A Surprisingly Effective Way to Deal With Your Inner Critic

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:19Hey, hey, happy Friday, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite and really most impactful for me personally, theories of the case when it comes to the human mind. I don't know if you ever saw that movie Inside Out or the sequel Inside Out 2. The idea is that it takes you inside the mind of an American girl and shows how she's got these different parts to her. She's got her angry part, jealous part, calm part, happy part, joyous part. This is true of all of us. and learning to understand that we've got these different modes into which we go and then developing a sane relationship with the various parts of your personality.

0:57You might call them demons, although not all of them are negative or problematic. But this view of the psyche and how to work with it has been incredibly helpful to me. And it's not entirely new, all the way back to the Buddha. The Buddha was working even after his enlightenment with one of his most problematic parts. He called this part Mara. It's kind of the god of desire and aversion and delusion, a kind of avatar of the most problematic aspects of the human repertoire. There's a lot to this. And like I said, I have found it incredibly helpful and I'm not alone. All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting some of our favorite moments from past episodes, kind of golden nuggets from our vast archive as selected by members of the team here at 10 % Happier.

1:45Today's episode is built around a selection from Mani Chandy, who works on our Substack operation. When we asked Mani, can you think of one of the most impactful things you've heard on the show? He mentioned a specific part of my conversation with Dick Schwartz, who's a family therapist, an academic, and a founder of a school of psychology called Internal Family systems, which is where you kind of look at the various parts of your mind and figure out how they work together and how you can work with them more successfully. So coming up, you're going to hear Monty talk about why he found this so impactful, and then you'll hear the specific portion of the interview with Dick Schwartz that landed so powerfully with Monty.

2:26Before we get to that, I just want to remind you that we're offering guided meditations that are customized to all of our episodes now, all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. And for the month of August, our teacher of the month is Kyra Jewel Lingo. These meditations are available to paid subscribers over at danharris.com. They're now the new normal here, so look out for them on the regular. As you've heard me say before, we really think about the podcast as the lecture and the guided meditations as the lab where you really get to practice all the fascinating stuff you learn on the show. So today's a Friday episode, so there's no guided meditation that comes with this episode.

3:03But if you want to hear all of the past and future, Monday, Wednesday, customized guided meditation, sign up at DanHarris.com. OK, coming up, we'll hear from Monty and then Dick Schwartz. If you're a loyal listener to this show, you know that I am an avid worker outer. And if you are going to exercise on the regular, one thing you need, it's a non-negotiable, at least in my opinion. You need quality socks. You can't skimp on your socks. And one of the sponsors of this show is Bombas, and they've been sending me these socks that I use when I work out. Not only when I work out, but also when I'm out in the world just wearing sneakers and I want some good-looking socks, I go to my Bombas on those occasions as well.

3:46It's become a little bit of a source of marital discord because my wife and I compete for the Bombas socks, so that's reminding me I need to go order some more. Long way of saying they make high-quality socks, But that's not all they make. They also make footwear. Do you know what EVA stands for? Neither did I. But Bombas makes their sandals and slides from this super lightweight, cushy, waterproof EVA foam. It's like walking on marshmallows. They also make underwear and T-shirts, the best base layers you'll ever own. Head over to Bombas.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20 % off your first purchase.

4:22That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash happier. Code happier at checkout. Hey, it's Dan. I just want to tell you about something I'm really proud of. The new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship.

4:58I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind. That makes you happier and less reactive because you're steadier. That improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier. Then your relationships get even better and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers like Sabine Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also, add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions.

5:33We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. Hey everyone, I'm Monty Chandy, one of the editors on the 10 % Happier Substack. For my staff pick, I wanted to highlight a conversation Dan had recently with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy. This episode hit home for me. Like a lot of people, I can be incredibly hard on myself when I screw up, especially when I don't live up to my own standards. There's a part of me that tries to keep everything under control and get things just right.

