Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Taming Your Inner Critic with Neal Allen

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

We all grapple with an inner critic, incessantly whispering that we're not good enough or worthy of success and love, fostering a cycle of self-criticism. What if we could tame this relentless voice, breaking free from its grip and embracing our authentic selves? The good news is, we can. In this Language of Love Conversation, I sit down with Neal Allen, the author of Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic. Neal takes us on an enlightening journey exploring the human psyche and the often-ignored superego. He shares his expertise on how the inner critic develops, its intentions, its impact on our lives, and fantastic strategies for recognizing and dealing with it. Taming the inner critic isn't just about finding peace; it's a path towards something more profound, something spiritual.  We unpack: How to recognize and address the inner critic's impact on our lives The role of compassion in understanding the inner critic  The paradox of perfection and productivity The "Peter Pan Kid" analogy The connection between releasing the inner critic and experiencing moments of grace and divine presence Make sure to visit Neal Allen's website to learn more about the great work he does. You can connect with him on social media too, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter(X) for updates. If you want to improve yourself and conquer that negative voice inside you, you should definitely read his amazing book "Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic.  Make sure to visit my website to check out my books on love, sex and relationships and explore my available courses. Tune in regularly to The Language of Love for great discussions and thought-provoking conversations with accomplished individuals and experts offering invaluable advice on how to love and be loved better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. And that way, my goal is to awaken your mind, body, and soul. It's time to become fluent in the language of love.

Neil Allen is a writer and a spiritual coach. His focus is really on removing the obstacles that are in the way of faith and allowing and fostering personal freedom in each of us. He's written several books. His newest book is called Better Days, Tame Your Inner Critic. And Lord knows every single one of us have that. So Better Days is really about freeing that body guard that we don't even realize we're carrying with us and we don't really need. The creature who molds your shiny, socially acceptable outer shell, as he writes. And we want to release ourselves from the inner critic so that we can live our truest selves. We want to get to know

the inner critic and quiet its voice so that we can become the person we were born to be rather than believing what the inner critic tells us we're supposed to be. I'm really excited for this conversation with Neil Allen. Neil Allen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. I love talking to you, Laura. I love talking to you too. It's always so much fun.

And I love the new book, Better Days, Tame Your Inner Critic. And Lord knows we all have a really noisy one in there. Some of us more loud and insistent than others. but I love you were describing the book that the idea or your premise for better days is about sort of freeing ourselves from that inner critic or you know almost that it serves a purpose as a of a bodyguard and we're going to get into that but basically tell me if this is sort of a good basic premise to start with I know there's a lot more to it but that we're all basically living with this parasite, this parasitic force inside us that is an inner critic intended to

keep us safe, right? Its purpose, it's well-intentioned. But tell us, tell us in your words how you would describe this inner critic that you tackle the strategies for understanding and also releasing in your book? So the inner critic known in psychology as the superego arrives in our lives long after our instincts. Our instincts show up at birth and they are truly part of us. And they basically have two purposes to engage the libido and to protect us in survival.

and they give us fight, flight, or freeze. The superego shows up much later. It doesn't become a strong force in our lives until we're five or six years old. Before then, we really don't need right, wrong, good, bad, which is the language of the superego. It's the language of what we call the conscience. And it's a socializing language.

It is a tool of our civilized lives where we live defaulting to distrust because we live next door to strangers. Tribal peoples who still live in a kind of Stone Age life existence near the equator in New Guinea and the Amazon don't have a strong or probably very much at all of the superego. They don't need one. They trust everybody around them. And so you mean by that, you mean they don't have to be vigilant or protect themselves from societal rejection or disapproval? Yeah. And they know their survival dangers are well known to them and are well taught to them. And they're always around people. And when they get to go off on their own, they have a strong sense of how to protect themselves and how to keep themselves

fed and safe. In a civilized society, we have to learn a lot of rules, most of which have little to do with survival. Some of them do, and the superego actually assists for a short while in learning about survival skills that involve fateful decisions. So at five or six years old, it's the first time for most kids, whether they're in Senegal or India or America or anywhere, Around five or six is the first time you're let off the leash to spend 15, 20 minutes without an adult supervising you. And that can lead you across a street in front of it, into an oncoming car. And so the superego's first job is to have a worried, slightly punishing, scolding parent

