Author: Ryan Klette
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Meet Your Inner Critics
The characters you may not even know are there, each with their own view of the world and their own ideas about what you need.
We all have an inner world populated by different voices.
Some encourage us.
Some comfort us.
And some criticise us.
Over time, these critical voices can become so familiar that we mistake them for who we are.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a different perspective.
Rather than seeing these voices as flaws, it understands them as protective parts—Inner Critics that developed over time to help us survive, belong, succeed, or avoid pain.
Each one is trying, in its own imperfect way, to keep us safe.
The work is to become curious about them, understand what they’re protecting, and build a different relationship with them.
Here are seven common Inner Critics you might recognise.
The Crusher
“What’s wrong with me?”
The Crusher believes there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
It uses shame and harsh self-criticism in the hope that if it points out your flaws first, nobody else will.
Its intention is protection. Its impact is shame.
The Perfectionist
“Is it good enough?”
The Perfectionist believes your worth depends on getting things right.
It is always refining, improving and correcting, hoping that perfection will protect you from criticism or failure.
Its intention is excellence. Its impact is never feeling finished.
The Controller
“Can I keep everything under control?”
The Controller believes uncertainty is dangerous.
It stays one step ahead by planning, organising and thinking through every possible outcome.
If everything is controlled, perhaps nothing painful will happen.
Its intention is safety. Its impact is rigidity and anxiety.
The Taskmaster
“Am I doing enough?”
The Taskmaster believes your value comes through productivity and achievement.
Rest can feel uncomfortable because there is always something more that could be done.
Its intention is growth. Its impact is exhaustion.
The Underminer
“Do I have what it takes?”
The Underminer expects disappointment before it arrives.
It encourages you not to try too hard because that feels safer than risking failure.
If you don’t hope too much, you can’t be hurt too much.
Its intention is protection. Its impact is self-doubt.
The Guilt Tripper
“Am I letting people down?”
The Guilt Tripper believes your needs should come second.
It keeps you motivated through responsibility and guilt, convincing you that saying no or choosing yourself makes you selfish.
Its intention is care. Its impact is guilt and resentment.
The Chameleon
“Am I who I’m supposed to be?”
The Chameleon adapts to fit the expectations of others.
It believes you’ll be safer, more accepted and more loved if you become who other people need you to be.
Sometimes, in trying to belong, you lose touch with yourself.
Its intention is belonging. Its impact is losing yourself.
A Different Relationship
These characters are not your identity.
They are protective strategies that developed in response to your life experiences.
As we begin to recognise them, something changes.
Instead of believing every critical thought, we can pause and simply say,
“Oh… there you are.”
That small moment of recognition creates space.
And in that space, curiosity begins to replace fear.
The goal is to understand these parts.
Because beneath every Inner Critic is a part of you trying to protect something precious.
Which character do you recognise most?
Most people recognise more than one.
We each carry our own unique Council of Critics, each with its own fears, beliefs and protective strategies.
The first step is simply getting to know them.
The more we fight these voices, the louder they often become. The more we understand them, the less they need to shout.
Curious to Learn More?
Recognising your Inner Critics is only the beginning.
In my Parts on Paper journalling groups we take time to meet these protective voices with curiosity rather than judgement. Through guided journalling, reflection and shared conversation, you’ll begin to understand where they came from, what they’re trying to protect, and how to relate to them differently.
The goal is to know them well enough that they no longer have to run your life. To become less identified with them and more connected to the calm, compassionate presence that Internal Family Systems calls Self.
Whether you’re drawn to exploring this work in a group or one-to-one, I’d love to hear from you.
Next Steps
Join my mailing list and receive the Council of Critics Assessment together with your personalised report.
A 5–10 minute reflective assessment inspired by Internal Family Systems.
→ Join the mailing list & receive the assessment
Continue the Journey
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The Critic that Stops Me
What the Critic Doesn’t See
The more coaching and therapy work I do, the less surprised I am by the invisibility of the inner critic.
