Working with your inner critic
Last week’s blog looked at why carers particularly can be ultra self-critical. This week’s blog is going to explore how to work with your negative self-talk. However, a caveat before I start. I’m going to be talking from the perspective of coaching and coaching tools. Sometimes negative self-talk needs a therapeutic space to excavate deeply embedded negative messages from childhood, or support where negative self-talk develops because of trauma. If you feel you might need this kind of therapeutic support, have a look at the BACP’s register of therapists.
I’m going to take you through a three-step process to engage with your negative self-talk and work with it:
First step: identification or how are we talking to ourselves?
There are a number of typical ways that we can engage in negative self-talk. These can include:
Filtering: ignoring the positives and only picking out the negatives in what we do.
Personalising: blaming ourselves for things that are actually out of our control, or only partly to do with us.
Overgeneralising: because I made this mistake, this thing will always be this way.
Should: This ‘should’ be this way otherwise I am a failure.
Name-calling: calling ourselves names like ‘loser’, ‘failure’ etc.
Magnifying: making an event far more significant than it actually is.
Consider what patterns of self-talk you engage in most commonly, what kinds of things do you tell yourself? Reflect on what are the triggers for this negative self-talk. Do some activities, or others’ responses lead to more intensive negative self-talk? Is it constant, or more intermittent?
Second step: evaluation
Here we take what we’ve found out in step one and examine it further to reflect on what these negative thoughts mean for us (here you might want to use a journal or a notebook). We can ask ourselves about:
Self-esteem: how does this negative self-talk make me feel? How does it impact on my behaviour?
Acceptability: would I talk to others like my inner critic talks to me? (What are your thoughts about this?)
Facts: ask yourself: What evidence do I have that the things my inner critic is telling me is true?
Outlook: Here you can ask yourself: If this negative self-talk continues, what will be the impact on my life?
Third step: reframing
Finally, we want to take our thoughts about how we talk to ourselves (step 1), and what this means (step 2) to consider what might be a healthier alternative. We can ask ourselves:
What could I tell myself instead?
We can use the following format to begin to reframe our thoughts:
“If …. then (replace negative thought with more reasonable belief)”
For example:
Original thought:
“My son is having a meltdown because I haven’t done enough to support him (personalisation), and ultimately I’m failing as a parent (magnification)”.
Reframing:
“If my son has a meltdown, then it’s because there are things in his environment and things about his day that have stretched him beyond his capacity for toleration/have heightened his anxiety and pushed him into fight or flight mode.”
Other examples might include “Ideally, I … but” formulations for “should” obligations from our inner critic.
For example:
Original thought:
“I should be vigilant all the time for things that could upset my son.”
Reframing:
“Ideally I would like to be vigilant all the time for things that could upset my son, but ultimately I have to accept that some things will be out of my control.”
You’ll notice that these ‘reframings’ are all about deescalating from ‘absolutes’ to more reasonable expectations of ourselves. They give us permission to be more fallible (see Szymanksa and Palmer, 2012), less perfect humans.
If this post has resonated with you and you want to deal with your inner self-critic and reframe how you talk to yourself, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.
Why are carers often ultra self-critical?
Talking to carers, I notice that whilst carers do a huge amount of labour, caring, and putting other people’s needs before their own, they nevertheless exhibit a lot of negative self-talk. I think there could be a couple of reasons for this:
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Survival mode
Bell and Ross (2014) suggest that how we perceive and react to an external stressor (e.g. an unexpected bill, a relative is admitted to hospital) can create further internal stressors. It’s possible that, if we have good support and resources, we can get that unexpected bill and think “that’s annoying” and then work out how to pay it without being too immobilised by stress. It’s also possible that our reaction might be to create internal stressors that compound our feeling of being stressed, such as negative self-talk, unrealistic expectations, and inability to accept uncertainty.