to accompany you. So it's like an internalized voice. And you're saying that this kind of happens in the child automatically and inherently because it's internalizing the parents having said a million times, don't look both ways before you cross the street, be careful, or is it something that develops on its own? We really don't know its genesis. what we know is that it's pretty much the same magnitude, the same kind of voice for everybody, and it arrives in its strong form at about the same time for everybody who lives in a civilized in civilization. So whatever its genesis, it's there to do an important job. It does actually two jobs. It helps you have an absent parent accompanying you when you're making fateful

decisions for yourself, like crossing the street, looking both ways. It also provides you with a couple of very simple-minded strategies, which I won't go into, but they're very simple strategies for buying time in confusing situations. Because at six years old, for the first time in school, for instance, first grade, for the first time you're sitting for 45 minutes doing what everybody else in the room is doing arithmetic or reading or social studies whatever it is you're not getting to select your own playstation or learning station and there are all these rules you have to follow and you can't just tug at the teacher to go to the bathroom you have to raise your hand all these rules show up and they're overwhelming because nobody tells the kid oh the rules are changing

you've got to learn the rules and you're starting the process. Yeah. You're starting the process of growing up and becoming one of those giant mature people around you who you have no idea how they exist, how they live their lives. They just take care of you kind of. Right. Right. So you're confused and you get a couple of strategies to get you through that confusion. And by the way, that's kind of it. You get a couple of strategies for social situations and you get a couple of rules for protecting yourself in fateful decisions, and they're wonderful. They allow you a little bit of freedom. They allow you to move your way through first grade and into second and third. And by the time you're 12, most of what it has to say, it is already delivered to you,

and you've internalized most of its messages. By the time you're 17, you're much more sophisticated in your decision-making than it is. It loves its job. It does not want to be fired. It does not want to be fired. It has a kind of weirdly strong survival instinct. And it's very scared that if it quits its job of taking charge and demeaning you and belittling you and making you feel as if you're a bad seed or you have original sin or you're about to be predatory or you're homicidal, if you take the Freudian view of it, it might not have a job anymore and it might disappear. So it becomes really tenacious. And I think, you know, it's interesting because one of the things that I work with when I'm doing work with people and is, or even just

when I talk to groups, especially if we're kind of pursuing a path towards self-love and personal freedom, one of the first things I'll do is say, I call it a thought cleanse. Even though you're not really cleansing, you're more becoming aware. But I just say, okay, for the next few days or even the next week, just pay attention to all the things you silently say to yourself in your head, Like, oh, that was so stupid. Why did I say that? Oh, my God, you're so fat. Or how could you have done that? Or why would you do, you know, all those critical voices. And most people aren't even consciously, they've gotten so used to that crazy roommate in their head is what I call it, that they don't even, it's become internalized. they don't realize that this is not you. I'll sometimes say to them, say hello to yourself. And the one who's saying hello is your personality. The one who's hearing hello is your true self, right? So where would the critic or the super ego fit between those two?

You know, you're one of the very few people I have met in my life who knows this. Nobody told me when I was 17 years old. Oh, by the way, that's a fake person. That's not you. And it just adopts the scolding tone of a parent. It's really an idiot. It is very stupid. And I can use words like moron and idiot with it because it isn't a full-fledged person. It is a facsimile of a person. And it's not just not me, it's an idiot who only knows a very few things that it can repeat over and over and over and over and over again, as if you didn't know them already, as if they weren't already fully incorporated in your worldview. We are not bad seeds.