It has become so normalised that we hardly notice it anymore.
If you don’t have one and it’s not giving you or other people a hard time, then what are you even doing here?
It’s almost as if we show our grit and worth by enduring this harsh voice. Maybe more importantly, by taking its comments to heart.
Recently I was coaching a woman in her sixties who works in sales. One of the consistent pieces of feedback she receives from her managers and colleagues is that she needs to slow down. She can’t keep working at such a frantic pace.
The problem is she doesn’t know how to.
If she is busy on the inside then she is showing her worth. And she has to keep showing her worth because somewhere along the way she lost touch with her sense of value.
When I worked with her recently she had just been given two warnings on the same day for gross negligence. She had quoted the wrong amount to a customer which, in her position, is about the worst mistake you can make.
What struck me wasn’t the mistake itself.
It was the reaction.
A double warning for the same incident can hardly be legal, but you get a sense of where it comes from. It’s not as if the critic hasn’t got a point. The mistake is far from ideal.
But the reaction to it is almost laughable.
Does the critic really think this is what changes behaviour?
Because what I noticed was that she immediately doubled down on her own critic. More pressure. More vigilance. More self-monitoring. Which, ironically, made her even more likely to make another mistake.
One of the things the critic so often assumes is that somehow the person could have done better.
In this case she was spending every day trying to avoid mistakes like the plague. She wasn’t careless. She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t indifferent.
She was already trying.
Which is why I asked her:
“What does a good mistake look like?”
She almost fell off her chair.
There is no such thing.
At least not from the critic’s perspective.
The critic that shows up in her boss wants things done a certain way. And as much as there is value in standards, they can eventually begin to suffocate the many different ways human beings reach the same goal.
The older I get the more interested I become in what sits underneath this voice.
Whenever I move closer to something meaningful, something else in me often wants to move me away from it.
Anything but that.
Anything but the possibility of being rejected, humiliated, ignored, overlooked, embarrassed, exposed or found wanting.
The critic, you could say, is the part that protects us from that old hurt.
The proud defender of shame.
Its motto is simple:
Never again.
Never again will we let ourselves feel that helpless.
Never again will we feel that worthless.
Never again will we be caught off guard.
Never again.
And because it is trying to protect us, it doesn’t feel like a voice at all.
It feels like the truth.
What it says goes.
To ignore it can almost feel reckless.
Of course I can’t let go of the guard rails.
Of course I can’t trust myself.
Look where that got me before.
But one of the biggest blind spots of the critic is that it often doesn’t see that its own strategies don’t prevent failure.
Quite often they rush us closer to it.
I remember going for an interview at my third high school.
My parents had recently divorced. I’d come back from a boarding school I loved because we could no longer afford it. I was struggling with acne, low self-worth and all the confusion that comes with being a teenager.
I sat down in the office of the man who would become my headmaster.
The first thing he said to me was:
“You’re a sloucher.”
Now to be fair, I was slouching in the chair.
But the furthest thing I was, was a sloucher.
I was insecure.
I felt like I didn’t belong.
I was trying to disappear.
What interests me now is that I can find compassion for both the boy and the headmaster.
The boy who did not know how to take space.
The headmaster that did not know how to give space.
Such is the power of the critic that in the headmaster’s mind this was probably the way young people improve.
Point out what is wrong.
Correct it.
Repeat as necessary.
Eventually they will become better.
But that isn’t usually what happens.
The boy doesn’t become stronger.
He becomes smaller.
He receives confirmation that there is something wrong with him.
Soon enough he won’t even need the headmaster to tell the story anymore.
He will tell it to himself.
And that is often what the critic accomplishes.
Not a better student.
A more diminished one.
My point here isn’t that critics are bad.
In fact, some of them have probably saved us from embarrassment, humiliation and rejection more times than we’ll ever know.
My point is that they often don’t see the cost of their own strategies.
