Transcription
Criticism is never easy to learn. That others judge us to be foolish, perverse, ugly, or unpleasant is one of the most challenging aspects of any life. However, the impact of criticism is hugely variable and depends ultimately on a rather unexpected detail: what sort of childhood we have had.
The clue as to whether criticism will be experienced as merely unpleasant or wholly catastrophic lies in what happened to us many decades ago, in the hands of our earliest caregivers. What is meant by a bad childhood is here a matter rather simply of love. An infant arrives in the world with a very limited capacity to endure their own being. It is the tolerance, enthusiasm, and forgiveness of another person that gradually acclimatize us to existence. Our caregivers' characteristic way of looking at us becomes the way we consider ourselves. It's by being loved by another that we acquire the art of looking sympathetically on our craft in troublesome beings. It's simply not in our remit to believe in ourselves on our own. We are utterly reliant on an inner sense of having been valued inordinately by another person at the start, as a protection against the subsequent neglect of the world. We don't need to be loved by many; one will do, and twelve years might be enough, sixteen ideally. But without it, the eternal admiration of millions would ever be able to convince us of our goodness, and with such a love, the scorn of millions will ever need to be fatal.
Bad childhoods have an unfortunate tendency to drive us to seek out situations in which there is a theoretical possibility of receiving outsized, which also means along the way, a high risk of encountering outsized disapproval. The emotionally deprived return almost manically to the question, never really settled, of "Do I deserve to exist?" And this is why they typically put unusual efforts into attempts to be famous and visibly successful. But of course, the world at large will never give the emotionally nervous the unqualified confirmation they seek. There will always be dissenters and critics, people too bashed about by their own pasts to be able to be kind to others. And it's to these voices that those with bad childhoods will be accused, however enthusiastic the crowd as a whole might be. We can observe along the way that the chief marker of being a good parent is that one's child simply has zero interest in being liked by large numbers of strangers.
We don't all hear the same thing when we are criticised. Some of us, the lucky ones, hear just the surface message from the here and now. For example, that our work fell short of expectations, that we must try harder with our assignments, that our book, film, or song wasn't excellent. This can be bearable. But the more wounded among us, if the farm criticism takes them straight back to the primordial injury, an attack now becomes entwined with the attacks of the past and grows enormous and unmanageable in its intensity. The boss or unfriendly colleague becomes the parent who let us down. Everything is pulled into question. Not only was the work subpar, we are a wrench and undeserved being, a piece of excrement, the worst person in the world, for that's how it will felt back then in a fragile, defenseless infant mind.
Knowing more about our tricky childhoods provides us with a vital line of defense against the effects of criticism. It means that we can be on our guard when we are attacked, against raising the stakes unnecessarily. We can learn to separate out the verdict of today from the emotional verdict we are carrying around with us and always seeking to confirm with the use of current events. We can learn that however sad the attacks we are facing, they are as nothing next to the real tragedy and the effective cause of our sadness: that things went wrong back then. And so we can direct our attention to where it really belongs, away from today's critics and towards the unconvinced parent of yesteryear. We can forgive ourselves for being in this area through no fault of our own, faithfully sensitive and in essence mentally unwell. We cannot stop the attacks of the world, but we can, through an exploration of our histories, change what they mean to us.
We can also importantly get a second chance. We can go back and correct the original verdict of the world. We can take measures to expose ourselves to the gaze of friends, all the more ideally of a talented psychotherapist who can hold up a more benign mirror and teach us a lesson that should have been gifted us from the start: that like every human, whatever our flaws, we deserve to be here. At the school of life, we believe that confidence is a skill we can learn. Our confidence prompt cards are designed to help us master this mysterious art. Click now to learn more.