Are there times when you feel you are hearing a very negative self-dialogue in your head and when things are quiet and you are alone, do you feel you have voices talking if not even yelling loudly in your head? Is this voice loud and prevents you from focusing on more positive thinking? This is sometimes called the Inner critic or self-critic. These voices are a history of what we hear from those we love, those we surround ourselves with, those we don’t even like, and even the media we are exposed to on a daily basis. They are a combination of well-meaning negative comments, snarky remarks those have said to us, and what media shares with us trying to sell us products by creating self-doubt and negative feelings toward ourselves.

One can say these voices are like the little person on our shoulder giving us this constant feedback and opinion. In many old cartoons they would show the image of an angel and a devil on each side of the person sitting on their shoulders, both giving pretty bad advice and suggestions. This is very similar to what we are experiencing now, a mix of them both telling us everything bad or worrisome we have every heard.

This inner critic can be something we use to try to “protect” ourselves by warning us that what we are doing is going to make us look bad, or that we can not do this thing so we should not try in order to save face. It can be the mean comments those in our youth yelled at us on playgrounds, or that a mean relative told us on a regular basis to be funny. It can also be the confirmation that we are not pretty enough or smart enough without buying certain products, which leads us to feeling ugly and inadequate.

When we are feeling sad or upset these voices seem to grow in volume and prevent any other thoughts to be heard or considered. We are hearing these voices and take them as the truth, when in fact they probably have little truth to you are anyone else you know. These are not our thoughts, or at least not ones we would want to have, they are negative, and making it hard to believe or even come to any other conclusions about ourselves. This leads us to have anxiety and poor self esteem and does not allow us to really grow and explore who we are or want to be as a person, we just allow the thoughts we are having about ourselves that are typically over exaggerated and probably not even true to dominate our thinking.

To start working on changing this negative way of thinking or even learning to create our own conclusions and thoughts we have to stop the noise we are currently hearing in our heads. There are different ways to stop having these negative thoughts, but one very effective method is through imagery, which is a powerful way to distract our angry brain from the path our thoughts are currently on. Imagery is visual symbolism or figurative language that evokes sense impressions in a literary work or other activities such as thinking or talking. This can be accomplished in multiple ways, the face of an angry person we know, or just a random angry person such as below

It can also be a fictional picture or image that you have created that will help you reroute your brain by imagining the thing or person you have created is sitting right there on your shoulder. The example down below is a fun  but comical figure that is descriptive enough to really help your mind change focus and really create the object.

I think using a bit of creativity is a great way to really have fun with the intervention, making it very much personal and effective for you . People have different ways of really creating a picture of something they want to imagine, some like to draw or paint the object or creature they imagine yelling these angry words in their brain, others like writing, which they are able to get very descriptive with their words of the details of this angry critic. It does not really matter which way you choose to create this vision, but it’s important to make it detailed so when you are imagining it on your shoulder, you are able to really have a detailed vision of something that will help with that initial distraction of your negative thinking. For this to be really affective, we need to stop the negative thinking that will be very powerful and loud, so we can change it to a more positive self-benefiting way of thinking that can help us grow and become the type of person we would like to be.

After we have created this image, we know go to the part we learn to quiet it down. There are different ways of creating this quiet, one covering this little critic up with things such as a hat, or even a scarf, or something even funnier could be imagining flipping right off your shoulder with your fingers or giving it a big push right off your shoulder. A very aggressive take charge though would be just giving this thing a punch right in the nose or gut, making the thing fly far away from your ear.

After this visualization is complete the real work comes in. So imagine the negative thought or voice being I am not very smart so I will not be able to do the things that my friends are doing. After we get the critic to quiet down, or stop talking all together, we can start with the thought what do I want to think? So do I want to think of myself as dumb, or would I like to think about; what I am capable of, and or of the things I have achieved, and what I want to be able to do. What do we want our voice to say? This is a chance to really hear what we want to hear, versus what the noise in our head makes us hear. This is something that will need to be practiced and take some time to become efficient with, due to the many years of the loud negative way of thought we had been using previous. Start with small things and work your way up, encourage friends to talk this out with you. If you are currently in therapy work with your counselor on finding better more positive ways of thinking and reacting to the world around you.