Your inner critic is not your conscience - Episode 2

This voice that is never satisfied

Remember the email you read over and over again…

The one you edited, then re-edited, then re-edited again… and had such trouble sending…

With that question echoing in your head: “Is this clear enough?” — and which had become, without your noticing: “Am I competent enough?”

And then at last… after agonising over it for an endless stretch of time, you sent it.

A few hours later, the reply arrived…

You opened the message… with a slight apprehension…

“Thank you. It's very clear. Excellent work.”

There. This time, you got your answer. And somewhere inside, a part of you exhaled and breathed more easily: the email was clear, the recipient is satisfied. You did your job, and objectively, the matter should be settled.

But still… something in you is already answering: “Well… it wasn't that complicated.” Or: “They're kind and not very demanding.” Or again: “Just as well I read it over ten times.”

You have just received exactly the proof you were looking for.

The proof that you are worthy, and that you can trust yourself.

But in a few seconds… you, or that part of you, have just cancelled it.

And that is the fascinating part.

Because it raises a question far deeper than that of self-criticism:

What happens when a success never counts as much as a mistake?

And above all:

How do you satisfy a voice that always has a reason not to be?

The inner critic's rigged accounting

When we succeed at a project and our manager congratulates us, our first thought should be: “I did good work, I deserve this reward.”

But often it's another version of that first thought that surfaces: “It's a stroke of luck, and they're really not very demanding.”

It's a subtle, insidious phenomenon, because although the success is real, it isn't fully registered as information about oneself.

It's attributed to circumstances, to luck, to the ease of the task, to overwork, or to the leniency of others.

In 2017, Shelby Levine, Kaitlyn Werner, Jonathan Capaldi and Marina Milyavskaya studied precisely how different forms of perfectionism shape the way successes and failures are interpreted.

Across two studies, of 185 and 240 participants respectively, those higher in self-critical perfectionism were more likely to attribute the attainment of their goals to external factors.

In other words, even when they succeeded… their success belonged to them less.

And this creates a strange asymmetry.

When we succeed, it's because “the circumstances were favourable,”, and when we fail, it's because “we weren't good enough.”

The inner books begin to look strange.

It's as if the inner critic were an accountant, with two columns in front of them.

In the first, the proofs of competence — but with annotations.

• A project completed →        “Luck.”

• A satisfied client             →        “Easy. ”

• A degree earned   →        “Anyone would have managed, working that hard.”

• A promotion granted       →        “They're being lenient.”

• A compliment received   →        “They don't really know me.”

And in the second column, the proofs of not being good enough — no annotation, this time.

• For every mistake.

• For every hesitation.

• For every question you can't answer.

• For every colleague better than you at something.

• For every criticism.

Even though there is, of course, no real accountant in our brain stamping information as positive or negative, research on success attributions clearly shows that some people process positive and negative outcomes asymmetrically.

And this asymmetry becomes especially visible in what is now more often called the “impostor phenomenon” than the “impostor syndrome”, since it is not an established psychiatric diagnosis.

A meta-analysis published in 2025 by Andrew Hill and John Gotwals brought together 25 studies, 12,141 participants and 42 effect sizes.

The impostor phenomenon was relatively weakly associated with simply having high standards; by contrast, its relationship with worry about mistakes, the sense of never being good enough, fear of evaluation and self-criticism was far stronger.

In other words, it isn't simply wanting to do well that brings one closer to the impostor phenomenon.

It's much more about what happens inside when “good” never seems good enough.

Because the problem isn't the quantity of proof, but the one who keeps the books

The human mind has a very common reflex: to credit itself with its successes and blame its failures on the outside. It's called the “self-serving bias” — an ordinary way of protecting oneself.

An experimental study by Fabio Ibrahim, Dana Göddertz and Philipp Yorck Herzberg (Current Psychology, 2023), with 170 participants given a fake intelligence test, describes precisely the opposite in people with strong impostor tendencies: success attributed to external, unstable causes, luck, ease, and failure to internal, stable ones: the self.

The authors call this a non-self-serving attributional bias — in other words, the only attribution mechanism in which a person refuses to protect themselves.

