Inner Bully, Self Criticism, and Self Abandonment

I’m becoming more aware of how my inner bully and self criticism is affecting my mental health / TMS symptoms. I am very VERY hard on myself, like if I do something wrong I tell myself I’m a useless piece of crap etc. Ex: I take a wrong turn on the road to my destination, and I’m chewing myself out saying “How can you be so stupid? An idiot could have seen the exit sign! What’s wrong with you dude?” I literally chew myself out. But it feels like a reflection of how others treat me. I have a lot of people close to me who are constantly coming down on me and hard on me, so I feel like I deserve it and likewise treat myself the same way. But then I made some really bad choices I know are morally wrong and I should feel guilty about. I had a mentor tell me there’s a healthy ammount of shame and guilt that one SHOULD feel when they’ve done something they know is wrong. So I guess my question is, is there a way to feel and admit guilt about something in a way where I am not attacking myself and inflaming my TMS symptoms? It doesn’t seem productive or helpful at all to work yourself into a panic for anything. It’s just self inflicted punishment.


Also this relates to the issue of self abandonment. I’ve been watching Teal Swan’s videos on emotional healing and she basically says that the key to healing trauma is not approach your symptoms or feelings like they’re something that needs to be fixed, but rather integrated as part of yourself, and you do this by sitting with your emotions and allowing them to be with you regardless of how unpleasant they are. And when you push your feelings away, you are essentially abandoning that part of yourself (Inner child?) which causes symptoms. I have such deep rooted shame issues that I don’t know how to do this.


I don’t feel like I can just accept myself as I am, let alone sit with my feelings in a loving way. I feel like when I try to treat myself with compassion and sit with my unpleasant feelings, I’m only doing it cause I want my symptoms to go away so bad - NOT because I genuinely desire to take care of myself or think I’m worth it. I believe Alan Gordon addresses this. Any thoughts?

 

“it’s not because we don’t know better; it’s because we don’t feel better. Emotional problems are irrational, meaning they cannot be reasoned with. And this brings us to even worse news: emotional problems can only have emotional solutions. It’s all up to the Feeling Brain.” - Mark Manson

 

I think this is important to be real about, and if possible use the emotional work in the opposite way. Find ways to work directly on the self-rejection, as an end in itself. In my experience, the inner emotional suffering, particularly with shame and self-rejection, causes more suffering than symptoms. By directing your emotional work, inner critic work directly at this suffering, you're less attached to what happens with symptoms ---which it seems you know have some relief/increase related to the self-rejection.

My go-to recommendation is The Soul Without Shame by Byron Brown. Just reading it normalizes and brings humor and self-compassion for these deep patterns. Then the techniques of directly disengaging from the Inner Critic are great. Not to everyone's taste, his very direct approach, but has worked for me and many clients. You turn the aggression which is directed inward as an attack on self, toward the attacking voice (the Inner Critic). It can be life-giving, because we lose a huge amount of our vitality running the self-rejection identities. The Inner Critic turns our life force against our own life's experiences. This is why it is so strong. It is our own aliveness turned on us at an early age to keep us in the loving field of our caretakers. Then we don't know how to turn it off when we mature. I say all this as a person with a very strong Inner Critic. It has in the past made me feel I was not worth being alive. So I know the weight and suffering involved for many.

I believe this is very true. We turn away from ourselves in the present because we learned this for survival. As lousy as the Inner Critic activity feels, it is a "distraction" from the direct experience of the underlying emotions such as sadness, fear, rage. It is a barrier to deeper work on the self. And it can be a trap to try to fix the Inner Critic activity, because it is essentially an outer orbit of experience. Brown's work encourages an in-the-moment release from the identifications, which frees us to feel more deeply what's actually happening.

Good luck in your journey. It may be this crux of your TMS experience, this hard nut to crack, is a doorway to a changed life, regardless of symptoms.

Andy

 

Oh, I have thoughts. I'm pretty hard on myself as well, although not to the degree that you are. The difference is both in what I might initially say to myself upon, say - using your example - taking a wrong turn on the road. I tend to move past that reaction pretty quickly...and it turns out that how we explain bad events to ourselves is key to avoiding pessimism and rumination which can both lead to depression and a large host of physical consequences, including all the TMS issues this forum is devoted to discussing. If that isn't scary enough, let's go ahead and add shorter, more illness-prone lifespans to the mix, because that's what decades of scientific evidence seems to have proven. I bring all this to the discussion because it seems pretty clear from your description that pessimism and rumination are how your inner critic approaches and explains many events that you experience, and a book I all too often feel compelled to recommend - Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism, taught me how to essentially tell that inner critic to "sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up". THAT, along with Sarno's ideas, spared me years of further pain, medical expenses, and endless research rabbit holes.

I am by no means a master of the skills I learned from that book, but I've gotten much better at them as time has passed, and I'm happier and healthier for it. It's probably not the end all be all of what you need to do either, but it is an excellent starting point. I just finished it for the fifth time, because I excel at needing to learn things the hard way and therefore need reminders occasionally of what I need to be doing and what I don't. It's empowering every time.

