Where does your inner critic come from?
Basically, thanks mum and dad 🙃
Maybe she’s born with it?
Or maybe it’s a response to behaviour from her primary caregivers 💁
In our last post, we spoke about what our inner critic is and the power of naming it. But where does this pesky voice in our heads actually come from?
Well, although we all have an inner critic, it probably won’t surprise you to know that it’s not something we were born with. Instead, this critical voice is formed during childhood in response to behaviour from our caregivers.
Rewind
In early childhood, we respond to our caregivers in ways that get us more of what we want, and we reject the things that get us more of what we don’t want.
For some people, that means being the good boy or girl who always has the answer, and for others, it is acts of rebellion that bring the most attention.
These early interactions with our caregivers, whether that be parents, teachers, siblings, grandparents or neighbours, start to shape our personality, our habitual patterns and also our inner critic narrative.
Shut up and drive (my personality)
Diving even further into this, we have something that psychologists and coaches call Transactional Analysis (TA) drivers. Transactional Analysis is a school of psychology that studies core drivers of behaviour. These drivers come from our early years and play out with our inner critic.
There are 5 TA drivers: Be Perfect, Be Strong, Try Harder, Hurry Up and Please Others. Read all about them in the post below.
Over to you
Cast your mind back to your childhood and think about how you responded to your caregivers. Were you always praised for good grades or behaviour? You might have a perfectionist inner critic narrative that tells you “you’re not good enough” or “you’re going to fail”.
Reply to this email or join the conversation on Instagram to tell us where you think your inner critic narrative comes from.
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Got a friend who could do with telling their inner critic to fuck off?? Share this post with them too.
Lucia! I love that you have a substack now. Yes! Inner critic totally comes from what people have said to me years ago on repeat, and I now believe it .. very damaging.