It's almost the perfect machine for sustaining a negative conclusion about oneself…

…because “if I succeed, it proves nothing”…

…but “if I fail, it reveals something”.

The game is impossible to win.

The inner critic and the historian for the prosecution

The inner critic doesn't stay in “today”, it is constantly opening the archives.

• “Again.”

• “You already did this last year.”

• “Remember that time when…”

• “It's always the same with you.”

And suddenly, a one-off fault is reinforced from the past.

A mistake is no longer just a mistake; it becomes the latest episode in a story.

In 2014, Nadja Doerig and colleagues used brain imaging to observe what happens when people are exposed to “personalised self-critical material”.

The study was small, only 20 participants, and it would be absurd to conclude that it had discovered “the brain of the inner critic”.

But the authors observed, among other things, the engagement of regions involved in self-referential processing and autobiographical memory when participants were faced with self-directed critical content.

This result doesn't prove that the critic “deliberately rummages through memories”, but it is consistent with something we all know: a personal criticism rarely has only a present.

It can instantly summon everything that seems to prove it right.

Because the inner critic is not only a prosecutor (see: Your inner critic is not your conscience - Episode 1 - When correcting yourself becomes condemning yourself - The inner courtroom), it is also a historian for the prosecution.

But a strange historian, one who doesn't necessarily seek to reconstruct your past honestly, but who looks above all for what fits the verdict.

When you think: “I'm incapable of speaking in public”, how often will your memory spontaneously offer you the presentation where you were excellent, the meeting that went well, the time someone congratulated you?

And how often will that other moment surface at once, your voice trembling, the blank in your memory, the presentation where you fell apart?

This whole phenomenon, the “historian for the prosecution”, is a metaphor I'm proposing, not a scientific mechanism that has been given this name.

But we do know that autobiographical memory and self-representation are intimately linked, and that self-critical processing engages, in particular, processes tied to self-reference and personal memories.

The consequence matters, because each new incident can seem to confirm the entire story that came before.

“I made a mistake” becomes “I've made a mistake again”

Then “I always do this”, and finally “That just proves I'm like that.”

The critic no longer has merely an argument.

It now has a case file.

A finish line that keeps receding

Imagine a race where, each time you try to cross the finish line, someone moves it a few metres further on.

You keep running but you never arrive.

And that is exactly the strategy the critic can deploy in order never to lose.

When you reach precisely what it asks for, it changes the rule.

• “When I've lost five kilos, I'll be satisfied. ” → Five kilos later: “Two still to go.”

• “When I get this promotion, I'll finally know I'm competent.” → Promotion obtained: “Now I have to prove I deserve the job.”

• “When this article is finished, I'll finally be able to breathe.” → Article finished: “It could have been much better. ”

The finish line recedes every time.

This mechanism holds an important place in the model of “clinical perfectionism” put forward in 2002 by Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper and Christopher Fairburn.

For them, the problem isn't simply having high standards.

It arises when personal evaluation becomes excessively dependent on the pursuit and attainment of demanding standards.

And their model proposes something remarkable: when a standard is reached, it can be re-appraised as having been too low, or not demanding enough.

So success is no longer necessarily: “I succeeded”, but can become: “It probably wasn't hard enough”, and a new standard appears.

A few years later, a small experimental study of 53 students tested this idea directly.

After receiving feedback that they had succeeded at a first task, participants could choose the same goal or a harder one for the next.

The higher their self-oriented perfectionism, the more they tended to choose the higher standard.

The study is too small to turn this into a general law, and the authors themselves point out several possible explanations.

But it offers an interesting piece of experimental support:

…in some people, reaching the standard can be precisely what leads them to raise it.

Telling demandingness and self-criticism apart

Without this essential distinction, one could easily conclude that to stop suffering, one would have to stop being demanding.

But that's not what the research shows.

Theodore Powers, Richard Koestner, David Zuroff, Marina Milyavskaya and Amy Gorin have studied, across five different studies, the relationship between self-criticism, self-oriented perfectionism and progress towards goals.

They find a relatively consistent negative association between self-criticism and goal progress.

But when self-criticism is statistically controlled, certain dimensions of self-oriented perfectionism can be positively associated with progress.

