Healing Your Emotional Self (13 page)

If you can’t answer yes to questions 1, 2, 3, and 5 and no to ques- tion 4, you may need to wait a while before attempting a reconciliation.

Facing the Pain and Confusion of Emotional Separation

Emotional separation often involves emotional pain. It can be painful to face the truth about your parents, to question their beliefs and the lessons they taught you, to stand up to them, or to disagree with them today. Separation brings losses, and even though they are necessary losses, they are still painful. You may have to give up the false hope that your parents will one day be the kind you have longed for and deserve. This loss can be especially painful.

Emotional separation can also create internal conflict. You may realize that taking care of yourself and being true to yourself will neces- sitate going against your parents’ wishes and beliefs. This may cause you to feel you are being disloyal to them. You may vacillate between conflicting emotions such as wanting to recapture a real or imagined sense of family closeness and a desire for revenge or compensation from your parents. At one moment you may feel like you want nothing to do with your parents or other abusive family members and at another moment you may worry that you might be disowned. It is especially challenging to distinguish between the negative internalized messages of your parents and the healthy messages of your true voice. Emotional separation involves the ability to hold the tension of two opposites. Although it is important to face the truth about your parents’ mistreatment of you and to allow yourself to be angry with

them, it is also important to realize that your parents were themselves mistreated. It is important to understand that you didn’t deserve the way you were mistreated and neither did your parents deserve the way they were mistreated. Although your parents were not responsible for what happened to them as children, they
are
responsible for what they did to you.

You will find that you will continue to grieve over the losses of your childhood throughout the separation process and that it will be a sig- nificant part of your healing. Your parents no doubt experienced losses in their childhoods but were not able to grieve over them. This con- tributed to their repeating what was done to them. By facing your grief, you reduce your own need to abuse others.

While emotional separation often takes time and the support of others, such as supportive friends, family members, therapists, or self- help groups, people who have been able to complete these steps report feeling as though they have finally taken the reins in their lives.

Psychological Truths of the Week

Those who have a history of abuse or neglect tend to remain enmeshed with their parents out of a desperate desire to get what they did not get when they were children.

Mirror Therapy Assignment #6

1. Review this chapter and write down which aspect of emo- tionally separating from your parents you are currently working on (declaring your independence, questioning your parents’ values and beliefs, setting healthy limits and boundaries, completing your unfinished business, or resolv- ing your relationship with your parents or other abusers).
   

2. Note how long you have been working on this phase, what tools you’ve used, and what you feel you still need to do in order to complete this step.
   

3. Write about which step you have the most anxiety or fear about, or which step seems to be the most difficult for you.
   

   7
   

   Quieting and Countering Your Inner Critic
   

   It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
   

   —S
   ALLY
   K
   EMPTON
   

   Let me listen to me and not to them.
   

   —G
   ERTRUDE
   S
   TEIN
   

   P
   EOPLE WHO WERE EMOTIONALLY ABUSED
   or neglected in childhood tend to have much in common, including a tendency to continually evaluate themselves, judge themselves harshly, and set unreasonable expectations and standards for themselves. Unfortunately, even though these tendencies may be a direct result of how your parents treated you, they don’t go away just because you have successfully sep- arated from your parents. These tendencies can hang on, a regretful legacy of the childhood abuse or neglect you experienced.
   

   My client Connie describes herself this way: “I’m an educated woman but I feel so incompetent and stupid most of the time. I con- stantly compare myself with other people and always end up feeling inferior in some way. I’m constantly amazed how other people seem to be able to speak up and not worry about whether what they say is going to be negatively judged by others, because I’m always afraid I’ll say something that will let other people know just how incompetent I really
   

   117
   

   am. Other people tell me that they are impressed with how much I know and what a good job I do, but I don’t trust others’ assessment of me. I always think they just feel sorry for me and are trying to build me up. I can’t take in their compliments—even those from close friends. No matter what other people tell me, based on my own criteria, I’m just not good enough.” Connie can’t relax and enjoy her life, because she has a powerful inner critic who dominates her every action.
   

   If you identified with some or all of Connie’s feelings, you also have a powerful inner critic. The following questionnaire will help you determine just how powerful your inner critic is.
   

   Questionnaire: Determining the Strength of Your Inner Critic
   

   1. Do you spend a great deal of time evaluating your per- formance, your appearance, your abilities, or your past history?
      

   2. Do you set very high standards for yourself?
      

   3. Is it difficult to live up to the standards you use to judge yourself?
      

   4. Do you give yourself little breathing room to make mistakes?
      

   5. Is your underlying sense of self often determined by your beliefs regarding what is right and wrong?
      

   6. Is your sense of self often determined by whether you have met your own or others’ standards?
      

   7. Do you spend a great deal of time worrying that you have done something wrong?
      

   8. Are you continually plagued by critical messages inside your head that you are unable to quiet?
      

   9. Do you constantly compare yourself to others or to the success of others?
      

   10. Are you often envious of others’ successes or achievements?
       

If you answered yes to many of these questions, your life and your experience of life are being dominated by your inner critic.

Your Inner Critic

A person raised by nurturing, supportive parents normally develops an inner critic who represents internalized rules and consequences. This inner critic causes him to feel “signal anxiety” when contemplating an action that goes against his value system, as well as guilt and some- times depression if he actually transgresses. In this way a healthy inner critic provides self-imposed punishment that keeps a person’s behav- ior under the control of his or her system of morality. But anxiety, guilt, and depression are kept within reasonable bounds, because his conscience is modeled on his parents’ reasonable attitudes. We inter- nalize the inner critic and its standards to keep our parents with us and to give ourselves a sense of protection, safety, and imagined power over ourselves and reality.

