Why We Think We Are Losers (But Actually Aren't)

Some of us are continually haunted

by a sense that we are losers.

Acquaintances may speak well of us

colleagues may praise us but there is an

inner critic inside who has a very

different verdict. You are a piece of

nonsense, you're laughable

you're repulsive.

This critic is extremely assiduous

and determined. They are a well champion

of sorts. They'll get into an argument

with our best friend, to insist that, no,

despite what they think we

really are awful. They'll disregard the

evidence of a promotion or a surprise

birthday party and keep returning to the

same theme. You are repulsive.

Why does this inner critic exist?

Why are they so remorseless?

If they are inaccurate, why do they

go on as they do? To find an explanation,

we have to go back in time. Lets pause

at the following scenario.

Early on in our lives, those of us

with a harsh inner critic

are likely to have faced a very troubling

situation. Someone close to us, it might

have been a mother or a father who didn't

seem to especially like us.

They were cold and forbidding, they often

got angry or they simply disappeared, and

maybe married someone else in another

country. Or else they fell into

depression or became an alcoholic.

Why did all this happen?

This is the question that would

have faced the younger version

of us. Though we forget this now. It's

very hard for a child to deal with a

vacuum of explanation. The mind has to try

to find some way of accounting for things

because otherwise the mystery threatens

to be unbearable. Better some answer

than afforded. Unfortunately the childish

mind doesn't have an accurate grasp of

adult psychology. Or the workings of the

grown up world. Nevertheless, it is an

energetic and vibrant machine and

eventually, it is likely to land on an

explanation that feels very powerful

and that in time, ceases to

reveal that it is just a

good guess rather than an iron truth.

And that explanation runs as

follows..."the bad thing that has

happened to me has done so because

I am bad." "Father has left home because I

suck." "Mother is screaming because I

suck." "My sibling died because I suck."

It's almost certain we hasten to add

that this is not the right answer to why

things unfolded as they did but that's

not the point. This was the answer we

landed upon and then felt most plausible.

A child will prefer to think that it

lives in a rationally ordered world, where

things happen for logical reasons, even if

this means having to think

that they are bad.

Rather than take on board the terrifying

notion that things happen that are

entirely unfair, entirely undeserved, and

entirely reprehensible to the interests

and hopes of a child. Better to insist

that one "sucks" than to have to believe

in an amoral, chaotic, senseless universe.

It's easy from here to see how the child

who decided that they suck to be precise

who had to conclude that they sucked in

order to make sense of an unbearable

pain. Then grows up into an adult who

continues to maintain in the face of any

evidence to the contrary that they are

dreadful. That all good news about them

is merely a cover for hatred. That

everything nice is undeserved, and that

they are despite key bits of evidence to

the contrary, a piece of excrement.

The way to break out of this prison, is

to realize that we are made up of parts.

The inner critic is not the whole of us,

it is a part of us that was formed early

on in response to a particular situation.

We might now thank it very politely for

its work. Because at an early stage, it

did, in fact, do a rather good job of

making sense of life, at a cost. It was

responsible, we might say for getting us

to the next stage. It tied us over. It

was very clever, for a six year old.

But at the same time, we can now afford

to take our leave of this helpful but

profoundly mistaken part. "Thank you,

inner critic." We might say. "You did

something bold and you meant well, but now

you threaten to ruin what remains of the

rest of my life." It is time to say

goodbye to the critic, and assess reality,

through a fairer less biased, less

uninformed lens. We don't suck. Something

awful happened to us. We aren't bad,

something bad happened to us that we

tried to rationalize by blaming ourselves.

We aren't awful people and we don't

deserve an awful future. We just came

from a rather difficult place.