Far too many people refuse to accept that their childhood experiences follow them into adulthood. Unaddressed childhood trauma bleeds out from your memories and subconscious. It creates habits that other people don’t have, shaping your perception of yourself and the world.
Though unwinding the trauma requires help from a therapist, there are habits and challenges you can address on your own. The path of healing is a long journey, so every step you take counts. Here’s how to get started:
1. Separate the accuracy of the criticism from how it was delivered.
In some cases, you may have been criticized for fair reasons. However, the way in which it was delivered may have been unkind and severe. For example, let’s say Crystal keeps making the same mistake, over and over.
If her mom were a reasonable, healthy person, she might have pointed out, “Hey, you’ve made that mistake multiple times. What can we do to fix it?”
But she wasn’t. Instead, Crystal’s mother says things like, “You screwed it up again. What’s wrong with you? You’re worthless.” Clearly, Crystal’s mom is abusive here. She’s adding a whole lot to a mundane mistake, even if the underlying criticism and guidance may have been relevant.
This also points to an important part of healing. It’s never a good idea to cast everything in a wrong light to discard it. Refusing reality is a subtle form of avoidance that will actually make your healing path more difficult. Crystal is going to make mistakes. She’s human. That’s normal. What isn’t normal or acceptable was her mother’s response to it.
2. Identify the main accusation.
As the therapists at Thriveworks inform us, self-critical people often have a default accusation that speaks loudest to them. It may be something like, “I’m difficult,” or “I’m too emotional,” or “I’m lazy.” It tends to be the thing they were most frequently told as a child, and often becomes an automatic and unconscious inner critic as an adult.
Whatever that unkind voice in your head tends to focus on is what you want to be able to articulate in your own words. The goal is to turn something that is intangible into something that’s easier to understand.
Once you understand it, you can more easily identify when you’re falling into those negative thought patterns that feed into it. If you know that you chastise yourself for laziness even while working hard, you will be prepared to interrupt that voice when you decide to take a break. After all, you can’t just work all the time, otherwise you will break down.
3. Replace the harsh self-talk with precise criticism.
This is a hard balance to strike, but it points back to accepting what is. A person who makes a mistake doesn’t help themselves by refusing to acknowledge the mistake. Instead, we want to focus on defining the mistake and why it happened to turn it into something actionable.
Instead of thinking something like, “I’m lazy for not cleaning the house.” You would instead want to focus on, “I was too exhausted to clean because I just finished working 12 hours.” It acknowledges reality, gives you something tangible to address, and explains the reason. It’s also not hypercritical when phrased this way.
4. Learn to get comfortable letting people down.
Criticism is often used as a tool of manipulation to enforce compliance. The child who is subject to that kind of behavior may become a people-pleaser as a result. And at some point, when you start addressing that behavior to change your habits, you’re going to find that other people do not respond well.
Why? Because people-pleasers tend to attract people who don’t respect boundaries. And when you start enforcing boundaries or correcting unhealthy behaviors that were benefiting them, they tend to get mad. Alternatively, you may find that they stop being your friend or drift away. That’s okay. That’s just part of the process.
What you’re actually doing is making space for people who will value you, regardless of your boundaries.
5. Stop treating authority as automatically correct.
A big part of receiving criticism is the power behind the person giving it. If someone in a position of authority criticizes you, you may feel their criticism is valid because of their authority. However, people in authority are still just people. Some of them are unkind, selfish, or just don’t know what they’re talking about.
At some point, it’s helpful to look at someone’s negative behavior and ask yourself, “Why would they act that way? What’s wrong with them?” Then consider whether or not that person is even worth listening to. There are plenty of incompetent people with authority. And any person in a position of authority who leads with cruelty isn’t someone worth listening to in the first place.
6. Build your evidence to counter the narratives.
In this circumstance, positive thinking isn’t a solution because it requires you to ignore a problem. That leans more into the toxic positivity kind of space. Instead, you want to keep a mental note of realistic proof that counters the narratives you’ve internalized. Your brain will change when you can look at tangible proof that you’re making better decisions.
For example, going back to the lazy narrative. You may be berating yourself because your house is a mess. But when you look at the evidence, you can see that you’ve just finished a 12-hour shift, so of course you haven’t done the cleaning. No one wants to do anything after a 12-hour shift. They just want to sit back, relax, and do nothing for a while to recharge for the next shift. That is normal and perfectly human. Instead, maybe you schedule some cleaning on a day off, which serves as another piece of evidence for you.
7. Lean into the discomfort you experience.
Be prepared to experience discomfort as you start to unwind these thoughts and implement better habits. It’s going to feel uncomfortable because not only is it new, but you’re pushing back against the negative conditioning you’ve received. Don’t mistake the bad feelings as you being on the wrong path and quit.
Instead, lean more into it. Let yourself feel those negative emotions and accept them as just part of the path of growth. After all, if growth were easy and painless, then everyone would do it. And they don’t. It takes focus and tenacity to get through those lows to something better.
8. Take risks and lean into your criticism.
Doubt kills a lot of dreams before they can ever get off the ground. You want to avoid falling into the trap of automatically disqualifying yourself from activities you want to do before you even try. Just because you believe you are a certain thing doesn’t make it the truth. You have to push through the distorted reality that was created by someone who was being unkind to you.
Their words don’t deserve that kind of power.
Instead, leverage the spite to help propel you to action. Lazy? Get out and exercise. Stupid? Do some intelligent things or start reading more. Incompetent? Do more things that will help you build victories. These kinds of activities will help you build that evidence you need to push back against the narratives you grew up with.
Final thoughts…
Just because someone who was important to you said something doesn’t make it true. Kind people don’t go out of their way to tear others down to make a point. If they were hypercritical of you, you have to stop and wonder why they would do that to a child? What child deserves to be spoken to that way? None. None do – and neither did you.
You can change those thoughts and habits, but it’s going to be a challenge. Thankfully, it’s a challenge with goals that you can accomplish with focused effort.
