About a month ago I began a short but protracted series of posts on how writers can use their writing process to befriend their inner ritics. Today is the 3rd post in that series.
First, I introduced the origin story of the Inner critic, a fate-twisted version of the natural human instinct to learn and grow thrugh mistakes, trial, and error. Next I presented strategies for using Gratitude to soften the grip of the Inner Critic, recognizing its purpose to make interacting with it easier and more comfortable.
Today we’re going to explore how to translate the Inner Critic’s acidic conversation into helpful advice and nourishing motivation.
Compassionate Reframing
In my first post in this series I described a tool used in Compassion-Focused Therapy called the Compassionate Other. Clients are encouraged to visualize — or imagine using whatever sense or senses they prefer — a person, character, or creature real or fictional, living or dead, with whom they feel safe. This should be someone or something they trust, feel comforted by, and can converse with easily in heir imagination.
In my post, I used the Compassionate Other to personify that human instinct for growth and learning in the face of failure. Think of it as a friendly sidekick accompanying you on your journey, or a wise mentor or guide nurturing your talents, gifts, and character. We’re going to work with the Compassionate Other more directly today.
Most of my clients can tell me specific phrases, words, or memories their Inner Critics utilize in ongoing efforts to protect them through stagnation or motivate them through emotional pain. Take a moment now and write down, sketch out, or otherwise represent the specific tactics your Inner Critic uses to thwart or spur you. Keep that handy, and get another sheet of paper, separate document, or whatever you need handy alongside it.
Now take a moment to ground yourself. Touching those sharp, painful experiences with your Inner Critic a moment ago can make the next part difficult. Take ten slow breaths, do a yoga pose or two, savor a couple of long sips of tea or coffee, or otherwise do something to care for yourself. When you feel balanced and comfortable again, read on.
There’s a core message in each of the insults, doubts, accusations, and failure-replays your Inner Critic has used against you on your own behalf. This core message represents what the Inner Critic is afraid of, and is trying to protect you from or motivate you to avoid. I’ll give you an example from my own conversations with my own Inner Critic.
Inner Critic Says:
“You need more time to edit because you don’t want to waste anyone’s time by making them correct errors you should have caught yourself. This teacher/editor/beta reader has better things to do than make up for your carelessness and laziness, and they will not appreciate it if you don’t do your due diligence. They’ll probably feel taken for granted by you and think of you as an ungrateful person who pawns her work off on other people..”
Never mind that “due diligence” is pretty vague when it comes to turning in drafts of essays, short stories, work projects, or novels. Never mind that no one has ever told me that they feel their time is wasted when they catch a typo or the wrong use of “there/they’re/their…” Never mind that the editor or teacher is being paid specifically to help catch errors. Submitting work with any error that i can correctly identify on my own feels disrespectful and wrong, and I worry that people will be angry at me for doing so.
It felt like a moral failure to miss an error I know how to correct. I felt like failing to identify and correct such errors made me a bad person! And no one wants to spend time with or be in relationship or community with bad people…
But making too many mistakes also heightened my sense of being burdensome. That experience is a nearly universal side effect of having a disability, and one I have worked hard to address. But recognizing that it wasn’t isolated to my disability was a huge break-through. I felt like allowing imperfections to increase others’ work-load might make me unworthy of their time and effort. My relationship, their paycheck, didn’t compensate sufficiently for the cost of associating with me and my imperfect writing.
“You’d better make this worth their while. If you ask or need too much, they’ll get tired of helping you.” That thought could have been about not being able to drive myself anywhere, but it also popped up whenever I thought about sending anyone a draft or a sample. These are the tactics my inner critic used to keep my imperfections — and my stories — safely tucked away and unwritten, and thus unedited.
Core Message:
Identifying the core message of your Inner Critic’s fear tactics can be a little tricky. Here is a two-step process that can make it a little clearer, again using my own experience as the example.
Step One: Identify the “Or else!”
Whether your Inner Critic is warning you of impending doom or reminding you of past defeat, it is informing you of an undesired outcome. That bad thing your Inner Critic wants to avoid is actually the key to unlocking a restorative spell to return it to its former glory as your compassionate sidekick. So, what is Your Inner Critic afraid of? Mine is afraid of abandonment.
