Being and Becoming - Dealing with Self-Criticism.

Episode Notes: Being and Becoming - Dealing with Self-Criticism.

Welcome to the latest episode of The Renewed Mind.. 'The Renewed Mind is a Podcast that offers a Christian Spiritual approach to overcoming depression and anxiety and helps to maintain good mental health. 

We are stepping into a reflective shift with this theme of "Being and Becoming." We’re moving past the mechanics of simply trying to jump-start our emotional engines in a balanced way, and we are looking at the deeper identity crisis that happens when depression locks us in a room and appears to throw away the key.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to the latest episode of the Renewed Mind. I'm Jeremy McCannis. The Renewed Mind is a podcast that offers a Christian spiritual approach to overcoming depression and anxiety and help to maintain good mental health. We are stepping into a reflective shift of gear this time. The theme is that of being and becoming. We're going to try and move past the mechanics of simply trying to jumpstart our emotional engines in a balanced way, and we're going to look at the deeper identity crisis that happens when depression locks us in a room and appears to throw away the key. Today's episode is titled Being and Becoming, and it's about dealing with self-criticism. Welcome to the Renewed Mind Podcast. Well, welcome, and if you've been with me on this journey so far, you'll know that we've attempted to deconstruct the courtroom of the inner critic. And we've also hopefully dropped that whip of self-criticism. But today we have to talk about another very specific response that acts as a sort of ball and chain dropped straight into the concrete of your life and tells you you have to be stuck there. It's the simple little phrase, I can't. Every time a productive thought crossed your mind, like I need to clean the kitchen, I need to open that book, I need to pray, a reflex in your brain immediately fires back, I can't. Today we're going to look at the terrible, terrifying psychological power of those two small words, and why sometimes we use them as a shield to hide from God and how they can completely derail the relationships that we value the most. In psychology, some people talk a lot about what they call auto-suggestion, the power of auto-suggestion. Now we know that your brain can take the negative narratives that you feed it and treat them as an absolute design spec for your reality. When you're trying a new skill or stepping into a highly challenging environment, feeling a sense of I don't know if I can do this is completely normal. Of course it is. That's just a sign sometimes that you're learning. But depression does something different, something insidious. It takes normal learning curves and turns them into global, permanent paralysers. You start saying and believing, I can't work, I can't read, I can't concentrate, I can't even get out of bed. Here's the danger, friends. If you say I can't often enough, it ceases to be a description of just how you feel and becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Your brain literally shuts down the neural machinery required to do the task. You have convinced yourself of your own inability, and that lie is becoming your truth, your living truth. But let's pull the curtain back a little further and look at the real spiritual undercurrent here. Why do we lean into this pattern so easily and so heavily? Sometimes I can't is actually an unconscious defense mechanism. It's a form of self-handicapping. We are sometimes secretly terrified of what it means to actually step out into the world and become the person God desires us to be. But growth requires vulnerability and it also requires the acceptance of the risk of failure. So to save face, we sometimes create the illusion of total incompetence. We tell ourselves, well, I would do what God wants, but I'm just too broken, too inadequate, too depressed. We use our weaknesses as hiding places, forgetting that God's power is actually made perfect in our weaknesses, not excused by it. We prefer the safety of the prison to the responsibility of the freedom we actually have. The tragedy of this I can't do it loop is that it doesn't just destroy your internal motivation, it showers your relationship with the important people in your life. To you, the wall is real when you say, for example, I can't clean my house today. It genuinely feels like you're trying to lift a car off the ground with your bare hands. But your spouse, your parents, even your friends, it doesn't look like paralysis to them. To them, it just looks like annoying whinging. This is because they remember the real you. They remember the version of you that used to function, used to laugh, and used to get things done. Because they don't understand the invisible weight of the depressive frog that you're enveloped by, they do the exact thing we talked about in the last episode. They start nagging, they push, and you resist, and suddenly your home or your life becomes a battlefield of frustrating power struggles. You feel misunderstood, coerced, bullied, sometimes just exhausted and manipulated. So how do we break this hypnotic spell of I can't, before it ruins your days and that of your family? We have to learn the difference between our feelings of capacity and our spiritual reality as people who are not just being in the now, but who are also constantly becoming in Christ. I want to look at how to reconstruct the internal dialogue so you can stop predicting your own failure and start experiencing the slow, steady rhythm of grace-paced action. The key is not to try to believe everything your brain tells you in those dark moments. When you're in a thick depression, your mind loves to make sweeping absolute prediction. It tells you, for example, you're too upset to concentrate. You can't read anything right now. Well, instead of buying into that global statement, I want you to run a small experiment. Next time you feel that way, or if you're feeling it right now, go immediately, pick up a book or an article, or maybe even the Bible, and commit to reading just one sentence. Then read it and then see if you can summarize what that sentence said