Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad states of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey folks, how are you? How's your day going? I hope you're thriving or at least surviving today.
Speaker 1 00:00:37 I want to die further into the important topic of getting past the crap your critic says to you and tapping into the energy behind it. It's an essential part of transforming your critic, but it's a really counter-intuitive method. We don't usually want to tap into anything about the critic, but that's because we view it as only bad. However, it only begins that way. Once you connect with the underlying process and start to integrate it, you experience the critic as an unfolding story that goes from oppressive to liberating. It starts as the archetypal a-hole, but if you keep processing it, you discover that it's a catalyst for your highest growth without it you'd be a dead head. And I don't mean the grateful kind. I mean, your potential would go to sleep. Of course, then you'd get depressed. So you'd have something else trying to wake you up.
Speaker 1 00:01:45 There will always be something trying to fuck up your life to try to wake you up, to get you on the right path. So how do you get in touch with this deeper process behind the critic? Well, that's what we did in episode 35. How to take your inner critic's power. We focused on the critic as an inner personality with a specific type of energy, instead of focusing on what the critic says, we worked on how it says it. The idea is to identify and describe the main features of how it acts upon you, aggressive, bold, relentless, powerful, or even afraid and transform these qualities into positive powers. You claim for yourself this deep potentiates, the critic's power. It's the companion work to processing the content of the critic's voice, which the previous exercise focused on this way of working on the critic or on any problem for that matter is really powerful.
Speaker 1 00:02:57 And it's not something we normally in most situations, the word is king, including the word spoken by your critic. At least that's what we think, but it's not really true. For example, when someone talks to you, the content of their words is really only a fraction of what they communicate. The rest is done subliminally through non-linguistic signals like tone of voice tempo of speaking, vocal, tambour, speaking, pauses, throat clearing ums, and AHS, eye movements, body gestures, and spatial movements, as well as the whole way. Your two psyches with their personal and relationship histories interact. And it's all influenced by the larger context. The two of you find yourself in the culture era political situation. And so on, some would say it's even influenced by the movements of the stars and planets. When your critic talks to you, the same kind of communication signals occur. It communicates to you in a specific way.
Speaker 1 00:04:11 You're the recipient of a particular kind of energy, a vibe, a style of communication, a way of imparting a message. The exercise focuses on these specific attributes of the critic. This focus on the how, instead of the, what is what we call in psychology process instead of content, they're both important, but process often gets overlooked. I actually first learned this by writing songs. I only later rediscovered it when I studied psychology. When you write a song, you've got word content that needs to be married with musical content. Music is mood, color, vibe, and feeling, and it has to come from the same place as the words, what you're expressing has to be congruent across the various elements, words, music, and also things like production, which is how you put together. The final product I remember cracking up at a song years ago, a producer friend played for me.
Speaker 1 00:05:19 It was by one of his artists and he wanted my opinion of the song. The lyric was I'm so lonely, but the music sounded really happy and upbeat that some folks can pull this off. If they know how to express a stories, many sides at once, but this was just an incongruent mess. It made no sense. It really hit the point home for me that you're telling a story and it's not real or believable. If the various elements don't match up, but there's actually some profound music where opposite are put together in a brilliant way. In 1967, Phil Oaks, a folk singer released an album called pleasures of the Harbor. It's an insane masterpiece. The lyrics are really sad and the music is happy, but it's in a sort of circusy creepy way. Like how clowns represent happy, comedic, silly, fun, but also sad characters or even evil figures.
Speaker 1 00:06:28 But it's not easy to mix together opposites and present them as a unified whole like that. It takes some sort of creative man in music. The process element, how the song sounds and feels is as important as the content element. What it says, the process aspect is crucial, not only in songwriting, but for working on your problems too, including your critic. I often say that every problem has a meaningful message, but the message doesn't only come from words, ideas, thinking, and concepts. It also comes from the way a problem feels. Although I don't mean the way you feel having the problem sounds like a Buddha word salad, but it's not. I mean, the feeling quality of what's being done to you when you're critic talks to you, it talks to you with a specific type of energy, a feeling quality, a vibe, it attacks you with it's the same as if an actual person or to criticize you critical words would come out of their mouth, but it would be done in a certain way.
