Dear Dylan:

Glad you started this thread. In your first post above you wrote: “I understand that being open and curious to our inner critic is the very way they lose their power”- I disagree.

There are two different things here: one is the Superego, the one Freud came up with. It is a mental part we all need, have to have to survive. It is the part that makes us able to control ourselves, so when we are angry we don’t automatically act on it, but evaluate situations before acting. It is also the part that we need to not overeat, over drink and run in the streets naked just because we feel like it. We have to have an inner critic for our well being.

Problem is so many of us has an inner critic with an extra layer of abuse attached to it. This extra layer of abuse is just that… abuse. It is not well intended. Just like an abuser from the outside, like a real life bully, this inner bully wants us harm.

So when I write “inner bully” I am referring to that extra layer of the inner critic. We need to keep the inner critic and remove from it the abuse.

I think that a real life bully was introduced into your life when you were a young child, a very young child when your brain was still forming, a mother or a father bullying you. Is that so?

anita