In desperate need of relief from inner critic

[holidayay]

My inner critic has gone berserk the past few months.
It's urging me more and more to consider that I am a useless waste of space.
I feel embarrassed by myself. I feel like a let down, a loser and a reject and that I deserve all of these things.
How to quieten this down?
I'm at my wit's end.

[Chart]

Holidayay, I'm sorry for this flare-up. Pete Walker's, Cptsd FSTT has a whole section on dealing with the inner critic. I need to go back and reread the book as a lot of it has melted from my memory since I read it a year ago. Wish I could be of more help.
Sending hugs and support if that's ok, Chart
 

[Armee]

 

You're in a profession too that breeds that type of self-criticism. Add in cptsd and ouch!

I don't know if this will help you...what I noticed to be true for myself was that the barrage of self-criticism and flat out hate would come when there was something else upsetting happening that would be harder to look at and deal with so the barrage of hate toward myself was this blaring distraction from whatever thought/feeling/situation I was unintentionally avoiding.

For me it was a very slow process of breaking down that cycle but how I did it just sort of evolved naturally. The first step  was just noticing the criticism to start with because for me and maybe you it just played in the background constantly I didn't even know it was normal to walk around without that horrible stuff in your head. It was just white noise.

After that step I started to notice sooner when it would start so that I could catch it at the beginning of the barrage.

Once I was noticing when it started then I started to wonder "now wait, I was just walking down the street feeling good and all the sudden I am hearing these voices about how stupid ugly disgusting and bad I am. What happened to make me feel that way just now?"

Then I started to be able to trace back in my mind and realize that something difficult had popped up in my mind and that these negative thoughts about myself were a massive distraction from the other difficult thing.

THEN I could start to push through the negative thoughts toward myself and pay attention to the trigger underneath them. "Oh. I'm not really a bad horrible human who's stupid and disgusting; I was thinking about my mom and that's so hard to deal with, let me go back to trying to pay attention to those feelings instead."

Or I became more aware of trauma triggers too. So being in a grocery store and someone would come close to me all the sudden I felt incredibly disgusting and gross and  completely overwhelmed with how everyone would know how disgusting I was and I'd need to get out of there and go wash myself in the store bathroom.

I TRULY THOUGHT I was disgusting and had to save people the horror of being near me. I thought that was why those thoughts were there....because they were true. But eventually I learned "ah: I was triggered. This is a trigger and I am having an emotional flashback to when I felt that way. It isn't that I AM disgusting, it's that I am remembering feeling that way and because hey because it's a flashback it feels like that is NOW, but it's the past."

All a very long way of saying...those negative thoughts are either a distraction from something else that is bothering you - smoke bomb! - or the symptoms of a flashback that feels like it is happening NOW. Get to the bottom of it and those voices will eventually soften and then eventually go away. Not quickly, but there's relief to be had.

I wish you luck in getting to the bottom of your relentless inner critic so you can have some peace. I guarantee you are not those horrible things. You're pretty amazing to be able to push through the things that happened to you and to make it in this intense intense field.   

[Blueberry]

holidayay, my ICr. used to say all that sort of stuff too, still does in fact but not so relentlessly. That's what inner critics do. May I say that you are not all that stuff your ICr. is telling you? Sometimes it helps to hear from someone else: You have as much right to a spot on this earth, just like everybody else around you. Just like the rest of us on the forum!!

You do NOT deserve what your ICr. is telling you! My ICr. uses words my FOO used against me, and they are not correct. If it's not too overwhelming, do you know whose words your ICr. is using? Sometimes it's helpful to know and to be able to take a tiny step back and say: "That's just them, it's not me."

It could also be a sign you're in a huge EF, which might have subsided already, I hope so.

Sending support.

[Chart]

  
Armee and Bluberry have summed it up beautifully!

[Kizzie]

I agree, BB and Armee said it well. 

The thing that helped me the most was asking myself when my inner critic flared up, "Am I really that bad, seriously? When I compare myself to the people who abused/neglected me how do I fare by comparison?" And of course I had to say "Not even close". I would then have a little talk with myself about what was actually good about me and little by little I convinced the voice to quiet down because that part of me knew it could not convince me anymore.

The other thing I did was take note of when the voice would flare up and it was when I started to feel good. That ICr part of us wants to keep us safe by not making us vulnerable to someone taking away our good feelings as most abusers tend(ed) to do. We do it to ourselves first before anyone else can. The thing of it is though, once we come to believe we are not bad or whatever the voice is trying to tell us, it has no power to scare us into curling up in a ball anymore.  We start to choose to live and we aren't as afraid of what that will bring because honestly chances are it can't be any worse than what we've already endured.

So my mantra nowadays is "Feel good, it's okay." Hope this helps!