Speaker 1 00:07:45 Maybe they yell or maybe they'd speak calmly and undermine you that way. Maybe they'd overpower you when you disagree or maybe they'd look scared because what they're criticizing you for is actually something they're afraid of how the criticism is delivered. We'll have a particular identifying quality to it. The quality is hugely important in the process. If you ignore it, you know, I'd only miss out on the real gold. You stay in your head and battle the critic with ideas and concepts, instead of transforming it on a visceral, your critic is a mind tripper, but it's also so got a body that you need to encounter. It's not a physical body. You can see it's an experiential body. You can feel and visualize it expresses itself through how it interacts with you. And the aim of the work is to identify amplify, explore and transform this energy from a power that's used against you into a power you claim as your own and use in a positive way.
Speaker 1 00:09:01 The most basic example of this is that the critic is often experienced as a powerful part of us, able to make us feel bad at the drop of a hat. You can spend a lifetime working on the content of what it says to you, and that's all good, but you won't be able to fully transform it without also integrating its power. In fact, if you have a critic that's saying the same things to you, it said 10 or 20 years ago, despite thousands of hours of working on these things, it means that you have to process and integrate its energetic element, its way of communicating. The cool thing about working on the energetic level, as opposed to the word level is that it's quicker dialoguing with an inner critic takes discipline because you have to sit there and go back and forth for a long time.
Speaker 1 00:09:55 It's essential work without it. You don't see what's happening in your process, but when you work on the energetic level, you can ask yourself, how does the critic as a problem maker act on me, not what do I feel? What does it feel? What's its energy. And then claim that energetic way of being as your own and use it in a productive way. Sometimes this kind of work can go pretty fast. What's the critic's vibe, aggressive and relentless, okay. Feel into being aggressive and relentless and identify where in your life you need this energy boom ton. Okay? Maybe not that fast, but it's direct. It's bodywork. As opposed to mind work, it can also go slower because you might have a fear or block when it comes to being aggressive and relentless, then you have to process the story around this, but you're still using your body to access your process.
Speaker 1 00:11:04 In fact, sometimes you can transform a critic purely through bodywork. Let me give you an example of a client. She was a 32 year old woman who suffered from a terrible inner critic. She had been working on it for years, had made a lot of progress, but still felt she hadn't really gotten the crux of the process. She frequently dialogued with it, debated it and argued with it, but she couldn't quite transform it. She came to the session one day and said her inner critic was putting her down for not getting perfect grades and her doctoral program. We had worked on it before and she had actually started working harder to see if this would relieve the problem. It did to an extent, but then the critic returned. Her critic was an unforgiving perfectionist. That kind that no one can live. I play acted the critic saying you're a bad person because you don't get perfect grades.
Speaker 1 00:12:10 I mean five A's and a, B, B a B only losers get BS. She argued back that she's doing her best, but the critic wouldn't stop berating her. We worked on it. I noticed she was making a strange head movement from side to side and subtly moving her shoulders up and down. I had no idea what it meant or if it meant anything, but I brought her attention to it. She said she hadn't been aware she was doing that. I suggested she do it on purpose and exaggerated. So she moved her shoulders up and down. And her head from side to side for a while, I told her to just observe and study what she was doing and let me know what comes up in her experience and aware after a minute or so, she laughed and said, it's like, I'm being seductive, moving in a sexy way.
Speaker 1 00:13:11 I said, awesome. Do it more. Get into it further, keep doing it and relate to the critic this way. I'll play the critic again. I showered her with insults, but this time she walked up to me, put her hand on my chest and said, come on, baby. Let's dance it. The ground out from under me as the critic, I tried my best to stay in the role, but I couldn't. She had deep potentiated, this critical figure with one sexy gesture. We pretended to dance for a minute. And then I asked her to focus inside and check out what's happening with her critic. She closed her eyes for a minute and said, it's gone. I feel sexy instead of criticized. And we both burst out laughing. After that session, she felt relieved of the critic for the most part. And one of the rows she got into her seductive, sexy way of being and seduced it into mission, her critic, which by the way, it was an extension of her stiff uptight perfectionist father needed a jolt of female sexual power to cool him out and bring him down to earth.
Speaker 1 00:14:37 Okay? Okay. Now sometimes the critic aims to send you a message of change, which not only helps you grow, but also relieves the critic itself. The way you need to change is identifiable in how your critic communicates with you. For example, if it's powerful and you feel weak, then increasing your power is going to begin to transform the critic. Other times your process may be like my clients, where your critic needs. You find a way to help it. Now these two different kinds of processes are really the same since you and your critic are just different expressions of your process, deep down, it's all you, you're you. And you're the critic. And you're also me, the world nature and the universe. It all depends on what you identify with all these parts of ourselves and the world are split up in our consciousness in order to drive our growth and awareness.
