Dear artfulapricot:

I see the Inner Critic as a mental representative of the real life critical parent. A child is not separated, mentally, from her mother. When the mother is critical, as the child’s brain matures, the mother becomes a mental entity in the brain, a collection of neuropathways. (A kind, gentle mother would have resulted in a kind, gentle Inner Critic- how fortunate that would have been!)

You wrote: “I’m often not sure if the thing bothering me is that inner critic who wants perfection or a legitimate problem”- I am very familiar with this problem. You also wrote that your boyfriend “feel(s) attacked and not good enough from the slightest comment or suggestion” that you make.” You then keep things to yourself, things build up, you get frustrated, cry, bring it up, “but by then it will come out in a torrent of magnified emotions. His reaction will be to be overly sensitive..”

What can you do…- best in the context of competent couple therapy, the therapist will teach the two of you how to communicate with each other right there in his office, give you exercises, practices to be done in the office and in between sessions. That would be best.

If you’d like to try to do without therapy, you can look for a good workbook on couple communication, and do the exercises in it with your boyfriend. Better pick up a good workbook though….

Here is an example of exercise: the two of you answer separately the following: what do you need from your partner- and then share your answers, learn from that.

Rule for communication between the two of you- EAR, standing for Empathy, Assertiveness, Respect.

There is much more. The idea is to communicate with your boyfriend about communicating; setting rules-of-communicating and then proceed to communicate following those rules. Each must feel safe with the other. There is so much more that I learned starting with couple therapy I had and would be glad to share more, but it is more than one post can carry and I have to have your responses in between my inputs.

When you have a concern and you don’t know if it is legitimate and should be voiced, or not- well, you can give me an example or two and we can go over them here.

anita