205. Fixing the inner critic

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Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience

The Third Invitation from The Five Invitations

p116 Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means no part left out.

Here he's talking about the problems with "helping," "fixing," and "care-giving" vs "serving." I know this is advice I should be taking to heart -- I'm the ultimate "fixer" -- but I'm having a hard time understanding the other side of this equation. When I have a problem, health or otherwise, I can't think of an instance when I wanted someone to just "serve" and "be" with me, I want a fix. (That wasn't supposed to sound so druggy.)

If you are having trouble sleeping (if this is one of the facets on which your life experience turns) chances are I will not be able to suggest an alternative you haven't tried or at least heard of, but what if I'm wrong about that? What if weeks later you say, "Small doses of melatonin have changed my life" or "Turns out my mattress was too hard (or soft) and my new Sleep Number bed was the answer to all my problems." And then I say, "You didn't know?... I mean, that's great."

And I have this fantasy of pulling up a chair and sitting with Ostaseski as his house slowly burns down. Trying to contain the fire a bit with a hose until the fire brigade shows up is such "fixing" behavior, after all.

Like I said, this is something I do know I need to work on.

Taming the Inner Critic

Here's another thing I probably need to work on, since I'm having a hard time figuring how it applies to me. There's a particular regret I have from when I was helping my father die. A situation I could have handled better -- and could certainly handle better now having had that experience -- but I know I was just doing the best I could at the time, and this regret has given me the understanding that we all need to forgive each other our failings in similar circumstances. So in a way it's one of those regrets I don't totally regret. 

I think what Ostaseski has in mind is a little different, that part of ourselves that prevents us from doing things we might otherwise do? I can think of several instances of this, but these are very logical criticisms based on actual life experience. (Though I concede they would look bad from a therapist's perspective. Which I guess makes that imagined therapist my inner, outer critic?)

Is it my inner critic that constrains my being snarky on the interwebs? Because that inner critic had a wonderful (for him) "I told you so" moment today. A photo of Jane Fonda showed up on my Facebook feed yesterday because a college friend had commented on it. The original message had to do with how great Fonda looked in her 70s. But most of the comments were Hanoi Jane attacks, which my friend was reacting against by noting the ugliness. Perhaps because the Ken Burns "Vietnam" series is in the news these days, I ignored my "mind your manners" critic and trolled the haters in solidarity with my old war resistance "mate" (she was surprisingly dull when I met her at an event.) This being Facebook, my dad's first cousin responded to my trolling post. At least I hadn't been vulgar.

This particular inner critic still has a valuable role to play, so I'm guessing this isn't what Ostaseski has in mind.

Curiously, Ostaseski mentions Karen Horney -- who I just read a piece about on Medium the other day. He writes,

p143 Karen Horney... wrote about three human coping strategies for dealing with basic anxiety. They are applicable both to how we reacted to criticism as children and to how we continue to respond to the inner critic today:

* Some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, collapsing, keeping secrets, and silencing ourselves. We avoid conflict. Maybe you went to your room, perhaps you quietly watched TV as you tried to absorb the judgement or simply endure it.
* Some of us move toward by seeking to please and accommodate, negotiate, persuade, and explain. Maybe you did extra schoolwork, tried to be helpful around the house. or always were well behaved in order to earn approval.
*Some of us move against by trying to gain power over others. We rebel or fight back. Maybe you talked back, yelled, acted with hostility, slammed doors, or snuck out the window and did what you wanted.

"Move against" is out, but both "move away" and "move toward" sound like me. "Moving toward" seems to me to be a part of "move away," if you want to get away with it. I did, and still do, act so as to gain approval, but if I feel you're being unreasonable I will slip into conflict avoidance that is "move away" but will look like "move toward" -- though, as an adult, I am usually in a position to call people on their bullshit except in certain employee-role situations. 

Or, now I think of it, friend situations where I would rather not lose the relationship but know the other person can't see another perspective. These are the tricky ones that often result in my subconscious stepping up and doing something (blowing off or turning up unreasonably late for an appointment) that I wouldn't do myself, but that I can't feel bad about when it happens. (Word to the wise: People are not amused when you respond with laughter to being informed that you forgot some date that had been planed for months. Something that is on your calendar and yet you still made a conflicting plan or else are just puttering around the apartment.)

Okay. Now I have a better notion of this inner critic. But I also have a "little friend" to help me deal with that. Do I really want to be totally self-actualized and free of these constraints? Is this something else that is more valuable as you circle the drain then as you live your life in general? Something else that I need to consider some more. Great, a book that should have come with a set of exercises to do on your own. Something else for my inner critic to nag about.