We are not predatory, homicidal when left to our own devices. We don't need a voice protecting us from ourselves. we're bent to the good and we're bent to i believe that and it's what people discover it keeps telling people that you're bad and so you're going to act it out sometimes right because you're going to suddenly behave as if you're a six-year-old because you've been told you're a six-year-old and you're going to you're going to be more inclined to temper tantrums right anger we call it anger in adults and you're going to be more inclined to i want people to see me because it's telling you it's important for people to see you and otherwise you'll be kicked

out of the tribe. It's telling you all these exaggerated lies, essentially, by the time you're a mature adult. And you're listening. That's the weird thing. And believing it. And I am taking instruction from the dumbest bully in the back of the class. Yeah, bully. And you describe the superego defenses. I had a question about this, actually. I'm just curious about. You describe the superego defenses as basically, because that's what it's trying to do. It's an idiot trying to defend you, right? It thinks it's protecting you. It thinks it's taking care of you. It thinks you need it. It needs to be needed. And it boils down to three fears you write or feelings, right? Withdrawal, anger, and self-righteousness. And the first thought I had

when I read that is like, yeah, yes, yes, and yes. But what about fear? So fear encompasses all defenses. Okay. The thing about fear, the thing about suffering, the thing about pain is that these are, we think we know what they are based on a model that has to do with our survival instinct, right? So they are words that are borrowed from our survival instinct and then used by the superego to hold us under its thrall as if social concerns had the same immediacy, urgency, and danger as survival concerns. Well, I was just going to say that once I was, I was watching, I don't even remember who it was. I was watching this guy speak somewhere. This was years ago, years and years ago. And this was the first time I heard it. And I've heard it since

many times, but I often think about it. And you were referring to kind of underdeveloped, more close to the Stone Age societies, when we were in those societies and when we were developing those societies and developing our instincts for fight, flight, freeze, whatever, like there were real dangers, you know, saber tooth tigers, trees falling on us, avalanches, whatever. Now, you know, if you're living in a modern society with all the comforts of technology and heat and refrigeration and medical care. We don't have the saber-toothed tiger at our door, but we still have those instincts. So we create them, we project them onto things like social rejection or not fitting in or being abandoned emotionally or literally. Those

become our saber-toothed tigers and we treat them as if they're, I guess our super ego, as you would say, it treats them as if they're life or death. And inside ourselves, that's the energy of it feels the same when we succumb to it unaware. Yeah. And I remind people that when I say my feelings are hurt, the word hurt is the same word as I say, ouch, that hurts if I'm stabbed with a knife, but I know perfectly well the difference between the two, right? I'm borrowing this word that's a physical word, and I'm pretending that the same thing is happening. And then when I search for what has been stabbed in my feeling, I can't find it, right? And then I remind people that the superego tells me my feeling is hurt. And so it's the same thing as

my arm being stabbed. And so I need to urgently and immediately respond to it. Defend. Defend. And I remind people that that urgency and that immediacy are completely false. And the way I know that is, haven't I had times when I didn't realize until a day later that my feelings had been hurt by somebody? What happened during that? There was no immediacy. There was no urgency to it. And by using a word that implies immediacy and urgency, like pain or hurt or wound, right?

All of us talk endlessly about trauma wounds and needing to heal wounds and all of that. Why don't we have a whole different set of words for the things that relate to our made-up emotions, right? Because the Buddhists are right about this. They're largely made up. I know it's very popular nowadays to relate all emotions to some kind of physical activities inside. But I remind people that even the neuroscientists haven't yet been able to debunk the behavioral scientists' discovery 30 or 40 years ago that thoughts precede emotions. I 100% agree with that. I mean, I feel like thoughts create feelings.

Beliefs create thoughts. thoughts create feelings and feelings are what we react from. And in relationships, as we talk about a lot on this show, you can imagine guys how this plays out, right? When we talk about being quote unquote triggered, how often is that your parasite at work, right? And not really your true self. A hundred percent of the time in my viewpoint, it is your parasite at work. Whenever I'm in conflict, whenever I'm judging things in a hierarchical set of values, particularly people, better or worse, good or bad, that's being curated by my superego. My superego only looks at the world as an imperfect place that needs to be perfected. And by the way,

this is quite valuable to a species that has to support 8 billion members on this planet, right? We're probably the next biggest, the next highest population of a non-domesticated large animal is probably the kangaroo, which has, I think, 15 million members to it. So we probably were intended to stay around the equator and be hunter-gatherers and not store food with maybe 150 million people. Well, we're supporting eight billion people, and that requires a lot of shipments of food to places where they can't grow their own. It requires a lot of houses to be built to maintain the standard of living that the species has created as an experiment for itself to be able to continue to thrive. And so we have to be very, very productive and to be very, very productive. It's very handy to think that things are imperfect now. Right. And that you have to whip yourself that things that you're in danger or in trouble. I got to whip my we're going to. So we're going to get into in a minute some of the strategies that you have discovered and developed that really help you kind of get a handle on and maybe even eject to a large extent your inner critic.

