For a while during my healing I had only heard about the inner critic. But there is also an outer critic in complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). Because one critic isn’t enough, we’ve got two: An inner and an outer critic. Shrinking the inner and outer critics can be one of the hardest parts of our recovery journey. The inner critic plays on your doubt, insecurity, and negative self-talk. The outer critic plays on your external fears, such as physical or resource limitations. Sometimes you're lucky enough to only have one critic speaking to you at once. At other times you have two critics coming at you at the same time...
The critics
The inner critic
The inner critic is that much discussed insidious inner voice within that talks down to you and makes you feel bad or sad. The inner critic is the part of your mind that views you as flawed and unworthy. The inner critic is often said to be an internalised version of a critical parent, using similar words and tone of voice to belittle you or make you believe you’re not worth much. You can end up believing the inner critic speaks the truth about you and is a major cause of low self-esteem. Pete Walker explains in his book 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving', that the inner critic is the “superego gone bad”. The inner critic causes an individual’s developed (or developing) superego to run into hyperdrive while simultaneously trying to win the approval of parents, friends, partners, and work colleagues. The inner critic drives a perpetual self-hate, toxic shame and self-resentment which builds as a survivor blames themselves for any and all shortcomings within their life.
Both the inner and outer critic are subconscious thoughts and actions which lead to a reduction of support and deep emotional connection. This results in isolation and lack of positive relationship within one's life.
However, you may not be quite so familiar with the outer critic, which can also develop as a result of poor early caregiving. So, let's dive in, or rather out...
The outer critic
Pete Walker writes on the topic of the outer critic in his book 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'. Walker is an expert on complex trauma, a psychological disorder with roots in inconsistent, neglectful or abusive parenting, which can cause interpersonal and relationship difficulties and fear of abandonment. As an adult, the person with complex trauma can develop a series of coping mechanisms to help protect from further trauma – but that serve only to retraumatise and replay early feelings of abandonment. The outer critic is the part that views everyone else as flawed and unworthy. When the outer critic is running your mind, people appear to be too awful and too dangerous to trust.” He adds that the outer critic focuses on other people’s imperfections and unworthiness as a way of avoiding having to invest in emotional relationships.
Pater Walker says that the outer critic develops as a response to parents who “Were too dangerous to trust”. The child learns to be hypervigilant to even the tiniest sign that the parent was becoming imperfect or ‘dangerous’ and as a grown-up believes that everyone else will be as similarly untrustworthy as the parents. In other words, the outer critic highlights flaws and pushes people away. It isolates and, even though it’s trying to defend against abandonment, it ends up recreating it. And so the trauma loop continues.
Children of abusive or neglectful parents are not able to show anger and fight back. They have to keep it hidden. Yet that anger doesn’t go away but festers into resentment and gets projected onto people in the present. The outer critic finds fault with everyone and suspects that everyone will eventually abandon them. Tiny transgressions get blown out of all proportion and the outer critic counts the many slights against it. The outer critic also shows passive-aggression by being constantly late, not following through on commitments, withholding positive feedback, and withdrawing when feeling hurt.
The outer critic can give a whole list of someone else’s foibles and flaws under the guise of ‘just being honest’. It thinks it’s being authentic but really it is tearing the other person apart.
The outer critic can emerge during emotional flashbacks (where a current situation brings up all the old emotions of a very old wound, as if it were happening all over again). It makes a person think that others will leave them and break their heart – telling them to depend only on themselves. They look out for the tiniest signs (facial expression, words, actions) that the person will let them down.
The outer critic has to be hypervigilant to potential slights and dangers. Children with complex trauma are often mocked or scorned for seeking support or love from their parents, and this can create a fear of intimacy and vulnerability when older. The outer critic believes that everyone else is as potentially dangerous as the original caregivers. This hampers our desire and ability to show vulnerability, which is key to healing.
The outer critic projects onto others the same processes of perfectionism and endangerment that the inner critic uses against the self. It perseverates about the unworthiness [imperfection] and treacherousness [dangerousness] of others to avoid emotional investment in relationships for fear they will replicate early parental betrayals.
The outer critic builds fortresses of isolation whose walls are enumerations of the exaggerated shortcomings and potential treacheries of others. In an awful irony, the critic attempts to protect us from abandonment by scaring us further into it. If we are ever to discover the as yet unknown comfort of soothing connection with others, the critic’s dictatorship of the mind must be broken. The critic’s arsenal of intimacy-spoiling dynamics must be consciously identified, confronted, suppressed, and gradually deactivated.
The outer critic typically arises most powerfully during emotional flashbacks when it transmutes unconscious abandonment pain into an overwhelmingly negative perception of people in general and /or of life itself. It obsessively fantasises, consciously and unconsciously, about how people have or could hurt us. Over the years these fantasies can expand from scary still-lifes into film clips, and even movies, eventually morphing into a veritable 'video collection' of real and imagined betrayals that destroy our capacity to be nurtured by human contact. “Don’t trust anyone”, “Proud to be a loner”, “You can only depend on yourself”, “Lovers always leave you”, “Kids will break your heart”, “Only fools let on what they really think”, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”, are titles of video themes survivors may develop in their quest for interpersonal safety. These defensive daydreams are analogs of the critic-spawned nightmares that also shore up the “safety” work of frightening us into isolation.
