Your inner critic is contagious
Your friend recounts a story, ending with a spiral of “I can’t believe I did that. I’m so stupid.” You remember doing something similar and now feel somehow chastened. You tell yourself that it isn’t about you and try to move on.
A father grumbles to himself, “Why can’t I figure this out? Don’t be an idiot.” His son hears that and remembers the math homework he was struggling with earlier. He decides he’s not good at math.
A sister lists her to-do list, the pressures she feels as a parent, the ways she isn’t measuring up. Her sibling hears this and internally writes a to-do list, feeling inadequate.
In each scenario, someone’s self-critic spoke out loud and someone else internalized its message. One person’s suffering multiplied and spread. Living with persistent self-criticism means living with chronic stress — self-criticism literally ignites our fight/flight response — and the effects ripple outward.
I like to think of our self-critics as masters of the conga line: they will get anyone and everyone to join their hateful little dance. The standards we have for ourselves extend to those around us, even when we don’t mean them to. When our self-critic is running amok, out loud and unchecked, it isn’t just hurting us. It’s hurting everyone around us.
Now. Let’s pause together. I can hear your self-critic trying to pick this up and run with it so hear me when I say: you did not choose to have an internal critic. It was handed to you. It might even repeat things you’ve heard — my neurodivergent readers will intimately know the ways criticism and “just try harder” got internalized. The self-critic is like malware that got installed, but now we need to address it head on, without more scrutiny and self-hatred.
The self-critic often defends itself. Like a toxic employee desperate to keep their job, the self-critic will tell you that you will become complacent without it. As if the only thing keeping you from abject failure is the voice telling you you’re failing (the same voice that will criticize you for being so hard on yourself in the next breath). So while the self-critic hurts you, the fear of who you are without it stops you from really addressing it.
And then it leaks out. Over brunch, in a spiral, as a casual comment thrown away. And the people around you all have their own critic that picks up that comment, stores it away. You were just processing, just trying to get yourself to do the thing, just thinking out loud. In that moment, you might really feel irresponsible, stupid, fat, lazy, a failure. And then, unchecked, the loop continues.
And if you’re a parent? Your child is just absorbing that self-hatred.
This is what haunts me a bit: I’ve noticed that most of the adult women I work with who struggle with body image and eating also grew up with a mother who criticized her own body. Mothers never have to tell their daughters to lose weight; they just need to hate their own beautiful bodies long enough. And they were once daughters too, maybe daughters whose bodies were directly criticized. These wounds run deep and go back for generations. The cycle is tragic.
Please know this: you should not swallow your self-criticism like it’s poison. I am not screaming from the rooftops that more of us need to silently suffer, watch our words, be more palatable. The sharing isn’t what is hurting us. The critic, the unrelenting standards, those are what hurt us.
Silence is where shame flourishes.
I’m suggesting something more radical than silencing your critic. I’m inviting you to be kind to yourself out loud. Yes, so that people can hear you. Because if self-criticism radiates outward, then so does self-compassion. It turns self-compassion from that thing you mean to try into the practice that could actually change our communities.
What this looks like, actually: on a Tuesday walk, catching up with a friend, “Ugh I am such a mess” becomes “Ugh I’m such a — that was about to be harsh. I guess I’m confused and worried about handling things wrong. I feel a lot of pressure.” And that’s the moment. The moment the conga line of hate stops in its tracks. The moment that a private struggle becomes a public permission slip to be gentle. More honest.
If you’re a parent, you are teaching your child to be kind to themselves when you are kind to yourself, out loud, on hard days. Even if your children are grown, I can promise you that they will notice if you start to say “I love that my aging body still gets to move like this.”
By practicing self-compassion out loud, you are also bolstering yourself to be accountable to your community. Self-compassion is what gives you the steadiness to be there for the people you love; not because you have all the answers and never mess up, but because you can hear their struggles and complaints without feeling like a failure.
Instead of dancing a conga line from hell, we can become sturdy, owning our flaws and our contributions, apologizing when we hurt people, celebrating wins. We become more alive.
Knowing that our own unresolved shame impacts others actually becomes the most beautiful reason to heal our shit. Because imagine what happens when you start saying out loud, “I’m struggling and this is hard and I can’t possibly be alone.” And your friend tears up and says, “oh my god me too.” Me too are the words that spark change.
