Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I don't know if you remember but in 1982 a movie came out called

Sophie's Choice. It was played by Merrill Streep and she won Best Actress for it with the Academy Awards.

It's a very tragic story about a woman, Sophie, who during World War II had been a Nazi

prisoner and her children were separated from her and she had to make a choice between which

child would live and which would die.

And slowly the movie unfold just showing the impact that choice had on her and how much guilt she felt over it and how it truly in many ways

destroyed her life. And in today's podcast I want to talk about the truly awful effects of self-criticism and how they can destroy our lives so easily

and often do if we're not careful.

Because as we go through life, we are going to make mistakes. We're going to do things that we wish we really hadn't done.

And when we make those mistakes, when we do those hurts towards others.

What's going to happen is we're going to have a choice too.

We're going to have a choice of criticizing ourselves,

of flaying ourselves emotionally for the rest of our lives or learning from these mistakes and growing.

And what will happen is as we go through our lives and we reflect on what we did, we're going

to have two choices, one of self-criticism and

one of forgiveness and learning and moving on. But if we choose the one of self-criticism

slowly with time, it will begin to eat us alive and destroy our lives.

So I have found over the past 30 years of helping people improve their lives, the number one thing that keeps us from

happiness is self-criticism. Now I know sometimes we have very challenging things happen to us where people hurt us and do heinous things

towards us. Those things are very important and we need to heal from them. But in regards to having

a good life, a happy life, we can heal from them quite easily because we work through

our feelings, we get better, and we heal. But when we do things to others and we hurt them,

...