Befriending Your Inner Critic! (Outweigh)

love coach and author and pleasure activist. So, Aubrey, welcome to Outweigh. Thank you for having me. We're gonna talk today about befriending your inner critic, and this is something that well, I feel like we all could benefit from, whether you're exploring whether or not you have needing disorder or disordered patterns with food or body image issues Like I can think of ways, certainly when I was in the throes of my eating disorder that my inner critic

was very, very very loud. But it shows up in other ways too, even when I'm at work, like oh so stupid, why did I just do that? Or why can't you know? So it doesn't. It's not just specific to outweigh. So I really feel like whatever you do share today, people may be able to take these tools and just plug them into different areas of their life where they need to be more compassionate and kind. Yeah. Absolutely, I feel like this is something that people experience their

inner critic in so many different environments. Like you said, it comes out anywhere, really that we feel vulnerable or insecure in any way, that inner critic is going to jump in there. So do you ever work with people that don't even really recognize that the inner critic is actually a problem Because I could see where so much of my life it was always there for me, so it's like my little companion. So I actually didn't see

it as a problem. Absolutely, And it's funny. This is this kind of ties into how I found myself working as a self love coach and focusing in this area specifically. Is because when I started as a coach, I actually was working with people around like organization and goal setting in their lives, like very much not focused in on

the like inner world of emotion at all. It was just very much like, let me help you to organize your life in ways that feel good and take steps towards your goals and accountability, And through that, I was seeing that the common theme really with everybody was there is this inner voice underneath that when we're trying to pursue something that's important to us, when we are feeling kind of vulnerable and putting ourselves out there in any way,

which comes up when we're pursuing goals, It comes up when we're trying to get organized and trying to move forward on things that people were like, why am I struggling so much? Why is this so hard? And often it is that inner critic voice that's creeping in there, that is where that negative self talk is coming from. And I think for so many people, we've lived with it for so long, and I would include myself and

that somebody who considers myself a recovering perfectionist. Just in so many ways, that inner critic was just always there, and so to notice it and sort of pay attention to it and draw it out can really be mind blowing for people, because we get so used to it being there that the idea that it could be another

way is just kind of foreign to us. Unpacking stuff like this is longer than what we have here in the episode today, but we'll kind of get the cliffs notes version of what you like to encourage people to do to start recognizing that voice and then flipping the script. Absolutely, and I think really a lot of it is exactly what you just said. It's recognizing first that that inner

critic is there. And so if you're somebody who struggles with a low sense of self esteem or low self worth in any way, or struggles with loving yourself, and that's where a lot of people come to me and they're just like, I have issues with my self esteem. I don't feel great about myself. It's first really tuning in to what are those thoughts that you're having about yourself? Right? What is that? And some people it's like, I know what my inner critics sounds like, I know what she's

saying to me. Here are the thoughts that I'm having. And for some people, they really have to pause and sit and be still and listen and tune into what that inner critic is saying, what the thoughts are. And I actually encourage people when they're first getting acclimated to this to write those thoughts down. They're not usually nice thoughts that we're writing down, But there's something powerful in channeling it onto paper and looking at the words that

you are saying to yourself. It's like having a tape playing in the background, and until we pause and really listen to and look at what it's saying, it's just we're kind of accepting that it's there, but instead translating that onto paper and writing out, well, what are these thoughts that I'm having? What is this inner critics saying and actually writing it out and looking at it can just be a powerful exercise to kind of get you started at realizing, oh wow, this is what I'm saying

to myself on a continuous basis. It can kind of be a little bit shocking to see. But from there that is where we can actually script something different. And so, for example, if you're inner critic is saying like, I'm such a failure, right, for example, I'm I'm a failure, then then that can come up when you make a mistake at work. That can come up if you're a person who's in recovery and has a relapse or has an experience that you're not feeling good about, and there

can be that inner voice of I'm a failure. Then if we know that's the thought we're having. We say, okay, there's that inner critic again. How can we reframe this? It's literally rewriting that thought, so coming up with what is the alternative to that thought. I could look at this as Okay, I'm a failure. Or I could say, you know what, I'm trying and I'm going to make mistakes and that's normal. Or I have compassion for myself

when I make mistakes. Right, there is that shift so that every time you're having that thought and you recognize it, you have something to grab onto to replace it with, to say, oh, nope, I'm having the thought that I'm a failure, but actually I know that I can have compassion for myself when I make mistakes. So it's actually about literally rescripting that and replacing that thought as you're

