We need to get a sense of who our inner critic takes after and to understand that our inner critic is a complex activity within us, ready to flare up when current conditions sufficiently mimic the original conditions that spawned our self-shaming tendencies. If, for example, we were overwhelmed by an angry parent who slam-shamed us, part of our work is to get in touch with the anger we had to repress in order to survive that parent’s rages. If we have our anger on tap, we can say an effective no to our inner critic (which is also a no-longer-buried no to what our angry, shaming parent did to
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