6:12And when I fall short, another part shows up as an inner critic, saying harsh things to myself I never dream of saying to a friend. Or sometimes, it's distraction. Scrolling TikTok, shopping online for things I don't need, whatever. What I love about Dr. Schwartz's take is that it doesn't label parts of us as bad or broken. Even my inner critic, or the part that numbs out with shopping or doom-scrolling, is genuinely trying to help me get my needs met. Living with all these parts of myself, often with conflicting ideas of what's best for me and how to achieve this, reminds me of the Walt Whitman line, I am large, I contain multitudes.

6:51This episode helped me to see those parts not as problems to fix, but as voices worth listening to. When I notice a part has taken over, I often ask myself, what is this part trying to accomplish? Or, what does this part need right now? Dr. Schwartz's approach helps me remember that we're all usually just trying to do the best we can with the imperfect tools we've developed. This way of thinking has made me a little kinder, both to myself and to others. I hope it does the same for you. Thanks so much, Monty. All right, so now let's hear the part of the interview with Richard Schwartz where he explains the basics of IFS or internal family systems.

7:30I thought maybe it would make sense to start with a refresher on IFS, internal family systems. Let me hand you the mic and you can just walk us through the basics of it. Okay, so there's a couple big pieces to it. So one in contrast to the most common way of understanding the mind, which is to think of it as unitary. I believe it's the natural state of the mind to be multiple. and that people with that diagnosis of multiple personality are no different from anybody else except that their system got blown apart more by the horrific trauma they suffered. But the idea that we all have these little inner beings, these little inner personalities, is for me a natural state of the mind.

8:19And that they also, before they're hurt or when they're not hurt, they're incredibly valuable. Each of them are there for a good reason. They have talents and resources to help us in our lives. But that trauma and what's called attachment injuries, which is basically bad parenting, and all the things we suffer, especially when we're kids, force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be quite destructive in our lives and freeze them in time so that many of these parts, you know, if I were to have you ask a part of you, like a critic or something, how old it thought you were, most people get a single digit.

9:05They still think you're five or six, and they still have to protect you in the way they did back then. So they get frozen in time, and they take in what I call burdens, which are the extreme beliefs and emotions that came into you during the trauma and then graft onto them and then drive the way they operate like a virus might. So that's the state of most of our parts, at least the ones that I tend to work with, because I'm a therapist. I'm trying to help people with the parts that are getting in their way. So the other couple pieces of this, because I come from a family therapy background, I had two advantages.

9:48One is I didn't know anything about intrapsychic work, psychoanalysis, or any of that. So when clients started talking about this back in the early 80s, these parts, I really just had to listen and try to understand what they were saying rather than impose a theory on them. And the second advantage I had is from family therapy, I was a systems thinker. So in families, we would track the interactions of family members with each other, and then try to make a map of who's allied to whom, and who's polarized with whom, and you can do that. And with that map, then we would know where to go to try and intervene.

10:28So I began doing that with these parts. I wasn't interested in each one individually, but how do they relate to each other as a system? And a map I came up with ultimately, which is held up as this very useful map over these 40 years is that there are these, you know, other systems would call them inner children, these young vulnerable parts of us who are very sensitive, but also when they're not hurt, are playful and joyful and creative and loving. And we love them because they're our most precious qualities a lot of the time, but they're the ones, because they're most sensitive, but get hurt the most.

11:06And so, they take on the burden of terror from some trauma, or the burden of worthlessness and shame, or the burden of emotional pain. And then once they carry that, and they're stuck in those scenes, we don't want to be around them anymore, because they have the power to overwhelm us with those feelings and pull us back into those scenes. And so we have almost natural instinct to lock those parts away. And our culture tells us to do that. This is a just move on, don't look back kind of culture. So we try to move on from the memories and the emotions of the trauma, but not realizing that we're also moving away from the parts of us that were hurt the most.

11:55So we call those exiles. When you do that, not only do those parts get hurt because you've abandoned them, but you lose contact with those wonderful qualities that carry. And so most of us growing up in this culture have a bunch of exiles. And when you have a bunch of those kind of raw, vulnerable parts, you feel more delicate because so many things could trigger that. and the world seems more dangerous because so many things could trigger it. And so other parts are forced out of their naturally valuable states to become protectors. Some of them are trying to protect you by managing your life so that your exiles don't get triggered, so they'll manage your relationships so no one gets close enough to hurt you again, or they'll try to make you look perfect so no one rejects you, or they'll try to make you achieve at a high level to counter the worthlessness.

