Self-criticism is a strategy that your brain uses to reach goals, protect you from harm, to fit in with social groups, strengthen your relationships, and more. It is a way of thinking and relating to yourself that often starts from a place of taking care of you, even if it doesn’t feel that way now. I think of self-criticism like a tool that you have available to you – it can often get the job done, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only or even the most effective tool for the problem.
You might be thinking: ‘If it hurts us, why do we do it?’. I believe the short answer to that is ‘because it works’ (or at least we think it will), and/or ‘because that’s the only strategy you know’ (maybe that is what you were shown or what you learned). Human brains have a natural tendency towards criticism. Our ability to think critically about ourselves and others, and our ability to monitor our environment and relationships for perceived danger has been essential for us to create the complex societies, communities, social systems, and structures we have today. Self-criticism can, at times, be a very useful attribute within our minds to promote self-reflection, and avoid negative consequences from problems. It plays an important role in being aware of how we impact others around us and can help up to maintain relationships. Self-criticism, like most things, is most effective when it is used appropriately in balance with other ways of thinking and relating to ourselves such as self-compassion. What happens for some people is that they don’t know how to create a balance between self-criticism and self-compassion, or they begin to overuse self-criticism as a pathway towards their goals or as a problem-solver. Unfortunately, self-criticism can often be a ‘short-term gain, long-term pain’ type of strategy.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) works by exploring the underlying need that your self-criticism is acting on or is trying to communicate to you, and makes this the focus rather than the criticism. It can help by shifting your focus and mindset from what you fear and what you want to avoid from happening, to what you do need and what you do want. Compassion focused therapy also works by offering you an alternative strategy to self-criticism that is motivated by the same unmet needs and that has the same overall purpose of keeping you safe – same goal, different strategy. Self-compassion teaches you to be attuned to your suffering, and to develop a sense of warmth and creative support in addressing the suffering you are experiencing. I see self-compassion as a strategy to constructively identify where you are, where you want to go, what is getting in your way, and making a plan of how to overcome barriers in your way. Self-criticism in comparison can often be experienced as highlighting the difference between where you are now and where you’d like to be, without engaging in supportive problem solving. Self-criticism is truly excellent at identifying problems, but it lacks the creativity and care required to help you overcome the actual barriers blocking your path.
Self-compassion can also be seen as the difference between telling someone to ‘do better’ and defining better, and then working on the skills needed to meet your definition of ‘doing better’. Overall, compassion focused therapy works by teaching you self-compassionate skills that you may feel blocked from exploring, or that you may never have been taught before.
Some of the self-compassionate skills and components of compassion focused therapy are:
- Identifying unmet needs that are driving you to use self-criticism
- Exploring what your beliefs about self-compassion are and what gets in the way of using it for yourself
- Exploring early experiences that have shaped your use of or beliefs about self-criticism and self-compassion
- Teaching you self-compassionate skills to build your ability to attend to your needs with warmth, kindness, and support.
- Identifying your strengths, abilities, and self-knowledge that can be helpful in making progress, overcoming challenges, and attuning to your values.
- Teaching skills related to goal setting, identifying and overcoming barriers, putting appropriate supports into place, and experimenting with different ways of motivating and encouraging yourself.
- Developing different methods of thinking and perspective taking, challenging cognitive biases towards self-criticism, and developing new habits of thinking.
- Practicing relating to yourself with self-compassionate skills learned and using these skills to progress on your goals and meet your needs
If you’re looking to shift away from self-criticism as your primary way of motivating or relating to yourself, feel free to reach out to me to book a free consultation.
Written by: Katarina Guillen-Spencer, MA RP
Would you like to read more about Compassion Focused Therapy? Here are some sources that you may find useful:
- Search: Gilbert, P. (2009). Introducing compassion-focused therapy. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 15(3), 199–208. doi:10.1192/apt.bp.107.005264 , Or you can find this article at this link: Click here
- Resources at the Compassionate Mind Foundation: Search: The compassionate mind foundation, resources, videos, or use this link: Click here