back to yourself. Do it out loud. Your inner critic, of course, will immediately shift the goalposts. Fine, it'll say, You read a sentence, but you'll never understand the whole book again. Don't take the bait. Read one short paragraph and then stop. This is the beginning of a step-by-step experiment, which is done one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time. Now some psychologists call this bibliotherapy, the use of reading and literature as a form of therapeutic tool to crack chronic depression. But imagine how much more explosive this tool becomes when the text you are reading is the living word of God. When you prove to your brain that you can in fact process truth, even if it be one sentence at a time, the invisible wall of paralysis will begin to crumble. Now let's be totally honest for a moment. Why are we so hesitated to run even these little experiments? Why do we feel we need to dig our heels in? Well, for many, there is a secret feeling of security in not trying. Because running an experiment, just as I suggested, introduces the risk of failure. As long as you refuse to try, you can maintain a secret comfort that you didn't feel. You get to tell yourself, I'm not actually incapable, I'm just choosing for the time being to sit on the sidelines. Now behind that, what can appear aloofness and lack of commitment, for some is a profound fear of inadequacy. To dismantle this, we need to perform a sort of double aspect personal audit. First of all, we need to think about the worst case fallout. Make a bullet point list of the negative consequences if you do try something and fail, if you take a risk and actually fail. Pull those monsters out of the closet. Then there is the coping blueprint. In response, write down exactly how you would handle that disappointment productively if you did fail in that way. When you see coping strategies written out in black and white in front of you, the fear behind them lose their teeth. You realize that failure isn't in fact the final fatal verdict, it's just your brain processing data incorrectly. Having the strategy and written down how you'll handle those disappointments is a very powerful tool. Think about it. At what age were you suddenly expected to know everything and never make another mistake? You actually learned to walk by stumbling, falling flat on your face and getting right back up again. You didn't give up as a toddler and say, well, walking obviously isn't for me. If you can learn to respect yourself within your failures, you stop being a source of shame and start becoming someone who is on an adventure in learning. And this brings me to the single biggest misconception about human productivity. If I were to ask you what comes first, motivation or action, what would you say? Well, 90% of people, when asked that question, will answer that motivation comes first. They believe the cycle looks like this. You feel motivated, then you take action, and then hopefully you experience success. But that, my friend, is completely backward. In reality, action comes first and motivation comes second. The real motivation cycle has been identified as action, develops motivation, which develops more action. Now, if you're a procrastinator and you're lying in bed waiting for inspiration to strike like a lightning bolt, or when someone suggests you get moving, your default response is often I just don't feel like it. Well let me ask you, who said you were supposed to feel like it? If you wait until you're perfectly in the mood to tackle your depression, you'll be waiting forever. You have to prime the pump. When you pump a manual water well, the old fashioned type, the first strokes produce nothing but dry, squeaking air. It feels useless, but you keep pumping and the vacuum forms and suddenly the water begins to flow spontaneously almost. Action is the thing that creates the emotion. The movement creates the mood. Get up and do something today, despite how you feel, and watch that the juices will start to flow. So so far today I've tried to break that hypnotic spell if I can't, and flip the motivation script in your head by proving that action must precede emotion. But we need to go even deeper into this wrestling match because we need to talk about what happens when the arrows don't just come from your own mind, but from the real events that occur or happen to you in the outside world. Think about such situations. Why does a single piece of negative feedback, maybe just an offhand remark from a co-worker, or a critique from a family member, or a performance review at work, or attending a large social event, why do they have the power to completely destabilize us for days? It's because for us, external criticism strikes a match in an environment already filled with flammable material. It echoes and seemingly confirms the harsh voice of our own internal tribunal. The relentless judge within. Many of us feel we live our lives under the gaze of a relentless, unmerciful judge who sits inside our minds. The judge speaks strictly in absolutes, registers only our faults, and completely disregards or even deletes our successes. Long before anyone else had the chance to make a disparaging comment about you, you'd already rehearsed the chorus of condemnation in your mind, telling yourself you're a failure, you never get it right, you're never going to be good enough. When external criticism hits you, it instantly activates your favourite cognitive distortions. Those we've talked about earlier, like all or nothing thinking, that if I make one mistake in this project, I'm a total failure, or overgeneralization, C, I always mess up everything I do. And emotional reasoning. Because this criticism I've heard makes me feel worthless, my worthlessness must be an objective fact. But feelings are not facts, and a distorted interpretation is not the truth. In the economy of God, those automated loops are exactly what the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 10 said are arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the knowledge of God. The real danger to your soul isn't the critical words spoken to or about you, it is the lie you choose to accept about yourself as a result. It's all about talking back with