having it. My friend Ali Fallon actually wrote a book called The Power of Writing It Down, and she she believes, you know, everybody has a story, and there's so much power in putting a pin to paper, and so I love that activity so much because yes, you're taking it from your brain to the paper and then your eyeballs are forced to look at it, and then you have

the next step in this. You know, I'm calling it activity, But this tool or this um what you can do to help get yourself out of this of rewriting it. I feel like though sometimes people might get, you know, stuck on well, I don't know really what to write. I know you give one example there for that, But what do you do if you don't When you've been stuck with the script for so long in your head and that's what's looped, it might be really, really really

hard to come up with your new script. Yes, absolutely, that's a great question. And I think we can look at two different ways. Right. One of these is for me, if if you're ever having trouble coming up with a self compassionate thought, look to the people close to you who are encouraging to you. And most of us have at least someone in our lives who has offered us encouragement,

who has said kind words to us. And if we can't generate the words, think about, well, what would this person who loves me say to this thought or what would they offer to me? Right, And you can pull kind of language from there if you're struggling to kind of come up with that yourself. But what this makes me think of is another piece of how we think about our inner critic, which is that I think so many of us think about this inner critic voice and we're like, I just want to turn the volume off

on this. I just want to mute it. I want to get rid of it. I don't want to have this part of me because it's bad, it feels bad. And when I work with clients, I actually really like to help them to build compassion for what that inner critic part is trying to do. And so the way I do that is really looking at, Okay, what is

the thought, what is the fear that's coming up? So the idea of, you know, if we're using the example of I'm such a failure, thinking about what that part of you that is saying, you know, you're a failure, there's something wrong with you. What is part trying to do right? And it's doing it in a backwards way, but it's trying to protect you from something. It's trying to stop you from putting yourself out there again. It's

trying to stop you from taking a risk. It's trying to avoid any scenario where you could be disappointed or sad or hurt or upset. Right, So this is a part of yourself that, again in a way that is now harmful and no longer adaptive, is trying to protect you.

And often this is something that in our lives before has protected us, right, we have for many of us, I consider myself to be somebody who was an overachiever growing up in a lot of different ways, and so for me, being successful was the way that I got love and the way that I got affection and attention, and so it was very adaptive for me to have that inner critic that's like, you're not good enough, it's never good enough, keeping better, keep doing this, keep doing that,

because it's that part of us that wants us to access love and attention and affection and safety. And then in adulthood we find ourselves saying this feels crappy, like this feels off full, and it's no longer helping me. So we have to shift how we look at that narrative and how we relate to that part of ourselves. And so we can look at that part and say, listen, thank you, I see that you tried to help me here. You're trying to warn me about a risk that I'm

going to take. You're worried about what if we make ourselves vulnerable and we're rejected. I see that, and also like that commentary isn't helpful. I think of an inner critic like a kid, right, I'm a parent. My kids often say things that are not helpful. Right. They offer opinions, they offer thoughts, they say I don't want to do this thing. They say this sucks and I'm mad at you, right, And I can hear them, and I'm not going to say I'm banishing you away. I'm not going to say

get out of here. I'm not gonna say I want to get rid of you. I'm gonna say, Okay, thank you, thank you for offering that. But I'm driving the bus now, I'm the grown up, and so we're gonna go my way, and so I hear what you're saying and we're just going to leave that there. Right. It's having a more neutral to almost even compassionate or orientation toward that inner critic voice and saying, Okay, see where this is coming from. I can see sort of the threads of how this

has developed over the course of my life. But now I'm going to choose something different. I love painting that picture of you know, you taking over the driver's seats, but still welcoming all the thoughts and the things to sit in the car with you. I guess if you will,

but they're just not going to drive. It's actually fascinating sometimes how our brain tries to just protect us in all kinds of ways, which I feel like when I was deep into my eating disorder, or if you have another type of addiction, or I've you know, walked through

alcoholism with loved ones. It's wild because it's so destructive, yet it's also brilliant because it's what's you're doing to survive and trying to protect you from something, whether it's feelings like it's numbing out that was the your brains or your body's solution to a problem. But then at some point you realize, Okay, this is no longer serving me and I need to to switch this up. And so that's what we have the opportunity to do with