but I want to ask you a personal question first about your relationship, which I know you'll let me do. So you're married to Anne Lamott. You call her Annie, which I love. And I'm just wondering, like, what would she say that you, because my husband teases me. In fact, he just teased me this morning because he will often say, you're one of the best relationship therapists I've ever seen. You transform relationships. You're one of the best in the world, but you don't always practice what you preach here at home. And he'll sometimes say to me, what would you advise your clients about what you're saying to me right now or how you're behaving? So to what extent are you able to practice this? Because I can imagine if you were really able to master this,

you would be walking around in a love relationship with very little judgment, lots of peace, much less discord, much more connection. So what would she say about your ability, to what extent you, because you are, you should be, you're our litmus for what we should be reaching for since you live this. Yeah. A couple of answers to that. The first thing is perfection is a trap. Yeah. And whether you're moving down a spiritual path and an old tradition or a new tradition, it's still a trap, right? If you think the idea is to become a perfect master at life, you're going to be very, very disappointed. You're screwed. You're screwed. Yeah. However, getting some peace and some freedom for some part of the day is great.

It's really wonderful. My superego had a 52 or three year head start on me and developed a lot of patterns of, you know, triggered stories running, you know, people have different words for it. Oh, the movie started, right? The script is going, right? I still have scripts that go. I still fall into conflict. I still mutter under my breath. I still do all of those things. There are two big differences, three big differences by doing the work that I've done, which is the work that I explain in the book. No different. One big difference is it doesn't happen as often, right? So that's good, right? That's very good. Yeah. You know, so it doesn't happen as often. Another even bigger difference, though, is as my story is running and I'm in conflict with Annie or anybody else, and I think the relationship is taking a dive.

I think that, you know, I'm going to have a hard time talking to her tomorrow, whatever I'm thinking. As that's going, there is now a part of me that doesn't believe the story, and that is just biding its time and going, God, I can't, kind of saying to me, very compassionately to me, kind of saying to me, it's my authentic saying, huh, that's still going on. You might want to work on that at some point, but meantime, it's just really kind of curious about it. I don't feel very guilty, I have to say, anymore about getting into conflicts that I know I shouldn't in some part of me knows I shouldn't have gotten into and I should be better than and all of that. My only responsibility is when the trance is over and the tape has quit running

and I'm no longer in the center of the conflict, I do have a responsibility that I take very seriously to myself to stop and go oh what was that and to consciously think about and it comes down to a choice there's a choice either that it's a conflict that arises so seldom you know once a month once a year it'll just play itself out every once in a while that i can just say not a big deal. Or, wow, that thing that I thought I had taken care of five years ago has come back to haunt me again, and I'm getting that voice in me again, and now I've got some work to do. And the work is always the same. The work is go right into the suffering, find the root of the suffering, find the false story from my past that my superego is using against me, and spend

enough time with that false story that it eventually shows its two-dimensionality and that it really has nothing to, I don't have to defend myself from my mother with schizoaffective disorder. She's not in the room with me, you know, whatever the story is. That's one of my stories. I want to dig into that a little bit more for folks. And I know you get into it in a great detail in the book, but first of all, just to reiterate, how do you know when your inner critic. I call it a gremlin too. I read that you call yours gremlin. I do too. You can give a name to it. You can get to know it. It has a whole very immature personality. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But just to reiterate, you know you are in the thrall of that or that

that is activated when you feel in conflict or judgmental. Yeah, that's it. We actually don't need to be in conflict or judgmental anywhere near as much as we think, because we're not in danger if another person has a different opinion, even of ourselves, right? We're simply not in danger. We think we have a need to assert something or to get something. And we forget that outside of food, housing, clothing, and safety, I mean, literal physical safety, they're all just wants yeah there are no other needs out there we don't even need love if you clear away your ego obstructions love is just there so that's not even so go ahead don't say that to me we need love my superego refuses to give that one up most of us have no idea

how to move through loss there's no roadmap to follow when you're trying to navigate grief And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way,

but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love. You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com, right there on the homepage, as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. But let me ask you this. Can we let's just use me as an example to take people through this process of and we don't have to go into the bowels of it.

