It takes concentration to recognise your Critic. Often you hear from the Critic when you are dealing with stress or in relationships (work, love and life). There is another time and that is when you are feeling low or discouraged, depressed, down on yourself. At these times it is very helpful to follow these four steps, in order to catch the Critic in the act of making you feel bad.
If you do this each time you are feeling down or depressed it will become much clearer to you the specific contents of the Critic’s voice and attacks.
What would you do if you had somebody in your life who sought at every opportunity to put you down, remind you that you’re not good enough, that likes to advise of the worst case scenario of each important event and they do all this when you are at your most vulnerable, scared and raw?
Disarming the Critic involves 3 steps: 1) unmasking his purpose 2) talking back and 3) making him useless.
Unmasking His Purpose:
You expose the Critic’s true purpose and functions when you unmask him. Some examples of unmasking the Critic are:
Clearly seeing the Critic’s functions makes the things he says less believable. You can see his ulterior motives. Even though he may rant and rave, you have exposed his secret agenda and can feel less vulnerable to his attacks. Remember the Critic’s voice has place in you because you unwittingly reinforce him. Identifying the Critics voice and calling him on his game, is the beginning of seriously undermining his credibility.
Talking Back:
You need to learn to refute the old negative programming taught to you as a child. Your self esteem will not improve until you learn to talk back to themessages sent to you by the critic. Remember the critic represents the beliefs that you holda dn more so the self-limiting beliefs that have been created throughout your life.
There are three methods for talking back. Used properly they will stop the criticfor a little while. See which of these three or any combination will work for you.
The Howitzer Mantras—These are words or phrases to hit the critic like a cannon blast.
This is poison.
Stop it.
These are lies.
Lies from my father, mother
No more put downs! Shut up!
Get off my back.
This is garbage, stop it.
The mantra(s) you choose should help you feel angry. You want to shout them loudly inside your head.To drown out the voice of the critic, mentally scream at him to drown him out with your indignation. To add emotional currency to this method I want you to visualise this critic as a tangible object or a person or character in your minds eye. As you shout your mantra(s) I want you visualise shouting at this image. It can help to see them disappearing or vanishing or been destroyed in some sense so they find it more difficult to return.
One other help to try is: put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it while yelling internally at your critic. Snapping the rubber band reinforces the “stop” commands and makes more successful your thought commands. The sting from the snapping of the rubber band helps break the chain of negative thinking. If you snap the rubber band and simultaneously yell at your critic when he’s talking to you, his attacks will greatly reduce.
Asking the Price—To disarm the critic, ask yourself what price you pay for his attacks. What is the cost of listening to the critic. Here are some possible costs you may pay:
Poor self esteem costs you a great deal in every area of life. So when the critic attacks, you talk back by telling him, “You make me fearful and afraid of people, you lose me friends, you make me harsh with my little girl, you cost me advancements and more money in my job, you make me search for a way to escape”. You can’t afford your critic—he costs too much!
Affirmation of Worth—This method is difficult especially if you deeply believe that there is something wrong with you—that you’re not OK. But it is essential to learn to affirm your worth in order to completely disarm the critic. The first two methods of talking back are important but they are not permanent. You create a vacuum when you silence the critic, but he’ll be back if that vacuum is not filled with an affirmation of your worth.
Many people feel that their worth depends on their behavior, as if they were an empty vessel filling up with drops of achievement. This makes your worth dependent on what you do and how well you do it. The critic wants you to believe that you have no intrinsic value, only potential for doing something worthwhile or important.
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