It’s often painful to get feedback from other people, and even harder to know what to do with it when we do get it. It can feel like an attack on our person, and it can be hard to identify whether there is something in the feedback that we can actually change.
For our clients who are highly self-critical, their internal critic is constantly giving them “feedback” about all the ways they are bad/wrong/damaged/flawed or how they are making mistakes or screwing up in some way. Often this “feedback” is not helpful. In addition, the experience of being criticized by your internal critic after you receive feedback makes it harder, perhaps even overwhelming,
to get feedback from others.
Compounding the situation, people who are highly self-critical tend to interpret feedback as rejection (or at least a threat of rejection).
Research shows that among high self-critics, the normal tendencies that all of us have to be on the lookout for signs of rejection are heightened, making them even more sensitive to potential criticism and rejection. This can increase the chance that neutral or ambiguous social signals are interpreted as hostile. For example, we might interpret a blank expression as hostile, feel like someone interrupting you when you are
speaking means they don’t like you, see someone’s slight turn of the body away from you as dismissing of what you have to say, or simply think that a frown means a person is upset with you.
Alternatively, high self-critics tend to interpret low intensity signs of rejection or criticism as if they are
strong signals and react to them with a lot of self-hatred, self-criticism, anger, defensiveness, and/or intense shame. The result is that high self-critics often feel like they overreact to self-criticism. For example, they may take the feedback in too quickly, getting stuck in self-blame. Alternatively, they may automatically discount the feedback and argue defensively.
