The thing about : the power of inner critic and killer

We seem to explore this subject of self criticism and the cutting off of full potential of life for my True Self over and over in therapy. Now I am touching base with deeper feelings hidden under defences and ‘thought stories’, at times it seems the Inner Critic cannot stop running his inner commentary to the extent that in session today I actually imagined strangling him by the throat.

Pete Walker devotes a lot of his book on Complex PTSD discussing how the inner critic functions to cut of feelings of anger and sadness as we begin to heal and face the full truth of our past. Neither of these emotions are okay with the critic who functions to shame or blame us or others for having them. I noticed today my critic is such a powerful black and white force of dualism. He doesn’t know how to deal with ambiguity and deeper complexes of human emotion, he would rather split and divide and shame and judge and often its me who comes out as the ‘bad’ wrong one for making such a fuss, or needing certain things.

I know as an adult I am not fully entitled to certain treatment from anyone. Those who care about us do their best to be kind and supportive and so do we but we cannot be all things to all people as humans we have limits. There comes a time when our own needs have to come first if we are moving towards emotional health. Those who accept this accept us and we accept them. We can say we are hurt by something while realising it may have nothing to do us and much more to do with the other person in terms of where they are at and they may not have any insight into the wounds we carry. But we can get a fairly good reality check when we have this kind of honest discussion with another person to see how much they care and vice versa.

Anyway today I felt the inner critic dropping back into the deep void toward the end of therapy. My capacity to enjoy myself, to take risks and trust is expanding. I had a lot of hurt last weekend over not being included but I also realise it is not always about me and it doesn’t automatically make me the bad or wrong one. The other thing I realised is that I dont have to shut down when I feel left out, I can allow myself to have my feelings of vulnerability which trigger older wounds that may always be there to some degree.

Luckily I have someone in my life now who allows me to protest when I don’t think things are fair. He doesn’t shame me for being angry like my Mum used to do. He accepts my feelings and that frees me to see that often the way I react is actually justified. Kat said to me today in therapy “we know by now that when you feel helpless its usual for you to feel angry”. As David Richo points out in his many books on maturing emotionally, our ego strives often for control and projects and expectation of entitlement which is not often a given in a challenging random world where not every one can be expected to be sensitive wrapped up as they need to be within their own concerns and life.

I am realising now I will always carry the sadness that my parents due to what was going on in their lives could not be there for me as much as I needed. At times when I really needed my father to look deeper and use empathy to see what was really going on with me, he could not. He came down hard and so I in some way come down just as hard upon my True Self. I can beat myself up, shame myself, put myself to death, disallow myself in all kinds of ways. I put limits on what I can enjoy, I have stayed wedded to gloom and doom too at times far too much but its really understandable when you know my developmental deficits. All in all we decided today I have done a bloody good job to work through what I have needed to. I am now more capable of self understanding. I can forgive others and the most important thing that I found today as I was crying over certain things that happened towards the end of my marriage to Jonathan is that I feel I actually now ready TO FORGIVE MYSELF knowing we both did the best we could do at that point of separation. We had to separate so I could grow and he too.

Today I heard a voice in my mind while I was crying over how I let Jonathan down and how he let me down too, saying “you need to forgive yourself”. Kat was also saying that being able to feel sad over things while seeing how no one was fully to blame for things even though there have been big let downs shows much growth emotionally speaking. All in all I am in a fairly good place really.

I am grateful even for all the sadness I have felt this week, I truly am. I am glad I have kept pushing through and trying to connect with my sister because the love is really stronger than any past resentment over things that went down when she and my Mum tried their best to help me at a difficult time while not fully understanding what it was I really needed then emotionally. And the truth is that at the end of my marriage they offered me support and in the end I stayed in the pattern of taking myself away again. I don’t even blame myself for that because I was trying to individuate anyway out of the family trauma matrix at that time.

Kat also said to me today that there is a deep psychic parallel in the fact that the movie American Sniper touched me so deeply this week. She way saying how toward the end of the movie it is just as Chris Kyle is differentiating out of his own trauma by trying to help another wounded vet that he is killed. I said to Kat that I felt in some way his murderer represented and aspect of Chris Kyle’s shadow. This may not be clear to some readers. In something I read on the internet in an interview with the killer Eddie Ray Routh he said that both Chris Kyle and Chad LIttlefield basically ignored him on the way to the shooting range. Routh was obviously deeply unwell psychologically as an aspect of his own PTSD and in a trance like state when he committed both murders.

Kat made the point that often it is just when we feel on the brink of separation or freedom from past limits or enmeshment that the fear of death becomes so very strong for us and the inner killer may rise up in us to cut us back down again, killing off new potentials but keeping us only half alive by keeping us safe. This made so much sense to me. The truth is now my longing for life and joy seems stronger and just maybe I will be able to bear the uprush of all that emerging energy without having to always kill it off through fear. I most certainly hope so. I have faced death and suicidal depression so many times, it is a real liberation to finally be finding some kind of freedom from the black white strangle hold of the unhappy rigid inner critic.