You can practically hear my Inner Critic sobbing “dont’ leave me!” In the above statements as it warns me of wearing out others’ good will. I have relationships, both personal and professional, and my Inner Critic thinks I’m in danger of losing them. It goads me with the horror of loneliness and isolation. But there’s a better way to stay connected than trying to earn love with perfection.
Step Two: Convert Fear to Desire
What you fear often reveals what you value. Afraid of losing something? That’s easy. That which you fear losing is what you value. Afraid of something happening? What is the opposite of that doom breathing down your neck? Sometimes it’s not a straight line from one extreme to another, like isolation to connection. It can be a little convoluted, more like fearing discovery as a fraud translating into a desire to lead a purposeful life. But if you follow fear backward far enough, you’ll discover your desire. And THAT is your Inner Critic’s core message.
“This relationship is important, I want to appreciate it.” “I really value that person’s feedback. How can I best learn from them, and how can I return the favor?”
My Inner Critic’s core message is “maintain relationships so they don’t fall apart.”
Reframing the Core Message
Now take that core message you’ve identified, get that second sheet of paper or document out, and write a short monologue or dialogue scene from your Compassionate Other. How would they encourage you to pursue the quest of your uncovered desire?
“You’ve told me about your writing coaching and editing side gigs for your friends, and I’m just wondering how you feel when you find typos and little mistakes in their stories and things.”
I stop with a faded blue bath towel hanging from one hand. I’d been trying to gingerly extract my clean laundry from beneath Greta’s limp, snoring body so I could fold it, but my therapist’s question just hit me. I feel like a bird who’s slammed hard into a sliding glass door.
“I probably wouldn’t think anything of it, actually,” I say slowly, turning around and trying to remember where my tablet — and my therapist’s face — is located in my room. I’m wearing a Bluetooth headset that facilitates my need to do laundry during my appointment with her, but this exchange feels meaningful enough for me to take a stab at eye contact. If nothing else, the effort slows me down enough to truly feel the impact of this conversation.
“I mean, it’s almost impossible to turn any work of any length in without at least one error. That’s just normal,” I continue. “There’s only so much spell-check and reading things back to yourself can catch. That’s the whole point of editing. Making mistakes is inevitable, and very human. So…” I reflect on how the right question from a good therapist means said therapist doesn’t have to do much for the rest of the session. Just light the right fire and the client will do the rest. “So catching and making mistakes are mutual experiences, and relationships are strengthened by mutual experiences. At worst, it has no impact on the relationship, and at best my humanness makes someone else feel more comfortable in their own humanity.”
As if to emphasize this, my motion has disturbed Greta enough that she oozes off the bed and settles comfortably onto the floor, in front of the dresser my clothes need to get into. I am an imperfect pet parent incapable of doing laundry in such a zen way as to avoid disturbing the dog’s nap, and my therapist admits the same losing battle in her own household.
Incidentally, as I contemplated finishing this post this morning, I found a Compassionate Reframing exercise on the Finch self-care app! While I’d call this app only about 70% accessible for blind users, I have greatly enjoyed and benefitted from that 70%. I’m also engaged with the developers in conversation about improving its accessibility.
Anyway, I tried their compassionate reframing exercise, and that’s how I crafted the imagined dialogue above between myself and my therapist. I’ve been seeing her long enough I can pretty much imagine what she’d say in any given situation now, and unless your therapy relationship is relatively new I’d say that if you can’t imagine your therapist as a Compassionate Other, there might be some tension in your therapeutic alliance you need to deal with.
So, now it’s your turn. Go write, or if you’re feeling a little less ambitious go check out the Finch app and look under Activities for the compassion exercise. Find the desire coded into your fear, and use it to transform your Inner Critic back into your Compassionate Sidekick. After all, that’s where it all started.
Today your favorite blindfluencer asks you to consider how a fear might reveal a gentler path to what you long for.
Look on the Dark Side 
One thought on “Editing and Anxiety: Compassionate Reframing”