Exorcising the Inner Critic Demon

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

All those negative voices inside your head, criticizing you, demeaning you, shaming you for every little mistake you’ve made–they are not you. They were put inside you by all the nasty people you’ve known in your life: your parents, siblings, neighbourhood and school bullies, coworkers, ex-boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses, and internet trolls.

Why did they do this? Did the mistakes you made really make you deserving of that much of a shaming? I doubt it, the great majority of the time, at least. Or were those attacks generally way out of proportion to whatever human flaws or foibles you actually manifested? I’ll bet that’s far more likely.

Here’s what those abusers were probably doing most, if not virtually all, of the time: they were projecting the hated parts of themselves onto you. They were force-feeding their negative energy into you, like the sadists in this movie forcing their victims to eat shit. You were made to introject their self-hate so they could function better without it. Shame on them for that.

Some narcissistic manipulators carry the projection a step further and engage in projective identification, in which they manipulate the victim into manifesting the very traits they’re projecting onto him or her. The victim then introjects those traits, unaware he or she is being tricked into it, and then behaves in the way the victimizers wanted him or her to behave.

An understanding of object relations theory will help to make projection and introjection intelligible to you, if you’re not familiar with how narcissistic abuse works. The first internal object discovered by psychoanalysis was the superego, an amalgam of one’s childhood influences in terms of ‘morality’ (parents, primary school teachers, religious authorities, etc.) and the way one ‘ought’ to be. When we measure up to the ego ideal, we feel pride; when we fail, we feel guilt or shame.

WRD Fairbairn devised his own endopsychic structure to replace Freud’s id, ego, and superego, as he felt Freud’s reliance on drives to be inadequate in describing human libido, which Fairbairn felt to be object-seeking (i.e., seeking other people for friendships and love) rather than mere pleasure-seeking (sex, smoking, drinking, drugs, etc.), the excessive pursuit of which he saw as a failure of object relationships.

Fairbairn elaborates: “…from the point of view of object-relationship psychology, explicit pleasure-seeking represents a deterioration of behaviour…Explicit pleasure-seeking has as its essential aim the relieving of the tension of libidinal need for the mere sake of relieving this tension. Such a process does, of course, occur commonly enough; but, since libidinal need is object-need, simple tension-relieving implies some failure of object-relationships.” (Fairbairn, p. 139-140) Enjoyment of things replaces love.

To get back to my point, Fairbairn replaced the superego with an approximate equivalent: what he called the Anti-libidinal Ego/Rejecting Object, which is a pair of personae like ghosts, haunting the mind; an ego opposed to the libidinal need for friends and loving relationships, paired with an internalized imago that hates and rejects everyone.

Fairbairn originally called the Anti-libidinal Ego the “Internal Saboteur”: see how close that sounds to the “inner critic“? That’s because the two concepts are in essence very similar, if not identical. We’re talking about a bad internal object, the image of a bad person haunting one’s mind like a ghost, shaming us and making us want to reject human company. It must be expelled.

Fairbairn said the personality splits three ways after we’ve been exposed to enough bad, non-empathic parenting or other bad childhood influences. Our original ego, Fairbairn’s Central Ego (roughly equivalent to Freud’s ego, and linked with an Ideal Object), just wants to have real relationships with people in the external world (Ideal Objects, because real people are the objects we should be having relationships with–this is healthy). Whenever this wish is frustrated, the child’s mind compensates by creating fake internalized ego/object configurations, Fairbairn’s Libidinal Ego (roughly equivalent to Freud’s id) and its Exciting Object (e.g., pop idols, porn stars, etc.), and the Anti-libidinal Ego/Rejecting Object (all the internalized people we don’t like) mentioned above.

Everybody has all three of these ego/object pairs that Fairbairn wrote of, but the worse the trauma of childhood emotional abuse and emotional neglect, the more pronounced the impact the two bad ego/object configurations will have on our lives. This also means that the inner critic will have a worse effect on us, especially if we have C-PTSD.

So these bad objects are like demons possessing us, like Pazuzu taking over Regan MacNeil‘s body in The Exorcist. (Fairbairn actually compared the bad objects to demons.) They must be cast out…but how?

Here’s a meditation/auto-hypnosis you can try. Sit or lie down in a comfortable position, away from any distractions. Close your eyes and breathe in and out slowly. As you do this deep breathing, begin to pay attention to what your body is doing, starting from your toes and feet, and moving up slowly to your lower and upper legs, then to your hip/thigh area. You should feel a buzzing, vibrating, relaxing feeling in all those contemplated parts of your body; imagine that relaxing vibration as water coming up to your hips, and now rising higher, relaxing your upper body. Contemplate your back, belly, chest, hands, and arms now vibrating with that relaxing ‘water’ all over them. Feel it reach your shoulders, neck, and head, relaxing you all over your face. Breathe in that ‘water’ as if you were a fish, and feel the relaxing vibrations all inside your body as well as outside.

Now that you’re relaxed all over, and still breathing deeply and slowly, in and out, count from ten to one, then zero, slowly with each breath; as, inhaling and exhaling, you reach each number in the countdown, feel your body get more and more relaxed. When you’ve reached zero, feel a maximum of peace, almost as if you’re about to fall sleep.

Now imagine each and every person who ever hurt you, one by one (briefly, of course, so it doesn’t trigger you out of your relaxation). As soon as you see their faces, imagine yourself as Father Merrin, saying “I cast you out, unclean spirit!…Be gone!” (Only, in this case, the exorcism is easy and effective, unlike in the movie.) Then, visualize each person being whisked up into the sky, far, far away from you, where you’ll never see or hear them again. Chant Merrin’s words in your mind over and over again, for each person who has emotionally abused you.

Once you’ve done all of them, imagine as vividly as you can what their opposites would be like: loving parents and siblings, true, loyal friends at school and in your childhood neighbourhood, good coworkers, good boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses, and good friends on the internet. These posts I wrote have more detailed meditations on good parents. Do all these meditations/self-hypnoses as often as possible, over and over again, for the best possible effect. Focus not so much on physical details in your visualizations as on the good feeling of removing the bad people and enjoying the love of the good people. I like to imagine the good people chanting my name and cheering me on, to encourage me, the chanting getting faster and faster, and louder and louder, till it reaches a climax of joy.

Other forms of therapy you can try to help you include writing about how those bad people hurt you and gave you that inner critic (I’ve done that in many blog posts, and I can tell you, it helps). As I said at the beginning of this post, the inner critic is not you; you are not the shit they shoved in your mouth. If their pain was put into you, it can be removed from you. Using my meditations (and others you can find on YouTube), writing therapy, and the many other suggestions given by many others online, you can exorcise the inner critic demon, little by little over time, until it’s finally gone, and you are free to be who you really are, a good, loving, compassionate person.

As that good person, the real you, you can now contemplate your connection with all that is around you, all that the inner critic made you feel isolated from. Continuing in your meditation, imagine that relaxing ‘water’ no longer as merely around you and inside you, but imagine you are a part of that water, and that everything is that water, an infinite ocean in which you feel perfect peace and love. Sustain this feeling of peace–meditating on the gentle flow of waves going through you and around you, that peaceful vibration uniting you with everything–for as long as you can, staying present-minded, with your focus on the NOW. Again, do this meditation as often as you can fit it into your daily routine, to get the best effects. In time, you’ll find that inner critic demon not only exorcised, but also transformed into an angel, an inner friend.