I mean, I'm fine doing that, but I'm sure it would take longer than the time we have. But so I notice now when I have a charge around something and I'm feeling really like agitated by it, I force myself, which is really hard. I force myself not to respond until I've calmed down a little bit and worked with it a little bit. So I got a big charge yesterday. I was really in the gremlin over, I belong to this women's forum that we are extremely connected. We've been together close to 20 years where we meet once a month and we go on a retreat once a year. And it's becoming apparent to me that just like dyad relationships, this group is a living force that changes and evolves over time. And so there was, oh, I know what happened.

This is so, it's a perfect example because it was so silly in the end. I mean, it's not that big of a deal, but I made a huge deal out of it. I was annoyed because we had made a decision where we were going on our retreat. We'd even chosen the place and the house we were renting. And then one of us said, well, I don't know,

is that going to be safe? And then everyone was like, I don't know, is it going to be safe? And then nobody would make a decision. So I got annoyed by that. And I just said, look, here are three questions. do you want to stay in a hotel? If you don't want to stay in a hotel, do you want to stay in a house? If you want to stay in a house, do you want to stay in a, are you fine staying anywhere? Or do

you want to be in some secure gated community? Just answer those three questions. And nobody responded for three days. Now, in the meantime, they know they've been right in the middle of my son. This is a bigger deal of my son having been murdered with fentanyl poisoning three years ago. They've been a huge support for me through all of that. But over the past year or two, that hasn't come up as much naturally. So, so I told them during our last meeting, Hey, I have the trailer is actually ready for this documentary I'm making. And it's like this heart centered. It's so personal to me. It's like, it's like my heart, a piece of my heart, this whole thing, putting it into that. Right. And they know that. And I said, do you guys want to see the

trailer? Yeah, we want to see the trail. So I send them the trailer radio silence. One of them One of them got back to me and said, oh, my God, that was amazing. But radio, they just didn't care. I mean, this is my story. I know they care. But my story and the charge was around, they don't really care about me or this group. They're not invested. I'm the only one invested here.

And maybe I should just put an end to this. I don't want to be in relationship with people who aren't willing to invest. Blah, blah, blah. Right. I went all the way down the path. So take me through the process of identifying the gremlin. Anybody who's written books has had the experience that many of their closest friends and family don't ever say a word about it. Don't read them.

But this was a five-minute trailer. I know, I know. Five minutes to watch a trailer. I don't expect them to read my books, but watch the trailer. They're scared. Yeah. So they're scared. And so the first lesson that comes out of that is, oh, I forgot everybody's on defense.

If it looks like an attack, if it looks like they're coming at me with their silence or with anything short of a spear, right, words, it isn't. They think in their heads that they're defending themselves. They're scared of saying the wrong thing. They're scared of not gushing. They're scared of gushing. They're scared of this. They're scared of that. A lot of people have never learned how to praise other people's work, right? They they're used to the harsh system of grading. Right. And it's nasty grading. Right. Because you want to get the A, but then you don't want to show people you got the A because then they'll think that you're boasting. Right. And so you're kind of stuck with this ugly system and you get raised in an ugly system. you want to, you know, I want to avoid that. And so mostly that's obviously what's going on. My guess is they all saw it. They all felt teary eyed. Right. And they didn't know how to respond.

Which in and of itself triggers me. We've been together for 20 years. You guys, like we know each other. We talk about our deepest, darkest. We know things about each other that we don't tell our partners or best friends. Right. Like you can't. And I found that offensive, but I get what you're saying. And I can have compassion for that part of them that was scared. Yeah. And recognize that for most people, suffering is a scary thing. For you, it's not. For me, it's not. For me, suffering is where I have to go all day long if I want God to appear, right? Other people's suffering, my suffering, I don't care. I don't care. All I know is that the form of love that social interactions take is most commonly compassion.