I'm not a therapist, but based on my own experience, that book may help you look at shame issues differently as well.

I don't remember where I read this, but at some point I came across the idea that there are two types of people in the world: 1) those who view others with empathy and compassion because they believe that everyone is doing the best that they know how to do with the tools they've acquired through experience, and if someone isn't meeting expectations, it's because there are tools they have not yet acquired or learned how to use effectively and 2) those who believe that people are fundamentally lazy and will not achieve or meet expectations without a whuppin' (what they see as proper external motivation). I bring this idea to the table because if you are the first type, I would argue that you see others that way because you yourself are doing the best that you know how given your knowledge and experience thus far. If THAT'S true, then would it not be reasonable to look back at past bad events in your life and be able to forgive yourself because you know that that past version of you was also doing the best that he knew how (even if it was not your proudest moment etc)? If you've grown (or matured or whatever) since the incident or situation in question, pat yourself on the back for that too. It's a lot easier to forgive myself when I can see that I've had some kind of growth since whatever thing caused me to feel shame. It's not that memory of certain things no longer stings a bit - they do - but I can live it and move on without dwelling on the past.

I really need to work on brevity I hope this helps!

 

@Davideus85
I’ll put my 2 cents down in here as someone who has pretty much lived with self loathing all my life —until fairly recently.

Therapy has done a lot to help me understand how and why I got the habit of hating myself. But, honestly, the actual changes have come from just determining to love myself until it feels more natural.

Nice inner head talk was miserable at first, but advised here at the forum to try it, I did. I laughed at the effort at first. I knew I didn’t agree with any of the nice things I was saying, but after awhile, I liked hearing it anyway. And then after more time, I started to entertain the idea of believing it. Right now, I almost believe it. Each level of advancement in this area has made me feel increasingly better. That’s why I’m going to keep at it.

I like to picture myself at about age 3 when I say the nice stuff. I’m innocent and sweet. I shouldn’t be sad. I shouldn’t hear mean things. “Make it stop,” I think to myself.

I don’t think this activity per se makes TMS symptoms go away, but I think it’s just one more key step in turning off the stress. Criticism is stressful. Would you spend time with a person who talks to you like you talk to yourself? Would you make friends with someone like that? I ask myself this. And I answer: “No. I wouldn’t like to hang out with someone like that.” Then I answer: “Well, then, why are you hanging out with your mean self all day long?”

The bottom line is habits can be changed. It just takes time and practice. Try it out. Be nice to yourself for a while. It doesn’t matter why you do it or if you even believe it at first. Just do it. It honestly feels good. It really does. It’s soothing. And that’s what you need. Your TMS is stress; it’s your body screaming, “Make it stop. Make all the toxic, painful stuff stop.”

If you’ve done something you feel guilty about, maybe write about it, ponder it, make amends for it if you can, talk to a spiritual counselor if you have one: then FORGIVE yourself. Kindly. Forgive yourself. <3

As far as being around mean people. I had to get rid of some people in my life recently because I finally realized they were causing me a lot of pain and stress. And that’s what I’m all about these days: getting it out of my life.

 

Me too! You guys!!!

 

I've also struggled with being a bully to myself and criticizing myself my whole life, I was a negative person, had a negative outlook on everything. I'm not 100% certain what caused this, but I'm not going to stress myself out looking for the why why why. I think it's important to understand how it's affected me and what I can do today/now, what steps I can take to heal.

I want to share something that I've been implementing daily that's been scratching a part of my brain. I don't think I've seen this mentioned on the forum, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. They're called afformations, not to be confused with affirmations. It's a play on the word, but it's also a different approach. Check this out, Davideus, and maybe you can implement it. I made a list of some of my afformations and have them taped onto my bathroom mirror. "Why am I good enough? "Why am I so good at being kind to myself?" "Why is it so easy for me to think positively about myself and my life?" The goal is not to answer it yourself. Your brain is neuroplastic and it likes to look for answers, and to work, right. So ask the question and let your brain figure it out. I feel like this works better for me than your regular old affirmations.

 

I think we’ve sort of touched on this idea, in that for many of us, affirmations create more stress because they are viewed as untruths or lies to our inner selves. Someone on the forums once mentioned to reframe them to truths to make them acceptable. I’ve used things like “I’m working on bel believing I am good enough” which soon morphed into “this x makes me realize right now I’m good enough” and now it’s “others can believe what they want, I choose to believe I’m a good person”.

 

@HealingMe
This is so cool!!! I love it! Makes total sense! Thanks!

 

I agree. It's brilliant! Thanks @HealingMe! I've watched a load of Dan's videos but somehow I missed that one.

 

You’re welcome. Hopefully it helps others like it’s been helping me.

 

This is great! It makes perfect sense to me. I have long disliked affirmations because they seem like I'm lying to myself. But this technique is very similar to why keeping a Gratitude Journal is such a powerful technique to dispel depression. It teaches the brain to look for what's good in your life, instead of our primitive brain's usual way of looking for problems in order to keep us safe. Instead we are instructing our brain to look for answers.

I keep hanging out on this Forum even though I've recovered from TMS because I keep learning things that improve my quality of life. Thanks to you all.