The dynamics of the outer critic are often obscured by minimisation and denial. Because the critic develops and dominates the psyche so early in childhood, its obsessions and “daymares” often fade out of awareness, and become subliminal like the sound of waves at the beach... like the sounds of traffic in the city... like the sound of the critic repetitively calling you or someone else a jerk, a loser, an assh*le.
The outer critic, the news, and the media
Sometimes the outer critic’s penchant for raising false alarms ensnares us with an insatiable hunger for listening to the news. When we do not resist this junk food feeding of the psyche with the news “service” that exults so thoroughly in the negative, we can be left floundering in a dreadful hypervigilance. The critic can then work overtime to amass irrefutable proof that the world is beyond dangerous, and therefore isolation and minimal or superficial relating are our only recourse. At such times any inclination to call a friend triggers images of rejection and humiliation before the phone can even be picked up. When flashbacks are particularly intense, impulses to venture out may immediately trigger fantasies of being verbally harassed or even mugged on the street. In worst case scenarios outer critic drasticising deteriorates into paranoia. At its worst paranoia deteriorates into fantasies and delusions of persecution.
Entrenchment is difficult to dislodge because its parlance is normalised and worse celebrated in our society skewering people seems to be standard practise in most TV comedies. Moreover, many influential seemingly healthy adults model a communication style that is rife with judgementalness, sarcasm, negativity, fear-mongering and scapegoating. Giving control of our social interactions to the outer critic prohibits the cultivation of the vulnerable communication that makes intimacy possible. We must renounce unconscious outer critic strategies such as:
1. I will use angry criticism to make you afraid of me so I can be safe from you.
2. Why should I bother with people when everyone is so selfish and corrupt?
3. I will perfectionistically micromanage you to prevent you from betraying or abandoning me.
4. I will rant and rave or leave at the first sign of a lonely feeling because if you really loved me I would never feel lonely.
The critic as judge, jury and executioner
Not all survivors hide their outer critic. Fight types and subtypes can take the passive out of passive-aggressive and become very aggressive. Such outer critic polarised types often develop a specious belief that their subjectively derived standards of correctness are objective truth. At times of intense triggering the outer critic uses its distorted detective-lawyer-judge function to build hyperbolised cases out of scarce evidence [imagined slights, insignificant pecadillos, misread facial expressions, inaccurate “psychic” perceptions] to put potentially intimate relationships on trial. In the proceedings, it refuses to admit positive evidence or consider extenuating circumstances and is quick to interpret any relational disappointment as a deal-canceling, unforgivable betrayal. This is also the process by which jealousy becomes toxic and runs riot.
Once the outer critic has become adept at building a case, it ascends to a higher moral ground and claims the right to micromanage others. Typically this is rationalised as being for the other’s own good, but unconsciously is designed to protect the survivor from any reenactment of early parental abuse or neglect. Micromanagement of others can then further devolve into treating them like captive audiences, giving them unsolicited performance evaluations, making unreasonable demands for improvement, controlling their time schedules, social calendars and food and clothing choices, and, in worse case scenarios, dramatically acting out jealousy. At its worst, it looks like taking prisoners and persecution, not making friends.
Road rage and the outer critic
Let us consider how the outer critic displaces anger from the past onto present day relationships such as during road rage, where we radiate anger a full 360°. We hate the driver who cuts us off, as well as all the other drivers on the road, our employees, our neighbours, and the government: They drive us into flashbacks. We can ventilate our anger by hitting a tennis racket on a cushion. This is a classic anger release work technique for externalising anger in a non harmful way. When our catharting peters out we close our eyes. We ask ourselves if our feelings of outrage had a trail into the past. It may bring us back to suppressed rage against one or more of our parents who never stood up for us or protected us when we were children. And then the tears come. Shortly after they subside, the epiphany arrives - it may make us laugh, genuinely. It is the laughter of relief that we sometimes get when we finally understand why something is really bothering us. As psychotherapists say “If it’s hysterical it’s historical.” That cursed luck of getting dealt those assh*les from the parenting deck and growing up in that house: That was pure unadulterated danger for us. Our rage is mostly about how unfair it was that we had grown up in that sorry excuse for a home. Rage and the less intense irritations we experience with our fellow drivers are common forms of outer critic transference. When we become more mindful of our driving frustrations or other minor everyday annoyances we can look below the tip of this iceberg for old unexpressed anger and hurt that it reminds us of. You can experiment with this next time you are inordinately angry at some driver for a relatively minor driving mistake. You can try asking yourself "What is this situation or feeling reminding me of?"
Listen to Pete Walker’s book for how to heal from the inner and outer critics: 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'.
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