So wanting to do very well isn't necessarily the problem; treating yourself as useless every time the goal isn't reached, that is one.

So why does our mind keep using such a painful mechanism?

And what can a voice that never validates be for?

This is where we enter a different hypothesis: what if the critic isn't always trying to make you improve?

A study by Ben Shahar, Guy Doron and Ohad Szepsenwol proposed conceptualising self-criticism, in the context of social anxiety, as a “safety strategy”.

The idea was this: identifying one's own flaws and monitoring them might help prevent their exposure to others, and so reduce the risk of shame.

The cross-sectional study, of 219 adults, showed associations consistent with this model, but did not prove that self-criticism is universally a protective strategy, nor did it establish causality.

But this hypothesis opens up a fascinating possibility:

What if the inner critic weren't really saying: “I want you to be better”,

but rather:

“I want to spot what could shame you before anyone else sees it.”

Then its behaviour suddenly becomes far more understandable.

Paying for shame in advance

From here on, I'm offering an extrapolation, not an established scientific concept, but a way of reading the mechanism.

Suppose that one day, very early, you learned a simple rule.

→ Being caught out hurts.

A humiliation, a mockery, one look too many. It doesn't matter. The lesson was recorded.

→ Better not to be caught in the act of failing.

So a discreet, almost elegant strategy fell into place.

→ Spot the fault before anyone else spots it.

And better still.

→ Condemn yourself before anyone else can.

Now you know concretely what that looks like:

• “My work probably isn't good enough.”

• “Anyway, I'm not really up to it.”

• “ I'm bound to make a fool of myself.”

And if someone criticises afterwards, a part of you can answer: “I knew it.”

Of course, the pain of the criticism will still be there, but it's no longer entirely unpredictable.

It's as if you had paid for the shame in advance — a kind of emotional prepayment.

This is obviously not how every inner critic works, but in some people one can put forward the hypothesis that judging oneself before others gives an illusion of control: “if I find my flaws before they do, they'll be able to surprise me less.”

So the critic keeps watch. Again. And again.

Not necessarily because it hates you.

But because it holds that “to stop watching would be more dangerous still.”

A quality check inspector who no longer passes anything

Remember, in our series on hypervigilance (Why am I always on my guard? — Episodes 1, 2 and 3), we spoke of a system whose alert threshold could become so sensitive that it ended up detecting danger almost everywhere.

The parallel stops there, and I'm not claiming that self-criticism is neurologically a form of hypervigilance, but the mechanical analogy is interesting.

Imagine a quality inspector: at first, their work is precious, they spot an error, correct it, then pass the product.

Now imagine that same inspector, but whose tolerance threshold has become so strict that no product can ever earn their approval.

They spot one detail, then another, and another, and when they find nothing… they simply conclude they probably haven't looked hard enough yet.

The problem is no longer their demandingness, but that they no longer have any condition allowing them to say: “That's fine, the work is done, I can send it.”

Which brings us back to the email: you sent it, the reply was positive, all went well, but your critic found an explanation: “It was easy to write.”

And then, when you succeeded at something else, it was: “You got lucky.”

And then one day you failed, because that happens sometimes, whatever the reason.

And immediately: “See, it was predictable.”

This time, no external explanation was needed; the proof went straight into the file.

And perhaps the inner critic's problem lies exactly here: it isn't only that it demands a great deal of proof, it's that it decides which proofs have the right to count.

So ask yourself a simple question.

Think of something you do well — really well — something others recognise you as good at.

Now watch the first sentence that comes after:

“Yes, but…”

Listen to what follows.

That is sometimes where the system reveals itself.

Because as long as successes can be cancelled and mistakes can become proof, no amount of success will ever definitively close the case.

So perhaps it's no longer a question of proof, but of the rules that decide:

• what counts,

• what doesn't count,

• what is enough,

• and above all, when it is finally possible to stop.

So the question that remains is: “Can we become better without mistreating ourselves?”

Because it won't be about making demandingness disappear, nor pretending that everything we do is wonderful, nor replacing every criticism with a positive phrase.

The question is much subtler:

“Can we keep our capacity to see what must change…

…without continuing to condemn ourselves to get there?”