When we are in survival mode we’re overwhelmed by stress. I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that in situations of extreme stress the body secretes stress hormones so the person is constantly feeling like they are vigilant for and reacting to danger. In survival mode this becomes a constant: there’s so much stress that all we can do is focus in (usually on the person being cared for), live moment-by-moment (and ‘survive’), and zoom in the right now (knowing that we are forgetting stuff, getting things wrong). Returning to Bell and Ross’s logic that it’s possible for a person to react to stress by creating more stress e.g. by invoking (involuntarily) negative self-talk; in a survival mode the activation of negative self-talk feels more likely. This is because in survival mode, where we are tired, potentially neglecting family and friends, forgetful and aware of making mistakes. Though we are reacting to stress in the best way we can, we nevertheless put ourselves in a situation where we are conscious that we are barely coping: and this is where we can become critical of ourselves.
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Compulsive sensitivity
Forssén et al (2005) did a study with women carers where they found that certain carers were incredibly sensitive to other people’s needs and pushed themselves (often into burnout) trying to meet those needs. The carers experienced an inner demand to put the needs of the people they were caring for before their own. Forssén et al called this “compulsive sensitivity.” Forssén et al (2005: 666) describe how compulsive sensitivity shifted people’s sense of reality:
“Adjustment to the needs of the recipient increasingly shut out the person’s own needs. Together with fatigue and isolation, which in themselves cause feelings of powerlessness, this adjustment gradually distorts [carers’] sense of normality. Any move toward changing the situation causes feelings of guilt.”
When I did my own study with carers, I found that this drive to put the other person’s needs before the carer’s was something all my participants did. In this study I linked this internal deprioritisation of the carer’s needs to negative self-talk. What I found was that when carers did coaching they were able to recognise that they were talking to themselves negatively. Coaching allowed them to think about how they could talk to themselves (and about themselves internally) differently. I think negative self-talk emerges because carers internalise society’s expectations around caring as a selfless activity. Negative self-talk is a way of downplaying the carer’s needs through self-criticism for not doing well enough or the emergence of guilt when a carer tried to do something themselves. It’s like the ultimate form of taking responsibility for someone else, by expunging yourself – and your self-talk reinforcing this.
I’ve mentioned coaching as one way that carers can reframe negative self-talk, and I’ll write more on other strategies soon. If this post has resonated with you and you want to deal with your inner self-critic and reframe how you talk to yourself, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.
How do I begin to recover from burnout? Part two
In the previous blog we explored beginning to recover from burnout through building social support and physical health. In this blog we continue this non-exhaustive exploration of some of the ways you can support yourself if you are feeling burnt out.
Look at (if and) where you can strengthen your agency
There’s lots of evidence that carers can struggle to prioritise their self-care (Collins, 2025; Diggory and Reeves, 2022). However, to give yourself permission to do this means that you are helping the person you are caring for as well as yourself. The tricky thing here can be navigating between your needs and the needs of the person you are caring for.
One way of doing this self-care can be seeing where you can strengthen your agency.
Whilst reading about recovering from burnout, I’ve come across literature that talks about strengthening people’s boundaries. A boundary might be saying ‘no’ to doing something that adds more responsibility/tasks for you. This makes perfect sense: burnout is linked to exhaustion, so saying no to extra or existing ‘load’ can help us recovery. A boundary, according to Michelle Ellman, is how we teach others to treat us. Boundaries signal what is us and what is something/someone else; what is acceptable, what is unacceptable.
Typically boundaries can be tricky for carers, because caring often means that the carer’s identity becomes subsumed into the identity of the person they care for. This is true for how carers perceive themselves and how others perceive them. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me that they have been ignored in processes where, as the carer, they are an expert on the person being supported. Furthermore, carer boundaries are challenging because carers occupy and switch between multiple overlapping roles: e.g. parent, administrator, advocate/fighter of the system, researcher, potentially also employee in another part of life. The rules of how people ‘treat us’ in these different roles might look different and make ‘hard’ boundaries difficult to maintain.
