The Critic

That wasn’t your idea

You don’t really believe that

You don’t really know what you’re talking about

That isn’t true. 

“Anyways, at about the same time — and I don’t exactly know how these things were causally related. I guess it was because I was trying to figure out who I was and how that could be fixed. Something like that. I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying. I don’t know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily, but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche. I’ve actually had students tell me that the same thing has happened to them after they’ve listened to some of the material that I’ve been describing to all of you. But I split into two, let’s say. 

One part was the old me that was talking a lot, that liked to argue, and that liked ideas. There was another part that was watching that part, just with its eyes opened, and neutrally judging. The part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking, and going, that wasn’t your idea; you don’t really believe that; you don’t really know what you’re talking about; that isn’t true. I thought, hm! That’s really interesting! That was happening to like 95 percent of what I was saying, and then I didn’t really know what to do. I thought, ok, this is strange. Maybe I fragmented, and that’s just not a good thing, at all. It’s not like I was hearing voices, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. People have multiple parts. 

So then I had this weird conundrum: which of these two things are me? Is it the part that’s listening and saying, no, that’s rubbish; that’s a lie; you’re doing that to impress people; you’re just trying to win the argument. Was that me? Or was I the part that was going about its normal, verbal business? I didn’t know, but I decided that I would go with the critic. And then what I tried to do—what I learned to do, I think—was to stop saying things that made me weak. I mean, I’m still trying to do that. I’m always feeling, when I talk, whether or not the words that I am saying are making me align or making me come apart. I really do think that the alignment is the right way to conceptualize it, because if you say things as true as you can say them, then they come out of the depths inside of you. We don’t know where thoughts come from. We don’t know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge. We don’t know what process of physiological alignment is necessary for you to speak from the core of your being. We don’t understand any of that—we don’t even conceptualize that. But I believe that you can feel that. 

I learned some of that by reading Carl Rogers, who’s a great clinician. He talked about mental health, in part, as the coherence between the spiritual—or the abstract—and the physical—that the two things were aligned. There’s a lot of ideas of alignment in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking. But, anyways, I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak. What happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying — 95 percent of it. That’s a hell of a shock—this was over a few months — to wake up and realize that you’re mostly deadwood. It’s a shock. You might think, well, do you really want all of that to burn off? Well, there’s nothing left but a little husk—5 percent of you. Well, if that 5 percent is solid, then maybe that’s exactly what you want to have happen.