12:50make you take care of everybody so that they depend on you, they don't leave you, don't let you take care of yourself. So these are just some of the common, what I call manager, protector roles that otherwise people call the ego, basically. But they have in common the desire to keep you safe and in control and to please people, and mainly so that you can not get triggered, these exiles don't burst out with their flames of raw emotion. Now, it doesn't always work, and the world has a way of breaking through those defenses and triggering your exiles. And when that happens, that's a big emergency, because it feels like these raw flames of emotion are going to take you out.

13:37And for many of the people I work with, they do. You know, when you get really triggered, you can't function, and some people are in bed for a week, and so on. So, it's all very real. So, there are other parts who are kind of on standby, waiting to deal with this explosion of flames of emotion by either getting you higher than those flames or dousing them with some substance or distracting you until they burn themselves out. So, we call those firefighters. So, that's the map. It's pretty simple. Exiles, and then two different kinds of protectors. One, the managers who are trying to preempt anything that might trigger the exiles.

14:21And then the firefighters who react after the fact, after an exile has been triggered. And in contrast to the managers who are careful and try to keep you in control and please people, these firefighters don't care about the consequences to your body, to your relationships, they just got to get you away from those feelings right now, no matter what it takes. And so there's built-in polarizations inside of us also between the part that when you feel that wants to get you drunk and then the part that attacks you for being a drunk and so on. That's the map of the parts, but actually the big deal about IFS, and I think this is very related to your word, is that in addition to these parts, there's a kind of essence in people that I call the self with a capital S.

15:13And I just stumbled onto that discovery back in the day, you know, a long time ago. Because as a family therapist, once I got hip to the fact these parts weren't what they seemed and they needed to be listened to rather than fought with, I would try to get clients to do that so maybe I'm having you try to get to know your critic and get curious about it rather than hate it and you're doing that and you're listening to the critic and it's telling you about how it's trying to protect you by running down your confidence so you don't take risks or by pushing you to achieve more there's always a positive intention even though often it backfires so I'm trying to get you to listen and even extend some appreciation to this part that you've hated and then suddenly the part that hates it has jumped in and is doing the talking and so things go south and it reminded me of family sessions where I'm trying to have two family members talk to each other and a third member comes in and sides with one against the other and it goes south and I began asking clients could you find the part that hates the critic or is afraid of it or whatever part you're working with has got an attitude about?

16:29And could you ask that one to give us the space to just get to know this one we're trying to work with? And to my amazement, when these other parts would separate, it was like some other person popped out and would do the talking and had these qualities that were really useful, like was calm, where seconds earlier they were really agitated or had confidence relative to the part or were just purely curious about it and also often would suddenly become compassionate toward it. And in that state, whatever part, the critic, let's say, would drop its guard and would really respond well. And then the client would basically take over the session and would know how to relate in a healing way to this part.

17:16And when I would do that with other clients, it was like the same person would pop out with those same C-word qualities, calm, confident, compassion, curiosity, but also would be clear. The image would change or would be courageous and could go to places that couldn't before or would be creative in how they related to the part or feel connected to it. And when I would ask people, what part of you is that? That's great. Let's keep that around. They'd say some version of that's not a part like these others. That's myself. So that's why I came to call that the self with a capital S. And now, 40 years later, we can safely say that that self is in everybody, can't be damaged, knows how to heal, and is just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they open space, it pops out spontaneously.

18:08And so that's the big deal about IFS. That's what I'm trying to bring to the culture is this kind of different understanding of human beings and the mind that is much more uplifting, actually. You said a lot there, so I'm going to try to sum it up, although it's a lot to sum up. But essentially, the IFS model says, I think it's intuitive, really. We all have these different modes, these different aspects of our personality, angry, jealous, happy, creative, ashamed, whatever. And you refer to these as parts. Sometimes these parts get inflamed, exacerbated through the trauma of our lives. and we try to compartmentalize or shut them out because it's too painful to handle.

