The Voice That Learned to Sound Like Them: Understanding the Inner Critic

There may be a voice inside you that is cruel. It waits for your quietest moments and then begins: worthless, disgusting, a burden, too much. It knows precisely where you are softest. It uses words you recognize, in a tone you have heard somewhere before — and that is the very worst of it. You have come to believe that this voice, of them all, must be the one telling the truth: the final proof, spoken from inside your own head, of how bad you must secretly have always been.

I want to tell you something that may take a very long time to believe, and I will say it as tenderly as I know how: that voice is not your enemy, and it is not the truth about you.

She is a part. And long ago, to keep you alive, she did something heartbreaking — she took up the words of the one who hurt you and made them her own. Not to destroy you. To save you. She reasoned, in a child’s desperate logic, that if she could only frighten you into being small enough, quiet enough, good enough, then perhaps the danger might pass you by. She learned to speak in their voice for a single reason: so that she could survive them, and carry you through.

She is a fierce protector, wearing the most terrible mask in the house.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. — Romans 8:1

The verdict she keeps reading over you was never God’s, and it was never yours. And when at last you turn toward her not with hatred but with tenderness, something almost unbelievable begins: the hardest room in the whole house discovers, for the very first time, that it is finally allowed to set the weapon down.

Rest Here.