Inner Critics Gone Wild: Boost Your Mojo & Improve Your Connections By Being Nicer to Yourself

If you regularly feel ashamed, defensive, less worthy than others, or underconfident -- that's your inner critic at work. You may not realize that an inner critic gone wild isn't just harming you, it's harming your relationships and sex life.

All of us can be mean to ourselves occasionally, but when it's a regular pattern it makes us feel awful, kills our mojo, and undermines our relationships. If you have that pattern, you probably learned it long ago and have been doing it for years. But you don't have to keep the habit. 

This episode unpacks the difference between self-indulgence and true self-compassion. It will show you how to know which you're doing, and how to shift into self-compassion when you most need it.

Stopping the habit of allowing that inner critic to run rampant is a gift to yourself, your loved ones, and super important for great sex and relationships. So join me and get started today. 

Learn more about me, get a FREE GUIDE to FINDING YOUR DEEPEST TURN-ONS, inquire about coaching, and learn how to get help with relationships and intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com.

Get a transcript of this episode by going to https://sexhelpforsmartpeople.buzzsprout.com/ Click on the episode, then choose the transcript tab.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 18. Today we're talking about the relationship superpower of self compassion. And, you know, we all have some negative self talk or negative perspectives on ourselves in our head to some degree. Some of us have a lot more than others, and our inner critic is running rampant.

And it's actually really hard on our relationships. as well as just on our own energy and what we have available to give others. So we'll talk about why it's a great idea to get a handle on that stuff. And I'll give you some good reasons to change that habit and some ways to get started. So let's actually get started.

Hello, everyone. I am so glad to be here with you today. It is spring in Western North Carolina, and it is rainy and green and beautiful. And my garden has a lot of lettuce, which is making me happy. And today we are talking about how not to be a an asshole to yourself and why that's really good for your sex life and relationships.

So, for today, so I have good news and then I have good news that's disguised as a hard truth. So this is the good news disguised as a hard truth. To be a great lover for someone else and to be able to really take in a great lover in front of you. You need to be loving towards yourself and we'll unpack that sort of like trope about like we need to love ourselves first kind of thing and actually really look at that today.

But I just want to say, you know, a lot of us walk around with a narrative in our heads that is this hyper critic inside, this inner critic who's frankly abusive. And you may not hear the thoughts in your head in words. I actually didn't used to until I really slowed down to pay deep attention. And then I started really actually hearing the sentences.

But some people don't actually think in words, but in sort of perspectives, emotions, impulses that you you notice, but they're not necessarily forming words. We're going to still use the term self talk to describe all of that because it's still what's, it's still the perceptions going on in your mind.

So however your self talk manifests, If it's abusive to you, you will feel like shit a lot. Because when we think thoughts like, I suck at this. I'm a loser. No one could love me like this. Whatever. I'm awful at this. I need to be different. Of course we feel bad about ourselves. Of course we feel powerless.

We're basically walking around with an abuser all the time in our head. That's it. But here's the thing. So just because we think those thoughts because the calls coming from inside the house doesn't mean the message is true. These thoughts are a hundred percent optional. And when I learned that it really changed the world for me.

It changed my entire, it was kind of one of those dominoes that changed the entire experience of my life. I'm not kidding. It really, really dramatically changed my life when I allowed myself to realize that those shitty thoughts about me were optional. So we get to choose if we want to believe them or not.

There is no objective letter coming from the universe to tell you that you are actually a loser. Or there's no real reason to wait for an objective letter from the universe to tell you you are not a loser because that's not coming either. We have to choose. And personally, I suggest that you stop deciding to believe those thoughts because they are just not helping you in any way.

And so, you know, it can feel kind of like, oh, easier said than done, which is absolutely true. It is easier said than done. But the decision itself is really important. Making the decision to stop beating yourself up is a really powerful thing to do. So, remember. Just because your brain says it, you don't have to believe it.

There are a million examples of things we think, people think, that are not objectively true. I mean, some people think that women are not as smart or capable as men. And even some women. Hilarious. It's just because some asshat thinks that, even if that asshat is living in your own brain, doesn't make it true.

So, the most important question is, is this thought or belief useful to me? Is it useful? And I promise that any thought that is shaming you, saying you suck or you're not good enough or worthy or whatever, is not useful. It's undermining. Feeling bad never helps us do better. I mean, think about if you want to change a behavior with, okay, so maybe you have a little kid who's no good at swimming.

