Search Results for: critical inner voice

Are you Parenting Like Your Parent?

…s our own. This internalized parent is what we refer to as one’s “critical inner voice.” It can feel threatening to separate from the people who we once relied on for care and safety. Yet, by having compassion for our child selves, we can extend this feeling to our children. We can differentiate from our parents’ less desirable attitudes and traits, while maintaining qualities that we admired in them. Once we make the connection between past event…

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What Love is Not: A Proven Method to Make Love Last

…ess with which we treat ourselves. Hitting the brakes on these behaviors, no matter how compelled we are to act them out, can help us stand up to these critical inner voices and have more compassion and love toward our partners as well as toward ourselves….

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Understanding Stress

…ld. This is a free hotline available 24 hours a day to anyone in emotional distress or suicidal crisis. Related Books: Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion  …

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Advantages of Dating After 40

…en we enter the dating world, we should expect to have countless “critical inner voices” toward ourselves and our potential partners. These negative thoughts may tell us we are too old or that it’s too late for us, that love is not for us, or that we are not attractive anymore. Our “voices” about our partner or potential partner may include thoughts like, “All the good ones are already taken,” or “There must be something wrong with him/her,” or “H…

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How to Find Your Happiness

…of view toward yourself. You will start to have mean thoughts or “critical inner voices” that tell you you’re inferior or that you are insignificant and only take up space. You may also run the risk of repeating the negative traits of your parent, in which case, you’ll notice having your own thoughts or feelings of superiority or entitlement. Maybe you’ll act out the same condescending, critical attitudes toward your children. Finally, if growing…

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Becoming Your Real Self: Shedding the Baggage of Your Past

…Differentiation The first step in the process is to identify the “critical inner voices” you experience about yourself, others, and the world around you. This critical internal commentary often represents the views of our early caretakers. It can be valuable to reflect on the messages you received from their attitudes toward you, labels you were given in the family, and what each parent actually thought about you. Often, as adults, we are still ex…

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How to be a good parent: It’s all about you!

…give this phenomenon the importance it deserves. In Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice I wrote: Our children need to be able to feel their loving feelings for us, for the people we really are behind our roles as parents. If we deny this opportunity to our children, they will suffer emotionally. We need to learn to be receptive to our children’s spontaneous expressions of affection and love toward us. This seems obvious, yet it may be the most diff…

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Can You Trust Your Own Perceptions?

…assuming that the co-worker doesn’t listen to us, that our spouse is being critical or that our child is out of control, we may want to consider that something else is going on inside us that has little to do with them. We tend to be extra sensitive to ways of being treated that hurt us in the past. We may even be looking for or misinterpreting interactions to fit in with an old way of feeling or seeing ourselves that, though painful, can feel com…

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7 Steps to Living the Life You Imagined

…t this anxiety and standing up to any self-critical attitudes or “critical inner voices” that arise is key in becoming your truest self. It’s essential to start choosing the ways you want to be. Think about positive traits you like in yourself that really express the person you want to be. Try to resist the urge to just go half way and really throw yourself into your goals. For the woman, that meant trying to stick it out and stay close to her hus…

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Break the Chain: How to Live the Life YOU Want

…g lasting and fulfilling change. Steps include: 1. Breaking with “critical inner voices” toward self and others. 2. Altering the negative personality traits that represent an incorporation of the aversive traits of one’s parents. 3. Identifying and letting go of patterns of defense formed as an adaptation to painful events in one’s childhood. 4. Developing one’s own values, ideals, and beliefs rather than automatically accepting the beliefs of oth…

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