Talking with coach Caroline Rigby, I realised just how tricky ‘boundaries’ can be for carers or parents. Quite apart from the fact that carers and parents have so many different roles, boundaries themselves are inherently ‘defensive’. The English word boundary derives from Latin and French words for limit, later coming to mean ‘the limits of a territory’ or dividing lines. As a carer or parent can you really draw ‘dividing’ lines? What is the impact on others of drawing such lines? For parents of Pathological Demand Avoidant (or Pervasive Desire for Autonomy) children, for example, setting a boundary can look like a demand or even a rejection to that child. Drawing boundaries can potentially become about asserting control, and in certain circumstances where children or family members are highly dependent might not feel possible.
So what if we make a ‘coach move’ here and reframe recovering from burnout by setting a boundary, as recovering from burnout by strengthening your agency? Rather than drawing a definitive line in the sand (a boundary) that feels defensive, disconnecting; agency feels connective. Agency (which comes from Latin, and means ‘to do’), is theorised in Psychology through Deci and Ryan’s ‘self-determination theory’. In this theory, people are inclined to grow and they do this by building autonomy, competence, and relatedness: being connected to others. If we think of agency then as premised on connection, we can then begin to explore what agency/needs does my child/ my family member have, and what agency can I develop? How could these work alongside each other? So we have agency and connection. We can also ask: what do I need to develop this agency? We can begin to think about how we can build our skills in this area.
In this last blog we mentioned how much of burnout comes from feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Developing our sense of agency gives us a way to begin to move and to become energised. Even if it might be tricky to navigate what that agency is in terms of balancing other’s needs and our own, agency nevertheless keeps us connected with others. If you want to think through where and how you could build more agency, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.
Acknowledgements: This blog would not have been written without the brilliant insights on self-determination theory by the coach Caroline Rigby. Thank you Caroline for your support and for challenging my thinking!
How do I begin to recover from burnout? Part one
In the previous blog we explored gaining clarity about whether you are burnt out. This blog is a non-exhaustive exploration of some of the ways you can support yourself if you are feeling burnt out. (More to follow in the next blog post. If you are seeking information on Autistic burnout, look at resources and work by Dr Megan Anna Neff.)
Reaching out for support
We’ve seen that informal caregiver burnout is linked to having a reduced social life (Gérain & Zech, 2019), so it follows that social support would be a key part of protecting yourself from burnout, or helping yourself to recover from it. One way in which you can do this is to build in what we’re going to call relational self-care (Smit, 2017). Relational self-care is where you have (non-judgmental) conversations with other people to help you keep perspective when you are caring for others. We’ve already said that it’s very easy to give everything to caring. So it’s good if you can check in with someone who can notice that maybe you are over-extending yourself, or you are more on edge than say this time last year/month. Social support is an important buffer against stress and burnout. Because it provides a perspective from someone who understands your situation, but is able to look at it from outside, it can also help you keep your self-esteem (Smit, 2017). This thing that you thought went disastrously was not such a catastrophe, actually it’s just something that does happen from time to time, and it’s normal. It’s key that this person really understands your situation and can support you in a non-judgmental, empathetic way: this might be a family member, a friend, or a professional.
Take care of your physical health
This is a ‘where you can’ try to take care of your physical health, as for carers this can be really challenging due to lack of time, overwhelming stressors, and exhaustion getting in the way. Good sleep, exercise, and a good diet are really helpful for underpinning your physical health and bolstering your resources. I realise this is easier said than done. I couldn’t do all of these (exercise, sleeping well and good diet) at the same time, so I started with the one that felt easiest for me, building up an exercise habit. Then once I had been doing that a while I tried to be a bit better with my diet. Some weeks I don’t do well with exercise at all. However, having intentionally included more exercise in my week, I recognise that ‘exercise’ has become a baseline now. This means I realise exercise when exercise is missing and it’s easier to get back to if I fall out of the habit. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but just doing something for ourselves can help build up our resources to protect us from burnout, or help us with small steps towards recovery. In the last blog on burnout we looked at how burnout is associated with having to give up things that are meaningful and important to carers due to caregiving (Gérain & Zech, 2019): thus if you can establish and maintain some practice that you do to bolster yourself, this will help.