We complain all day. Human beings gossip. You were mentioning that earlier. It's the funniest thing, right? So civilized human beings gossip about socializing and suffering, right? We're gossiping about this person said this, this person did that, you know, blah, blah, blah, All day long. It's a symphony of complaining, really. And we do it because it works. If you complain to get rid of the complaint. Once I've told my story about, you know, the brother-in-law who is just doing this or that to me, I don't actually have that. It's venting. That's the basic, like expelling it, right? It's expelling it. You know, it disappears after a while and you can go on and complain

about something else. The funniest thing is that tribal people are also inveterate gossips, but they're gossiping about falling out of trees and large predatory mammals, right? They're gossiping about survival issues. You see that mountain lion, the paws on that beast. Yeah. So we're all gossips and we all gossip to expel our suffering. And once you know that, you start to learn that actually suffering is kind of cool because if I'm accepting that it's in the room, then this warm social sense of love will arise all by itself. Yeah. They do seem to go hand in hand, which I keep trying to explain to people. So if I forced myself not to send them some snarky message and proclaim that I'm thinking about leaving the

forum and I'm tired of all the things I wanted to say in my trigger. But if I didn't automatically do that, or I wanted to kind of take a deeper dive into your process, right? How would I identify what message from the gremlin or my inner critic was operating here? Because I think I know, but you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. And I can answer in two ways. One way is it doesn't matter, Right. So one way is to notice that if you're in conflict, it's 100% on you. It doesn't matter what generated the conflict. Okay. So it doesn't make a difference. All right. In one way, it doesn't make a difference. And the way I prove this self to me, because it's such an unfair system, especially since nobody else has signed on to the system and they may

think, well, it's 60% your problem, 40% mine, or it's 100. They may think it, agree it's 100% my problem, right? So nobody has signed on to the system. But it works for me because of something that I noticed, which is I can always find 99 invisible imaginary people. I call it my 99 person process or something. I can always imagine 99 people lined up next to me for whom that issue would not be a problem. And there are annoying people who everybody agrees are annoying and in some way? Well, I might have to search through a billion humans, but I can find 99 who I can line up. And if that's true, then that's on me, right? And that reminds me, they're being defensive, I'm being defensive, we're projections talking to projections. This is illusory, not in a like

Hindu, you know, the world's illusion way. Yeah, life is an illusion. I think life is real and And the familiar life has got in it just like the spiritual parts of life have got in them. But I also believe that we do spend a lot of time in projection. And most of projection is not noticing that the other person is being defensive and taking personally. And projecting onto them some rejection when it was really not about you. It was about their own fear. Now, my work with my clients generally takes people into their childhood trauma stories.

So everybody's got three or four, I call them keys to the kingdom stories, right? For the generation before ours, the most common story that was around was second, third, fourth grade girls going to a party wearing the wrong dress and being humiliated by the other girls, right? The wrong dress story. Yeah. Public humiliation. There's usually, I often hear from older women, the wearing the wrong dress story. There are three or four such stories. Some of them are just the awfulness of a truly awful parent and remembering a scene where the belt was brought out. Right. And some of them are wearing the wrong dress. For me, I think it was that i didn't i don't matter yeah and there will be a story that tell a i don't matter story that

story is clutched on to yeah but you've got three or four an origin story i know you're there three or four that the superego keeps right at the tip of its tongue right and it's reminding you it's curating your memory, right? We think memory is an accurate representation of our past and that's just nonsense. Memory is a bunch of moral tales that we've stored. We've stored just enough of the event to have a beginning, middle, end, and a moral. And usually the moral is intended to remind you that you got into trouble and you don't want to get into trouble again. And it gets brought up. And we forget that if we were really six years old when dad brought, my dad didn't bring up the strap. I'm just using this. But if you really were six years old when dad brought out

the strap, 10 minutes after we pulled our pants back up and finished crying, we were goofy six year olds hanging out with our older brother, you know, laughing at a Superman con, right? Right, right. And that memory wasn't stored. Yeah, the after. of the rehabilitation and the recovery and everything was okay or just the or just the i had lots of things happen that day like carrie fisher is famous for somebody asked her i think it's in the book somebody annie told me this one and somebody asked her are you happy now you know

after recovery or something and she said happy something to the effect of happy is one of the things that I am most days. And that's what being six years old is and seven years old and eight years old. It isn't as if the five minutes of being humiliated by the girls and the ensuing hour of that party took more than an hour out of your life. It's that it got stored and told that that's who you are and that's how you're going to be humiliated in the future. And you better watch out and spend a lot of time with that, which is a bunch of nonsense, right? It isn't how you live the rest of your life. And it certainly has nothing to do with who you are when you're 20 or 30 or 40 or 90.

