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If your inner critic is harsh, it can lead to mental-health problems like depression and low self-esteem.

Internal family systems (IFS) therapy helps us understand that our inner critic part is not malicious.

IFS offers step-by-step tools to transform the critic from harsh to helpful, which can be life-changing.

Everybody has an inner critic. If you’re lucky, yours might be fairly mild and benign, gently reprimanding you when you make a mistake. But for most people I see in my consulting room, sadly, that’s not the case. Their inner critic is loud, dominating their thoughts throughout the day. And it’s relentlessly harsh, negative and undermining, hammering them about everything they say and do.

Self-lacerating critics like these can have a profound effect on your mental health—harsh self-criticism is linked with chronic anxiety, stress, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and low self-esteem.1 It’s easy to see these parts as destructive, malicious, or even malevolent. I have never met someone who tells me: “Dan, I really like that mean voice in my head!”

Meeting hundreds of critics

Having helped hundreds of people overcome difficulties with their mental health, I have spent a great deal of time trying to find effective ways of managing inner critics. I have tried multiple approaches, from the cognitive restructuring of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to the creation of a compassionate self in compassion-focused therapy. In schema therapy, I was originally taught to confront the "punitive critic" (the harsher flavour of critic), standing up to their vicious attacks to........

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