Speaker 1 00:15:48 Otherwise we'd all be unconscious blogs, which we anyway are a lot of the time in terms of my client's process, the way for you to help the critic is to use your awareness to sense amplify, explore and unfold, how your body wants to react to it instead of your mind, or like we did with my client. Notice how your body already is reacting in a subtle way. Your subconscious expresses itself, not only through your thoughts and feelings, but through subtle and not so subtle physical signals. For example, if I have a credit come up, I get a subtle tension in my stomach. You might get a slight headache or suddenly feel tired or tense or start tapping your fingers on the desk. All of these seemingly innocent signals are unconscious reactions to your critic. My client's subtle head and shoulder movements were her unconscious process of seductive sexiness, trying to come to her awareness.
Speaker 1 00:17:06 It was her as yet unknown solution to her critic in that moment, in order to bring it to awareness, we had to amplify her subtle movements and follow her inner experiences up until that point, her work on the critic had been great, but it was missing one key ingredient. Her critic was intelligent and rational and the way she had worked on it was largely in the same frame of mind being smart, rational, industrious. As I said, she had made a lot of progress this way, but she needed to change the how, the way of interacting and being that characterized their relationship. The new way of relating to her critic and of living life was to let her sensuality inform her consciousness and guide her experience. Her body process solved her problem. I remember one of the first times I worked this way with someone. I noticed that when I play acted his critic, he balled his hands up into fists.
Speaker 1 00:18:20 I brought his attention to it and it unfolded into a crazy boxing session where he beat the crap out of my punching bag. Now this visceral way of processing the critic, isn't only a way to work on your own inner oppressor social movements do it too. For example, the way blues and rock and roll culture, change the oppressive white mainstream culture of the 1940s and 1950s. It's a way of transforming the critic by using emotional truth, soul personal power. America has such a painful racist history. The brutal treatment of Africans brought here in the slave trade. Wasn't something that was ever going to be overcome by direct force. Sometimes the process behind an attacker, whether internal or external is for the victim to take up arms and defend himself. But other times, this isn't the way like with my client who discovered her sexy power as the way to disarm her enemy.
Speaker 1 00:19:28 But think about it. You've been kidnapped from your Homeland, brought on a ship to a strange land and forced into a life of slave labor in the cotton fields. You have no power and no resources. Step out of line and you get beaten or worse on an internal level. Sometimes people are so abused by their critic. They feel so hopeless and powerless. They commit suicide. So abuse happens on various levels. Although some is obviously worse, like the African-American plight. So what did they do? They instinctively followed their processes. First. They began singing mournful chance as they worked in the sun scorched fields. It was their natural way of expressing their pain and staying connected to their African roots. Then they began forming these chants into reverse. After that they started borrowing musical elements from the European scales. They heard in their masters music and they create a raw blue songs.
Speaker 1 00:20:43 When the mass migrations from the deep south up north to cities like Chicago happened, and this raw blues music got electrified, it began spreading in the African-American community. It became their spiritual shield, their identity and the expression of their soul. The words and music encapsulated both their tragedies and triumphs. Eventually the music bled over into the white community. The power of these authentic soul sounds tore down white people, stiff culture, and drew them into a new experience. The first crossing of racial lines happened at blues concerts where the segregated white and black audience members refuse to be partitioned into sections, tore down the dividing ropes and danced together over time. Blues music integrated a celebrate Tory vibe into its foundation of raw emotion and pain. One song could take you from the depths of despair to the Heights of party's Ville. It's a powerful example of how acknowledging your pain expressing it, creating with it, dancing it, transmutes it into something else, something liberating.
Speaker 1 00:22:09 And as they say, the rest is history, rock and roll spread to the whole world and liberated entire cultures. The blues is the transformation of white oppressive power into the power of the soul, the enduring human spirit that can't be broken. It's an example of taking an unconscious negative power and transforming it into a conscious positive power. The only thing that remained the same is the core absolute unwavering power of belief and action. But instead of it being absolute evil, racist oppression, it became absolute, authentic expression of the true raw, real natural human spirit. My client discovered her sexy power as the solution to taking the ground out from under her cold negative critic. Blues did the same thing basically by tapping into deep, raw sexual, spiritual, true feeling, and using it to take the ground out from under the white supremacy of the era. Of course, everything's a process and racism is obviously still a huge problem. So I'm speaking in relative terms, but it was the beginning. See you next time, stay aware.
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