Next week I’ll write a little more about the different kinds of critics that show up in our lives and the roles they play.
But maybe the even more interesting thing is that not all critics are the same.
Parts on Paper Journalling Group: Meeting the Critic
Over the next few weeks I’ll introduce each member of the Council of Critics and share some simple journalling prompts to help you get to know these voices.
If this speaks to you, you’re welcome to join Parts on Paper: Meet the Council of Critics—a three-week online journalling journey. Together we’ll begin to recognise these inner critics, understand what they’re trying to protect, and find a different way of relating to them.
The goal isn’t to get rid of your inner critic. It’s to understand it. And in doing so, remember the Self in us that’s calmer, wiser, and better able to lead.
More information here.
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The Addict in Me
I have been doing some work at a rehab centre and, in my short stay, have learned a few things.
I look around and who surrounds me?
Addicts.
And I, as a non-addict, occupy a different position in their minds than they do in mine.
If you are like me and are termed a non-addict, then when you step into a space where people are in a program that teaches them to introduce themselves with:
“Hi, my name is Ryan and I am an alcoholic.”
it can feel confronting.
But I think I get some of why it’s important to start there.
Addiction is almost always associated with deception, manipulation, denial and lies. If you don’t start by naming the problem, there’s a good chance you’ll find a way around it.
But the more time I spend around addicts, the more I wonder whether some of these patterns belong not only to addiction, but to being human.
Sometimes personality itself starts looking like a manipulative structure, something that will do almost anything to get what it wants while avoiding what it fears, rejects or cannot bear to feel.
Often the suffering we experience seems tied to this push-pull dynamic. We have what we don’t want and we don’t have what we want. And so personality goes to great lengths trying to restore balance, usually by searching for relief in ways that often deepen the problem.
The 12 Steps begin with honesty for a reason.
Tell the truth or don’t tell the truth and pay for it.
Research increasingly shows that chronic dishonesty is not only hard on relationships, it is hard on the body. Martha Beck speaks about this. Coming from a Mormon background, she describes becoming deeply disconnected from herself while trying to live according to beliefs and norms that were not hers.
In order to stay connected to her community, she had to lie to herself.
She had to become someone she wasn’t and somehow hope that belonging would make it bearable.
Eventually she realised that if she continued betraying herself, she would become even sicker.
But what if you are not Martha Beck and you cannot leave?
Maybe you don’t have the strength, courage, resources or conditions to separate from your family or community in the ways you need to.
Maybe you continue to feel there is no other way to survive than to be inauthentic.
I keep thinking while writing:
What’s the point of words if they don’t actually belong to me?
At some point a substance or addiction can start to look like the only way out.
My point here is context.
Many of us were fortunate enough to express more of who we are and have that received and welcomed more often than not.
But almost everyone, I imagine, has experienced moments where they felt they could not fully be themselves.
We needed to become something else for someone else.
Maybe this is where the lie begins.
In those moments we are no longer ourselves.
The only possibility is starting with being honest with yourself.
Addiction begins making more sense to me from this angle.
Not as moral failure, but as an attempt to survive disconnection from self, others and life itself.
If we cannot feel connection to the life that is actually ours to live, we start searching for something else to live inside.
At another rehab centre they told me that as a non-addict I should be careful not to imply that I am the same as the residents.
And I understand that.
I have not lived the consequences many addicts have lived, and I do not want to minimise the reality of addiction.
But still, as I sit with addicts, the distinction between addict and non-addict starts falling away a little.
I am not immune.
Under different conditions I could have been sitting on the other side of the room.
I too know manipulation, avoidance, denial and self-deception.
I too have strategies for escaping myself.
I too can become trapped in rigid patterns that do not easily loosen simply because I want them to.
And yet I don’t think human beings fundamentally long for deceit or disconnection.
At some level I think most of us long for honesty, belonging, peace and authenticity.
The difficulty is that survival patterns do not disappear simply because conditions improve.
