The Nice Girl Syndrome (18 page)

If you answered yes to only a few of these questions, your inner critic is not very strong. If you answered in the affirmative to many of these questions, your life and your experience of life are being dominated by your inner critic.

Your expectation of perfection from yourself will not change as long as you are constantly being bombarded by the negative messages from your inner critic. One of the most powerful ways of quieting and countering your inner critic is to talk back to it—literally. Just as you (hopefully) would not allow a bully or a tyrant to relentlessly criticize you or put you down, you cannot allow your inner critic to continue to wear away at your self-esteem.

Most people are very uncomfortable with the idea of talking back to their inner critic. It may seem silly, and since your inner critic is usually created by your parents’ messages to you, it may feel as if you are talking back to your parents. If you are still intimidated by your parents, this can be a frightening prospect indeed. If the idea of talking back to your critic scares you, start off slowly, doing it only when you feel particularly brave or strong.

The following words and phrases have proved to be particularly powerful in silencing an inner critic. Choose those that feel good to you, that empower you—that make you feel angry.

• Shut up!
  

• Stop it!
  

• This is poison. Stop it!
  

• Get off my back!
  

• This is garbage!
  

• These are lies.
  

• These are the same lies my mother told me.
  

• I don’t believe you.
  

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• No more put-downs.
  

• Go to hell!
  

Catch the critic just as it starts—before it is allowed to weaken you or do much damage. Internally scream at the critic so you can drown its voice out with your anger. Profanity is perfectly healthy and may empower you further. If you do this whenever you hear your critic’s voice, you will find that its attacks will diminish in frequency.

Unfortunately, you cannot permanently quiet your inner critic’s voice by challenging it or telling it to shut up. This helps at the time, but eventually the voice will return. What you need to do is replace the critical voice inside yourself with another voice—a nurturing inner voice. You need to replace the critic’s negative messages with positive ones (you began to do this in remedy 1).

1. Begin by focusing on replacing your critic’s voice with a pos- itive awareness of your essential worth, as opposed to the idea that your worth depends on your behavior. This means that you begin to entertain the idea that you are already enough just the way you are. You do not need to achieve anything more to be of value.
   

2. Repeat these words to yourself several times a day, especially when you find that you are being critical of yourself: “I am enough just the way I am.” You may not believe this when you first say it, but eventually the words will sound more and more true to you.
   

E
XERCISE
: C
REATING A
N
URTURING
I
NNER
V
OICE

The following exercise, based on the work of Laurel Mellin, will help you create a nurturing inner voice.

1. Take a deep breath and begin to go inside yourself.
   

2. You may become aware of feelings of anger, sadness, fear, or guilt, or you may feel a void inside. Tell yourself that
   

   whatever you find there, it is okay. Continue to focus inside.
   

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3. If you notice a wall of thoughts, step over the wall and begin to sink into yourself more deeply.
   

4. Continue to focus inside and see if you can find even a beginning sense of connection with yourself.
   

5. Bring up a nurturing inner voice. This is not a harsh or crit- ical voice nor is it an overly sweet, indulging voice. It is a warm, loving voice that cherishes you and accepts you for who you are. In time, this voice will become your own but for now, it can be any voice that meets your needs (for example, the voice of someone who has been kind to you, the voice you use when you talk to a baby or a beloved pet).
   

Compassion is the most powerful antidote to the poison of your unhealthy inner critic. When you have compassion for yourself, you understand yourself and accept yourself the way you are. You tend to see yourself as basically good. If you make a mistake, you forgive yourself. You have reasonable expectations of yourself and set attain- able goals.

Compassion is a skill. That means that you can improve it if you already have it, or you can acquire it if you don’t. The next time you hear your inner critic chastising you about something you did or did not do, counter this negativity by telling yourself something like “I’m doing the best I can” or “Given my circumstances, this is all I am capable of at this time.” Learning to be compassionate toward yourself will also help you to raise your self-esteem.

Women who were raised by perfectionists as well as those who are perfectionists themselves often attract partners who are perfection- istic abusers. Domestic violence usually starts with degrading behav- ior, insults, and put-downs. One partner begins to convince the other that he or she is causing unhappiness in the relationship and needs to change. Many Nice Girls believe that they must be the cause

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of the problems in the relationship and so they try harder to please.

If you are with a partner who is constantly complaining that you do not do enough or that what you do is wrong, you need to tell yourself that this person has a problem. He or she was more than likely raised by a critical, perfectionistic, or shaming parent, just like you were. But this does not give your partner the right to mistreat you the way he or she was mistreated. You also need to tell yourself that this person is never going to be pleased, so your attempts to please him or her are absolutely futile.

The following steps, taken from my book
Healing Your Emotional Self
, will guide you through the process of healing your shame.

1. Accept the fact that you did not deserve the abuse or neglect.
   Tell yourself that nothing you did as a child warranted any kind of abuse or neglect that you experienced. If you continue to blame yourself for your parents’ inappropriate or inadequate behavior, you may need to get in touch with how vulnerable and innocent children are. Spend some time around children who were the age you were when you were neglected or abused. Notice how vulnerable and innocent they really are, no matter how mature they try to act. Ask yourself, Could these children ever do anything to warrant abuse?
   