They haven't learned yet. Do we shame them and berate them, telling them to swim better? Huh? No, it doesn't actually help. I mean, you can, but that would be pretty shitty parenting, right? So, let's stop pretending it works when we do it to ourselves, because it doesn't. It just makes us want to hide and like, Drink a bottle of wine or take some Klonopin or overeat or binge watch Netflix or whatever.

It does not help us do whatever it is we want to accomplish in this life. And it also actually really keeps us from truly connecting and truly taking in connection with others. So, the platitude, right, you have to love yourself to be loved. I think is some, some ways true and in some ways not so true because I do think that people who don't love themselves can love.

I used to not love myself and I could love others, but I didn't really get to feel love on the same level because I struggled to take it in in return. It was like it bounced off me because I didn't actually have a landing place for it that I had created by loving myself. And I, so I do know when you don't love yourself, it's actually also quite hard to offer unconditional love to others.

Our love winds up with so many strings attached tying back to our self worth. It's just not as free and unfettered as it can be. So, We're going to dive into the nitty gritty of this sort of shitty self talk habit and pattern today. And I want you just to know it's a habit, and all habits can be changed.

But habits take patience and intention to change. And that's really what I did with my self talk, and it made a big difference. And I've helped a bunch of people do that, and it makes such a huge difference in our lives and our connections. I'm going to give you an inventory to do to help you figure out where and how you could love yourself better.

Most of us have some improvements at least we could make that will really feel delicious and wonderful when we do. And we're going to talk about why it's handy for your relationships to do that. And, you know, caveat here, we're not going to solve all the negative self talk of anybody in one podcast episode, but I am going to give you just some awareness about why it's important to tackle and some resources to start.

And we're going to start with just one of the most important distinctions to make, which is the difference between self compassion and self indulgence. And this is a really important thing to understand because so many people mistake one for the other and advertisers really love it when we do that because you can buy stuff that is self indulgent.

You can't buy self compassion. We have to give that to ourselves. So a lot of us worry that we can't be nice to ourselves because we'll wind up in self indulgence, or we think conversely that self indulgence is sort of the best or only way to do self care, which it's absolutely not. So why does all this matter anyway?

So one, it feels absolutely fucking amazing to be your own best friend and to be Your own lover, your own best, very good parent, right? So much better than being the abuser of yourself. And I promise, cause I've done both and I know which feels a lot better. And it's also way better when you're loving and kind to yourself.

You show up differently in relationships with other people. It's easier to be generous of spirit with people. It's easier to be. You're not as much in the habit of harsh judgment, so you don't, you're not turning it on yourself, but you also don't turn it on others as much. It's also easier not to be in that sort of like envy or needy type of energy because you are filling your own self up.

If you're super hard on yourself and you berate yourself, we always wind up over dependent on others to soothe our wounds. Right? The ones we inherited through life, maybe from childhood, but also the ones we're constantly re inflicting on ourselves. And then others have to be on the hook to soothe all of that, and it just doesn't leave much room for sexy.

And it just never results in the changes we want. Right? So. It also kind of weirdly, this is an interesting one I discovered when I changed this, was that it drives kind of weirdly selfish behavior because when we're mean to ourselves, we are kind of paradoxically super self focused. It's actually hard to have anything to give other people.

Because we sort of wind up giving out of this desperate desire to get given back to, which is actually kind of manipulative. And you can really feel it when you're on the other side, when you're like, Oh my gosh, I have so much more available to people now that I'm kinder to myself, including having my own boundaries, right?

So this is all really important for relationships. And it's actually really good news because hopefully it just gives us all more incentive to stop the negative self talk and to really, if you have done a lot of work on this already, to just keep up with your maintenance because it can creep back. We have a very shaming society that is very judgmental and those judgments will kind of creep back in and we need to really sweep them out regularly.

So, this is a really, you know, important but shitty habit that kind of sucks the life out of us. Depression is just one way the body mind shuts down in response to the hyper inner critics abuse. Addiction is also a common response to like numb out that abuser. So it is a mental health topic, right? But it is also a sex topic.

If you are really intensely negative with your self talk it can be a really important reason for a low libido, like a very hard to get turned on when you are in the middle of getting abused all the time, right? You can imagine if you were being abused by somebody else it would be really hard to be sexual.

And now just imagine all that stuff is going on on the inside. So, of course, we can wind up having armor around both our heart and our bodies, our genitals, because we just, we, we are experiencing this sort of desperate need for love that we're not getting. And it can just be really yeah, really hard to attune to our partners, hard to, to be with ourselves.