18:57At that point, the part becomes an exile. That's correct. At which point we see the emergence of two, you might call, protector parts. The manager, often an inner critic who's kind of like a sheepdog, trying to keep everybody in line to manage things so that the exiles don't grab the mic. and alternatively the firefighter who's much less regulated and will try to douse the flames with alcohol or shopping or gambling or whatever it is. Both are trying to manage the exile in different ways. That's true. The route to sanity is to, first of all, to recognize that we have all of these parts and then to the best of your ability to relate to them from what you're calling the capital S self.

19:44And so I know we talked about this last time, but I think it's worth bringing up again. What is the link for you between what you're calling the capital S self and what in Buddhism we would call not self, like our core is that we have no core, that the self, the idea that there's some core Dan behind my eyes, between my ears, that's an illusion. In fact, a really harmful illusion, whereas you're pointing to this capital S self as being the point of origination for healing. Yeah, so I've had many, many of these conversations with Buddhists, and what we can usually come to is it's linguistic. So what they're calling self is really what I'm calling parts.

20:30So, no self in Buddhism is really the absence of these sometimes extreme voices and parts that are cluttering your mind. And as you get them to open space inside, you find this kind of calm essence that people call no self in Buddhism, but for me is really the self, the capital S. So, that's where I've come to reconcile it. And for somebody who's having, I can imagine at this point listeners being a little confused. And I'm probably part of the problem because I brought in this hard to understand concept of no self. But just again, very simply, your concept of the self is the best part of us, the sanest, calmest, clearest, most compassionate aspect of the human mind.

21:20Yeah, and it's our essence, actually. It's who we are when all these parts separate. And it has these great C-word qualities that I just mentioned and some other kinds of qualities. And for me, and this is related to your work too, I think, when I encountered it in people, I couldn't reconcile its existence because I'd been trained in what's called attachment theory to believe that to have any of that inside, you had to have gotten it from a relationship. So as a child, you needed to have gotten it from good enough parenting. If you didn't get it there, you had to get it from a therapist. And if you didn't get it there, you had to get it from a spouse or someplace.

22:01For it to be native inside of us, and I was working with people who had been horribly abused on a daily basis as children, and so there was no way I could reconcile encountering this and them with that theory. So, it wasn't until I started and I was sort of directed to look into spirituality that I could ground that observation. Because like you were saying about Buddhism, virtually every spiritual tradition has a word for this and almost no other psychologies do. So, in Buddhism, it's not only no self, but it's also Buddha nature. And in Christianity, it would be Christ consciousness. In Hinduism, it's Atma.

22:43And in Judaism, it's Nefesh. and so on. I actually co-authored a book where we went through each tradition and identified that essence that we were finding in us and how they describe in very similar ways. But I was finding that we could access that very quickly in people, even people who've been horribly traumatized, in contrast to a lot of those traditions where you have to meditate 20 years to get to it. But for me, it is the same and it is a kind of drop of a bigger ocean. so the model in my own thinking has much more evolved in a spiritual direction that way that there is this big self that others have other names for that you can access through meditation you can access through psychedelics and that you know this is a particle of that big wave or a drop of that big ocean yeah there's a whole debate here that i don't think we should have about big self, because I think there are some in the Buddhist world, including many of my own teachers, who would say, as long as you're identifying with anything, you're suffering.

23:54But let me set that aside and go to this notion of, in the later schools of Buddhism, of a Buddha nature, which, as you said, there are names for this in many spiritual traditions. My understanding is this kind of gets us into the debate of, like, what is fundamental about human nature? Are we red in tooth and claw? Are we rotten root and branch? Or are we essentially good? And I'm not an expert in this, but my understanding is there are some data coming out of the sciences indicating that actually, like in our rawest state, you know, if you look at a baby, for example, and put in front of a baby like a mean character or a nice character, they'll very naturally gravitate toward the nice character.

