Your inner critic is not your conscience - Episode 3

Can we become better without mistreating ourselves?

You remember the email we have been following since the start of this series, the one you wrote, read over, corrected, read again, and whose attachment, recipient, spelling and wording you checked a hundred times…

The one where everything was fine, and yet, just as you were about to click “Send”, something stopped you again.

A thought that had every appearance of good sense: “If I stop checking now, I’m bound to let something slip through.”

But hidden behind it, another, a deeper reason: “If I stop being so demanding of myself… I’ll let myself go.”

And this may be the hardest belief to question, because after all… the inner critic isn’t always wrong.

It has sometimes pushed you to work harder, to redo a file, to prepare a presentation better, to think before answering, to start over until the result was better.

And so the conclusion that took hold seemed logical: “It’s painful… but I need it.”, or: “Without it, I’d be less effective.”, or again: “It’s my harshness that drives me forward.”, “Without that whip, I’d do nothing at all.”

And this is no doubt one of the reasons the inner critic holds on so well.

Because it makes us believe it is the engine, and that in letting it go we would lose our momentum, our motivation.

The question, of course, is not whether demandingness is useful. It is.

So, do we really need to mistreat ourselves in order to become better?

In 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen ran four experiments with people who had just failed, made a mistake, or thought back to a personal shortcoming.

Some of them were invited to respond to themselves with a little kindness rather than harshness.

One might have expected them to settle for their failure, reassured on the cheap. The opposite happened.

Those who had answered themselves with kindness turned out, afterwards, to be more motivated to repair, to learn, to change.

No less demanding, but more available to progress.

Self-compassion does not make us complacent.

It frees the energy that shame was holding hostage.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that treating yourself gently always makes you perform better, nor that harshness never achieves anything.

The real choice has never been between criticising yourself and letting yourself go.

It has always been between condemning yourself…

…and seeing yourself with discernment.

The contract we never signed

Many of us operate as though an invisible contract existed.

A kind of inner agreement no one would ever have spelled out, but which would say:

• “I’ll let you speak harshly to me… on condition that you keep me from failing.”

• “You can remind me of all my mistakes… if it stops me repeating them.”

• “You can tell me I’m not good enough… if it drives me to become better.”

And as long as the results keep coming, the contract seems to work…

And the inner critic can take the credit.

After nailing a presentation following three long, exhausting nights of preparation, or after checking the file fifteen times and finding not a single error left… its voice pipes up at once:

“You see? That’s thanks to me. Just as well I kept the pressure on, because without me you’d have forgotten something…”

The trouble is that it then becomes almost impossible to know whether you succeeded… thanks to the inner violence… or in spite of it.

Because success retrospectively validates the whole method.

Even what it cost.

From judgement to discernment

This is probably where the word “compassion” has caused the most misunderstanding, because it has easily been associated with being nice to yourself, making excuses, minimising your mistakes, reassuring yourself artificially, or repeating in front of a mirror that everything is wonderful.

That is not what we are talking about.

Imagine for a moment that you really did hurt someone.

You can react in several ways:

• Complacently: “It’s not a big deal. They’re too sensitive.”

• Critically: “I really am a horrible person.”

• But there is a third possibility: “What I did was hurtful. I need to understand what happened, apologise if I can, and do differently next time.”

Look closely.

This third response is not more lenient; it is probably even more demanding, because it allows neither fleeing responsibility… nor taking refuge in self-hatred.

And above all, it contains something the inner prosecutor rarely has: a direction.

So one question remains: “What do we put in its place?”

Not silence, not complacency, not positive affirmations, but something far more precise: discernment.

• Where judgment says: “You’re incapable,” discernment says: “There, your preparation was insufficient.”

• Where judgment says: “You always ruin everything,” discernment says: “There, you reacted too quickly.”

Judgment looks for someone to blame, and to do so it closes off every other possibility.

Discernment looks for information and leaves a door open.

And both can be extremely demanding.

The difference is that one attacks the person…

…while the other works on the problem.

So how do we handle our critical thinking?

Before exploring the various ways of better handling our critical voice, let us pause for a moment on a curious paradox: the critic can also come into therapy with you, and use it to grow stronger.

Sometimes a person may begin therapy to learn to judge themselves less… and turn the therapy itself into a new ground for judgement.

• “I’m not doing the exercise properly.”

• “I should be better already.”

• “I understand it all intellectually, but I can’t manage it.”

• “Even my therapy, I’m managing to fail.”

A meta-analysis by Christina Löw, Henning Schauenburg and Ulrike Dinger brought together 49 longitudinal studies, 56 independent effect sizes and 3,277 patients.

