About the Inner Critic
Hearing about c-PTSD and accepting that you have it are two very different things. Maybe I am used to not being taken seriously, my feelings dismissed. I have had a lot of that. Maybe that’s why I have started dismissing myself, telling myself that it’s all not too bad, I am exaggerating, I am acting like a fucking baby. Goddammit I should finally toughen up and stop being so attention-seeking… The inner critic… This little voice that keeps whispering in my ear telling me that I’m not good enough.
I guess this helped for a while. I did listen to the voice. I did toughen up. I did ignore the pain and the past until it wasn’t there anymore. “It wasn’t there”… What a funny thing to say. It was always there. But anyway, I was simply not “feeling it anymore”. I thought I had beaten it. In fact I had just ignored it. But the critic was always there. Whenever dark thoughts would dare poke a finger to the surface the critic would rise and shout “it is in the past, it is unimportant, stop being such a fucking baby”. If I had these stressful nightmares that would wake me up, the critic would say: “Who cares what this means? What difference does this make to your life?” And if I was getting — what I know now to be — an emotional flashback and ended up sobbing on the floor while the world around me was crumbling into pieces, the critic would come in the end, when it was over, would tenderly pick me up and slap me in the face and tell me to “sober up! What the hell is wrong with you? What is the fucking problem anyway? You are exaggerating and making everything so much worse! Was this really necessary?” It was almost comforting…
More often than not, still to this day, I blame myself for things that happen, things for which other people would casually point the finger to someone else, or even to bad luck. But not me. No, not me! I would think that, maybe, I am causing bad things to happen to me. I am the kind of person who allows others to treat her in a certain way. I accept behaviors from others that other people would not accept and this is why I am being mistreated. Or, even better, my behavior, my attitude, my aura, my entire being actually forces people to act badly around me, even though they don’t really want to and would not do it otherwise. People would not do to others what they feel comfortable to do to me. I make people angry. I push people over the edge. I am enabling that. Or, as my friend El says, “if you have a certain energy and think negatively, then negative things will happen to you”. It kinda hurt when she said that… It does make sense, but it hurts. I didn’t want someone to confirm that, “Yes, it is your fault. You have bad energy. You are causing bad things to happen to you”… hm… I don’t want to believe that….
Get Gaea’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I once researched the Internal Family System concept. I was very intrigued and tried to identify the characters within myself. In retrospect, I wouldn’t really recommend this to anyone. Don’t do this alone, without professional guidance! I stopped it myself as I quickly realized it was too much for me to go there alone… because I truly feared it would make me go completely crazy. Anyway, the interesting thing about this experiment was that one of the main characters of my “family” was “the Judge”. Here is what I wrote:
The judge
The judge says: “You’re a fake, you are a fool, you are an asshole, you are making this all up. You just want attention. Nothing you say is true.”
The judge questions everything as untrue and attention-seeking.
The judge says “what the fuck are you moaning about, this is just you trying to be special and different. You are blaming your good parents and your family and making up lies so that you can manipulate others and get it your own way. You are faking a miserable life, while you were pampered and taken care-of. It is disgusting, you are disgusting”.
The judge thinks I am a wimp. A really bad person who is looking for excuses elsewhere for her bad behavior. The judge is, well, extremely judgemental after all. And she is pissed off! And embarrassed.
The judge is there almost all the time.
This is what I wrote, before I ever read anything about the inner critic. The judge is always there. Sometimes it is a driving force. An urge to be better. A willingness to thrive. A prompt to drop the bullshit and the lame excuses. To an extend it is probably healthy and every one should have at least a certain level of self-awareness and judgement. But my inner critic goes to the extend that today I still often feel that my therapist himself does not really believe I suffer from c-PTSD. So what if he is the one who told me about it on our first session? Maybe he sensed that this is exactly what I wanted to hear. Just some sort of validation. It doesn’t make it true… It doesn’t make it right either. And even though I know that such thoughts are borderline ridiculous, it is still very hard for me to get rid of them. I need to ask my partner again and again: “Do you believe me? Or do you think I’m making it all up?” I don’t mean the stories themselves. I know that what has happened, has really happened. I know the raw facts of things. There is no doubt in my mind for the things I know, if they really happened. I know what happened. But was it really so bad? Was it bad enough? It doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? Are my reactions “justified” or am I just a fucking, nagging, baby?
The answer came rather simple and quiet, on my third therapy session. I hadn’t really dared mention this one story until then, I still felt it somehow too personal. I had really hardly ever talked about it, and I didn’t think I had enough trust to share it in that context. But on the third session I thought probably I should, so I told my therapist about the time when I was playing in the yard of our apartment building — still a little girl of 5,6 years maybe? — and a man came and asked me “where can we play?” And I said “here”, pointing around the yard with my little hands, but he said, “no, let’s go in the basement”, so he took me to the basement and opened his trousers and lowered his underpants and rubbed himself on me, used me, to relieve himself. When he was done I didn’t know what it all was, what it meant… I just knew I was wet and needed to get out of my clothes. And I knew I should run. So I ran up the 5 flights of stairs to our apartment — strategically avoiding the elevator, where I could be cornered again — got into our flat and into the bathroom where my mother was sorting the laundry, undressed and threw my clothes in the pile. And I proceeded to not tell a soul about what happened for more than 10 years… I can tell you exactly what the man said. I can tell you what I was wearing. I can tell you how my mother was kneeling on the bathroom floor sorting laundry. I can tell you how she looked at me and what she told me when I was back. But for years this whole story made me feel absolutely nothing. I would remember the attack (wow, it’s the first time I call it an attack) and have exactly zero feelings about it. I was untouched. I thought it left me untouched. After all, I mean, nothing even really happened, right? It’s not as if I was raped or something! So this cannot be “it”, right? this cannot be “the Trauma”? Only recently I learned that sometimes trauma can be so impossible to comprehend and to manage, that it creates a complete void of any feeling. This does not mean you’re fine. It is in fact quite the contrary… But as much as this intrigued me, and as much as it was — is — very hard to actually talk about this event, to speak the words, to not just think it, but to say it — I still thought, this certainly cannot be it.
This is what I told the therapist and he, very softly, very calmly and very reassuringly told me that yes, this was certainly a traumatic event. But more than anything, more than this single event, more than this attack, the real trauma was in the fact that I, a little kid, completely vulnerable and utterly terrified, ran home after having been violated and did not say a word about it to my parents. Because I did not feel safe to do so. I did not feel safe at home.
So when I doubt myself, when my inner critic takes over and challenges my sanity, I try to remember these words. Yes, this is a very hard question to answer. Why is it that something that happens and passes and leaves one person untouched, could scar another for life? I guess the human being is so complex and intricate that there is no right answer for any of this. I have to accept that however bad it was — or was not — this thing that I called the life of mine, it has left some significant scars. Many of them running deeper than others. And it does not really help, when my inner critic says these scars do not exist. Because they do. And now I’m dealing with them.
