Smoke and Mirrors: Why Your Inner Critic Sounds So Convincing

In the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, the great and powerful Oz rules the land from behind a curtain. His voice booms. The room fills with fire and smoke. Everyone in Oz believes him, right up until a small dog pulls the curtain aside and reveals a man working a machine.

I think about that scene often, because it is a picture of something that happens inside us every day.

Humans have a part of the psyche called the superego (the moral guide). At the right size, the superego guides us and helps us. Once it grows too big, it becomes the inner critic. It's like good cop, bad cop. When it's doing its job, the superego lives by "protect and serve." Grown too powerful, it becomes the bad cop, using too much force and hurting the very people it was meant to protect.

Here is the thing I most want you to know about the inner critic. It works through your nervous system, and it sounds the alarm. But like the Wizard of Oz using smoke and mirrors for effect, the inner critic is often louder and scarier than it needs to be. Its overactivity puts us in the fear center of our brain, and then we are no longer at our best.

How did this happen? The superego evolved to warn us of danger. It alerted us to run from the tiger. That alert was designed to switch on, do its job, and switch off again. But in modern life, it tends to stay on. There are many reasons it stays on, and I'll cover those elsewhere. When the inner critic makes its pronouncements, your body responds the way it would to a tiger. Adrenaline releases. You move into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Thoughts start repeating. "Alert, alert! This thing happened!" The danger emotions arrive, fear and anxiety among them.

This is why the inner critic is so persuasive. It takes over your body chemistry, your emotions, and your mind at once. How can something be false when you feel it at a cellular level? Why would you sit still when the emotions are this strong? Why would it even occur to you to question the message when the critic repeats it until there is nothing else in your head?

What you are experiencing in those moments is a biological event. It happens to humans. It happened to your parents, and it will happen to your children. And a biological event stays a biological event, even when it arrives with a story attached. The alarm in your body is telling you something real about your body chemistry, but it doesn't mean the information that goes with it is accurate. You're a failure? You're a loser? You're not good enough? These are the thoughts we have when triggered. Can you see how exaggerated they are?

In many families, whoever was the most upset got the power, setting the terms for everyone else. Something similar goes on inside us, where the loudest, most activated voice tends to run the show. The work is to grow a part of you that can watch all of this happen, stay steady, and make its own choice.

That part is available to you. It builds every time you pull the curtain back and say: "That supposed power was just smoke and mirrors. That 'truth' was just my nervous system going off. And underneath, I am just a perfectly imperfect human being."

Next time you feel the alarm go off, pause for a moment. Notice that your nervous system is activated, and that's just what we humans do. This is already different from automatically believing that inner critic voice.