truth. To heal this pattern you have to learn how to talk back to the tribunal, not with defensive anger or fragile pride, but with the quiet authority of grace. This is a psychological necessity and a core spiritual discipline. When a toxic thought enters your mind or you hear such a thought, you are under no obligation to believe it. Instead, drag it into the light and cross-examine it and offer a counter-biblical reality. For example, the internal accusation might be you are entirely worthless and inadequate. The scriptural cross-examination might say no, I am intentionally created in the image of God, Genesis 1 27, fully redeemed by the blood of Christ, Ephesians 1 7, and called according to his grand purpose, Romans 8 28. Another example of an eternal accusation might be you've messed this up, you're never going to get anything right. The scriptural cross examination will say no, the God who began a good work in me is faithful, and he will carry it on to completion. Philippians 1 verse 6. This is the literal application of these biblical texts, the literal application of what Paul also said in 2 Corinthians when he said where it is about taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ. You arrest the rogue thought at the border of your mind, examine its passport, and if it runs contrary to the gospel, you don't let it in, in fact you deport it. But what about when the critique is real, human and pointedly directed at you? Whether you're a student facing a tough evaluation, a professional being managed, or a leader steering a ministry, human words can carry immense weight. Even people in the highest positions can be shaken to their core by a few lines of critique. Well, Proverbs 1821 tells us that the tongue has the power of life and death. But notice that power doesn't just belong to the person talking to you, it belongs to what you say to yourself in response to their words. Criticism is not a verdict on your worth. Your identity is completely off the table here. That is not on trial. Christ has already settled the case, declaring you are valued, loved, and fully accepted. Once your worth is safe, then criticism loses its power to paralyze you. It stops being a weapon designed to destroy you and transforms into a tool designed to sharpen you. When you live out of your secure identity in Christ, you can handle even negative feedback with an immense amount of psychological flexibility. You can filter it through wisdom by asking these very clean, clear three questions. Firstly, what part of this critique is actually true? And if it is true, secondly, what can I learn from this to improve? And then finally, what part of this is just the other person's baggage, meaning none of this is mine to carry. This attitude develops a rare form of emotional maturity. Humility without humiliation and resilience without resentment. When you are no longer running on the toxic fuels of a desperate need for human approval, you are actually finally free to become exactly who God made you to be. As Paul boldly writes in Galatians chapter 1, verse 10, if I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. There is only one verdict that sticks. Ultimately, there is only one judge whose opinion has any binding authority over your life. And he has already stepped into the courtroom and rendered his final permanent verdict in the verdict of Jesus, who says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Jesus was the only flawless person to ever walk the earth, and he endured constant, venomous, unjust criticism, slander even and betrayal. And how did he stay steady? 1 Peter 2.23 says he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He didn't waste his time trying to manage his reputation with his critics, he left his vindication in the hands of the Father. So if the criticism you receive is baseless and cruel, just let it roll off your back and fall to the ground. Let God handle the scales of justice. But if the criticism contains a kernel of truth, then receive it with grace, because Proverbs bluntly reminds us that whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, and whoever hates correction is stupid. God is not looking for a flawless performance from you today. He's looking for a faithful and teachable heart, one that is willing to be transformed. So as we wrap up today's episode, look at the continuing journey of healing in your mind and remember this anchor for you. You are not what others say about you. You are not even what you think about yourself in your lowest moments. You are exclusively and eternally what God says about you. And what the Creator says is this He says, You are chosen and deeply beloved. Colossians 3 12. You are redeemed by name, Isaiah 43.1. You are cleansed and forgiven, 1 John 1 verse 9, and you are being made entirely new to Corinthians 5.17. This is the baseline reality of the renewed mind. And over time, as you practice this, the opinions of the world will begin there to lose their power, to derail you in any way or rob you of your peace. Criticism will cease to be a wound and it will become a teacher, and through it all, grace can be your guide. Now, before we finish this episode, I want to issue a call to action. I want you to step out of the passive listening zone that we've been in for a while together today and into an act of intentional creation. I have one question, one challenge for you to take into your reflection and indeed your action as you step out in the world today. And that is to ask the question of who are you becoming in Christ? So I'd like you to open a journal or the notes app on your phone and write down three specific qualities that you want to develop and grow over the coming weeks and months. Don't let those ideas and thoughts arise out of what when you think you fail to do in the past. Look at who he can build you to be. Focus on who you want to become. Focus on the becoming, not the being. And that's it for today. My name is Jeremy McCandless. This is the Renewed Mind Podcast. Your identity is secure, the verdict is in, my friends, and your growth is already underway. Walk in that freedom today. Thanks for being with me. And I trust I'll see you back here again very soon. Soon. Bye bye for now.