A Child Abuse Survivors Group Community Group
We survived child abuse, but the pain still remains and so do the other effects which can last a lifetime. We are often unable to find adequate help, and we are seeking answers that can help us understand what happened so that we can go on to lead normal lives. (Please note that this is a group for child abuse survivors only. If you are a professional in the mental health...
The inner critic judges and demeans a person. The inner critic is usually experienced as an inner voice attacking a person, saying that he or she is bad, wrong, inadequate, worthless, guilty, and so on. The inner critic often produces feelings of shame, deficiency, low self-esteem, and depression. It may also cause self-doubt and undermine self-confidence. It is common for people to have a harsh inner critic that is debilitating.
Verbally abusive parents and siblings can plant thoughts in a person's mind that are self-critical and demeaning. The inner critic may be especially difficult to silence because it consists of words and phrases and even images repeated over and over again by someone else during a person's childhood, teen years, and early adulthood.
Do you have a critical inner voice? How have you tried to stop it?
Verbally abusive parents and siblings can plant thoughts in a person's mind that are self-critical and demeaning. The inner critic may be especially difficult to silence because it consists of words and phrases and even images repeated over and over again by someone else during a person's childhood, teen years, and early adulthood.
Do you have a critical inner voice? How have you tried to stop it?
I've tried really hard to silence it, to trace it back to its roots, to see how irrational it is...but so far nothing has worked. There are other aspects to it as well...there's an inner voice that plays Devil's advocate to me all the time, undermining and belittling me. It's not a spoken voice, just negative thoughts that make me feel like I'm a failure.
My father was the same. He would work at things and get all wound up about it. He would actually talk to himself with words like "Stupid, stupid!!!" I'm sure he was abused as a child, then turned around and started abusing me. This evil business has a way of leapfrogging from one generation to the next like some hereditary disease.
And perfectionsim worked well for me in business because I could be working on long drafts and at night in bed I would see page 25, paragraph 3, line 5, approx word 25 and know from the file that it wasn't the Jeffersons and should read as the Higgins. I would pick up the phone in the middle of the night and call my boss and leave a voicemail for him on that to correct the draft when he worked on it in the morning. My perfectionism in business was very useful for my bosses but really bad for me. I think when I became disabled, I couldn't work and the perfectionism blew apart and it took me apart in a way.
I worked so hard to reverse those voices and I did a good job of it for years. Then I let my brother and sister back into my life - and little by little I started hearing the negative crap about me - and I am now way back down to how i used to feel. I have to find a way to reverse those voices again but I'm not being very successful at it at this point.