But it is central to the operating principles of that inner critic or gremlin. And one of the things- Who wants you to be a six-year-old. Yeah. And so you lay out a lot of beautiful processes for kind of getting to know your inner critic and creating a relationship with it. And also, and this is the part where I was giggling to myself as I was reading it because, so basically just to tell, I mean, tell me if I'm not summarizing this correctly, but just quick. I mean, it's a longer process and he gets into all the details in the book, but basically there's a process that you kind of go into your bot. You, you identify where those thoughts are kind of coming from the inner critic thoughts and you put them in front of you and you hold it in

the, in the palm of your hand and you let it take shape and you start a conversation with it. Like who puts you in charge? When did you take charge? Why are you still in charge? That totally was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the part I started giggling at knowing me, I am a really crappy debater. And I was re and so after that, after you get those questions answered, now you're getting in, then it's about sort of getting into this. I would, maybe you wouldn't call it a debate, but kind of getting into this debate that you're going to win. Cause like you said, the super ego, that little gremlin, whoever it is, is kind of an idiot, but they're very stubborn and you have to kind of keep at them and go around them and convince them to let you take charge. And I was

thinking I would lose that argument because I am not a good debater. At some point I would like, so talk about that a little bit. Yeah. And I would say what you don't want to do is get into an argument with it, right? Because it loves conflict. And so I wouldn't quite call it a debate. You're asking leading questions that have yes and no answers, right? And a couple of nice things about this facsimile of a person that's an idiot that you're talking to is that it's actually honest. It will answer your questions honestly. So if you ask it, are you worried about your on survival, it'll ham and ha and eventually answer yes. And it's easy to flatter. It's just like Trump that way. It's very easy to flatter. And so what I found is that if you remind it that

it's tiring work to be in charge all the time, and you remind it by saying, asking it, isn't it tiring work to be in charge all the time. And it says yes, usually. Most people, it says yes. Sometimes they say no, and you have to move on to something else. But most of them say yes. I offer it a very fancy title in semi-retirement. I say, well, why don't you go into semi-retirement as my occasional ethical advisor? And 99 out of 100 of them are like, yeah, that sounds good. I would like to be your ethical advisor. I'm on the board. But you also talk about how each time you interact with, especially when you are convincing your superego to release you and let you be in the driver's seat and stop trying to control you, you thank it. Thank you for keeping me alive as a kid. Thank you for being so protective, showing it that appreciation. in. Yeah. And it is true that particularly for people in particularly dysfunctional families, it was sometimes the most reliable narrator for the six-year-old or seven-year-old. It was the

thing that got them to school on time, right? When their family couldn't, right? And so it served a wonderful purpose and it bought you your earliest strategies for how to deal with confusing social situations with adults in particular. And that was wonderful. It just should have retired. And it does. It brings that part of the conversation most of the time, even when I'm watching it, it brings tears to my eyes, right? It's the Peter Pan kid, the kid who was faced with this horrible job of growing up and just couldn't see how it was possible and couldn't make their way. And it came along and said, I got this for you, kid. And that's very touching. What I also remind people is that that was then, that now you can treat it the way it deserves to

be treated, which is politely and with authority. It wants to take authority away from me. And so it's important for me to kind of notice that whenever I'm dealing with it as an adult human being interfering with my adult life, I don't actually need to be particularly compassionate with it. I don't want to get angry with it. I don't want to fight with it because then it strengthens and amplifies, that amplifies its voice. But I also don't want to be a pushover to it, right? Because it's kind of out, it's outstayed its welcome. It's not a real human being. So other parts of me, I need to be compassionate with because they're part of the real human being. so that's not it never was me I thought it was me now that I know it's not me and the wonderful

