inner critic

Fantasy Bond 101

This month, I’ve been working on creating a whiteboard explaining the fantasy bond and I’ve come to realize that it is a complex concept to get across in only a few words and with simple drawings. A while ago, I did a whiteboard about the critical inner voice, which was also challenging to describe. What… Read more »

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Are You Sabotaging Yourself?

Many people struggle with reconciling what they think they want with what they go about getting. What I mean by that is, they don’t fully understand how and why they get in their own way when it comes to their goals. To a certain degree, many of us don’t actually want what we say we… Read more »

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Why We Must Keep Nurturing Connection

If these past 18 months have forced us to evaluate anything, it’s the importance of connection. Be it through new technologies, outdoor activities, or the little pods we’ve packed into to stay safe, we’ve all had to find creative ways to make connection work in a world of social distancing. Nurturing our relationships is one… Read more »

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Why We Don’t See Ourselves Clearly

On any given day of our lives, our self-esteem is likely to hit plenty of peaks and valleys. One minute, we may feel confident and content, the next we may feel insecure and uneasy. As unsettling as this can be, it’s not uncommon. Our self-perception is often not based on what’s actually going on in… Read more »

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The Critical Inner Voice and Addiction

It would be hard to overstate the massive impact of this past year’s pandemic on individuals’ mental health. Last August, the Centers for Disease Control reported results of a survey that showed anxiety  disorder symptoms in 2020 to be three times those reported in the same period of 2019, and depressive disorder about four times… Read more »

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Three Ways to Beat Your Insecurity

For many of us, not a day goes by where we aren’t affected by insecurity. In my last blog, I wrote about two primary sources of insecurity. Here, I will talk about an approach to challenging our negative self-concept by seeking inner security, bolstering self-compassion, and countering the “critical inner voice” that resides in all of us. Developing Inner… Read more »

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Are You Feeling Insecure?

One of the biggest afflictions I see people struggle with is insecurity. This is in large part why I’ve dedicated much of my life to studying the self-critical thoughts or “critical inner voices” people experience. It’s probably no surprise to you that in decades of research, one of the most common self-attacks I’ve seen people… Read more »

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Coping With Loneliness During a Pandemic

Part 1: Overcoming the inner enemy that haunts us when we’re isolated. In late 2019, the team I work with at PsychAlive decided to offer a webinar on overcoming loneliness that would run in April of 2020. At the time, we had no idea that a global pandemic would give the subject of loneliness an entirely new… Read more »

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The Importance of Accepting Compliments

Receiving compliments may be one of the areas we all have room to stretch and grow!   Whether compliments are from someone we know and love or a complete stranger, we can struggle to accept the kind words of others. However, this struggle goes deeper than manners or cultural norms, it shows that the recipient is… Read more »

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Are You Setting Yourself Up For Failure?

It’s now February and nearly two months into our New Year’s Resolutions for 2020. So how are you doing with yours? Do you know that, according to the American Psychological Association, 93% of people set resolutions at the first of the year? And did you also know that research shows that by February, 45% of those… Read more »

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