How is it that we can be so turned against ourselves? Where did this enemy within come from? How did we end up with this critical inner voice? The answers lie in the past when, as children we were trying to cope with our lives in the best way possible.

The nature and degree of this division within ourselves depends on the parenting we received and the early environment we experienced. Parents, like all of us, have mixed feelings toward themselves; they have things they like about themselves and they have self-critical thoughts and feelings. The same negative feelings that parents have toward themselves are unfortunately often directed toward their children as well. Therefore, parents have both loving feelings toward their children as well as critical thoughts and negative feelings toward them. Mothers and fathers who feel that they are bad find it difficult to believe that something good could come from them. In addition, children, just by their presence, tend to stir up in their parents the feelings they had when they were children. If a parent has unresolved feelings from their trauma or loss in his or her past, these feelings will impact his or her reactions to his or her children.

Every childhood includes situations where the child’s needs are not met and, as a result, the child has feelings of frustration or suffers emotional pain. We all experienced moment of rejection neglect, or even hostility from our parents or primary caretakers. These incidents, whether they were frequent or rare, made a significant impression on us.

Most of us, if asked, could recount in surprising detail a time when one of our parents lost control. What provoked our parent’s anger is often forgotten, but the feeling from the experience is clear and lives on in our memory. We had to try to protect ourselves against the fear, anxiety, and pain that were aroused at those times when our parents, in spite of their best intentions, acted out angrily toward us, humiliated us, or were indifferent to our feelings.

Children learn to treat themselves in much the same way their parent’s treat then. In other words, people tend to parent themselves ad they were parented, both soothing and punishing themselves in a manner similar to the ways their parents soothed and punished them.

excerpt from Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to Counter Negative Thoughts and Live Free from Imagined Limitations by Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D., Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., and Joyce Catlett, M.A. Dr. Lisa Firestone will be hosting a Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice webinar tomorrow - May 25 - from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT. You can register here.