Most of us can hear an inner voice saying negative things to us. Some things it may say are “you aren’t good enough”, “no one likes you”, or “I am a bad person”. We aren’t born with this inner dialogue. Often, we learn to internalize the messages (either directly spoken or indirectly communicated to us) from caregivers around us as we grow up. As time went on, these outer message turn into our own voice and we became our worst inner critic. I spent many sessions working with people to learn self-compassion and unlearning these core beliefs we have about ourselves and the world. The effects of this can move beyond our own inner critic and can also translate into how we parent our own children.
How can we break this cycle?
I want to start by defining the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt can be a helpful emotion for children and adults to get in touch with our inner values and motivate us to do and act better. When we have guilt thoughts we may here “I did a bad thing” or “I made a mistake”. The thoughts are directed towards the one action that we did that disagreed with our values. Shame moves beyond this action and connects to our sense of identity. Shame thoughts sound more like “I am a bad person” and “I deserve bad things to happen to me”. Through this distinction we can already begin to see how devastating the feeling of shame can have on our lives.
When parenting children, it is important to help them understand the difference between their actions and their sense of identity. If they did something wrong, we could normalize that we all make mistakes, and that their BEHAVIOUR is not acceptable, but they are still accepted as a person.
Let’s look at a situation: A young boy walks up to another kid and steals his toy. A typical parental response would be “you are such a bad boy”. We can transform this into “I know you really wanted that toy, and next time we need to wait our turn and ask”. This way we are focusing on his emotion of wanting the toy and identifying a more desired behaviour in the future. This is just one simple example and parenting is much more complex than this.
If you are someone with a heavy inner critic, it’s important to try and work with someone to unlearn these messages. We can live in a space where we are allowed to have emotions and not feel threatened for having them all the time. This takes patience, practice, and self-compassion.
