How you talk to yourself matters enormously. Not as a vague wellness concept, but in a concrete, neurological sense. The stories you repeat to yourself shape the neural pathways your brain defaults to. The good news is those pathways can be rewired. The less good news is it takes deliberate practice and it feels uncomfortable at first.
What the inner critic actually is
The inner critic is the internal voice that narrates your inadequacies, anticipates your failures, and reminds you of your worst moments at exactly the wrong time. Most people have one. For people in concussion recovery, it tends to run particularly loud, because there is so much material to work with: things you can no longer do, ways you have let people down, the gap between who you were and who you feel like now.
The inner critic is not a character flaw. It is usually a protection mechanism that developed early, often in childhood, to help you anticipate criticism before it arrived. The problem is that it keeps running the same program long after the original context has changed, and it does not discriminate between useful self-correction and simply being cruel to yourself.
You cannot silence it by arguing with it. But you can build another voice that is stronger.
The DBT exercise: meeting both voices
This is a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy exercise I found genuinely useful. It involves getting specific about both voices, because vague awareness of your inner critic is not the same as actually knowing what it says and what it wants.
Part one: meet your inner critic
Write down your answers to these questions. Do not edit yourself while you are writing.
- What does your inner critic say to you when you are struggling?
- What does it feel like in your body when your inner critic shows up?
- If you could give your inner critic a form, what would it look like? What age is it? What does it wear?
- What does your inner critic actually want for you? (It usually wants something that was once protective, even if it is going about it badly.)
Part two: meet your compassionate self
- What does your compassionate self say to you when you are struggling?
- What does it feel like in your body when your compassionate self shows up?
- If you could give your compassionate self a form, what would it look like?
- What does your compassionate self want for you?
The goal is to make the compassionate self as real and specific as the critic. For many people the inner critic is vivid and detailed while the compassionate self is vague or unfamiliar. That imbalance is worth noticing.
Affirmations: the rewiring tool
You may have heard of neuroplasticity: the brain's ability to modify, change, and adapt throughout your life, even after trauma. We have somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 thoughts per day, and the ones we repeat most frequently are the ones that become grooved pathways. Negative self-talk, repeated often enough, becomes default. So does its antidote.
Affirmations are the deliberate practice of replacing unhelpful thoughts with ones that are more accurate and more useful. They are not about pretending things are fine when they are not. They are about interrupting the automatic loop and offering the brain a different pathway to travel.
How to build your own
Take a thought that is not helping you and find its true antidote. The antidote does not have to be the polar opposite; it just has to be more accurate and more kind.
- "I am broken and defective" becomes "I am healing, and healing is not linear"
- "I am unloveable" becomes "I am worthy of love"
- "I am a burden" becomes "I am allowed to need support"
- "I am not as good as I used to be" becomes "I am learning who I am now"
Ways to use affirmations
- Say them out loud. Reading silently is weaker than speaking. Something about using your voice makes it more real.
- Say them in the mirror. This is uncomfortable, genuinely uncomfortable for most people at first, and that discomfort is useful information about how little you believe the thing you are saying. Persist anyway. It changes.
- Use oracle cards. Pulling a card each morning with a mantra for the day is a low-effort way to introduce an affirmation practice into an existing routine.
- Louise Hay's Heal Your Body is worth looking at if physical pain is part of your picture. It maps specific affirmations to specific physical symptoms, with the premise that pain in the body often has an emotional counterpart.
- Try it for a week before you decide if it works. The first few days feel strange. The strangeness is part of the process.
I have been guilty of a really harsh internal monologue for most of my life. The inner critic exercise made me realise how specific and persistent mine was. It said things I would never say to another person. It had been saying them for decades.
Some of the unhelpful thoughts I carried through my recovery:
- I am not as good as I used to be
- I am broken and defective
- No one will ever love me, I am unloveable (I actually believed this from a very early age)
- I am just a burden on everyone I love
The compassionate self exercise helped me create a new voice. My compassionate self I imagine as an older version of me: kind, wise, not at all interested in my inadequacies. She shows up now when I am struggling and says different things. I did not conjure her from nowhere. I built her deliberately, through this exercise, over time.
On affirmations: my old chiropractor in Wellington once told me to look at myself in the mirror and say "I love you because you are loveable." I cannot express how uncomfortable that made me. I would cringe, breathe shallowly, feel something close to disgust. That reaction was useful information. It told me exactly how much work there was to do.
I persisted. It changed. I can now look at myself in the mirror and mean it, mostly. That shift, from the person who flinched to the person who can say it and feel something other than revulsion, is real. It took time and it was worth it.