You’ve been beating yourself up about what happened.

Which is a strange thing to do.

If you saw one of your friends constantly berating themselves how would you feel?

I’m sure that you’d want them to stop.

But somehow, it’s ok for you to do it?

It’s like there’s a part of you that wants to be mean.

Therapists call this a ‘critical voice’.

It’s like you’ve got an inner critic living inside you.

If we had more time we could explore this voice further.

Find out more about them and understand who they might be.

For example, if your parents were critical when you were young, their voice may have got “internalised”.

It’s as if they’re still giving you an unwelcome commentary on life.

More surprisingly, sometimes you might think you deserve to be punished.

Maybe something difficult happened, and you just assumed you’d done a bad thing because nobody said anything about it.

Or maybe someone did give you the message “you’re bad”.

But unfortunately, because our time here is restricted, I’m afraid we can’t look into this any further.

Instead, I want to introduce something that’s important when dealing with a critical voice.

Compassion.

And I want you to consider allowing more compassion for yourself when this critical voice kicks in.