Getting In Your Own Corner
A common topic that any therapist works on with clients is figuring out what to do with the part of us that is self-critical.
I don’t know if it’s universal or not to have an inner voice that is critical, but it sure seems close.
You would think that letting go of a part of ourselves that spends all day criticizing us and making us feel bad would be easy when we want to feel better, but it’s more complicated than that.
This critical voice usually serves some important part of ourselves that we really don’t want to let go of. In other words, it does something important for us. Its motivations are good, it just has some pretty harsh methods.
For example, maybe this critical voice is trying to help us navigate socially in order to avoid rejection from others around us, or maybe it’s trying to help us connect with others, or maybe it’s trying to help us be at our best in some way, helping us stay focused, or motivated, or overcome barriers.
These are all important things, and so it makes sense that we might be reluctant to let go of a part of us that’s trying to accomplish something so important.
The good news, though, is that we don’t need to let go of what our critical voice is trying to accomplish. We just need to change our approach, because that critical voice isn’t actually going to help us out to the extent it’s trying.
The critical voice may really be in our corner, so to speak, but its method is hampering our abilities, stunting our potential, limiting our growth.
There’s an example I’ve found myself turning to recently, taking the idea of “being in our corner” literally: the relationship of a boxing coach to a boxer.
More specifically, I find myself thinking of the most recent addition to the Rocky franchise, Creed II, and the relationship between the young Creed’s opponent Viktor Drago and his father and coach Ivan Drago.
I’ll skip giving a rundown of the whole movie and get straight away to why I think this image is helpful.
Earlier in the movie, the Drago father-and-son team are out training. The younger Drago is running, while his father follows behind driving a truck and yelling encouragement. At one point he swerves the truck in front of his son, gets out slowly but obviously upset, and says flatly without room for argument: “If I tell you to run faster, you run faster.” His son looks pained, as if helpless, but doesn’t argue and just nods agreement.
This gives us a lot of information about their relationship. The elder Drago coaches his son ruthlessly, unquestioned, from a distance, and driven by something that is causing him to not see his son’s pain at the distance between them.
We find out over the course of the movie what’s driving Ivan Drago, and he finally does come to truly see his son Viktor, but it takes his son being beaten badly in the ring and losing before this happens.
At the end of the movie, there’s a brief shot of the father-and-son Drago team training again, but we can clearly see that their relationship has changed. Ivan is no longer in a truck following his son, pushing him from a distance, with ruthless persistence.
Instead the two are both running, side by side, and the younger Viktor gives his father a quick glance, happy that his father is running with him rather than pushing him from a distance.
This is the shift we’re looking for with ourselves.
The relationship between the two earlier in the movie depicts what our critical voice is like in relation to more vulnerable parts of ourselves. It’s driven by something, it’s trying to accomplish something, but it isn’t really seeing the rest of us and so is misguided in a way that can be harmful or limiting.
The relationship between the two at the end of the movie shows us what it can look like to relate to ourselves more compassionately. Note that they haven’t stopped training. It’s not that they stopped pushing, moving, lost motivation, or stopped trying to accomplish anything. Becoming compassionate with ourselves luckily doesn’t mean we lose all that.
What changes is that the motivation and self-encouraging happens with compassion, with relationship, not from a critical distance to ourselves. We are in our own corner with ourselves rather than against ourselves, both motivating ourselves as well as looking out for our true best interests.
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