One of my favourite addictions is busyness, and culture rewards me for it.
The message is not:
“You have a problem.”
The message is:
“You’re on the right track. Push harder.”
As I sit with addicts, I see how my ego has the same capacity for deceit.
I am certainly not always honest with myself.
I have ways of avoiding myself.
This sounds a lot like addiction to me because even when I want to change, it’s often more accurate to say the pattern is running me than I am running it.
I could easily recite my own version of the first step:
I am powerless over my patterns.
This then leads me to Step Two.
The language of “Higher Power” points to something interesting.
Some traditions speak about this as Self, or the unbroken part of us. The part that remains intact beneath the conditioning, trauma and adaptations. The part in us that would not be possible to fully traumatise or break.
As we begin opening to this deeper self, we start connecting to something more honest and less defended.
Something that does not feel quite so separate from life or from other people.
Could this be part of what we mean when we say:
“Trust yourself?”
Not trusting every impulse.
Not trusting every fear.
Not trusting every craving.
But trusting the deeper ground beneath the trauma.
Learning to follow the place in you that is authentic and true.
Inviting everything in us that needs holding and attention to turn toward this more compassionate guide.
I think this is part of what the 12 Steps are pointing toward.
Not simply sobriety, but reconnection.
Learning to trust something in you that stands outside the fear, conditioning and survival patterns—and learning to follow that.
Maybe that is why these first steps feel so universal to me.
Not because everyone is an addict in the same way, but because so many of us know what it is like to become disconnected from ourselves and then organise our lives around avoiding that pain.
Part of me wants to join the addiction world and admit that, in my own way, I recognise myself there too, even if my forms are less visible and more culturally rewarded.
Some addictions are simply more visible than others.
Obviously some addictions are more destructive and extreme than others and need to be treated.
But take something like addiction to power.
It is often celebrated rather than questioned.
The more you accumulate, the more applause you receive.
Yet try asking someone deeply attached to power to stop.
Often they can’t.
Sometimes domination itself starts looking like addiction to me. The difference is simply where the suffering goes.
Put one of these people through a sincere 12-Step process and, if they are willing to look, their amends list may be every bit as long as a substance user’s.
There is maybe an even bigger problem underneath all of this.
It is not only that many of us become disconnected from ourselves or forced into adaptation.
It is also that this is not entirely a benign universe.
It can be a hostile one.
Survival has not always been easy for human beings.
We carry long histories of danger, violence, instability, uncertainty and exclusion.
You start wondering whether some of these traits—deception, hypervigilance, manipulation, denial—evolved alongside survival itself.
In some conditions these patterns were closer to protection than pathology.
Which makes the real question even harder.
How do we learn to trust ourselves not only when the going is good, but when things fall apart?
Maybe this is the deeper challenge.
Because it is easy to speak about authenticity and truth when life feels safe.
Much harder when survival feels threatened.
And if we look honestly at the world right now, uncertainty seems to be increasing rather than decreasing.
Economically, socially, politically, environmentally—many people feel less safe, not more.
Fear increases.
Instability increases.
And with that, the pull toward old survival strategies increases too.
It becomes harder to trust yourself.
Michael Mead speaks about this in many of the old stories he works with.
Often it is precisely in periods of difficulty and fragmentation that truth-telling becomes most important.
Not certainty or performance, or pretending everything is fine. But honesty.
The willingness to stop lying about who we are and where we are.
Maybe this is partly why recovery spaces move me the way they do.
Because beneath all the suffering and chaos, there is also something profoundly human happening there.
People, often with more difficult upbringings and harsher life conditions, gathering together to tell the truth.
And in a culture that rewards image, performance, productivity, avoidance and endless striving, that starts to feel radical.
In that sense, rehabs and recovery centres can almost feel like strange little beacons of light.
Places where people come to admit powerlessness, face themselves honestly, and slowly reconnect to something more real.
That feels like a lesson far bigger than addiction.