24:35Or if you have a baby or a toddler in the room and somebody participating in the experiment, pantomimes being in pain, they will naturally express concern and try to help. So there are some indications that this idea of a Buddha nature or essential goodness, it doesn't require exogenous factors like good parenting. It's just in us. Yeah. So I'm just finishing reading for the second time a book by a guy named Rucker Bregman called Humankind, where he goes through all the data there is to show that we've been laboring under this misconception about what people are really like. And we do have this really good essence.

25:16So I'd recommend that. I wrote it down. It includes the research you're talking about. Yeah, maybe a guest on this show. I do want to get to the practical, because that's the subject of your new book, but just to stay with the sort of esoterica for a second, you know, when you talk about managers and firefighters, again, just to refresh people's memories, these are the parts that we develop to keep our shit together. In the case of the manager, often the manager manifests as a kind of inner critic, keeping you in line. And then the firefighter is kind of a wanton, reckless pain relief often, you know, just let's just get us out of this let's save us from the exiled unwanted parts of ourselves by drowning it in some sort of dopamine ocean it reminds me a little bit, especially the managers and here's where I could probably get myself in trouble with Buddhist scholars but to the very small extent to which I understand protect your deities within Tibetan Buddhism I'm wondering whether there's some overlap there I think so.

26:27Yeah, I've been collaborating a little bit with Tris Soltra Malioni. Do you know that name? She wrote a book called Feeding Your Demons, and she's a Tibetan Lama. Yeah, that's where we've come to some agreement that those demons, they call them, are really just these protective parts, and that rather than fight with them, feed them and help them calm down and relax and transform. So, yeah, I agree with that. It's so interesting she has this term feeding your demons. I kind of independently arrived, well, independently, nothing's independent, a codependent universe or an interdependent universe.

27:06But I've started using the term high-fiving your demons. It's great, yeah. You know, and I've learned this from you, and I've also learned it through the work of Kristen Neff and others involved in self-compassion And of course, in my Buddhist practice and studies, you know, I think my traditional approach and the approach of many people is to use the managers or the firefighters to keep the exiles at bay. And it's pretty hostile. Whereas if you blow them a kiss or give them a high five or feed them, not in the sense of indulgence. Exactly. But in a sense of like, thank you, I recognize that these exile parts, or even the managers I may not like, are essentially, as you said before, the organism trying to protect itself.

27:50We develop these habits and patterns, often for very good reasons, but they're not skillful. If you welcome them to the party and give them a party hat and let them sit at the table, they often get quite compliant. Very much, yeah. That is part of what I'm trying to bring. I actually could reference a book, because we're talking so much about Buddhism that just came out, called Outshining Trauma by a guy named Ralph De La Rosa. And it's all about IFS and Buddhism. And one of the big pieces of it is that there's been such an attitude about the ego, quote-unquote, in so many Buddhist traditions, and that we're really trying to get Buddhists to do what you're talking about, which is to love them up, And if you do that instead of trying to shoo them away, these parts, that you get much more cooperation in your meditation.

28:45Yes. What I realized doing high-dose loving-kindness meditation, where you flood the mind with warmth, it can feel quite forced or treacly or saccharine, this practice. But what I realized after I got over myself and allowed myself to do it at a high dosage was as my demons, let's call them that, or my parts, whatever you want to say, were emerging in my practice, I was meeting them with more warmth. And I was realizing that my mindfulness practice heretofore was shot through with aversion. Totally. And aversion is, in Buddhist speak, a hindrance. That's right. If you're actually feeling aversion towards something, you're not truly being mindful of it.

29:24So, mindfulness properly understood, self-awareness properly understood, contains in it a kind of mixture of warmth and non-judgmentalism. And I was practicing mindfulness improperly up until that point, really. Maybe. I mean, I've just run into many Buddhist teachings that actually encourage you to do it that way. So, yeah. So, this is revolutionary in the Buddhist world. and another woman named Lama Willa Baker has really transformed her teaching around that. And it's hard to be loving and compassionate to this ego that gets vilified in Buddhism. It's a lot easier if you think of them as these little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe and sometimes are misguided.