The Psychology of the Inner Critic: How the Voice Inside You Took Power
TL;DR: Psychodynamic therapist Rick Cox explains how the punishing internal voice takes power, linking it to shame and past emotional avoidance. Learn how we use The Therapy FAD Framework (Feelings, Anxiety, Defence) to shine a light on the self-attack and challenge the inner critic to achieve emotional freedom.
The inner critic collects every label you’ve ever believed about yourself. Therapy helps you see who you are beneath them
The Invisible Saboteur
You are attempting to make positive progress in your career, your relationships, or your personal growth. Yet, there is a constant presence in your mind: the punishing internal voice. It tells you you’re not enough, that success is temporary, or that you are fundamentally flawed. This voice is louder than your own sense of worth, leading to self-sabotage and profound emotional distress.
If this relentless self-criticism feels like an inevitable part of your personality, I want to challenge that belief. In depth psychotherapy, we understand that the inner critic is not your true self. It is a powerful psychological structure, the internalisation of past experiences, that took power to ensure your survival in a world that felt unsafe.
The goal of our work is to understand how it took power, so we can finally loosen its grip and reclaim the self it has held captive
How the Critic is Forged in the Past
The cruellest irony of the inner critic is that it often sounds exactly like someone who hurt you, abandoned you, or demanded perfection from you long ago. Your personal history still lives on inside you, like a dictator in your present.
The critic develops as a misguided form of defence mechanism. When a child faces painful emotions, especially shame, they may internalise the external criticism to predict or control future pain. If I punish myself first, I won't be surprised when others do it.
This structure, what we refer to in psychodynamic terms as the pathological Super-Ego, is focused entirely on maintaining emotional avoidance. It keeps you small, anxious, and stuck because genuine emotional freedom feels like an existential risk.
The Critic as the Engine of Anxiety and Shame
The voice inside your head is the primary mechanism fueling feelings of low self-worth and anxiety. Your fear of self is directly linked to the strength of this internal saboteur.
Our depth-oriented psychodynamic approach focuses on dismantling this critic not through sheer willpower or brute force, but through focused, relational action. We use The Therapy FAD Framework (Feelings, Anxiety, Defence) to shine a light on the self-attack:
• The Defence: The inner critic is the Defence, the self-attack that keeps you preoccupied and ensures you never access the vulnerable, painful Feelings (like grief or healthy anger) buried beneath the anxiety.
• The Relational Test: We observe moments when you minimise your achievements or apologise unnecessarily in the session. This is the re-enactment of the critic, turning you against yourself. The therapeutic space is used to confront this pattern, helping you learn to relate to yourself without collapsing into shame.
By gently, yet firmly, challenging the inner critic’s destructive logic, we help you restore emotional access and develop the capacity to tolerate your own anxiety.
Reclaiming Your Voice
Self-loathing and self-sabotage are not a life sentence. They are symptoms of historical struggles you’ve had to survive. You don't have to keep emotionally surviving.
Where Fear Meets Freedom means committing to the difficult, courageous task of recognising the critic as the enemy of your authentic self. Therapy helps you separate who you are from what you’ve carried, strengthening your healthier, adaptive self so you can step into a life that feels more your own, more connected, more grounded, and more yourself.
The critic’s voice is one face of repetition, pain turned inward. Why We Repeat What Hurts Us explores how familiar suffering becomes its own strange safety.
If this reflection resonated, you might explore:
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
What Cures in Therapy Is Truth…
The inner critic appears as cruel. However, it’s terrified.… Therapy helps it stand down.
Explore more in depth
Is your inner critic louder than you?
If you’re tired of fighting the voice inside your head, therapy can help you uncover where it began, and who you were before you needed it.
FAQ: The Inner Critic and Therapy
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It likely developed as a way to avoid rejection, criticism, or punishment early in life, an unconscious strategy to feel safe through self-control.
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Yes. Therapy helps you understand the function of your critic, regulate the anxiety it defends against, and develop a more compassionate internal dialogue.
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That’s common. In therapy, you’ll learn to slow the process down, to feel before reacting, so the critic’s voice becomes distinct from your own.
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Healthy reflection is different from self-attack. The goal isn’t to remove self-evaluation but to remove the shame that drives it.
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Notice when it speaks and what emotion comes right before it. Beneath every harsh word is a feeling waiting to be felt.