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The Uncertainty Meter
I came across one of the most interesting ideas recently from Sarah Bergenfield speaking about the neuroscience of uncertainty.
It’s not a new idea she is putting forward, but no less important for that.
And why should we care about monitoring uncertainty?
Because “I don’t know what to do” is one of the most uncomfortable places a human being can find themselves.
At some level, I think most of us are trying to avoid that experience.
We want to feel like we are managing uncertainty. We kind of like the idea of not knowing exactly what comes next, but only if we have enough confidence in ourselves to handle whatever arrives. There is nothing worse than having it thrust upon you and feeling like you don’t have enough of what you need to deal with it.
The “in over your head” experience.
We are right to want some control, some degree of certainty. Otherwise life would simply be too much.
Sarah’s description of uncertainty reminded me of something Aldous Huxley wrote many years ago in The Doors of Perception.
(I explored Huxley’s ideas in more depth in an earlier essay, Cleansed Perspective, for those interested in going further down that rabbit hole.)
Huxley proposed that the brain and nervous system function less like a camera and more like a filter.
Reality is simply too vast, too complex and too full of information for us to take it all in. So the nervous system narrows our experience down to what appears most relevant for survival.
In Huxley’s language, we are each connected to what he called “Mind at Large”—a reality far bigger than the small slice we normally perceive. But for practical purposes, that larger reality has to be funnelled through what he called the “reducing valve” of the brain and nervous system.
The purpose of this filtering isn’t truth.
It’s survival.
From this perspective, the brain is constantly making predictions about what comes next. Most of the time those predictions are accurate enough that life feels manageable. We know where we are going, who we can trust, what tomorrow is likely to bring.
But when reality stops matching the prediction, uncertainty rises.
And from an evolutionary perspective, that makes perfect sense. Not knowing what is coming next could be dangerous. Better to predict, prepare and stay one step ahead.
The challenge is that the same uncertainty that signals danger can also signal growth.
The nervous system often struggles to distinguish between the two.
That being said, not knowing can also be one of the highest expressions of our creativity.
It is in not knowing that we make space for whatever new thing life is trying to birth through us.
A relationship.
A business.
A book.
A difficult conversation.
A new version of ourselves.
From a mythological point of view, whatever is waiting to come into being arrives through those willing to remain an empty vessel for a while.
None of these emerge from certainty.
They emerge from a willingness to stand in territory that cannot yet be fully mapped.
The same uncertainty that our nervous system experiences as danger can, at times, be the very doorway through which life is trying to move us forward.
Uncertainty is not one thing or another.
We want to find whatever certainty we can and rest in that while simultaneously making space for the bigger reality that life itself is a profoundly uncertain place.
What’s even more interesting to me is that uncertainty affects us differently.
Not only do different people respond differently to uncertainty, but our own inner world can become full of contradictions around it.
One part may become excited.
Another becomes terrified.
One part freezes.
Another immediately starts making plans.
One part wants guarantees.
Another wants adventure.
Whatever the constellation of our inner experience, it seems unlikely that anything moves us quite as much as uncertainty.
Much of psychology focuses on external triggers.
That person upset me.
That event stressed me.
That conversation made me anxious.
And of course that happens.
But what if our state shifts are not always driven by other people?
What if sometimes our uncertainty meter is simply running higher than usual?
Without anything dramatic happening, we may find ourselves more tense, more contracted, more vigilant. A little more on edge than normal.
And this inevitably shapes the lens through which we experience our day.
Imagine you are in a fight with your partner.
They storm out and leave.
Your system is now not only responding to the conflict itself but also to the uncertainty surrounding it.
When will they come back?
Will they come back?
What does this mean?
The mind starts trying to close the gap.
To resolve the uncertainty.
To regain a sense of control.
What’s fascinating is how much of this happens automatically.
The question for me is not how do we eliminate uncertainty.
The question is how do we grow our capacity to be with it without becoming reckless.
