You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg,

and I'm really glad you're here.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking

about how to be less self-critical or how to befriend your inner critic.

Now, I think this is something that so many of us struggle with, no matter where we sit on the

attachment spectrum, frankly, I think self-criticism is a burden that many of us are very well

acquainted with carrying through our lives. And, you know, in thinking about today's

episode and how to frame it, I was reflecting that so much of the time the language we hear

around self-criticism and our inner critic is like, how to silence your inner critic. And I very

deliberately steered clear of that framing because as with anxiety

and the way I teach about that, I would never say like how to get rid of anxiety or how to

eliminate your anxiety because I don't think that anxiety is the problem. I actually don't think

that your inner critic is a part of you that you need to silence or dominate or erase or destroy or get rid of.

Really, I see the inner critic as a part of you that is playing a role that is protective in some way, and that might

sound a little funny, as with a lot of our protective parts that engage in behaviours that we

might label wrong or bad or inconvenient or unwelcome, ultimately there's some reason.

If you are moving through life, moving through the world

with this voice in your head that is constantly being hard on you, being judgmental,

telling you that you're not good enough, telling you need to do better, pointing out your

floors, all of those things, blaming you for everything that goes wrong.

There's a reason for that. And as we'll talk about

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