Self-Talk
Be Your Own Best Friend
Turning your inner critic into an inner cheerleader.
Updated June 12, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- It's ironic that the person most responsible for your happiness is also your worst critic.
- Some people hear their inner critic so often they mistake it for the voice of their self.
- Your inner critic most often reflects the influence of a childhood caregiver.
It’s a common thing to hear someone say they are their own worst enemy. It’s especially common for therapists to hear. Many people come to therapy to work on their relationship with themselves. This is where the “own worst enemy” feelings really kick in.
We often have self-images that were formed very early in our lives. Our interactions with our caregivers and their opinions of us serve as the basis for self-image. If we are encouraged to explore, try, fail, and persevere, we will likely grow up into adults with a positive self-image and the ability to be resilient. If we are made to feel that we can’t do anything right, and the things we might attempt are doomed to failure, we will likely grow into adults with a negative self-image who doubt themselves and create reasons why not to do things that will inevitably fail anyway.
Often, the clients I see in therapy have a negative self-image. They might be successful in their line of work, be in relationships that are satisfying, and have otherwise happy lives, but still have a strong inner critic that makes it difficult for them to feel that they deserve the happiness they experience in life. The inner critic is always with them, finding reasons to undercut the things they want to accomplish and bringing a subtext of displeasure to the events of their lives.
We can hear the voice of the inner critic so often that it feels like the voice of our self. But I find it helpful to externalize this critical voice into something that is not representative of our true self. A client might be discussing a work opportunity they’re considering and, in the next breath, list reasons why it wouldn’t work out, then shift smoothly into a positive appraisal of another opportunity, and just as smoothly shift back into the critical voice that ends with them coming up with reasons not to try.
An approach I use to examine such a dynamic is to have the client think about their best friend, someone in their life who is positive and supportive of them, someone who likes them and is rooting for them to succeed. We’ll take a situation such as a job opportunity and examine it, first from the inner-critic perspective. This involves a listing of personal faults that would prevent us from getting the job or performing it well if we got it.
Then I’ll ask the person to imagine what their best friend would say about them if that person were pitching them for the job. Ideally, we would discover that our best friend has a much higher opinion of us than we do of ourselves. The best friend doesn’t jump to the negatives that would keep us from succeeding; the best friend lists our positive qualities and all the reasons why anyone would be a fool not to hire us.
At that point, I’ll often say something like, “Wow, our best friend seems to think pretty highly of us. I wish we could be as supportive of ourselves as our best friend is”. And the client will agree.
Then the question becomes, why can’t we think like this? What’s stopping us from deciding that we want to be positive and supportive of ourselves—and then acting like it?
The client will invariably shake their head and say something like, “I wish it were that easy”. Which is accurate. It’s not easy. It’s actually quite hard to do. It’s easy to appreciate how great it would be if we were less critical of ourselves. It’s hard to dig deep and discover why we are so self-critical, and to retrain ourselves so that the inner critic is minimized, and more room is created for the critic’s inverse, by being our own best friend.
Therapy can then explore how we developed such an inner critic. Often, such work leads to the realization that the voice of the inner critic is not really our own voice but that of a parent who instilled in us the idea that we would never be enough, that we would never succeed, or that we would never deserve good things to happen to us.
Once we can appreciate that the inner critic we’ve been listening to our whole lives is actually the voice of someone else, we can learn to replace the critic with a more positive voice, that of our best friend. The goal is to learn to treat ourselves as our friend would.. We can train ourselves to move away from the inner-critic instinct and be nicer, kinder, and more supportive of ourselves.
Ironically, the person most responsible for our happiness (ourselves) is often the one who is the most critical of us.
