Befriending Your Inner Critic: The Shortcut To A More Positive Inner Narrative

Discover the shortcut to inner peace and self-acceptance using the technique I teach my 1:1 clients! If you've struggled with a strong inner critic and found that affirmations alone take years to make a difference, this video offers a practical step-by-step technique to create immediate distance from negative self-talk and build a more positive and fulfilling self-narrative. You'll discover relatable analogies and real-life examples, in which I provide you with the tools to embrace a compassionate inner dialogue and achieve a happier, more joyful life. Let me know in the comments what it moved for you ❤️

Transcript

0:24

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai - Go Unlimited to remove this message) If you have a really strong inner critic, it can be really hard to get distance from that voice. It can be rabbiting on in your ear and often what's taught in the personal development industry is to use affirmations and positive self-reinforcements. You start to build up a positive narrative alongside this negative narrative in your system and the hope is eventually the positive one becomes more strong and the negative one becomes weaker. Now this does work but it takes a long time. I think for me this took something like between like five and eight years when I did it for myself and there's actually a faster way, a quicker way, like a shortcut if you will, to getting distance from the negative voice and reducing the power that that voice has in your system. So that's what we're going to look at briefly in this video today. So I'm Natalie Ford, I love talking about our inner world, I love supporting my clients to get to know themselves better from the inside out so that they can change things that are not feeling good and supportive in their system and create happier, more fulfilling lives for themselves and part of what I support my clients with is exactly this, like finding parts of us inside that have a strong critical narrative or a narrative, a story, a voice that is not supportive, not feeling loving, kind, gentle, it's not like the divine mother or the divine father energy, it's a more wounded voice within us and changing that so that we can actually have a happier, more joyful experience. And I've literally just come off a client session so I thought I'd share with you what we did in that client session where I helped my client actually create space from her inner critic and have a different perspective so she can start to leapfrog, like take the shortcut to changing this inner narrative to be more positive. So I believe and you've already noticed in the way that I speak that we have many parts inside of us, we're not just one individual inside and what I mean by that is you're going to have an inner critic part, you're going to have a part that thinks that you're amazing and awesome and why doesn't everybody else see that and you're going to have a part that is really focused on your career and really goal-driven and you're going to have a part that you know is maybe looking for a relationship or is really in love with a partner and we have many many parts, I believe we actually have hundreds but we don't need to go into that today. And the first step of creating distance and befriending your inner critic is to recognise that your inner critic is not all of you because you don't feel that way about yourself all of the time right, you don't always feel shit about yourself, you don't always feel like oh god I'm not good enough, I should be doing differently. Sometimes you actually think I did really well there, yay me, like I really oh god I did really well and if the negative voice was you all of the time then you wouldn't have those positive experiences so it's good to just take a step back for a moment and say oh yeah actually like yeah actually I do have different voices, I do have a voice that supports me and champions me and I do have a voice that is negative and I do have these other voices and to recognise first of all that these are all miniature parts of us inside and it's not just one part it's lots of many parts inside so that is step number one to get a little bit of distance to know oh actually me the adult version so for me the adult Natalie I'm not any one of those parts like those parts can come forward and I love the bus analogy you've maybe heard like the analogy of like having all your inner children in the back and you're driving the bus and just every now and then one of your inner children comes from the back of the bus and grabs the steering wheel and's like I'm in control today and then suddenly for you know an hour or two we've got the inner child driving and they're on a rampage and you know the wounded part of us is controlling the inner narrative in our in our mind but once that part has lessened back it goes to sit back in the back of the bus and the adult version of us comes forward and we get to drive the bus again and this is such a helpful analogy it's really really helped me through my journey my many years of doing this work so yeah this first stage of recognising that you're the bus driver you're the one in control and sometimes these other younger parts come forward and take over but our job our job on our healing journey is to recognise when there's a younger part driving the bus and say hang on a minute you get to sit in the back you're still part of me of course you're still part of my story and part of my being but you don't get to drive the bus you're not the one making the decisions so both of these ways of looking at us help us get this distance which helps us have perspective and helps the adult part of us come forward and have more power the second step that we can do to have more distance and to start to befriend our inner critic once we've recognised oh wait hang on this isn't all of me it's a part of me we can then step two and this can sometimes be really challenging if you're new to this work but if you've been doing this work for a while you might already have a sense of this that actually all of your inner parts all of these children sitting in the back of the bus are actually trying in their own slightly disruptive maybe not necessarily an adult way of doing things but in their younger child way of doing things they're actually trying to help you they're actually trying to help you get to a better place now that might be by guiding you in your career it might be by trying to help you find love it might be by trying to fill your life with lots of amazing beautiful experiences but sometimes and this is true for the inner critic sometimes these parts tell us that we're bad at something or tell us that oh this is all your fault you