Chocolate and my inner critic

    I confess I wrote this last night. Over the five months I’ve been writing this blog I’ve often wondered what would happen if (when?) I hit a week where I had nothing to say. This is my third attempt at pulling together a post. The first attempt screeched to a halt at 500 words. The second sounded like a fourth grader wrote it.

    The fertile creative space I depend on for writing seems to have left. I miss it. So where did it go? It’s been temporarily banished by my inner critic. The critic is the antithesis of creativity.

    In addition to not writing a blog post, a number of other things aren’t getting done. The house needed to be vacuumed last week. April is national poetry month. I have written no poetry. My business partner, Pam and I are working on a video for Pryanta Healing. I seem to have the attention span of a gnat…not conducive to editing video. I blew off going to the gym yesterday morning. Chocolate is the only thing I want to eat.

    Everyone has weeks like this. Beyond the intense energy of April’s cardinal grand cross, nothing external happened to set this off. It’s just where I am. The grand cross is magnifying and exaggerating a lot of things, including my inner critic.

    At first I tried to quiet the critic down. I did yard work, shamanic journey work and drew. The critic didn’t care. I tried chocolate, computer games and a marathon of Criminal Minds reruns. The critic still didn’t care.

   I tried immersing myself in video editing. After mangling the same clip four times, it hit me. The critic wants my attention and wasn’t going to quiet down until I listened. Okay, let’s dance.

    Numerous psychological studies have been done on people’s relationship to their inner critic. These studies show that people who are more self-critical have less motivation and less self-control. Self-criticism often triggers a vicious cycle.  It creates a need for comfort which pushes a person back toward the behavior that initially triggered the criticism. So giving the inner critic my full attention is a bit tricky.

    After making myself sit still and listen to my critics litany of what I’m not doing well I made a startling discovery. The more I heard, the less impact the critic had on me. In fact, as soon as I consciously gave the critic my attention, it lost some of its charge.

    My critic derives strength from remaining hidden and staying in the shadows. When it murmurs and yelps in the background, it seems larger, stronger and more authoritative than it really is. When I drug the critic into the light by giving it my attention, it shrank.

    When I really hear what the critic says, much of it is ridiculous. Not vacuuming doesn’t make me a degenerate. Not having a great idea for this weeks blog post doesn’t mean the muse has left for good because I’m a crappy writer. I know my brain is predisposed to interpret my experiences as saying something about who I am, but this is pretty extreme.

     So not only does my inner critic thrive on remaining unconscious, it lives in exaggeration and fear. Funny, that sounds just like my ego. Oh….the inner critic is my egos voice. That explains why, as I listened to the critic, it sounded more and more like frightened child.

    A couple years ago a dear friend of mine came up with an image for her ego that I’ve used many times. A little red-caped imp sitting alone in small room trying to direct the Universe with a tiny wand. The imp truly believes that room is the entire Universe. Anything beyond the small room is unknown, dangerous and must be guarded against.

   My inner critic is reacting to CHANGE. Even my daily routine is in flux these days. I’m doing my best to stay with the unknown; the awareness that I am not in charge of squat. My critic wants things categorized, identified, delineated and orderly. It has no concept of a bigger picture. For it the idea of releasing the illusion of control and surrendering feels like a death sentence.

    Initially my critic being loud enough to chase me for days until I listened seemed like a dubious opportunity. However if the critic hadn’t cornered me, I might not have given it my attention long enough to hear the frightened child under its rant. It’s easy for me to respond to the criticism by getting defensive or angry. A frightened child evokes a completely different response in me….compassion.