According to Les Greenberg, Ph.D., the creator of Emotion-Focused Therapy, there are two kinds of inner voices that cause problems in people’s interior worlds, often just outside of their awareness.
One of these voices is what I have come to call the “shame critic”. This is the voice that tells people what is wrong with them, often in the most damning of terms. When people don’t realize that it is their shame critic that is talking to them, they tend to hear its words as “the truth”, and the result is they feel crappy about themselves–crappy and ashamed. And, since shame is such a painful feeling, people with an active shame critic often become depressed.
The other inner voice is what I call the “anxiety machine”. This voice produces anxiety by telling people all the things they should be afraid of. It has a very active imagination and comes up with all sorts of scary scenarios to warn people about. People with an active anxiety machine in their heads often can’t relax or sleep. They may feel exhausted, and their necks and jaws may ache.
So, if the result of these inner voices speaking to us is so emotionally destructive, why do they do what they do? The answer usually is that they came into being early in life, often modeled after the voices of parents or other authority figures, in order to protect the child who has been hurt from further hurt, or the child who has been neglected from getting into trouble when she finds herself having to deal with situations above her developmental level.
If our shame critic gives us a good walloping for making a mistake, the logic of the critic goes, especially if the mistake is the kind that may lead to others’ disapproval or rejection, then perhaps we won’t make that mistake again, and will therefore not suffer the painful results. If our anxiety critic warns us about every possible bad outcome that might occur, then we will be really, really careful and maybe not get into situations in which we are over our heads and maybe, just maybe, be able to avert interpersonal and other disasters.
After the shame critic and the anxiety machine get created in childhood, they just keep on going, causing emotional problems for adults who no longer need their protection. These inner voices may be well-intentioned, but their effects are deleterious.
In working with these inner voices, Emotion-Focused therapists like me first help clients to become aware of them, and then create in-session experiences in which the part that has to listen to the inner voice, the “experiencing self”, and the voice itself can come to a better understanding of each other. Once shame critics and anxiety machines realize the actual impact of their actions, they are often quite willing to soften their approach, or even stop talking altogether. Often, after such therapeutic work, all that it takes to get one or both of these inner voices to pipe down in real time is a reminder from the client about the in-session agreement that was made.