Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast, I'm Forrest Hanson. In our last episode you heard Dr Hanson and Dr Gilbert

continue our focus on the strength of confidence, particularly discussing how we can

grow a healthy sense of self-worth, be honest without being critical, and stop undermining ourselves.

Today we're going to look at the two different attitudes or voices that live inside all of us,

the inner nurturer and the Inner Critic.

To help us explore these two inner characters, I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen.

Could you explain what you mean by an Inner Critic and an Inner Nurturer?

Because when put that way, it can sound a little out there or maybe even borderline psychotic.

Right, a little psycho. Yeah. It's this notion that within all of us the psyche is more like an archipelago than a continent. In other words, we all

have these different perspectives or views and there are certain attitudes and even emotions and body sensations associated with these different

parts of the normal cell. Jung actually had a term for these, he called them complexes, the idea that they are in a sense a complex of

viewpoints and related emotions and sensations often grounded in a person's developmental history.

So to sort of simplify it, it's as if inside each one of us,

if we were to divide the psyche, the self into three major parts,

would be an internal part that is sort of being done to

as to where I call it the beleaguered self and then we have the inner attacker and the inner

nurturer and it's not that we have some kind of multiple personality disorder or that

were psychotic. It's just that inside us we're pulled in different directions

by different tendencies, different aspects of ourselves.

And it's very useful to appreciate the power on the one hand of the inner attacker, let's call

it the inner critic, offset on the other, very importantly,

by hopefully a big, powerful, wise and effective inner nurturer.

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