Your self-critic is killing you! Here’s how to shut them up
How big a part of your life is your inner critic? Do you ever say things to yourself like, “You’re so stupid” or “What’s wrong with you?” or “Why did you do that?!” If so, you’ve simply got to STOP! Because you’re killing yourself!
Watch my video where I talk about a scientific study that proves that your inner critic is killing you and hear about things you can do right now to get that inner critic off your back and out of your head.
If you’d like to finally get that inner critic to shut up once and for all, please contact us and speak with one of our Retreat Guides. They’ll connect with you on a deep level, getting to the root of the problem. Then they’ll custom design a retreat that is specifically designed to root out the blocks and gunk that are feeding that inner critic, bringing you back into peace and the experience of being your best self.
Or if you’d prefer, call us toll-free at 1-877-204-3664 (US and Canada). For our friends outside the US and Canada, call 01 928-204-5988 or click here and one of our Retreat Guides will call you.
Lauren says after her Soul Adventure, “I understand who I am and I love me!”
“I was in a very dark place and my heart knew I needed healing and clarity. My soul adventure provided a safe place to journey through my pain and grief, gave me the tools to continue the healing process, and helped me become balanced and whole. I am no longer hardened by the world – I am soft and gushy! I no longer react in anger or frustration; I can breathe life and peace inside when confronted with difficult situations. I understand who I am and I love me! Thank you Sedona Soul Adventures!”
~ Lauren S., Dallas, TX
I love when I read studies that are verifying the work that we do here at Sedona Soul Adventures. It used to be that all of this stuff we talk about was considered New Age gobbledygook, but now studies by medical doctors and scientists are verifying what we’ve been saying all along. Which is:
Self criticism is killing you.
This particular study was published in the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration and reported in the New York Times with the title, “Why You Should Stop Being So Hard On Yourself.”
Here’s all the things they discovered:
- Self-criticism can take a toll on your mind and body
- Self-criticism can impact your body by stimulating inflammatory mechanisms that lead to chronic illness and accelerate aging
- Self-criticism can have measurably destructive effects, including symptoms of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, negative self-image and decreased motivation and productivity (When they say measurable they mean empirical studies have proven this)
- Self-criticism can interfere with your productivity
- Self-criticism leads people to becoming preoccupied with failure
The article then goes on to talk about why we humans do this and the answer is, (in their words): “Blame evolution”
Which means that our brains are wired to notice our mistakes and for most of us, we then go on to tell ourselves that what we’re doing is either Good or Bad. That’s great, because if we do something that needs to be corrected, then we can go ahead and correct it. The problem is that for a lot of us, we then go on and rather than just learning from the mistake, we allow it to take us into a shame spiral…
Chronic illness
Accelerates aging
Interferes with your productivity
Depression
Anxiety
Substance Abuse
Feelings of Failure
And when you do that long enough and often enough, it leads to all the bad stuff they were talking about earlier:
Is that serious enough for you to get you stop?
Do you say things to yourself like:
“You’re so stupid”
“You’re an idiot”
“I Hate You”
“What’s Wrong with you?”
Or do you lie awake at night endlessly replaying a negative situation over and over again in your head, telling yourself you should have said this, or you should have done that?
In the article, the next thing they ask is, “What should I do?” And their one word answer is: Self-Compassion.
Self-Compassion is the practice of being kind and understanding to ourselves when confronted with a personal flaw or failure.
And they offer three steps to help with Self-Compassion:
- Meditation
- Meet your criticism with kindness (change your self talk from “you’re a loser” to “everybody makes mistakes”)
- Start noticing how you feel better when you are more compassionate with yourself, and then keep doing it over and over again
When they’re discussing the three steps in this article, they wrote: “This is, of course, easier said than done.” And that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?
I’m sorry, but you and I both know that simply telling someone to stop calling themselves a loser and telling them to start meditating is not going to stop a lifetime of self-loathing and self-criticism. I had years of therapy and it didn’t stop it, because it didn’t get to the root of what was causing it.
You see, so much of the pain and self-loathing comes from so many deep places and they affect us on all levels — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. When we have issues of not loving ourselves completely and unconditionally (and I have to say every single person I’ve ever met has that to one degree or another), it shows up on all those levels.
On the Physical level, we feel insecure about our bodies (haven’t you noticed how even people who are “beautiful” think they aren’t perfect?).
On the Emotional level, we deeply feel the self-criticism and it goes to our core.
On the Mental level, we’re thinking things like “I’m a loser,” “I’m so stupid,” etc.
On the Spiritual level, we actually believe that there’s something wrong with us.
Unless we’re dealing with this on all four levels, it just stays there, stuck and not moving.
We had a man come to us last year who, on the outside, seemed to have it all. He was very successful in his work, he had what seemed to be a great marriage, he was in good health, and his kids were doing well. His wife contacted us because all of a sudden he was feeling really unhappy and withdrawn – not really depressed, he just wasn’t happy and he had no idea why. We told her that we couldn’t set up the retreat for him unless we spoke with him directly and made sure he actually wanted to come (that’s the only way this will work).
When we connected with him, he was saying all this self-deprecating stuff about himself, which he told us he did because he didn’t want other people to think he had a big ego. But as we delved deeper, we really got to it.
We discovered that he had been given up for adoption at birth and he was never able to find any kind of information about either of his parents. Even though he had been adopted by a very loving family who took great care of him, we discovered that he had a very deep seated belief that “there must be something wrong with me,” for his own mother to have given him up.
He had never told anyone, not even his wife, that he felt this way. He hid the fact that he was adopted, he was ashamed of it, and he felt that in some way, he was a phony. That if people “really knew” him, really knew the truth about him, they wouldn’t like him. In his emotional clearing session all of this finally came spilling out, all these years of holding all this in, this self-loathing that literally had been eating away at him like a cancer.
And then he did a Radiant Heart Healing and the hole that was left from all the self-loathing was suddenly filled with all this love that he was feeling for himself…he said it was just gushing and gushing.
But the most amazing thing was in his Breath Journey. He was already feeling great, and feeling all this self love when suddenly he had a vision of a woman who he just knew was his mother, even though he had no idea of what she actually looked like.
I told him later that I thought this was the Divine Mother, the mother of us all coming to him and he stopped me and said, “Debra, no I know it was my mother, the spirit of my mother.” Now you have to understand this is a very successful, very straight business man who started out being very skeptical about all of this stuff, saying all this to me and of course, I just loved it and was so happy for him that he was feeling all this healing love.
He went back home and his wife told me later that he is totally a changed man. She then told me she had been afraid he actually had cancer because he seemed to her to be withering away, even though he had been tested and there was no indication of that. I told her that self-loathing can be a type of cancer – it eats away at us and now these studies are showing all the negative effects it can have on us.
If this is an issue that you’re struggling with, please reach out and let us help. We’re masters at getting to the root of what’s causing the self-loathing, clearing it out and moving you back into connection on all levels – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
I hope this helped, and if you got value from this video, please take the time to like it, share it with someone in your life who think might get something out of it and subscribe to our channel.
And If you want an even more direct path to really loving yourself completely, – then go to SedonaRetreatGuide.com and get your complimentary copy of The Sedona Guide to Spiritual Retreats today.
Or if you’d like to talk to someone about doing a retreat that will turn your life around, call us at 928/204-5988.
You can have the life AND the relationship you want – I know it!
