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Some of us are continually haunted by a sense that we are losers.
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Acquaintances may speak well of us.
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Colleagues may praise us,
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but there is an inner critic inside who has a very different verdict:
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you are a piece of nonsense, you are laughable, you are repulsive.
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This critic is extremely assiduous and determined,
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they are a world champion of sorts.
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They’ll get into an argument with our best friend
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to insist that no, despite what they think, we really are awful;
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they’ll disregard the evidence of a promotion or surprise birthday party
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and keep returning to the same theme: you are repulsive.
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Why does this inner critic exist?
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Why are they so remorseless?
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If they are inaccurate, why do they go on as they do?
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To find an explanation, we have to go back in time.
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Let’s posit the following scenario.
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Early on in our lives, those of us with a harsh inner critic
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are likely to have faced a very troubling situation:
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someone close to us - it might have been a mother or a father
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- didn’t seem to especially like us:
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they were cold and forbidding, they often got angry,
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or they simply disappeared and maybe married someone else in another country.
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Or else they fell into depression or became an alcoholic.
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Why did all this happen?
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This is the question that would have faced the younger version of us,
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though we forget this now.
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It’s very hard for a child to deal with a vacuum of explanation.
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The mind has to try to find some way of accounting for things
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because otherwise the mystery threatens to be unbearable.
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Better some answer than a void.
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Unfortunately, the childish mind doesn’t have an accurate grasp of adult psychology
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or the workings of the grown-up world.
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Nevertheless, it’s an energetic and vibrant machine
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and eventually, it is likely to land on an explanation that feels very powerful
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- and that in time ceases to reveal that
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it is just a good guess rather than an iron truth.
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And that explanation runs as follows:
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the bad thing that has happened to me has done so because I am bad.
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Father has left home because I suck.
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Mother is screaming because I suck.
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My sibling died because I suck.
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It’s almost certain - we hasten to add
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- that this is not the right answer to why things unfolded as they did.
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But that’s not the point.
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This was the answer we landed upon and that felt most plausible.
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A child will prefer to think that it lives in a rationally ordered world
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where things happen for logical reasons
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- even if this means having to think that
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they are bad rather than to take on board the terrifying notion that
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things happen that are entirely unfair, entirely undeserved,
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and entirely reprehensible to the interests and hopes of a child.
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Better to insist that one sucks than to have to believe
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in an amoral chaotic senseless universe.
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It’s easy from here to see how the child who decided that they suck
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- to be precise, who had to conclude that they sucked
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in order to make sense of an unbearable pain
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- then grows up into an adult who continues to maintain,
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in the face of any evidence to the contrary,
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that they are dreadful,
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that all good news about them is merely a cover for hatred,
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that everything nice is underserved and that they are,
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despite key bits of evidence to the contrary, a piece of excrement.
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The way to break out of this prison is to realise that we are made up of parts.
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The inner critic is not the whole of us,
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it is a part of us that was formed early on
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in response to a particular situation.
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We might now thank it, very politely, for its work,
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because - at an early stage
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- it did in fact do a very good job of making sense of life.
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At a cost, it was responsible - we might say - for getting us to the next stage,
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it tided us over, it was very clever for a six year old.
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But at the same time, we can now afford
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to take our leave of this helpful but profoundly mistaken part.
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Thank you inner critic, we might say.
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You did something bold and you meant well.
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But now, you threaten to ruin what remains of the rest of my life.
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It’s time to say goodbye to the critic
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and assess reality through a fairer, less biased, less uninformed lens.
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We don’t suck, something awful happened to us.
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We aren’t bad, something bad happened to us
that we tried to rationalise
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by blaming ourselves.
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We aren’t awful people and we don’t deserve an awful future;
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we just came from a rather difficult place.