2. Tell your story.
   As the saying goes, “We are only as sick as our secrets.” By keeping the fact that you were abused or neg- lected as a child away from your close friends and family, you perpetuate the idea that you are keeping it secret because
   you
   did something wrong. Sharing your experience with someone you love and trust (your partner, a close friend, a therapist, members of a support group) will get rid of the secret and help get rid of your shame.
   

3. Place responsibility where it belongs.
   Although you may
   intellec- tually
   understand that the abuse or neglect was not your fault, you may not know it
   emotionally
   . You may still blame yourself. Absolutely nothing you did as a child warranted any kind of
   

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   neglect or emotional, physical, or sexual abuse that you expe- rienced. You did not cry so much that your mother had to leave you all alone in your crib for hours at a time. You were not such a demanding child that your parents had to ignore you. You didn’t have such a big head that your father had to “bring you down a notch or two” by telling you that you were stupid. Your parents’ (or other abusers’) reactions were their responsibility and theirs alone. It is vitally important that you understand this.
   

4. Give back your parent’s (or other abuser’s) shame.
   When an adult abuses a child, it is often because he or she is in the middle of a shame attack. He or she is, in essence, projecting his or her shame onto the child. While any form of abuse is taking place, the child often feels the shame of the abuser and is over- whelmed by it—causing the child to actually take on the shame of the abuser. You may have been told many times by your therapist, or by your friends and loved ones, that the abuse or neglect you endured was not your fault. Now is the time to start believing it. Releasing your anger toward your parents or other abusers will help you stop blaming yourself. The abuser is the appropriate target for your anger. Getting angry at your abusers will affirm your innocence.
   

5. Allow yourself to be angry.
   After several months of our working together, my client Mallory began to get more in touch with some of her anger toward her father for shaming her so much as a child. But this didn’t sit well with Mallory, “I’m responsi- ble for the good and bad about me—not my father. It’s diffi- cult for me to admit that I can be affected by anyone, much less him.” Many people who were neglected or abused feel the same way as Mallory did. They prefer to take responsibility for how their lives turned out rather than to blame their par- ents. Holding your parents responsible for the way they neg- lected or abused you and the effects this kind of treatment had on your self-esteem is not the same as blaming. Blaming keeps you stuck in the problem, whereas righteous anger helps you move through the problem. Those who refuse to get angry at their abusive parents tend to sink into self-blame, shame, and depression. It is much healthier to allow yourself to release
   

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   your righteous anger than it is to turn that anger on yourself. By getting angry at your parents for their negative treatment, you are also more likely to be able to reject the negative mes- sages that came along with that treatment—negative messages that still influence you today.
   

6. Expect others to accept you as you are.
   To heal your shame, you also need to consciously work on believing that it is okay to be who you are. This means you need to stop relying on any- one who treats you as if you are not okay the way you are. Surround yourself with people who like and accept you, as opposed to people who are critical, judgmental, perfectionis- tic, or otherwise shaming. Open up and deepen your relation- ships with supportive people. When someone treats you well, make sure you absorb it. When someone does something nice for you or says something nice about you, take a deep breath and soak up the good feelings. When you are alone, remem- ber the positive or kind things the person said or did.
   

Justine, the woman who started therapy because her boyfriend refused to commit to her until she was “perfect,” came to realize that the problem wasn’t about her at all, it was about her boyfriend. “He’s a perfectionist, just like my father,” she announced to me one day.

After working on releasing her anger toward her father for never being pleased with her, Justine decided that she didn’t want to be around anyone who didn’t accept her exactly the way she was. “I’m just over it. Sure, I’m open to hearing someone’s requests for me to stop doing something that really makes them unhappy, but if some- one starts complaining about my behavior, I see it as a sign to get out of there. I just can’t afford to be around critical people. I just won’t do that to myself.”

E
XERCISE
: G
IVE THE
S
HAME
B
ACK TO
T
HOSE

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1. Sit comfortably and breathe deeply.
   

2. Imagine you are looking inside your body. Find any shame or bad feelings you might have there.
   

3. Imagine you are reaching down inside your body and pulling out all that dark, ugly stuff—all that shame and self-blame.
   

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4. Now imagine you are throwing all that dark ugliness at the person who shamed you or abused you, where it belongs.
   

5. Open your eyes and make a throwing motion with your arms. Say out loud as you do it, “Take back your shame. It’s not mine. It’s yours.” Do this until you can feel the truth of what you are saying.
   

A major remedy for breaking out of the habit of trying to be good and perfect is to own your dark side or shadow personality. Owning your shadow does not mean pretending that the dark does not exist. Neither does it mean embracing the dark, as some practitioners of black magic or Satanism teach. What it does mean is that you work toward taking back all those forbidden thoughts, feelings, and unde- sirable and rejected personality traits. Only by finding and redeem- ing those wishes and traits that we chronically deny in ourselves can we move toward wholeness and healing.

Shadow-work forces us to take another point of view, to respond to life with our undeveloped traits and our instinctual sides, and to live what Carl Jung called the tension of the opposites—holding both good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark, in our own hearts.