Dear Patrick:

I wonder if the idol you mentioned was a parent?

You wrote: “the foolish thing is I believed it”. A couple of things:

1. A child is not capable of evaluating what he is told as true or not true. A child believes what he is told without evaluating it. It is not that a child is foolish. A child is not experienced yet, no prior experience to use for a possible evaluation.

2. If you were told what was true, it wouldn’t have distressed you then or now. For example if someone told you now that you are a zebra, not a human, that wouldn’t distress you, would it, because you know it is not true. But when you were told by your idol that you were not good enough, or less than, or this and that, those things distressed you then and now because they are not true.

How to get rid of that voice, that mental representative of the idol, that inner critic?

It takes exploring the message of the voice: is it true, doing what you were not able to do as a child: evaluate it.

It takes more and more mindful of that voice, that is, noticing it during the day as it voices itself here and there, in the circumstances it does, then disengaging from it. This is a practice that takes a whole lot of time and persistence, extreme patience.

anita