thing is every time I notice it's not me I win and I get a little more distance from it because it's a vampire and it strengthens itself and amplifies itself by pretending to be me in a sub vocal nagging when I bring it out to the sunshine so I tell people my only homework for all of my clients and for anybody confronting the life of the superego is, is your only real job is to get better and better when in conflict, they're going, oh, that's you curating this, not me. That's you, the inner critic telling me I'm not worthy or I'm unlovable or some small portion of, I'm not worthy and I'm not, that's not me, that's you. And the more times I do that, the weaker it gets and the farther away it goes, because that's really, it's only kind of bulwark

is the pretense that it's necessary and me, and it's neither. I have a conscience that's far more sophisticated than it's already well integrated into me by the time I'm 17. And by the way, some people say, well, what about sociopaths? Well, their superego isn't really very effective, is it? Yeah, their sociopaths never got too big. Well, so this is almost a beautiful place to kind of wind down our conversation. And guys, there are so many, Neil lays out really extensive processes that he's done with himself and he does with his clients to getting to know your inner critic, to having

conversations with it, to releasing it. But let's just end with this question. As you were describing, the more that you work with it and then start recognizing and continue to recognize that this isn't you and that it's not necessary and that it's not in charge and you work to release it and you've, this isn't, I'm sure a lifelong process. I'm assuming nobody is completely 100% free of this, as we were saying. But what does your life, what does one's life look like in comparison?

Right. So for someone listening and they're like, do I really want to do I mean, I know I have an inner critic, but like, what's the payoff? Yeah, the first and and for most people, the primary payoff is a massive reduction in anxiety because your anxiety is you think you're anxious about outcomes and you that you're anxious that the outcome will be not what you predicted and will go south on you. But the fact is, you're actually a mature adult and mature adults know that the outcome is wrong to you 20% of the time or 40% of the time or a certain percentage of the time. That's not a big deal. Things go south. Things don't work out. Yeah. what anxiety really is. And Freud, it's kind of one of these hidden gems that Freud figured out. Your anxiety is actually worry about being punished by the superego. And so the worry is a scornful look from an absent parent, right? The worry isn't the circumstance. The worry is the punishment of the superego. And the only punishment of the superego is a scornful look

of an absent parent. That's its only power to punish me. And moving the superego to the side removes the punishing parent. And without the punishing parent, you don't have anxiety. So my anxiety reduced. The other thing that happens, and this happens to a lot of people, And it certainly happened to me is this freedom of not being as worried all the time about right, wrong, good, bad allows me at least during the portion of the day that I'm not watching the news or that I'm not involved in some way with a family member who's just difficult or, you know, those parts of the day do appear. But the rest of the day is mine. yeah and i don't have it crowded with lists of things to do the super ego curates my list of things to do and doesn't let you just be in flow and doesn't let you at least me doesn't let me just chill it's like you should be doing this why aren't you being productive

and to me that's where the divine enters the world is when if i can just get my ego out of the way. And when we say ego, since we're not really in the survival business very much anymore, our ego really is our superego. It really is our inner critic. When the inner critic's to the side, it means my ego's not in the way. It means I'm not having to fear the world as it presents itself to me. And that's just what all the traditions say is the divine. It just opens to the divine. and it opens to love it opens to truth it opens to equanimity it opens to simple contentment yeah and i think those two things are connected right as you are less in a place of clenching anxiety trying to sort of attend to and avoid the disapproval inside your mind it creates so

much more space to be in those moments of grace and to live from grace, which is my constant intention. So I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful to you for this conversation and for all the work you're doing to help us eliminate a lot of our suffering. So thank you for being here and for this beautiful conversation. Oh, it is so beautiful. I very seldom get the chance to talk to a like-minded person who kind of shares my view of the weirdness that no one told us we had to discover on our own, that this wasn't us, that that voice was unnecessary and wasn't us. Yeah, that crazy roommate in our heads, man. The book is called Better Days, Tame Your Inner Critic by Neil Allen. Definitely worth a read and play with some of the techniques

he talks about. Nothing bad will happen. And my guess is something beautiful will begin to open. So thank you. Thank you for listening to The Language of Life. Thank you.