The voice of this harsh inner critic still sucks joy from my creative life

By David McElroy · August 26, 2018

My inner critic is constantly busy. Every time I think I’m making progress on quieting his harsh criticism, he pops up again — ready to tell me that my work is no good and that I’m not good enough.

This isn’t anything new. I’ve talked about it before. But since my father died four months ago, I’ve had moments when I thought maybe that voice had died with him. For now, though, the voice is still there, at least part of the time.

This afternoon, I received a really nice note on Instagram from someone who I don’t know. This person posts really high-quality shots of nature and recently started following one of my accounts.

“Hello!” this fellow photographer wrote. “I just wanted to say your photos are so amazing, especially the recent ones! You’ve become my favorite account to follow. Keep up the fantastic work. All the best.”

A sane and reasonable person would feel happy with such praise, but my harsh inner critic seemed to hear only four words: “…especially the recent ones.” So that must mean the things that aren’t recent must be terrible. Why else would he have felt the need to qualify his praise? Right? Something in me felt crushed.

My rational brain knows better. Some part of me knows there was no such criticism intended. But the inner critic doesn’t care what makes sense. The inner critic doesn’t care about anything other than robbing me of the joy which I could otherwise take from my work.

I shot the photo above late this afternoon. I was sitting at a traffic light and suddenly noticed the sun behind this foliage created beautiful colors and highlights. I grabbed my camera from the seat beside me and fired off five quick shots before the light could turn green.

I was happy with the picture. It’s at times like this — when I’ve done some minor thing which few people are going to notice, but which I believe is good — when I feel best about my work. They’re moments in which I realize I do have talent and that I’m getting better and better as I work on the various parts of my craft.

It seems as though those are the moments when the inner critic is most likely to strike. I had posted this picture to Facebook and Instagram. It was a few minutes after that when I got the gracious note from the other photographer.

And that’s when the inner critic struck.

I’ve told you before where this inner critic comes from. My father used to harshly criticize me, especially when I did things for which I received praise. I constantly wanted to impress people — because something in me has always been starved for praise and attention — but when I received that praise, I wanted my father to be proud of me. And that’s always when he found reasons to criticize me and tell me why what I had done wasn’t good enough.

“If you had done this the way I told you, it would have been even better,” was a constant theme of his criticism, even when what I had done had surpassed the work of everyone else around me. He couldn’t just let me bask in the joy of praise.

And the inner critic still tries to play his role, even after he’s dead.

It’s humiliating to admit to you how much I still need your praise. I’m scared my work isn’t good enough. I’m scared other people aren’t going to like it. I’m scared I’ll never be good enough to be the big commercial success I want to be.

I wish I didn’t need that affirmation. I wish my own rational approval was good enough for me. But as long as the inner critic is still there, I’m afraid I’ll still need you to help me overcome that — to let me know I’m doing good work.

Yes, I’m too sensitive about my work. I know that. Even praise can be turned around and made to seem bad. I have to ask for your patience. It’s one of my faults. I’m aware of it, but I haven’t been able to get past this one — so please be patient with my fears.

Note: If you’d like to follow my Instagram accounts, you can find one which focuses mostly on sunsets and random nature shots here and another which focuses on the cats and dog in my life here. I can only imagine how many photos I’ll take one day when I have children whose lives I can document. The small inset photo above on the right is Thomas watching birds outside the house Sunday afternoon. The picture below is Lucy’s Saturday afternoon portrait in the back yard.

Share on Social Networks

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

Related Posts