Self-compassion
To have self-compassion you need to become your own best friend. Kristen Neff suggests that you support yourself in the way you would treat a best friend who is having a difficult time. Self-compassion means being kind to yourself, speaking to ourselves kindly (and not castigating yourself for not attaining perfection, or not getting things right all the time). It means seeing ourselves as human, flawed and capable of making mistakes. It also means that we don’t mourn for what we were ‘supposed’ to have or do. Self-compassion means being present with our thoughts and feelings in a mindful way – recognising patterns of negative thinking – but not getting hooked on those thoughts. Instead of chasing negative thoughts down a negativity rabbit hole, mindful thinking recognises that in some way they might be trying to protect us, even if they might not helpful for us right now.
Taking small actions
Taking some small, manageable steps that you have identified and planned will help you to feel better. This is because small steps are ‘hope’: psychologist Synder defined hope as a 1) motivation that comes through successful agency, and 2) having a pathway, a plan to move forwards. So identifying a step forward is important as it gives you agency, when much of burnout comes from feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Secondly, having a plan to move forwards helps you realise that agency and gives you a new baseline from which to then build your next steps forwards.
If you are burnt out or feel you are becoming burnt out and you would like some support, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk. In this next blog post we’ll have a look at strengthening our agency.
Am I burnt out?
Burnout
We often throw around the phrase ‘burnout’ to convey our tiredness and exhaustion – sometimes it even gets used as a badge of honour to show we’ve been working really hard. Burnout is more than this though. It’s a psychological and physiological condition, and it has to be recovered from.
Burnout was first defined in the 1970s in relation to workplace performance. Psychologists identified three main features of burnout (Maslach and Leiter, 2016):
- Cynicism: detachment from or hostility to work
- Exhaustion: depletion of energy
- Inefficiency: declining competence and productivity at work
I think it’s also worth noting that psychologists came up with this theory not by looking at how paid employees navigated the world of work, but by looking at how volunteer caregivers were affected by their roles (Gérain & Zech, 2019).
Signs of burnout
While Maslach thinks of burnout in measurable psychological terms (and doesn’t distinguish between physical fatigue and mental weariness), people can exhibit a whole host of different burnout symptoms. Some of these symptoms are psychological,
- Trouble remembering,
- Loss of confidence and/or increased negative thinking,
- Difficulty in decision-making,
- Reduced capacity for coping,
- Anxiety,
- Depression,
Some of them can be health-related:
- Insomnia,
- Aches and pains (e.g. Headaches, back pain, shooting pains),
- Tiredness,
- Susceptibility to getting ill,
Some of them can manifest in behaviours:
- Undertaking risky behaviours,
- Aggression or irritability,
- Withdrawal and avoidance,
- Loss of motivation and procrastination.
This is not an exhaustive list, but my aim here is to show that burnout emerges in different ways: we may be burnt out or showing symptoms of burnout and not even realise it.
Carer burnout
I mentioned earlier that the psychological concept of burnout derived from observations of how volunteer caregivers were affected by their work. It may not surprise you to learn that since 1986, informal caregivers now have their own specific category of ‘carer burnout’ which has refined the earlier descriptors for the context of caring. Carer burnout is characterised specifically by:
- Emotional exhaustion and being overloaded
- Emotional distancing from the person being cared for (as a means of self-preservation)
- The reduction of a sense of positive accomplishment through being involved in care.
Many things can make a difference to people’s likelihood to be burnout, such as the kind of caring they are doing, their family and support arrangements, and gender – women are more likely to get burnout from caregiving.
What can make a difference to burnout?
I’m going to focus in on two key things that can impact on people getting burnt out:
- Informal caregiver burnout is linked to having a reduced social life (Gérain & Zech, 2019)
- Likelihood of carer burnout is increased by caregiving resulting in having to give up things that are meaningful and important to the carer (Gérain & Zech, 2019).
If you feel burnt out, it is important to have/establish some kind of social connection. For so many people I talk to, being able to discuss their circumstances with other people who understand is a really key resource: this might be family, friends, or a professional. I’ve discussed elsewhere that when we are in survivor mode, caring, we often go into social isolation and hunkering down. Evidence shows that the more social support you have, the more likely you are to protect yourself from emotional and physical stressors (Bruce, 2009).