Stronger self-criticism before therapy began was associated with overall less favourable therapeutic outcomes.

This is not a sentence, nor is it a huge effect, but it reminds us of something fundamental: the inner critic can turn almost anything to account in order to carry on its work.

Even an attempt meant to break free of it.

And the most hostile forms, those that come close to rejection or self-hatred, also appear among the hardest to change in the available literature; so the critic does not always accept its new role on the first attempt.

But often, understanding the mechanism is already enough to create a first distance.

And here, several very different psychotherapeutic traditions seem to converge, each with its own vocabulary, on a single idea.

The idea that it is not always necessary to suppress critical thinking, but that it is possible to change the relationship we have with it.

→ Cognitive therapy, for instance, questions the belief: “What real evidence do I have that this mistake means I am incapable?”

→ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, works more on fusion with thought. Instead of: “I am incapable,” it invites you to observe: “I notice that my mind is producing the thought that I am incapable.”

And however tiny this may seem, psychologically the distance is considerable.

Indeed, a meta-analysis published in 2024 by Jenna Macri and Ronald Rogge, gathering 67 studies and 9,123 participants, concludes that ACT interventions help people take more distance from their thoughts, treat them less as absolute truths, and avoid difficult emotions less. And this greater psychological flexibility seems to go hand in hand with a decrease in psychological distress.

→ Other approaches go further still, literally giving the critic a place. In some forms of emotion-focused therapy, two-chair work lets the critical part and the part that receives its attacks speak to each other.

A small pilot study led by Ben Shahar and colleagues, with nine highly self-critical people, observed, after this intervention, a decrease in self-criticism and an increase in self-compassion and in the capacity to reassure oneself. And even though the sample is obviously far too small to draw a general conclusion, the result is interesting.

→ Schema Therapy has something very close in the “Punitive Parent Mode”, the punitive parent, that extremely critical and punishing inner configuration.

In a 2021 study of twenty patients with borderline personality disorder, an empty-chair technique was compared with cognitive challenging.

Both methods reduced the power and credibility of the punitive belief.

Cognitive challenging reduced its credibility more immediately after the session, whereas patients preferred the empty chair, which they found more emotionally engaging.

A qualitative study published in 2025 on sixteen patients who had undergone Schema Therapy likewise reports a subjective decrease in the power and credibility of the punitive mode, notably through empty-chair work and imagery.

But these are retrospective qualitative interviews, not a trial demonstrating the specific effectiveness of a technique.

So why does all this matter? Because it shows that giving a shape, a voice or a place to a critical part is not some oddity peculiar to hypnosis or NLP.

Several therapeutic models already use this separation, not to say: “This part isn’t me,” but rather: “This part exists within me… without being the whole of what I am.”

→ There are many ways, in hypnosis, to work with internal representations, parts, ego states, imagery or symbolic dialogue.

Ego-State Therapy, for example, has a long tradition of hypnotic work with different parts of the psyche.

But when we ask a much more precise question: “Has hypnosis specifically demonstrated its effectiveness on the inner critic?”, the literature becomes far thinner.

There is no solid body of controlled trials directly testing: hypnosis = a decrease in self-criticism.

And even though we do not, today, have controlled clinical trials establishing a specific effectiveness, that does not stop us from examining the logic of the therapeutic work.

Provided we do not confuse clinical coherence with scientific proof.

Drawing up a new contract

In the symbolic work used in Humanistic Hypnosis, there is a way of approaching this part directly.

Not by trying to make it disappear straight away, but by meeting it.

Because we saw in the previous episode that it can sometimes be pursuing a function it believes essential.

So we can give it a form, not necessarily human, and whatever its form, the aim is not to decide in advance what it represents, but to observe what appears, to listen to it, and then to negotiate.

And to draw up a new contract with it, a contract in two parts.

→ Part one: keep the information, remove the verdict

“You may go on pointing out what’s wrong, but you no longer have the right to use what I do to decide who I am.”

You may say: “This presentation isn’t prepared enough,” but no longer: “You’re incapable.”

You may say: “There, you did harm,” but no longer: “You’re a bad person.”

You may flag, warn, question, even be demanding, but the verdict on identity no longer has a place.

The function stays; the condemnation does not.

And there is a more interesting transformation here…

…than making the critic artificially “nice”.

Because it doesn’t need to become nice.

It needs to become useful.

→ Part two: give it back a stopping condition

In the symbolic work, one proposal becomes possible: to create a meeting space, an inner place, a time, an appointment.

Something that means: “I’m not ignoring you. I will come and listen to what you have to say. But you no longer need to speak twenty-four hours a day.”

This may seem extremely simple, but symbolically, something fundamental changes.

A critic that has an appointment no longer needs to become a permanent guard post.

