Search Results for: critical%20inner%20voice

Ways to Improve Your Relationship While Sheltering at Home

…or doing things differently than how you’d like. Be careful, because this critical and picky voice in your head is actually an enemy to your relationship. Chances are, you are both working extra hard and are under a lot of stress, and now, in particular, is not the time to engage in a tit-for-tat mentality. Of course, your partner isn’t perfect, and you are bound to notice real shortcomings in them. However, searching for evidence of their flaws…

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Are We Still Condemning Women for Their Sexuality?

…physical selves. As they reach adolescence and start dating, protective or critical attitudes from parental figures tend to teach young women to suppress or resist their sexuality. Everyone from their parents to their peers may be sending them the message that being sexual is synonymous with being a slut. Of course, not every woman is brought up with an unhealthy or repressive view of sex. Many young girls are well-educated and rightly taught to r…

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Fear of Intimacy

…They can be immature, self-hating, irritable, angry, suspicious or overly critical. And regrettably these limitations tend to impact how they parent their children. From this less than perfect experience, children grow up with a less than perfect image of themselves. As a result, people arrive at adulthood psychologically equipped to survive in the type of emotional environment that they have come from. But it is a whole different world out there…

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Letting Go of Anger

…ning it on ourselves. We may then start to experience an onslaught of self-critical thoughts. For example, if your partner or spouse tends to nag at you about practical matters, you may initially feel infuriated at being intruded on or criticized. Your heated response may strike you as irrational. Getting mad would only rock the boat, so instead, you disregard your emotional reaction. Soon enough, you may start to turn this frustration on yourself…

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"Get by With a Little Help from Your Friends"

…ssion and improve people’s mental health. When you avoid an isolated, self-critical way of thinking, you are far more able to think logically and behave pro-actively. Friends remind you that your worth is not determined by how much you make or defined by what you do. They offer a crucial perspective that counteracts your own critical point of view. Even if you’re not comfortable turning to your friends for sound psychological advice, the simple di…

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The Act of Loving

…ou are. Expressing your love in this manner enriches both your lives. Your critical inner voice will most likely try to sabotage your loving exchanges with your partner. It will influence you to overlook a loving gesture: He never demonstrates his love for you. I don’t see any signs of it. It will belittle your partner’s loving responses: You call that loving? It’s nothing. You deserve more than that. It will make fun of you when you acknowledge s…

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Destructive Relationships

…rents were generally loving, the subtle or incidental times that they were critical or irritable or insensitive effected us, making deep impressions in our psyches and leaving us with unfavorable attitudes toward ourselves. We enter adulthood programmed to relate to the world at large just as we related in our original families. So when the treatment that we received in our childhoods was bad, that is the treatment we seek today. Even though we ar…

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When the State of the World Overwhelms You

…nd alert without torturing ourselves with destructive thought patterns or “critical inner voices” that coach us to feel helpless. There are real reasons to feel sadness, real reasons to feel anger, but there is no value in using the state of the world to remain tortured and trapped inside our minds. We are far better off getting out of our head, seeking connection, taking actions, and interacting with the physical world around us. If we notice our…

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How to Not Lose Track of What’s Really Important

…uld really work harder. What makes you think you deserve free time?” This “critical inner voice” can be harsh, judgmental, and perfectionistic. It tells us that if we don’t do this or that or get things exactly right, then we are failures: terrible parents, awful spouses, losers in our careers, and unworthy human beings, in general. We get so lost in what we should be, that we lose a sense of who we are and what we want. In addition to pressuring…

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How to Overcome Insecurity

…s to feel insecure Outline therapeutic steps to challenge and overcome the critical inner voice Illustrate the value of practicing self-compassion Present techniques to overcome self-sabotaging behaviors that feed feelings of insecurity Feelings of insecurity often source from early in our lives: attitudes directed toward us, labels we were given, and attachment patterns we experienced. As we grow up, our insecurity is exacerbated by a negative in…

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