So here's an exercise that is doing an inventory on your own negative self talk. Alright, so I want you to grab a journal and you can come back to this later. If you just wanna listen to it right now, come back to it. We're gonna be I'll put in the show notes like what minute this starts so that you can always come back to it and figure it out and not have to go through the whole thing.

So grab a journal and just explore, write out some examples of things that you know you are mean to yourself about, and if you don't have anything, you know, you're specifically mean to yourself about what about. times that you withhold positive kudos, self talk to yourself, credit, affirmations. Which aspects of your existence are you meanest to yourself about?

Or do you most withhold your own approval around? Which ones are you nicer to yourself about? So some examples might be your appearance, your size, your intelligence, relationships, money, cleanliness, diligence, slash laziness, right? That's a big one for a lot of people in a productivity shaming culture.

Schedules or time, your behavior in social situations, the way you approach intimacy, your parenting. I mean, anything, right? What aspects are you nicest to yourself and meanest to yourself about? And then I want you to just take a moment, and if you're just listening to this right now without a journal, kind of just come up with, you know, see if you can reflect back and think about a couple.

And just imagine for a moment that you were never mean or withholding of approval to yourself again. Just imagine that part of your brain. Just sort of fried out and was gone. And it just wasn't possible for you to be mean to yourself anymore. You could only be loving to yourself. You just lost the capacity for negative self talk.

What comes up for you when you imagine that? What feelings arise? Are there objections? Even if you kind of consciously disagree with them intellectually, what are the objections? that your brain is offering. So write down any feelings you have, even if they make no sense to you right now, and any thoughts your brain offers about why it might be a problem to be unreservedly kind to yourself.

And it's handy to do this in a journal because it depersonalizes it. It helps us get stuff out of our brain where it feels so much a part of us and put it on paper where we can see it and look at it as some sort Things that we might have learned or coping mechanisms we might have developed that might not be serving us anymore, right?

We can take it out of our brain and make it a little bit more separate. And you know, it's okay. Whatever is going on in there is okay. I have had the worst self talk really possible. Like, the I don't deserve to live variety, right? And I have come at, which was like existential, yeah, just like terror and and devastation and despair, basically.

That's what that, that made me feel like. But I was able to shift that. So I know that it's okay for whatever is in there to be in there. Most of us are not taught well how to love ourselves in practice. And our cultural messages from, you know, a puritanical lineage typically equate self love with laziness and arrogance.

But Nothing could be further from the truth. There are Some, you know, the type of self love that will pay off the best for you is self compassion, and compassion is not arrogance, and it's not laziness, right? It costs nothing. Nobody can sell it to you. You just have to cultivate it for yourself with practice, and it will actually help you get through hardships and provide true comfort to other people.

It's like having a compass to joy. and fulfillment and deeper connection with other people when we have compassion for ourselves. Because then we have enough to go around for everybody else too. And it's easy to see how to give it to others. So here's the difference. The big difference between compassion and indulgence is this.

Compassion requires presence. Being with ourselves in mindfulness, you know, like holding your own hand. That's how I think about it. And self indulgence, in contrast, is a distraction from presence. So sometimes that can be helpful in the short term. And, you know, all of us have a right to a little distracted pleasure now and then.

I am never saying that we shouldn't, you know, have a little distraction and a little distracted pleasure. But it usually doesn't actually help the situation to have a lot of it. It might help to have a little bit, but a lot doesn't tend to build joy or connection. And it doesn't even really tend to provide true comfort, even when that's what we need most.

So you can imagine that sort of feeling of having a sort of numbing out with, you know, maybe like eating a giant pile of sugar, like you eat like 12 cookies, right? That's like, okay, there was like this momentary relief that happened and then you just feel awful later. So that tends to be kind of how it feels when we go overboard with self indulgences.

And we often turn to them when we've been abusing ourselves in some way, like berating ourselves or overworking. And it becomes this sort of shameful rebellion before we head right back to our patterns of self denial. And most of the time we don't even allow ourselves to fully enjoy whatever our indulgence of choice is without shaming and worrying while we're in the middle of doing it.

So, you know, if we want to just rest, right, the rest feels less restful, less energizing, and we sort of distract ourselves while we're doing it, and then we feel worse. So when we're in self indulgent energy, our thoughts and feelings follow some typical patterns, and they're all kind of associated with trying to escape reality in order to make ourselves feel better.

But because part of us knows that we're doing that, we inevitably have this underlying theme of shame and guilt, like judging ourselves for being quote unquote lazy, right? And we have a tendency to deny our own power from this place too. So we see other people's accomplishments as threatening, right? I mean, after all, if I'm judging myself as lazy, then anybody else doing stuff that's kind of amazing, I'm gonna feel a bit threatened by.

