabiting a very punitive inner environment. So I hope that that's been helpful. If what I've shared in this episode resonates with you, consider checking out my free training on how to heal anxious attachment and finally feel secure in life and love. I talk about the shame spirals that we can get into when we have negative beliefs about ourselves. Like there's something wrong with me, I'm broken. And that can fuel certain behaviors that are coming from a place of fear that in turn add to the shame and the self-blame and the sense of brokenness. And so we can get stuck in these really negative downward spirals in terms of our inner relationship and self-image. So I talk about that in quite a lot of detail and the training amongst many other things. So if what we've chatted about today has resonated with you, definitely consider checking out my free training on how to heal anxious attachment, and finally feel secure in life and love. Okay, guys, gonna leave it there. Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks guys