Self-Esteem
No Enemies Within: Healing Our Inner Critic
Transform your inner critic by understanding what it’s really afraid of.
Updated July 9, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
One common reason people seek out psychotherapy is for help taming a harsh inner critic. Our critical internal voices can range from annoying to deeply distressing, causing us to feel insecure, anxious, and even a sense of shame or inadequacy.
Inner critics are remarkably resistant to change and can have a powerful impact on our quality of life. It’s hard to experience joy, or a sense of ease and vitality, or even to truly relax, when we feel continually under fire from a voice telling us we’re not good enough, are defective, or are shameful in some undefinable way.
Inner critics go by various names, all of them as negative as the way they make us feel: demons, gremlins, saboteurs, enemies, and judges, to name a few. In this post, however, I’ll refer to them using a more positive framing, as protective parts. The term comes from Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and is meant to describe a fundamental truth about our inner critics: They usually represent deeply wired adaptive strategies developed early in life to help us manage powerful feelings of vulnerability, fear, and hurt. They’ve almost always outlived their survival value, but they persist as though the world hasn't changed at all.
Origins: where do inner critics come from?
A common origin of inner critics lies in early childhood. If we perceive that we are only acceptable if we are high achievers, or don't show anger, or don't express our needs, or if we experience implicit or explicit messages that we are unacceptable, unlovable, or inadequate in some fundamental way, we may internalize these messages and cope with the pain they cause by turning against ourselves. An inner critic may develop as a way of getting some distance from the distress, a strategy for managing our vulnerability, hurt, and fear. It may also develop into a harsh taskmaster, determined to drive us to be good enough, appealing enough, successful enough to overcome the painful experience we had of feeling like we were somehow not good enough to be loved and accepted for who were genuinely were, by the people on whom we most depended.
Turning against the self wires the brain to continue turning against the self.
Turning against the self is an extreme adaptation to painful circumstances, and once it becomes habitual, it’s very difficult to change. It’s a truism in neuroscience that “neurons that fire together wire together”—meaning that turning against the self wires the brain to continue turning against the self.
Over time, inner critics get deeply wired into the subcortical brain. They persist as implicit memories or schemas that live a timeless world below consciousness. They are seemingly impermeable to change and are continually triggered by anything that recalls our early experiences of pain, shame, unmet needs, and vulnerability. They can leave us continually stressed and anxious, burdening us with old stories of being not good enough, not being acceptable.
Did you ever notice how resistant inner critics are to change based on new information or rational thinking? Arguing logically with deeply wired protective parts (inner critics) is usually fruitless. When our partner or friends or family remind us that we’re smart or appealing or acceptable just as we are, we may genuinely agree on a rational level, yet our inner critic is likely to dismiss such reassurances and persist unchanged. Positive self-talk can certainly be helpful in specific situations, countering our critical inner voice during a meeting or a presentation or if we're out on a date, but it’s unlikely to have a lasting effect or fundamentally alter that harsh inner voice.
In a wonderful retelling of the story of the Tibetan monk Milarepa, author and educator Dawna Markova describes the return home of the monk after years of wandering the countryside teaching meditation and compassion to villagers. He arrives home only to find his small hut filled with terrifying demons, all seemingly eager to kill and devour him. Taking a deep breath, he bows to the demons, welcomes them into his home, and sings them a lullaby to soothe whatever pain has transformed them into demons. Then he asks what they need in order to heal. In that moment, the demons disappear, and he is safely home.
If we want to heal our own inner demons, our harsh inner critics, a good place to start is by sitting gently with them, inviting them to be seen, and listening to what’s behind their angry, critical behavior. What feelings and memories lie behind or beneath their anger and harsh criticism? What are they frightened of? What pain are they trying to protect themselves—and ultimately us—from?
Like the demons in Milarepa’s hut, we might ask what they need in order to feel safe, what feelings they need help dealing with. We can reframe their harsh, critical behavior as an outdated survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness, rather than as something cruel or bad within us, an annoyance to be gotten rid of. In the presence of a safe and supportive adult (either our compassionate adult self or a therapist), that protective part may be able to let go of its well-intentioned but unhelpful efforts to shield us from threats that no longer exist. Feeling safe and seen, old schemas or beliefs about our inherent inadequacies or flaws may finally give way to new information, a process known as memory reconsolidation.
I once worked with a man who felt driven by his inner critic to work relentlessly long hours, to the point where he was neglecting his family and his own health. He was haunted by a voice telling him he had to achieve great things in his professional field, no matter the personal cost, and that whatever he had already achieved was not enough. When he finally sat with this harsh inner voice in therapy and invited it to be seen, he saw a small boy who felt terrified of losing his parents' love if he didn't excel at everything he did. He wept at the burden of this small child and saw how his inner critic—the voice driving him to work so compulsively—was actually trying to protect him from the possibility of rejection by the people on whom he most depended. The more he sat compassionately with this frightened child, the quieter the inner critic became, and the freer he felt to work less and focus more on his family and his own well-being.
If you’d like to work with your protective parts on your own, there's a wealth of resources to take advantage of. Doing this sort of work on our own can be challenging, especially if our protective parts developed in response to traumatic early experiences. Working with a therapist trained in experiential approaches such as IFS, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), or Coherence Therapy can make the work more manageable. And because early trauma is almost always interpersonal in nature, doing this healing work in the context of a safe, nurturing therapeutic relationship can provide a kind of healing that’s hard to create on our own.
To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
References
Dr. Richard Schwartz, who developed IFS, has a helpful book called No Bad Parts that describes the theory and methods of working with our parts.
Psychologist Tori Olds has a wonderful series of YouTube videos on experiential approaches to working with protective parts, including inner critics.
Rick Carson has a lovely guide to working with inner critics called Taming Your Gremlin.
I also recommend the RAIN model described by psychologist Tara Brach in her book Radical Compassion. RAIN stands for the four steps of (1) Recognizing when our self-critical parts are triggered; (2) Acceptance of whatever we find—making space for whatever images, memories, or feelings arise when we invite those self-critical parts to be seen and known; (3) Investigating or inquiring into what is needed in order for our protective parts to feel seen and safe; and (4) Nurturing our vulnerable, split-off parts, offering comfort and reassurance, and the presence or our own caring adult self.