This is where parts work becomes useful.
Because uncertainty doesn’t land on neutral ground.
We all have histories.
Some of us grew up in homes where the world felt dangerous and unpredictable.
Others grew up around chaos, where uncertainty was simply normal.
Some of us learned to control.
Some learned to avoid.
Some learned to perform.
Some learned to disappear.
All of this influences how we respond when uncertainty appears.
If I listen carefully enough to the voices inside me, I often hear a range of different perspectives.
One urges caution.
Another sees possibility.
Another remembers what happened last time.
Another wants to leap.
Perhaps the task isn’t to silence uncertainty.
Perhaps it is to listen carefully enough to hear who is speaking.
The beautiful thing is that we are not limited to any one of these voices.
There is something larger that can listen to them all.
Huxley called it Mind at Large.
Other traditions speak of awareness, presence, Self or soul.
Whatever language we use, most of us have touched it at some point.
The place in us that can remain open when the rest of the system contracts.
The place that doesn’t need certainty in order to be present.
The more I think about it, the more useful the uncertainty meter becomes.
Not because it tells us what to do.
But because it helps us understand what is happening.
One of the first questions we can ask is:
What is influencing my meter right now?
The most immediate zone is the self.
Our own body.
Our own thoughts.
Our own internal world.
A strange pain appears in the body.
A symptom we don’t understand.
A sensation we weren’t expecting.
Suddenly uncertainty enters.
The mind begins trying to make sense of it.
What does this mean?
Is something wrong?
Do I need to worry?
The uncertainty meter starts climbing.
From there we move outward.
Into our immediate environment.
The people we live with.
The places we spend our time.
I know someone whose uncertainty meter was constantly activated by a building project next door.
The noise wasn’t the problem.
The uncertainty was.
How long will this continue?
What will happen next?
When will it stop?
The nervous system struggles when there is no predictable end point.
Then we move outward again.
Family.
Relationships.
Community.
Perhaps it is a change at work.
A new teacher at your child’s school.
A shift in a friendship.
A parent becoming ill.
Every circle we belong to has the potential to increase or decrease our sense of certainty.
And then we arrive at the widest circle of all.
The world itself.
Wars.
Politics.
Economic instability.
Social change.
To whatever extent we allow the world in, it too influences the meter.
What strikes me is that we all have different sensitivities.
The same event may barely register for one person and completely destabilise another.
A war on the other side of the world.
A change at work.
A strange sensation in the body.
A child struggling at school.
The uncertainty is not only in the event.
It is in the relationship between the event and the nervous system experiencing it.
There is no universal uncertainty meter.
Only our uncertainty meter.
And perhaps that is where regulation begins.
Not with fixing.
Not with certainty.
But with noticing.
My uncertainty meter is high today.
Something in my system is responding.
Something in me is looking for safety.
Just naming it can create a little more space.
A little more compassion.
A little less identification with the stories uncertainty generates.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty.
Perhaps the goal is simply to become more aware of our relationship with it.
To know when the meter is rising.
To understand what is influencing it.
And to remember that there is something in us larger than the uncertainty itself.
To know when the meter is rising is already the beginning of wisdom.
If you’re interested in exploring these themes further, I write regularly on Substack about uncertainty, parts work, identity, belonging, recovery, and the many ways we learn to navigate being human.
I’ll also be facilitating a small online Parts on Paper group starting on 24 June.
We’ll be exploring many of these themes through reflective writing, conversation and a series of prompts designed to help us hear the different voices that emerge when life becomes uncertain.
The aim is to become more intimate with the ways we have learned to survive.
To understand the protectors, strategies and assumptions that shape our lives from behind the scenes.
And perhaps, in the words of Suleika Jaouad, to become a little more creative with our survival.
To discover new possibilities for responding to life beyond the patterns we inherited, learned or developed out of necessity.
If you’re interested in joining the group, drop me an email and I’ll send you the details.
