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Self-Criticism Is Not Self-Improvement

<Self-Love>

Looking inward to identify the barriers to our happiness isn’t about beating ourselves up. Taking responsibility for our own happiness is not about blaming ourselves. It’s not about willingly taking on guilt and thinking, “It’s my fault!” or “I’m so stupid!”

It’s really important to understand that self-improvement is not self-criticism.

Taking responsibility for our own happiness is about letting go of the concept of blame altogether—both toward others and toward ourselves—because this means we truly understand and accept that our difficulties are part and parcel of being alive.

If we are critical of ourselves, it’s harder for us to be honest about our needs and fears. When we receive criticism—even from ourselves—the natural reaction is defense. We defend ourselves against ourselves without even realizing it. What this means is that it’s very easy to be in denial about where we need to improve as people because we don’t feel safe enough to be honest with ourselves.

How can you feel sufficiently safe to be honest with yourself when you are always judging yourself?

This is why even when we genuinely want to improve ourselves, we can find it so difficult—we want to transform, yet part of us blocks it out. We are resisting change even while we are desiring change.

So criticizing ourselves only seems like a good tool for improvement, while it is in fact detrimental to being a better person. We can also think we are improving while in reality we are regressing, because our self-protective mechanism has kicked in to prevent us from seeing our own flaws.

Some of us think we are self-aware, but we are actually in denial.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, it is not self-criticism but self-acceptance that is key to self-improvement.

When we can accept ourselves, it means that we are not subconsciously judging ourselves or being resentful of who we are. This means we feel safe enough to be honest and acknowledge our shortcomings and weaknesses, and that we do not feel so guilty and ashamed that we have to block them out or make excuses for ourselves.

Self-criticism is one of the main reasons why even as we are working so hard on being happy, we still find ourselves unhappy. If we self-criticize and constantly beat ourselves up, it means we don’t accept ourselves. If we don’t accept ourselves, it means that we are constantly attributing blame for our unhappiness, which is as unhealthy as blaming others for our unhappiness.

Our lack of self-acceptance manifests in our reactions toward people—we’ll constantly feel that we are lacking, and this results in always comparing ourselves to others. It’s also why we can be so sensitive to what people think of us. Always subconsciously seeking acceptance from others makes it very hard for us to be at peace.

Until we stop criticizing ourselves for not being good enough, we won’t understand that our happiness has never been about being good enough or perfect enough, because we have always been enough. To be human is to already be imperfect, which means that we are bound to experience doubts, insecurities, needs, and fears.

My husband Yuri likes to say that we are like Swiss cheese—it has plenty of holes but is perfect the way it is. I laughed when he said it, but the image holds such truth! We have to work on filling up the holes and gaps in our lives (and therefore we seek self-improvement), yet we are simultaneously also perfect the way we are (hence the self-acceptance).

If we keep creating conditions listing what we must achieve to be happy, or how we must feel to be happy, or how our life has to be for us to be happy…then we will always be at the mercy of our own discontentment.

The other thing to understand is that if we use self-criticism as a way to motivate ourselves to be better, not only will it backfire, it also means that we will likely employ the same methods on the people around us—we will think that it is a good thing to criticize those we love because it will “motivate” them to be better. Then, the same cycle of unhappiness will plague the people closest to us.

We can only access our happiness when we can recognize what holds us back or weighs us down. This requires us to first accept and love ourselves so that we can freely identify the barriers to our happiness without guilt and shame making us resistant and defensive.