Self-Criticism is at the Heart of Most Emotional Disorders

It takes three seconds.

Three seconds to look at your own, frighteningly intense emotional response and say ‘I’ve gone insane’ or ‘I’m so stupid’ or ‘I’m a monster!’ or … insert your own negative self-criticism here.

This is all you need to do become emotionally ill.  Honestly.  An intense emotional response to something followed by a nice juicy heavy duty self-critical judgement.

You see, this isn’t just a mere string of words.  This is a viewpoint – this is a self-image viewpoint; it’s a snapshot picture you produce of ‘you’.  And when you say it, because you’re in the middle of an emotionally intense moment and because our minds remember our viewpoints best when we produce them in an intense emotional state, your mind will flash this belief through your brain and body.

And because this experience is so intensely emotional, your unconscious mind believes it to be real because you’re ‘feeling’ it and suddenly you see your own emotional process as ‘a problem’.  It’s not the situation you find yourself in that triggered the intense emotional response you’re having, oh no.  It’s you.  Oh my goodness, you’ve gone wrong!

And then you react emotionally to your alleged ‘internal problem’ by producing a secondary emotional reaction designed to freeze the first reaction in place – a double whammy.  You feel bad and then you feel bad about feeling bad … and bad about feeling bad about …

And, because the first emotional response still wants to come out and then the second response wants to come out too you produce further responses designed to hold those initial and secondary responses in place … and it builds and with each additional response you keep telling yourself how much more ‘insane!’ you are.  You are now at war with yourself.  Full blown unconsciously-driven-negative-self-image war.

Three seconds.  The words that created the viewpoint are hidden by all the intense emotional energy produced as a result of the viewpoint you’ve put in place and your thinking brain is now repeatedly hijacked, fogging your mind and memories to a point you can’t figure out what you did to cause this problem.

You can spend weeks to months working through the emotional response, then looking at the viewpoint but still being unsure what’s ‘wrong’ with you, and then you get what we call an ‘insight’.

Insights tend to appear ‘out of the blue’ when we’re not quite expecting them but when they do appear we may self-criticise for not finding them earlier (don’t do that by the way, the self-criticising for not finding the insight earlier thing, this is how insights work).

An ‘insight’ is a ‘view within’.  Guess what you’ll see when you see the ‘insight’?  Those three blasted words you thought all that time ago: ‘I’ve gone insane’.  That’s what you’ll see – those three judgemental words that caused you to form an instant, self-critical viewpoint you burned into your thinking and believed without question instantly and in the heat of the moment.

And within the same three seconds you will then allow yourself to undo that viewpoint.  You suddenly realise how powerful those initial three seconds were and how you need to make sure you never do that to yourself  again.  The next time you experience an emotional response that intense you’ll spot that you’re about to self-criticise and you’ll interrupt yourself (won’t you?  Please do).

Self-criticism in the middle of an intense emotional response – don’t do this.

When you discover your husband has had an affair with your sister thus destroying two of your closest relationships in one go, and you suddenly have an enraged urge to kill them both, instead of thinking ‘I’ve gone insane’ and starting to fight your own response go get practical, professional help to get the emotions safely out of your body without self-criticising or self-harming yourself or hurting them.

Also – don’t allow abusers or people who don’t respect you to provide you with self-criticisms you then start applying as self-critical judgements.  It has the same devastating affect.

The majority of emotional disorders are caused by the basic self-critical belief ‘I should not be feeling this’.  Seriously.

Acknowledge what you feel, accept it regardless of intensity and find a constructive way to get it out of your system as soon as possible - your chances of remaining emotionally well are then much higher.

In every instance where I have helped someone with an emotional problem (myself included) I hear the self-criticisms spew out:

‘My silly behaviour’

‘My accidents’

‘It’s stupid of me …’

‘I am dangerous …’

‘I need to be locked up …’

‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with me …’

and within a matter of half an hour to an hour I get smiles from these folks simply by showing them a completely different set of viewpoints to adopt (they don’t become well straight away – but simply realising they’re not what they keep telling themselves they are makes a huge difference – they’ve got their own insights to find and they’re on the way).

You know those three seconds?  Don’t do it.  Let yourself off the hook. Allow yourself to be a fully rounded sometimes emotionally-intense human being.  We’ve been feeling this way (and safely releasing the feelings over time and moving on to happiness again) for millions of years.

When you find yourself creating a negative viewpoint of yourself on the basis of an intense emotional response – stop.

Regards

Carl

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