Three Ways Somatic Therapy Can Help You Quiet Your Inner Critic
How to stop attacking yourself by uncovering the protective side of your inner critic
4 min read
We’ve all encountered that impatient, belittling, and unforgiving inner voice we call our inner critic. Harsh self-criticism can especially arise in competitive environments like New York City, where it feels like there’s always someone in your professional field or social circle who is in some way outdoing you. While it’s true that competition can be healthy for growth, what happens when it leads to an inner dialogue that feels critical and self-defeating?
What many people don’t realize is that the inner critic is not an enemy. It might sound counterintuitive, but think of it more like an inner protector that came online at a time when you needed it most, trying to keep you safe from something. While insight-based therapies like CBT strive to cultivate awareness of the negative core beliefs that hold you back, they often stop there. Body-based, somatic therapy works with your “felt experience” to help you uncover what your inner critic is trying to do for you, so you can cultivate true self-acceptance and tend to your most vulnerable needs and desires. This article will cover three ways a somatic therapist can help guide you through this process.
One: Become aware that you are labeling, criticizing, or undermining yourself. Awareness is the first step to help create mindful distance from your inner critic. Soon, you will sense that there are at least two parts of you engaged in an inner conflict: the part of you that’s doing the criticizing and the part of you that’s being criticized.
Tina Tacorian, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy in NYC says, “Over-identifying with the criticizing or criticized parts of yourself can show up as a block in the therapeutic process—you might feel stuck or like you can’t move forward. Non-judgmental observation of your internal process can help you stay in the present moment and tend to the parts of yourself that need healing.” Mindful awareness will open you up to a greater ability to sense your inner longings, needs, and desires.
“Over-identifying with the criticizing or criticized parts of yourself can show up as a block in the therapeutic process—you might feel stuck or like you can’t move forward.”
Two: Stay with the “felt sense” of how your critical statement feels in your body. Don’t brush it off or try to push it away because it will only continue to operate implicitly. Tina explains, “You may vacillate between rationalizing the inner critic and getting angry with it, with statements that sound like “I just hold myself to really high standards” and “What is wrong with me?!”, without ever feeling any relief.” Staying with how a self-critical statement “lands” or feels within you acts as a lever to help uncover the vulnerability it’s trying to fiercely protect.
The inner critic wants to protect you from feeling incompetent, inadequate, or like a failure. When your therapist asks you to repeat such fears out loud, such as “I feel incompetent” or “I feel like a fraud” they’ll then ask how that feels in your body. You might feel something like a “sinking feeling” in your stomach. Staying with that “sinking feeling” can help you access words, images, and memories of a time you felt unprepared, embarrassed, unqualified, and alone. In the absence of the help you needed then, the inner critic came online to toughen you up by disavowing your legitimate need to feel supported, encouraged, and prepared.
Somatic therapy can help you stay with these once intolerable feelings so you can feel more resourced and better prepared to tend to them. This process will help you not only acknowledge but also feel on a body-level the vulnerability that’s being protected.
“Self-acceptance might sound like a cliche or a platitude but it actually describes a process of accepting and forgiving all past and present aspects of yourself.”
Three: Invite what the vulnerable part of you really needed at the time before the inner critic came online to protect you. Allow yourself to observe what comes up without judgment. As you drop down into the vulnerable, scared parts of you that needed guidance, assurance, experience, etc, you will start to feel compassion for yourself like you would a dear friend or a young child. “Self-acceptance might sound like a cliche or a platitude,” explains Tina, “but it actually describes a process of accepting and forgiving all past and present aspects of yourself in order to pave a path forward to healing. What you are protecting yourself from becomes clear and truly felt.”
As we have seen, we unconsciously identify with our inner critic to protect ourselves from experiencing our deepest fears. Uncovering your past-felt hurt can help you access your resilience and feel true compassion for yourself. This is often ground-breaking work for the individual as our inner-critic can often be traced back to a time in our lives when we couldn’t make sense of the rejection, criticism, or punishment we received. These feelings and self-perceptions then resurface in stressful and competitive situations that are all too common in New York City.
Once we feel safe enough to feel compassion for all parts of ourselves, we can reclaim our disavowed needs without feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or guilty. The therapists at Downtown Somatic Therapy are qualified to provide a safe space to explore these places within ourselves that are no longer helpful and are ready to be let go.