There is now a condition.

A place. A time. A beginning.

And above all… an end.

Be quiet, and thank you

Here is a simple technique, born of my practice.

I call it:

"Be quiet… and thank you."

(Be quiet, or whatever way you'd use to tell someone to hush…)

Its principle is simple:

1 - A first, essential step: catching the voice of the inner critic the moment it appears.

Not afterwards, not when the day is over, but at the precise moment it starts to speak, so familiarly… something like:

"There, failed again."

"Honestly, you could have done better."

"You're really not up to it."

This moment is important, crucial, because you have identified the voice, and so you are no longer completely fused with it.

You can hear it… without being obliged to treat what it says as true straight away.

And that is where the technique really begins.

2 - Second step: when that voice takes the form of judgment, humiliation or verdict, the answer must be firm:

"Be quiet. I won't listen to what you have to say when you say it like this."

"I refuse to listen to you when you speak to me this way."

"We're both in the same boat."

"If you spend your time drilling holes in the hull while I'm trying to move forward, we'll sink together."

"I'm willing to hear what you have to tell me. But only when it's useful and constructive."

"When you help me understand what needs to change instead of explaining what's wrong with me."

And then… you start again.

Because this technique doesn't work like a magic formula.

The voice comes back: "Be quiet. I won't listen to what you have to say when you say it like this…."

It comes back the next day: "Be quiet. I'll listen when what you have to say is constructive."

It comes back again, same answer, again, and again, and again…

It is precisely the repetition that matters.

Because in time, something begins to change in the relationship you have with that voice, and what I have observed over the years, in many people who have used this technique, and in myself as well, is particularly interesting.

The voice does not necessarily disappear, but it changes its tone.

Instead of: "You're useless," it begins to say: "There, perhaps you didn't yet know enough."

Instead of: "You always ruin everything," it becomes: "It didn't work this time. But if you keep learning, you'll probably get there in the end."

→ In place of a verdict… information sometimes appears.

→ In place of condemning… it begins to guide.

And this is where the most important part of the technique comes in.

3 - Third step: when that voice finally comes back with something useful… say to it:

Thank you.

Not ironically, nor to reward it artificially, but because, this time, it has served a function that can really help you.

A heartfelt thank you. A thank you of relief.

"Thank you. That, I can take in."

"Thank you. There, you're giving me something I can work with."

"Thank you. There, you're helping me move forward."

And from that moment, your inner critic simply learns that there is another way to make itself useful.

This is obviously not a technique validated by specific clinical trials.

It is a practice drawn from my therapeutic experience and thousands of hours of observation in session, but it meets an idea we have found throughout this series:

We do not necessarily need to suppress the inner voice; we can learn to change the relationship we have with it.

To refuse the verdict.

To keep the information.

And to stop giving the same weight to every sentence…

…simply because it comes from within.

So now… send it

Let us come back one last time to our email.

You read it over once, perhaps even a second time.

A sentence catches your eye; you look at it.

Is it actually wrong? No.

Is it unclear? No.

Is any information missing? No.

Then the voice arrives, as expected, as usual.

“You could perhaps still…”

But this time… you hear it.

You don’t fight it, you don’t tell it it’s ridiculous.

You don’t repeat to yourself: “I’m wonderful.”

You simply ask a question: “Is there still anything useful in what you’re telling me?”

Silence.

Perhaps there really is a correction left, and so you make it.

But perhaps there is none left, and so something can finally come to an end.

The work has been done, the information has been heard.

The verdict is no longer needed.

Your cursor moves, you click “Send”.

And the email is gone.

What if the problem had never been this voice

For three episodes, we have looked at the inner critic from different angles.

We have found that it could take a mistake and turn it into an identity, refuse certain successes, reopen the archives of the past, keep moving the finish line, and sometimes convince us that its harshness was essential to our progress.

But perhaps the real question was never how to silence it.

Because a life with no mistakes, no doubt, no questioning and no demands does not exist.

And perhaps it would not even be desirable.

Inner freedom begins elsewhere: at the moment we stop confusing what we observe in ourselves with what we are.

A mistake can become information without becoming a condemnation.

A weakness can point to a path without defining a person.

A success can be welcomed without having to prove anything forever.

And an inner voice can be heard without automatically being given the last word.

Perhaps that, in the end, is what growing up is: no longer trying to become someone beyond reproach, but learning to look clearly at what is there, to correct what can be corrected, to accept what cannot… and to carry on regardless.

Because deep down, perhaps we never needed to become our own judge.

We only needed to learn to become our own witness.

Clear-sighted enough to see.

Demanding enough to act.

And human enough not to turn every imperfection into a verdict.