How to Squash your Inner Critic

  You know those voices that pop into your head and tell you that you’re fat, that you need to lose weight, that you’ve eaten too much, that you’re ugly, stupid, boring, or whatever?  A lot of people with eating issues suffer with these voices. They hear them and believe that the voices are right. They get sucked into them.

But you don’t have to engage with those voices. When you hear them, rather than listening to them and believing them and doing whatever you can to change yourself so those voices won’t pick on you quite so much, you can turn to them and just say, “there’s no room for you right now, I hear you, but I’m not going to listen to you. I’m choosing not to engage with your mean words.” Just because you hear these things, doesn’t mean it’s true.  The truth is totally subjective and you can choose your own truth. That truth might be, “You are perfect, whole, and complete, just the way you are.”

These “voices” so to speak is the voice of your eating disorder, or your super-ego, or your inner critic. You might not be able to shut it off, but you can choose not to listen to it or not to let it control you. You can choose to tell it that you are not making space for it right now. You can choose to create a different voice that helps you to feel better about yourself.

What are some things that you do to disengage with the critical  inner voice?

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