People who have been neglected or abused do not have a reason- able inner critic (also known as the superego or the judge). Everyone has a critical inner voice, but people who were emotionally abused or neglected tend to have a more vicious and vocal inner critic. Theirs is a pervasive yet often invisible presence in their lives.

The
pathological critic
is a term coined by the psychologist Eugene

Sagan to describe the negative inner voice that attacks and judges us. A loud, verbose inner critic is enormously poisonous to your psychological health—more so, in fact, than any trauma or deprivation you have expe- rienced. We can often heal our wounds and recover from our losses, but the critic is always with us, judging us, blaming us, finding fault in us.

Your inner critic likely treats you with the same lack of under- standing and acceptance that your parents did when you were grow- ing up. One of its major jobs is to motivate you toward unreachable ideals. It keeps egging you on to reach that perfect image, never let- ting you rest or feel satisfied.

Our inner critic’s function is to maintain the status quo in two ways: It keeps us away from what it considers to be dangerous or unmanageable parts of ourselves. And it directs us toward whatever ideals it feels will make us an acceptable, successful person. It con- stantly admonishes us with comments like “Don’t do that.” Its demands are never-ending and the actual feeling we are left with is “I am not good enough and I never will be.”

Your inner critic or judge not only evaluates you according to its own standards, it also constantly compares you with other people. Comparison is closely related to self-judgment—so much so that if you are comparing yourself to someone else, you are also judging yourself. For example, when you are doing well according to one stan- dard, there is always someone who is doing better with whom you can compare yourself. When the inner critic is in control, comparison is always oriented toward determining worth or value—that is, who is “better.” If you are different from someone in some way, this means that one of you must be better than the other.

Celia causes herself a great deal of pain by constantly comparing herself to others. For example, when she goes out with her girlfriends, she tends to stay quiet and listen to their stories. As they talk about their children or their latest accomplishments, she feels like such a failure by comparison. Her friends’ children seem to be so well adjusted compared to hers, and her friends all seem to be moving up in their careers, while she feels stuck doing the same old job. On the way home, her inner critic reprimands her for being such a bad mother, for not staying in school long enough to get a degree, and for a multitude of other things. By the time she reaches home, she is deep in a depression.

How to Identify Your Inner Critic

The sad truth is that it doesn’t matter what you have accomplished in life, how much success you experience, how beautiful or handsome you are, or what efforts you make to raise your self-esteem. If you have a powerful inner critic who chastises you constantly or who dis- counts your achievements at every turn, your self-esteem will always be low.

The first step to quieting your inner critic is to identify it inside yourself. Your inner critic has many roles. It is that part of you who:

• Creates rules describing how you ought to behave and then screams at you that you are wrong or bad if your needs drive you to violate its rules.
  

• Blames you for things that go wrong.
  

• Calls you names such as “stupid,” “ugly,” and “weak,” and makes you believe that the names are true.
  

• Compares you to others—especially to their achievements and abilities—and finds you wanting.
  

• Sets impossible standards of perfection.
  

• Tells you to be the best and that if you are not the best, you are nothing.
  

• Beats you up for the smallest mistake.
  

• Keeps track of your failures or shortcomings but doesn’t remind you of your accomplishments or strengths.
  

• Exaggerates your weaknesses by telling you that you “
  always
  screw up a relationship,” “
  never
  finish what you started,” or “
  always
  say stupid things.”
  

If you were emotionally abused as a child, the chances are high that your inner critic is undermining your self-worth every day of your life. Its voice is so insidious, so woven into the fabric of your very being, that you seldom if ever notice its devastating effects. Your inner critic may be experienced consciously as a thought or a “voice,” but most of us are unaware of its habitual activity. Usually we only become aware of it during stressful situations when our shame is activated. For example, when we make a mistake we might hear an inner voice that says something like “What an idiot!” or “There you go again, can’t you get anything right?” Before giving an important presentation at work or a speech in front of a class or group, you might hear “You should have prepared more; you’re going to make a fool of yourself,” or, “Everyone is going to see how nervous you are.” Marianne, the woman you met earlier who could not look in the mirror and who suf- fered from severe depression, described her inner critic like this: “I have a voice inside my head that is relentless. All I hear is, ‘You messed up, you didn’t do it good enough, you are a failure.’”

Even when you do become aware of the attacks, they can seem reasonable and justified. The judging, critical inner voice seems natu- ral, a familiar part of you. But with every negative judgment, every attack, your inner critic weakens you and tears down any good feelings you have about yourself.

Your inner critic often appears as your own voice, making it seem as if you are the one who has these notions about what is right, what is necessary, or what things mean. But make no mistake about it: the voice you hear is not yours; it belongs to someone who lives inside you, someone you’ve brought along with you on your life’s journey.

By paying attention to your self-judgments, you will begin to real- ize that they were learned from others. These standards can actually run counter to what you yourself want, feel, or know to be true. Unfortunately, even when you realize the voice is not yours, you can- not separate from it. Hard as you may try not to, you continue to watch yourself, keeping track of your pluses and minuses. You continue to feel watched by those around you and to fear their disapproval, indif- ference, or rejection. You see your own judge in others as well as hear- ing it inside yourself. You begin to realize just how little control you have over this judgment process. You are at the mercy of a critical, punitive attitude—a manifestation of your self-distrust and self-hatred.