Coming to Life

As you grow into your immediate environment, culture and society, it is the voice of rejection, criticism, punishment and judgement that shapes your behaviour and attacks your every move. You can come from a loving family or an abusive one – either way, if you were given very strong messages about your wrongness or badness as a child, then as an adult your internal critical voice will come pestering you at every chance it gets. This internal voice is ruled by fear as opposed to love. All children grow up with emotional leftovers from unwelcoming gestures. We all learn to maintain conscious and unconscious memories of all those times when things have felt wrong or bad. These unavoidable scars inflicted on my Self-esteem (i.e. admiration and approval). This also led to the birth of my inner critic. The inner critic blames you for everything that goes wrong. It is your first connection to a state of emotional bondage. It’s the invisible “cage”. It exaggerates your weaknesses and has countless control over your mind as it uses various missiles such as “I should”, “I must” or “I have to” in order to continue remaining alive and in control within you. The critic is often so easily believed and so sneaky that whatever thoughts it gives birth to sound normal. It resides in your comfort zone, and so you actually feel safer believing the things it is telling you. Most people commonly have a negative internal and external dialogue, in the name of shame, self-loathing and self-attack, that is being ruled by their inner critic. The problem with this is that it triggers our ‘threat system’, which signals to the brain that we are under attack. The brain responds by releasing cortisol and other hormones that triggers our fight-flight response. This is very unhelpful as we can’t actually run from ourselves! Yet, a lot of people motivate themselves in this way which can lead to much stress and anxiety. Given that this has become a cultural norm, perceived as our “natural” way of existing, we become unaware of the subsistence and damaging effects of living in this way.