When we fail at something that matters to us, our instinct is often to try harder. We take a deep breath, redouble our efforts, and resolve to be more focused, disciplined, or determined. This comes up when we try to improve our health, change how we relate to others, or manage our money. Sometimes we reprimand ourselves, scold ourselves, and demand that we do better. Other times, we simply resolve to try harder.
In many ways, this makes sense. From a young age, we learn to correct our behavior in response to negative feedback. We learn which actions earn approval and which bring disapproval. Over time, we internalize these lessons—and that is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to learn to recognize when we have fallen short, made a mistake, or acted in ways that conflict with our values.
Over time, though, we can begin to confuse recognizing our shortcomings with being hard on ourselves, associating improvement with the latter rather than the former. We assume that if we don't reprimand ourselves, we will become complacent. If we don't feel bad about our mistakes, we will fail to learn from them. We may come to believe that the discomfort of self-criticism is what keeps us honest, accountable, and motivated to change.
The Inner Critic May Have a Point
While these fears make sense—we do want to be honest with ourselves, learn, and grow from our mistakes—the route we take to do that may not. When we criticize ourselves, we may experience the voice as a judge, telling us we are lazy, selfish, weak, or undisciplined. Other times, we are less severe. We recognize that we could have done better and resolve to try harder next time. Either way, we tend to look inward for something to fix, believing that if we can change ourselves, we can change the outcome. It is tempting to say we should be less critical of ourselves—and that may be true. But before we fully go down that path, it may be worth considering that our critic may be trying to help us, just not particularly skilled at finding the right way to say the words we need to hear.
We have all had conversations with well-meaning people who care and want to help, but whose words land wrong and leave us feeling worse. We may see something that needs to change in another person, yet find that the way we express it makes them defensive, discouraged, or less able to hear what we are trying to say. Perhaps this is a useful way of relating to our own internal scold. It may have a point, but the way it makes that point, the way it makes us feel, is so harsh as to be counterproductive.
Seen this way, our inner critic is not necessarily trying to make us miserable. It is trying to help. It has developed a strategy for protecting us from the consequences of our shortcomings or pointing out the things we need to pay attention to. But perhaps the only way we have learned to shape those insights is through harshness and judgment. This helps explain why simply deciding to be kinder to ourselves can be difficult. If we believe that criticism protects us from failure or helps us see things clearly, giving it up feels dangerous. We may understand that our self-talk is harsh and counterproductive, yet still worry that without it, we will stop trying, stop seeing the world clearly, or stop working to improve.
The challenge is not to silence the critic. It is to recognize what it is trying to accomplish and find a better way to accomplish it. In one way or another, all of us can learn how to say difficult things with more kindness.
Suffering and Accountability
When we do something wrong, we often feel that we ought to feel bad about it. If we hurt someone, lose our temper, or fail to follow through on a commitment, feeling guilty seems appropriate. It signals that we recognize the importance of what happened– but it is really easy for this to spin out of control. We begin to believe that the worse we feel, the more seriously we are taking our mistakes. We may even feel that letting go of our guilt would be a form of moral evasion, as though feeling better about ourselves would mean excusing what we did. This is where we make the error– suffering and accountability are not the same thing.
We can feel terrible about hurting someone and still fail to apologize. We can spend hours berating ourselves for losing our temper without doing anything to understand why it happened, how to prevent it from happening again, or making amends with the consequences. We can punish ourselves for neglecting our health while continuing to neglect it. I often see people get caught in this cycle. Each time they fall short, their self-criticism grows, and each failure seems to reinforce what the critic has been saying all along. They begin to see repeated failure as proof that something is wrong with them, rather than as a sign that their approach isn't working. As this cycle becomes more entrenched, some people shut down, others turn to drugs or alcohol to escape how they feel. The internal critic may be entirely correct in its identification of the problem, and yet so unkind in how it delivers that news that it impairs our ability to make change.
Conversely, we can acknowledge that we have done something wrong, take responsibility, make amends, and work to change our behavior without deciding that we are terrible people. Feeling bad about what we have done is not the same as doing something to make it right. Our distress does not repair the harm we have caused nor create the change we seek; our self-punishment does not guarantee that we will behave differently next time. And behaving differently the next time is not dependent on punishing ourselves or feeling bad or guilty.
Sometimes, we subconsciously treat suffering as a kind of payment. We have done something wrong, and we owe ourselves some misery in return. Once we have suffered enough, we can move on. But there is no reason to believe that this accounting system works—and many reasons it does not. We do not need to make ourselves miserable to demonstrate that something matters to us. Instead, we might respond to what happened in a way that reflects its importance.
Hard Identities
For some of us, self-criticism moves beyond being a habit and becomes part of how we understand ourselves. We take pride in being the disciplined ones, the demanding ones, the people who hold ourselves to high standards. We don't make excuses for ourselves. We are willing to look clearly at the ways we fall short, even when the truth is uncomfortable. We may even come to believe that this willingness to be hard on ourselves is evidence of our honesty and integrity.
But there is a difference between being honest with ourselves and being harsh with ourselves. We can recognize our shortcomings without condemning ourselves for them. Yet when we have spent years equating criticism with honesty, a kinder assessment can feel like an excuse, a way of avoiding the truth or letting ourselves off the hook. We may become suspicious of our own willingness to treat ourselves with understanding, as though doing so means we're no longer holding ourselves accountable. We have come to associate discomfort with taking things seriously, and may worry that without it, we will lose our ambition, our discipline, or our edge.
The problem is that we can become so invested in being people who are hard on ourselves that treating ourselves differently begins to feel like a form of dishonesty, or the very slippage we need to guard against. We want to become healthier, more patient, more reliable, and more generous. We want to recognize our shortcomings and take responsibility for them. But we have come to believe that doing these things requires us to remain perpetually dissatisfied with who we are. Yet chronic dissatisfaction is a poor way of living life, and itself probably not the most honest way of assessing anything.
The Means and the Ends
The irony is that we often judge ourselves harshly because we want to change, yet that same harshness can make change harder. When we turn our shortcomings into judgments about who we are, we shift our attention away from what happened and what we might do differently. Our harshness and unkindness with ourselves, rather than helping us grow, leads us to becoming preoccupied with our inadequacies, discouraged by our failures, or reluctant to face the things we find difficult about ourselves.
We want to become healthier, more patient, more reliable, and more generous. That requires us to recognize where we fall short, take responsibility, and work to change our behavior. It does not require us to be judgmental or harsh.
The point is not to make ourselves feel better by being dishonest, lowering standards, or to stop caring when we fall short. It is to recognize that we can take our shortcomings seriously without turning them into judgments about our worth. Paradoxically, the more compassion we bring to ourselves in these spaces, the more we can actually work with what needs to change.
Love,
Doc
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