Your Inner Critic Is Probably Trying to Protect You

The harshest voice in your head is usually not the enemy it appears to be.

Most people arrive wanting to get rid of it. The critic, the taskmaster, the one that narrates every mistake in the second person. The instinct is to fight it, argue with it, or drown it out. IFS therapy in Washington DC.

That approach tends to go badly, and I think there is a reason.

We have parts, and they have jobs

The idea that we have parts with different jobs, some of them extreme because they are protecting something, tracks with how people actually experience themselves.

Nobody has to be sold on this. Everyone already talks this way. Part of me wants to take the job. A part of me knew it was over months ago. There is a piece of me that just wants to disappear for a week.

Once you take that language seriously rather than treating it as a figure of speech, a lot of internal conflict stops looking like dysfunction and starts looking like negotiation between parties with different assignments.

The non-pathologizing stance

Here is the part that changes how the work feels: even the harsh inner critic is usually trying to keep you safe from something.

Often from humiliation. From being caught out. From the specific thing that happened once, a long time ago, when standards slipped and it cost you.

That does not make its methods good. It is frequently cruel, and it is usually operating on a threat model that expired years ago. But it is not a random malfunction, and it is not the part of you that needs to be destroyed.

Curiosity beats confrontation

When you attack a protective part, it usually protects harder. That is its entire job.

So the practical move is not to win the argument. It is to get some distance from the part, enough that you are observing it rather than being it.

There is a real difference between I am worthless and there is a part of me telling me I am worthless right now. The words are similar. The position you are speaking from is not.

Leading from Self

When a part takes over entirely, when anxiety is not a feeling you are observing but the whole weather system, there is no room left to make a decision from.

The aim is to get enough separation that the calmer, steadier vantage point can be in charge again. Not to exile anything. In my experience, a protective part that is heard rather than argued with often has less need to hold on so tightly.

That sounds soft. In practice it tends to cost less than an internal argument that has no available winner.

Where this fits with everything else

This is not a separate system I switch into. It sits alongside the rest of how I work, including the more structured cognitive approaches, and it pairs naturally with attention to what the body is doing while all of this plays out.

Parts work is one useful way in. It is not the only one, and I do not force it on anyone for whom it does not land.

If this way of thinking appeals to you

There is no pressure in reaching out. A first conversation is mostly me listening to what is going on, and you deciding whether I sound like someone you could work with.

Ariel VanDoren, LPC

True North Psychotherapy

1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, Washington DC 20036

202.599.0522