Self-Criticism and Never Feeling Good Enough
Nothing You've Achieved Has Made the Voice Quieter.
You got the thing. The offer, the promotion, the number you'd been working toward. There was maybe an hour of relief, and then it started.
It wasn't that hard. They had low standards. Anyone could have done it. And anyway, the next one is the real test.
People tell you you're good at what you do. They say you're kind, and they don't know how you manage it all. None of it sticks to you.
You may recognize some of this:
A compliment goes right past you. A small piece of criticism stays for a week.
On paper, you know that you're not the things you say about yourself.
Part of you is waiting for the one event that proves everyone had you wrong.
You'd never speak to a friend the way you speak to yourself, and you don't think that's unfair. You think you deserve it.
Rest needs a reason, and you rarely have a good enough one.
You've been doing this for so long that the voice sounds like your own thinking. It sounds like standards. Maybe it was there to straighten you out, or to make sure you were still wanted, or to prove you weren't lazy.
However it started, it isn't something you chose.
What We Do in Sessions
You already know where this came from. So we start somewhere else.
You've done real work on yourself. Therapy, classes, whatever you've read. Those lessons aren't wasted and we'll use them. What we add is aimed at the part that hasn't moved.
We use EMDR and Accelerated Resolution Therapy® to work with what's still carrying a charge. Sometimes that's something from a long time ago. Sometimes it's a situation happening now that sets the voice off. You don't have to go looking for anything, and you don't have to talk through it in detail. We start with what's already showing up.
We start where you are, not where you think you should be by now.
There's no homework. You keep using anything that's helped, but the work itself happens in session, and most people notice the change showing up on its own rather than through practice.
A lot of my clients could explain all of this to me in the first session. They're not confused about themselves. They're tired of understanding something that hasn't changed.
What Getting Better Looks Like
The praise starts landing. Not because you've talked yourself into it, but because you're finally on your own side.
Someone tells you that you did a good job and you take it. You make a mistake and it stays a mistake instead of turning into something about you. You're with people and you're actually there, not half in your head checking how you're coming across. You go to sleep without replaying the day.
Hard days don't stop. What changes is that you stop treating them as a verdict on who you are.
If any of this sounds like you, you don't have to keep managing it alone. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation.
