so this is the ICr ?!?!

[paul72]

I was sitting with my wife last night, we were catching up on our days, when I found myself dissociating.
She was talking and I was trying to get myself back to hear what she was saying. To myself, I said " come on... you can't be doing this now"
And then there it was.. the first time I'd heard the voice so clearly
"You always do this... you can't get back... you're messed up... you'll never be ok..."
I mean I've had these thoughts a million times but I had never heard that voice ... certainly I've never known what it was.
I could acknowledge it was my ICr, just mocking me. In the moment, I was able to see that I was the BIG person and he was just a TINY bully.
That wasn't enough for me to stop it unfortunately.. it took about 15 minutes before I could finally distract myself.
He was SO MEAN! I can only imagine how damaging he's been to my mental stability. I am really hoping that having heard him now, I can start to recognize him more and diminish his power.
He might be small but he's a real piece of ** lol

[Kizzie]

Yeah, you heard AND saw him for what he is - a tiny bully.    

[Papa Coco]

Phil,

I hope this doesn't sound too crazy, but I'll share what my T and I do when my inner critic abuses me like this.

That IC may be a bully, but the ability to dissociate is not. In MY situation (Not speaking for you, but for myself), my Therapist and I go through this all the time. He reminds me that the part of my brain that does the dissociation is doing it out of love for me. Protection. It sees a familiar ancient threat and jumps into action to protect me--because it loves me. It doesn't need to be stopped, it just needs to be reminded that I'm all grown up now and able to handle more stress than I once could. The dissociation protected me from harm when I was a child, so that's what it knows to do now. My T tells me that when this happens, to NOT hate my helper, but to thank it for having my back. I sometimes need to stop what I'm doing, close my eyes, and try to connect with the part of me that's decided to make me dissociate. It even helps to put my own hand on my own shoulder to add a physical sense of love, and to see myself as strong adult me talking with frightened child me, saying "I see you're very scared right now." Early on in this therapy, he even had me pick two seats and move myself physically from one seat when I'm the child to the other seat when I'm the adult, so that my brain could more easily see my two parts talking with each other in a friendly, helpful way, rather than resist. You know how resistance works: If you hate someone you avoid them. If you hate part of yourself you avoid it. If you avoid it, it becomes even more disconnected. We need to embrace all parts of ourselves so we can join forces and get past our pasts.         (My post, here-and-now, is extremely oversimplified. A good, quality therapist should know how to do this very skillfully with you.  I'm not trying to tell anyone how to be cured, but I'm just trying to show that my therapist is taking the opposite approach to being angry at the voices in my head who are trying to help me.)

Once I can calmly put myself into the shoes of my "protector" who's giving me the dissociative protection, I can often get my protector to agree to let me handle this without dissociating so badly. My T says that while I'm in my distress, that's when I should have all my parts say to each other, "I'm with you. I'm for you. You're in me. And I'm in you." I do this now, and I repeat the words until I feel like they are getting through to me. The goal is to merge the frightened child with the protective adult and with the dissociative helper. CPTSD is a fragmenting of the brain into its natural, different parts. It simply stops the communication between fear, love, hate, sadness, joy, etc. These exercises are meant to help me start communicatively bringing those parts back together so I can become more and more whole again. My Therapist says that I'm "bringing my whole team to the table to work this out as a team, rather than as fragmented individuals."

Rather than spending my life being either too hot or too cold, I'm learning to blend so I can become comfortably warm. Able to protect myself from abusers without losing my compassion and bliss.

Even the inner critic voice in my head was coming from a place of love. It's like the voice was frustrated and lashing out, saying "SEE?  See what happens when you don't do what others expect from you? You big Dummy?" It was a warning, trying to get me to stop going too close to old danger. For me, the IC sounded like the voices of all my abusers who spent decades shaming me for being me. For me to hear them inside my own head was me becoming my own abuser first so I could protect myself from THEM doing it.     (Again: This post is very oversimplified: I really need my professional T helping me with this, but over the years I'm getting better and better and better at doing this myself without his help.)

Today, the more I stop being afraid of the part of me that's trying to protect me, the more that IC voice quiets further down. For me, the IC voice was tied directly to my NPD sister, my crazy mom, my crazy dad, and my abusive priests, nuns, teachers and classmates from when I was in catholic school. Knowing my depression and anxiety and dissociation are all trying to help gives me an ever-growing sense of peace and thankfulness for my own, well-meaning, but overly zealous inner protectors. It makes me less afraid and frustrated. I feel like I'm learning how to use their protection in a more productive way, rather than "the tail wagging the dog" in my life. It makes me more thankful that they once helped me survive a time when some of the boys I grew up with in Catholic school took their own lives. My ability to dissociate saved my life where it didn't save other boys from that same school. So, with a lot of repeated help from my professional Therapist, I can now release my fear and anger and just say "Thanks for protecting me, but right now I don't need you. I'm all grown up now and my wife is not mean like my mom and siblings and priests were."

Even the IC is trying to help us. It's trying to tell us to remember how dangerous it once was to be criticized by our former abusers. For me, if I chastised myself, I was helping my abusers abuse me.

This technique is something my professional T and I do together a lot. If you have a therapist, you might ask them about this method. It's been the only thing that's ever worked for me. That's why I use DBT therapists instead of CBT therapists. In the past, my 7 CBT's over the span of 20 years, used to try to help me try to stop listening to the critic. If CBT works for you, please use what works for you. But it didn't work for me. So I had no choice but to find a different type of therapy. In MY history, the CBT's I paid all used a similar version of a cure that only worked for a year or two at a time. It was a behavior modification trick, sort of like screaming into a pillow or snapping a rubber band on my wrist. It didn't, in any way, help me to merge my fragmented parts back together.

Again: I'm so sorry for writing such a long post. And again: I'm NOT a trained professional so please take what I say as nothing more than me telling you what worked for me. I am NOT qualified to tell anyone else how to get better. I am qualified only to report my own experiences.

[Blueberry]

Phil, it's actually your ICr! IC = Inner Child

Yes, ime once you figure out where those sentences are coming from it gets easier to spot them and tell them to shut up or whatever else works for you.

[paul72]

thanks Kizzie, Papa and Blueberry
I'll change that title to ICr  ... a pretty important distinction, thank you

I was pretty stressed about it last night but definitely feeling positive about being able to recognize it for the first time

[Papa Coco]

Thanks for the correction, Kizzie. ICr. 

[Kizzie]

It was actually BB that picked up on it - she has sharp eyes, always has lol.

I think it's awesome that you feel positive about being able to see/hear your ICr so clearly.  Now you can talk back to it whereas before you likely wouldn't quite have known it was doing it's thing.  That may allow you to choose whether to stay present or not (dissociate or not).

I do agree with Papa that it bullies us out of love most of the time (i.e., trying to protect us), other times, at least in my case, it just feels like my abusers having a go at me. In either case hearing it clearly means perhaps you can talk to it about piping down.