So it's just useful to know what that pattern looks like so we can catch ourselves and invite more compassion in instead. So a handy way to contrast the feelings and actions we take from self indulgence versus self compassion, self indulgence tends to look like that distraction and escape from presence.

obeying urges or capitulating to those sort of emotions that are like, please distract me. It tends to look like cycles between overwork and exhausted buffer, buffering, or like numbing binges. And we see from that place, we see failure as an excuse to give up. We get into this sort of like, fuck it, or what's the point?

It's often difficult to offer empathy to others without deprioritizing or sacrificing ourselves. It feels like when we offer compassion or empathy to somebody else, it automatically takes from us. And if we're in self indulgence, we often have shame as a common response to our own imperfections. And when we compare with others, we feel demoralized.

So that is kind of the, I don't know, circle of symptoms of being in more sort of self indulgent energy. If we are in self compassion, it looks very different. So this is a much different, this is actually true kindness to ourselves. It looks like mindfulness and presence with our experience in the moment.

Allowing and processing our emotions, including any urges to distract, with like a loving patience. Kind of how you'd talk to a three year old having a tantrum who wants ice cream for dinner, right? That, it's okay, I get that this is what you want, I hear you, I know it's hard. Right. This is not what we're doing right now.

It's this very patient, kind approach to the self who is struggling. It looks like having a steady, sustainable work pace where you allow yourself to build in rest, breaks, fun, right? When we look at failures from a self compassion place, we see them as just new information about what doesn't work.

Inspiration to keep trying new things. It's easy to extend compassion and empathy to others without feeling like we're self sacrificing because we are compassionate enough to hold our own boundaries and recognize our own capacity. When we're in self compassion, we also can accept our own imperfections as universal, right?

Everyone's human. Oh, look, I just, you know, fell over in front of this whole group of people like, haha, that's actually kind of funny without it being in a self deprecating way. It's like, Oh, everybody does that sometimes. This was my time today, right? And we only compare ourselves to others for Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. inspiration or like to admire them, right? I can say, Oh my gosh, I can compare myself to Simone Biles and I'm not feeling bad about myself. I'm just like, Wow, look what humans can do. Like, I can't do that, but I admire so much that she can. So those are some of the ways that you can separate out yourself.

All right, am I in, what am I doing? Am I in, in sort of self indulgence energy or am I in self compassion energy? And it's totally normal to sometimes be in indulgence. I mean, I still do it and don't make the mistake of refusing to have compassion for yourself when you are in self indulgence that we really need it at that moment.

It's just simply a mindset more of fear of being afraid of our own negative judgments So the cure is actually always to bring compassion, to release that judgment and accept yourself as, you know, perfectly imperfect, 100 percent lovable, hold your own hand. So I, now look, I know that that may sound really hard and even unattainable if you are a person who happens to be really in the throes of negative self talk.

So, If that's the case, look, you have some work to do, I'll be honest with you, and it's joyful work and I promise it's worth it, but yeah, if you want to get out of that, there's, there's some effort that needs to go in, but you will have more joy and more energy and more Take care. compassion available for other people in your life, including your lovers and your kids and, you know, your friends and your family.

And you won't feel like you need everyone around you to be perfect or perfectly meet your needs. And that is really liberating. So, Some of the ways you can start on this, you know, are listing some of those ways that you typically try to make yourself feel better when you're under stress and seeing which ones might be coming from more indulgent versus compassionate energy.

You know, you can just write like a C or an I versus next to them. And then, you know, really seeing is there something else I could do that would be kinder? What would I do if I was being my own best friend? What would I do if I was talking to other people? a little three year old who was suffering? How would I suggest they support, how could we, I support them out of this?

And then try to turn that towards yourself, right? Try to turn that compassion towards yourself. So it really does require a lot of practice to change this narrative. If you are in negative self talk a lot, and then if you are kind of rebelling with that self indulgent kind of response, which is very normal when you are beating yourself up.

And we want to avoid things like kind of like bullshit affirmations that you don't believe and just try to gently see what would be just a little bit kinder, right? How could we talk to ourselves just a little bit kinder? So, You know, for me, I, it took me about a year of full, like, hardcore practice and continued maintenance with a bunch of tools before I really got this down, but I did start feeling better right away.

And if you need help, please reach out because most people do need help with this, and it will do you a world of good to get on top of it. And it will also be a big kindness to the people who love you and enable you to connect more and get out of your head better so you can be present with the world. With all the people you are in relationship with. So thanks for being here today and I will see you next time.