know you stupid idiot you should have done differently and it sounds very critical because it is but when we actually talk with this part and this is what I do in my sessions with my client we actually take the space create create the distance and then communicate with this part from a place of neutrality in our system we actually get to understand and find out the parts intention underneath the criticism and for the client I've just been working with actually this part's intention what this part was telling her was that oh you're an idiot you made the same mistake it's all your fault you deserve to feel this pain but actually when we got to the heart of this part we discovered that actually this part was trying to stop her feeling alone and of course this is not an adult and not a desirable way of going about it but this part was actually really young and we also discovered because this can be true often for for our inner critics is that the inner critic has mirrored an adult in your younger life so for example with this client this this part this inner critic had taken on the voice of her mum her mum when she was really young and at that point in her life the mum was telling her you made a mistake if you keep doing this you know you're going to end up alone if you keep repeating this same mistake you're going to end up alone now the mum obviously had her own pain that was playing out her own trauma that was in her system and maybe didn't know how to communicate in the most loving way in that moment because she was probably she probably had a child driving her bus and communicating in that moment so it probably wasn't her highest self communicating in that moment so she was she was saying you know you silly thing you you made these mistakes it is your fault and if you keep doing this you are going to end up alone and my client had taken on or a part a part the inner critic part of my client had taken on this narrative as a way of staying loyal to her mum a way of loving her mum in a slightly dysfunctional way but still a way of saying like my mum was trying to protect me and I see that and this is the only way that I know how to carry forward her message so we were able to create distance and space and see this loving intention of trying not to end up alone and then we can start to repair and heal this story in our system so we were able with the my client today to just create the space and just see oh okay first of all this is not all of me and secondly this part has actually a loving intention even if the execution is maybe a bit dysfunctional we can work on that in in the sessions but we at least see oh I see that your intention is one of good is one of wanting me to not end up alone so this is huge this alone is really really huge and in my sessions with my clients we do a lot of this work where we start to create this separation and then we also start to work with these parts to say hey is there another way that you can stay loyal to my mum is there another way that you can help me from help me to not be alone perhaps you can actually be with me and stay with me in my moments of loneliness and love me and channel the divine mother energy or the divine father energy and support me to not be alone in that way rather than to tell me that I'm bad or to blame me or to tell me that it's all my fault can we find a different way of loving me and supporting me in those moments and this would be step number three but this requires further steps that we would do obviously in the session although maybe you can do that yourself if you if you've done a lot of this work or maybe you can book in with me and we'll do this work together so that you don't have to feel alone you don't have to do this whole journey by yourself because it's a lot right it's a lot to do this healing work and we as the adult version of so for me adult Natalie when I speak with my inner parts because of course I do this work too right I've done this work for a really long time when I'm talking with my inner parts I get to say to them you know this role that you're holding in my system this role of trying to stop me being alone it's it seems like a lot of responsibility it seems like a big role you know can I help you with that can I adult Natalie who has all the all these adult resources available to me can I help you take on that responsibility and maybe lessen your burden a bit so that actually you little little me little inner critic me who actually really is just a younger child and inner child version of me maybe you want to go off and play you know maybe there's maybe you're exhausted and maybe you need to sleep or maybe you want to go off and play in the fields or on your bike or maybe you want to do some coloring or maybe you want to go play with friends or you know whatever the little version of me wants to go do when I support that part to relieve its burden then that little part gets to go off and play and actually it happens internally in my system that I start to experience more joy I the adult me takes on the heavy stuff because I've got the shoulders to carry that and the younger parts of me get to go and have fun and play and where affirmations and positive statements come in those are still really valid because what you're doing is you're building up another part in your system that can see those positive parts of you and can really champion you in that way and it also supports what we call more self-energy which is the adult part of you to say actually yeah like this inner critic that's had so much power in my system before because I thought it was me I thought it was all of me I can now see how small it is it's just a young part of me and I the adult part of me can start to see like actually it's not not true all of that story that it's that it's saying and I can start to champion the positive parts of me how you know how pretty I think I am how amazing I think I am how intelligent kind loving compassionate goal-driven how capable I am how strong I am all of those beautiful positive qualities and that's where affirmations do really play a part but it's a much slower route if we only go down that route and we don't actually do the shortcut of detaching from the inner parts and doing the inner work that I support my clients to do in my sessions so I hope this has been helpful for you please share with me in the comments like did you have an aha moment in this session did you learn something about yourself and if you did like how did it help you I'd love to hear and if you would love to work with me just reach out to me you can see my links in my youtube header come book a session with me or send me a dm through one of my social media channels and I'd love to chat with you and get to know you better