the inner critic. I feel like the inner critic do we learn it from somewhere or is it how does it just come up? Because I feel like other behaviors we see play out, we maybe watch others, but this is stuff inside of our head. And a lot of us started hearing these voices or this voice or this inner critic when we were quite young. So I guess it's just our in our brains, is like some of us are wired as a way to just protect us. Yeah, And it's it's one of those things that's a little

bit different for everybody. It's a combination of things. So when we when you talk to like an individual person about their inner critic, you might, you know, all often ask clients like, what does the voice sound like that you're hearing? Right? For some people it's like, oh, it's my voice. For some people it's oh, it's my mom's voice, it's my dad's voice. Right, So for all of us

it develops a little bit differently. But it's the part of us that says, hey that this is what you need to do to earn love, This is what you need to do to earn And that's really I mean, I think that's what it all boils down to. All of it really is how we how we grew up and learned to earn love and to feel worthy of love.

And so when that inner critic voice is coming up, sometimes it's just ideas that we've internalized about ourselves, whether it's from caregivers, whether it's you know, looking around and you know, developing ideas about body image that come from media, that come from our family culture, that come from all kinds of things. It's influenced by just the kind of cultural marinade that we sort of exist in, right, And

so for everybody, you know, it's a little different. It might be more of an influence of your parents or your caregivers if they were particularly critical or pushed you really hard, or had phrases that you know, they said often that really burrowed in for you. For some people it's peers. For some people it's more things they see in media. It just it. But it all kind of plays a role into basically this part of you that develops, like I said, as a as an adaptive coping mechanism.

It's this part of you that's saying, like, hey, to be safe, we need to remember this. And the way that we get to that quickly is not to you know, have that whole sentence of for you to feel safe and loved, this is what you should try to do. It's like you're a failure. Don't be a failure. Or you know your body is wrong, don't have your body be this way whatever that looks like, right, And so yeah, I think it comes from a lot of different factors,

but often it stems from childhood, right. It a lot of times when I work with clients, we can trace it back to a pretty specific time in childhood where it's like, okay, here is where I learned that I got attention from my parents if I was getting aiss in school, and so achieving academically became the thing that I worked toward. And if I wasn't doing that, that inner critic voice comes up to kind of push me to be doing that right. And that can be true

for a million different things. My sister has been working through and she's spoken publicly about it, so it's not like I'm talking about her. But you mentioned perfectionism earlier, and she has been able to stem that back to when she was thirteen and our dad left and she thought, well, as long as I seem as though everything is perfect and I have everything tidy and in its place and I'm put together, he'll want to come back. And she's seen how that now in her you know, mid forties,

has played out. Her entire life and shown up in different ways, and now she's ready to shed that and no longer wants to try to be appear perfect all the time because it's exhausting. So it really can show up in all kinds of ways. And you know, I think about me being a mom and having a twelve year old and a fifteen year old, fifteen year old girl, twelve year old son, and I think that the writing activity you shared might be something good I could do

with them, and maybe we could even do together. I and said something the other day about when he looks in the mirror, he feels ugly, and he brought it up at school with his teacher, and his teacher reached out to me, and then we were working on it.

And so I'm thinking about how I wonder what would be something good that I could do with him, because I know we have a lot of parents that are listening to so you know, it's one thing dealing with thoughts in our own brain, right, but when you're a mom or a dad and you've got kids that are saying negative things about themselves, because there's something that's powerful

for parents to do with their kids. I love this question, and I um I have an eleven year old son and we have I have eleven year old son, eight year old daughter, and we you know, talk about a lot of these things with them as well, and I think that bringing it into writing for kids can be really powerful. I also think for kids drawing out them

talking about it. I think hearing a thought like that of like your child expressing that they feel ugly, A lot of parents are scared by that and are like, no, no, you're not ugly, and we leave it at that, and we don't want to talk about it. It feels scary to draw it out. And I think the best thing you can do with kids is really create space to say, I want to talk about this with you, like I'm here. You can tell me it's okay, to name that, we can unpack that, we can explore where that comes from.