The second point is that having things that are for you is really important as it also gives resources to cope and stave off stressors. Carers often focus everything on the person being cared for, but in the long term this is not sustainable. As a carer you can justify having things for you as these help sustain you: if you have sacrificed things that were for you to do your caring work, are there any small steps you can take to reclaim these (or other things) as part of your arsenal of resources?
Conclusions
In exploring burn out, I’ve been suggesting that a first step to tackle burnout is to recognise it for what it is. The symptoms of burnout might look different for different people, but there are some common factors of overload, fatigue and feeling disconnected.
The second step is navigating burnout is to start to ask: where can you get (social) support? And how can you support yourself?
If you are burnt out or feel you are becoming burnt out and you would like some support, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.
Reframing avoidant coping
When we experience a stressor or a problem, sometimes we deal with the situations we find ourselves in through avoidance. Becoming busy is one example of this: we squash our emotions, resolve to carry on, and/or distance ourselves from the stressor/problem. Often the consequences of this come back to bite us, sometimes in burnout, sometimes in emotional explosions, or becoming disengaged.
Psychologists often divide coping strategies into ‘avoidant’ and ‘approach’ styles.
Avoidant coping strategies are often termed ‘maladaptive’. It is normal for us to engage in these behaviours and strategies because they are often occurring around things we construe as threats. ‘Maladaptive’ coping can involve denial or distancing and escape. Whilst denying something that seems uncontrollable and difficult can be an effective short-term strategy for dealing with it, it does not help resolve things in the long term. According to Hofmann and Hay (2018) distancing can be a way of dealing with negative emotions and thoughts, whilst escape is a response to a problem. Escape develops an exit strategy as a way of dealing with a threat: however, in the long-term escape can itself become harmful as it can lead to other negative behaviours (e.g. isolation, unhealthy addictive behaviours, (my strategy of choice) comfort eating etc.). Lisa Doodson (2019), discussing how stepfamilies cope with stressors, suggests the following can be examples of avoidant coping in parenting:
- Mental disengagement: becoming involved in other activities to avoid a problem
- Behavioural disengagement: giving up on solving a problem
- Venting: focusing on the stress and dumping emotions related to it (but not necessarily in a problem-solving way).
By contrast, approach styles to coping engage with the problem/stressor and take (or attempt to take) positive steps to resolve it. Doodson (2019) suggests that this might look like:
- Seeking out social support: getting advice, support and sharing the load
- Active coping/planning: working out solutions to aspects of a problem and then enacting these solutions to minimise the problem and feel some agency
- Reframing/Acceptance: working out what aspects of a problem you can’t change and then working out how you might accept this or let things go.
Coaching can be useful here as it can help to recognise how and where maladaptive coping is happening and can support turning avoidant behaviours into approach behaviours.
Here are some ways in which avoidant behaviours can be reframed to approach a problem or stressor:
- I think venting can be positive: the environment and the recipient of the vent must be right. It’s important who you vent to: if you go to the source of the problem you might end up focusing on the problem and how the person is perceived to cause the problem rather than working towards a solution. I have seen venting work positively in a coaching space because a) the person you are talking to is non-judgmental b) coaching offers containment – it’s a space to put the vent without those emotions needing to leak outside of the coaching c) it gives a framework to look at the problem/stressor and the emotions in solutions-focused way. I think these same elements would also apply to counselling here.
- Creating self-awareness: this might involve reflecting on feelings and thoughts in relation to a particular situation and thinking about what has gone well in terms of coping and what could be better.
- Clarifying: as well as becoming more aware of ourselves, reframing an avoidant approach can also involve looking at what is happening with the particular problem/stressor: what aspects are most difficult and why? What would it mean to approach this differently?
- Solution orientation: when we look into problems deeply we can start to spiral, with problems creating more problems and more negativity. When we look at solutions, we start to engage our imaginative capacities and most importantly we start to hope and see possibilities (we could take a small step here, we could do/think this differently).
If you feel you are stuck in avoidant coping and you would like some help to shift into an approach style of coping, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk. We support you to support your families.