The Weekly Reframe: A gift For Your Growth
Supporting you to free your mind so you can live from your heart!
“Your inner critic often appears as your own voice, making it seem as if you are the one who has these notions about what is right, what is necessary, or what things mean. But make no mistake about it: the voice you hear is not yours; it belongs to someone who lives inside you, someone you’ve brought along with you on your life’s journey.”
– Beverly Engel
For a couple of decades, I lived with a tyrant.
A quiet, relentless tyrant who woke up before I did, already waiting for me. The moment my eyes opened, it would start in on me. A wave of unease. A knot in my stomach. A fog of dread I couldn’t name or explain.
At the time, I didn’t realize it was my inner critic.
I just thought something was wrong with me.
This voice felt so familiar, so constant, so woven into the fabric of my identity, that it didn’t occur to me to question it. It didn’t feel like a tyrant. It felt like me.
And because I believed it was me, I gave it full authority.
It dictated my moods.
It shaped my decisions.
It drained my joy.
And I never even noticed the subtle takeover happening inside my own mind.
It took slowing down and giving myself the space to actually notice my internal world. It took working with my coach and bringing these thoughts into conscious awareness. Only then could I see what had been running the show:
A whole dumpster fire of unquestioned beliefs, distortions, fears and inherited voices masquerading as truth.
Well, the actual truth is that the inner critic, while it may seem to be a character flaw, is not. It’s a brain function.
Your brain has a built-in negativity bias. An evolutionary holdover that scans for threats more readily than it scans for opportunities. And because the brain wants efficiency, it bundles the most repeated thoughts into subconscious programs, so it can run them automatically, with zero effort.
That’s why the critic often feels like your default setting.
It’s not that you’re negative, it’s that your brain is trying to protect you using outdated instructions.
It reminds me of the parable of the fish who doesn’t realize she’s swimming in water. Water is all she’s ever known. It feels normal, invisible, inevitable, until one day she leaps above the surface and discovers that an entirely different world exists. A world where she can see the water rather than live inside it obliviously.
That’s exactly what it felt like for me.
I finally jumped above the water. I saw that nothing was wrong. I had just been identifying with a voice that was never truly mine.
And slowly, I learned a new skill:
I learned the ability to become a witness to my thoughts rather than a prisoner of them.
When you can witness the thought instead of merge with it, you create a tiny opening - an inner spaciousness - where choice lives.
You can then ask the question: Is this voice actually telling the truth?
Because the witness, the one who observes, is the one who is actually you. You can't force the inner critic to disappear, but you can separate it from your identity. And once you learn to do that over and over again, your inner critic slowly loses its power over you. You can get in the driver seat and strap your critic in nice and safe in the passenger seat where it's still there, it's just not navigating anymore.
A Gift for Your Journey
Because the inner critic shows up for all of us in different ways, I created a practical guide to help you understand and work with that voice:
“How To Work With Your Inner Critic - A Practical Guide.”
I’m attaching it here for you.
Let it be a companion to this week’s reflection. It will support you to have a clearer understanding of what your brain is doing.
Step By Step,