But to just be in a space where their feelings are okay, to be something that's expressed right, that you are not afraid of their feelings and their emotions and them expressing that to you and just recognizing that that, yeah, like kids are going to have moments of insecurity. I mean that the age that your son is right now is one where like we start comparing ourselves to pears

in a big way. There's all kinds of factors at play there, and so I think having a space where you can process that and where you're encouraging them to open up and share that with you and to make that a conversation rather than I think often we have

these thoughts and we say them. And I think for myself, you know, as a child, naming thoughts of feeling like I have to be perfect, and my mom would of course say like, no, you don't, you don't have to be perfect, like it's fine, But that doesn't make the thought go away. That's not drawing out the experience, that's not helping me understand where might that be coming from.

And so I think the best thing you can do as a parent is really just to hold space for it, to say thank you so much for being willing to talk to me about this, or to say, hey, your teacher shared this with me, and I really want to understand more, right, I really want to hear more from you about this and what you're feeling because it matters

to me. I love that and the good thing about us or you encouraging us as parents to do that now with our children is it's like, oh, my parents didn't do that for me, because I don't think they knew they didn't have that they like you said, they were just kind of like, oh no, you know I A narrative for me when I was a kid is that I wasn't smart, and that's stuck with me even now. I still struggle with. Like I said, an example is that would be at work and be like, oh, you're

so stupid, and I'm feeding into it. I'm like, oh, yeah, my teacher in high school was right, I'm not smart, and I think my parents are just like no, no, you're smart. But then there was no real work with it. And if you're hearing this now and a light bulb is going off, like yeah, we have the opportunity to not only work on our own inner critic voice, but we can start giving our kids the tools so that they're not I'm forty one now and trying to you know,

actively work on this stuff. Like maybe they'll have the tools to work on it in these early years to where they can have a healthy relationship with their their inner critic. And I love the way you have said it. Befriending your inner critic and not pushing it away, but saying, Okay, I'm acknowledging you're you, you're here, but you're not going to control me, and you're not going to be in

the driver's seat. Absolutely, And I think it's the like you don't you don't scare me kind of part of that, right, And even maybe initially it does scare you, and that's also okay, But getting to the place where you're saying, I see that you're here, and I'm just going to be present with you the same way you would be with your child, right, And I think I love that you use that example of doing this with kids because I also encourage people to really have that same compassion

for themselves. Right to look at your inner critic the same way you look at your child's inner critic, with curiosity and with openness. Right, instead of saying, oh, these are bad thoughts, I want them to go away. I don't like that this is here. Let's shoot it to the side where it festers and grows too. Instead say okay,

let's bring this into the light. Let's look at what we're working with here, and that way we can build a sense of of compassion for ourselves and then we also model that if there are kids in our lives too, and curiosity is so key. I'm glad you've said that word because that's been a huge part of my healing journey, is being curious about all the things that are coming up.

And you mentioned to even having kids draw things out, But I think there's there could be some power in that as as adults, to tapping into our younger selves and maybe doing an activity that seems like, oh, that's for kids, but it probably would be very therapeutic to process some of your inner critic in a childlike way. Yeah, because that voice is often coming from a childlike part

was infused during childhood. So often the way we can heal this stuff is to tap into that inner child mentality and explore there and have that sort of compassion for that part of ourselves and engage with it through play. Yeah. Awesome. Well, if people want to learn more from you, Aubrey, your website is your name, Aubrey Henderson dot com. Seems pretty pretty easy to remember. Aubrey Henderson dot com. Against self love, coach, author,

pleasure activists, all the things. I know you specialize in setting boundaries. So those boundaries, boundaries scare me. But that's okay. I welcome the fear. That's right, I will recommit. I sit with it. Why did they scare me? Body image, relationships, sexuality, all the things self confidence? So if you know people want to learn more, they can check out your website. But also on Instagram you are Bree. So how many ages are in that off? A b r e Yah?

Yeah b r e. So because I figured just Aubrey spelled like you spell, it was probably taken. So I love that you got creative in your Aubree and your Aubrey on all platforms. So thank you so much for taking the time to just chat with us about our inner critics and giving us the tools to at least acknowledge and then you know how to flip the script.

And I also love, love love that you said if you're struggling with what to come up for your new script, hopefully you have someone in your life that you can ask. Because that's also something that I'll do sometimes with myself, is if I hear myself say something about myself, I'll say what I say that to my my fifteen year old daughter, no, And if I heard her talking like that, I would be like no, don't talk about yourself that way.

And so thank you for the writing exercise, and you know, the suggestion to try to ask others around you or if you have a therapist or someone like that, but really if you have like a sibling or a BFF or someone in your family that knows you, well, yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for having me. It's been great, Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Aubrey