Annoyed and a little insulted

So he inner critic gets triggered when my client numbers get low and I am not meeting my self imposed quota for the month. I have not had any new leads in the last two months despite all the the ways I used to generate new leads. My inner critic will not let me relax and pushes me to do new things like look into and figure out direct mail marketing, hiring someone to revamp my website.....spending money on things I should learn how to do myself. I have a small little business that keeps me working and not curled up in a ball on the couch all suicidal.

How he is going on about how I do not talk to my husband about how much do I actually need to bring in each month for the budget and that i actually do not even know how much money we have. My H works for the federal government (very meticulous about retirement and saving money. Uses quicken to log everything) and makes a great salary and has told me in the past to make whatever I want to make and we are fine with money. He just wants me to be happy and he is proud of what I have done.

He feels if my inner critic new EXACTLY what I need to make it would calm down and that maybe my number I have in my head is to high. No I go by how many hours of training clients I have and that if I have to much down time because clientele is low the anxiety, and the inner critics voice comes in on how worthless I am comes crashing in. I have to keep myself so busy to keep it quite.

He said it is a vicious cycle and to ask my husband to go over the finances with me while I am cooking dinner as cooking will keep me in adult mode.

Well, this all just shows that he is in full agreement with your inner critic and makes it even harsher than what it already is.

I don't like getting bogged down in any kind of psychological lingo, because, I think, it dehumanizes human experiences. Instead of being fixated on who is the inner child and who is the inner critic and what they do, the way I see this situation is that your T simply doesn't want you to have human needs and to be vulnerable or simply relaxed at any time. This, to me, seems like the antithesis to therapy.

So right now my 7am client just contacted me that there is an issue at work and has to log in earlier and needs to move to either late this afternoon or tomorrow morning. This just left a huge gap until my 8:45 client. I am up and dressed and now I am in a panic. To much time on my hands. I could go workout but I just don't want to as I am already showered and dressed. Plenty of things to read but I can't focus so I want to just lay on the couch with the dog. This makes me want to stab myself.

It'd be awesome if you could just lay down on the couch with the dog. Someone as "lazy" as I am would also cancel all the clients for one day and give myself a day off after all the hard work I've been doing for a long time. I'd curl up on the couch the whole friggin day, drink friggin chocolate and read a book or watch something fun but I am sure it'd be too much for you to allow yourself.

Conceptually, what he is saying is making sense to me, as someone who used to have a very b*tchy inner critic. In my experience this was a painful and long lasting experience, and for me that inner critic was so strong because pretty much any person and the world in general can sound like a critic piling on. IMO it is worth tackling this issue and learning to live without that monkey on your back. Assuming you want to work on this, is it possible for you to try thinking about and doing it differently? I don't see your T saying that it's "wrong" or is otherwise critical of your behavior oriented towards soothing your inner child, but that it's not dealing directly with the problem. What if you started building up the part of you that convinces the inner critic s/he is no longer needed? Or however you might see it.

For me trying to silence my critic wasn't really the point. I saw her as thinking I needed her to stop screwing up my life (I wasn't so much screwing things up but not being perfect in every way). I don't know really how this changed, but it seems to me your T could help you think about this, if you are willing to consider it. It's a different way of being than how you have been.

Seems like there are a few threads of things that may be coming together to dog you. There is an inner critic, and then there is your relationship with your inner critic. I'm not sure I believe your inner critic can make you behave (which is a choice) in a certain way, just like you don't have to act on feelings, you can have or feel a certain way and behave another way.

Another issue is what you really want versus what you may need to do to keep your business running. I have my own consulting business and I think there is built in anxiety around this because nothing is ever certain. I don't know much about the massage business but my massage therapist who I see every 2 weeks, sometimes every week, works for the owner of a business and also works as a waitress. There are lots of choices in my small city and I've had a few different therapists and I can say that I believe clients can be won and lost based on business decisions. But I do think you have to nurture your business in some way just to keep it at a consistent place, you do have to figure out how to get new clients, so maybe figuring out what your goals really are and not just setting arbitrary numbers is part of the issue.

On your T's strategy of talking to your H and cooking or whatever, it's pretty easy for me as a stranger on the internet to look askew at that. I try to imagine myself in your place and I think it sounds ineffective. But I don't know you as I presume your T does (assuming you feel this) but it does seem like you are stuck with this inner critic and inner child battle and you need a new way out of it. You do have choices, and one of them is to try the strategy your T is recommending. I haven't done the kind of therapy where my T makes many suggestions or even asks me direct questions, but there have been a few times where he's said "hey try this" and it doesn't sound like something I want to try, but I give it a whirl and at least some of the time, it has worked. If it hasn't, I go back and say this was my experience with it and we talk about it some more and maybe figure out a different approach.

For me the key has been a willingness to do it differently than I have been. Sometimes I think being open to change is the only real thing that matters, and somehow that translates into doing things in a new way and then there are these shifts that happen. I think for you some of it may be changing your thinking that you *have* to do x because your inner critic makes you. This might point to developing some better negotiating strategies with your critic or challenging her beliefs that such a thing is really necessary. In my experience this kind of inner dialog, both with my inner child as well as inner critic has led to greater connection and less distinction between these parts. I think the Ts call this "integration," which feels good and has decreased my anxiety and fears.

Sometimes when T's make suggestions, it's not so much about the concrete thing they are suggesting but an attempt to get you out of your stuck place and do something different, to try to get you to the place where you're on board with the *goal." So if cooking or talking to your H or whatever doesn't seem like the right approach, keep talking until you can come up with something that does seem like a right way to do things.

There's a poem I read in the Courage to Heal, a self help book for survivors that I read back in the 1990's. It goes something like I walk down the street and I fall into a hole, the next day I walk down the street and I try to walk around the hole but I still fall in, then the next day I walk down the other side of the street but somehow I still fall in, then I walk down a different street.

(The poem is much better than my rephrasing, see it here Quote by Portia Nelson: “I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in...” )

Where you are now seems like a really difficult way to live. I can sort of tangibly feel why your T may be pushing you to do things differently. Maybe this isn't the right time or he's not the right person to help you, but I'm not sure that trying to do it differently along the lines of his suggestions would be terrible.

I'm sorry that you're in this space. I think this is something that is changeable and it doesn't have to be this way. A small change in your schedule and unexpectedly having some open time seems like a gift. Given that your client will be in during the afternoon it doesn't seem like a business problem (i.e. losing a client or losing the $$ from the work today). It might be that your ability to reschedule is a real positive for your business, and it keeps clients coming back. I usually don't have to reschedule my appointments, but if I do it is hard for my massage therapist to give me one later that day or week.

I wish I understood more why you feel this way. It doesn't seem like a failure related to your business or a loss to your business. Seems like there is a lot going on and maybe the original "annoyed and insulted" feelings are tripping a lot of emotional wires. Would it help for you to call your T?

My inner critic tells me I am never doing enough. I also have a fear of ever having to go out to work at a company or a standard job as my mental health issues cause so much problem. The panic, anxiety but the business I build works perfectly for me. I bring in the same or even more than when I worked in a typical job with a crazy commute. I have more free time to decompress but at the same time I panic that if I do not get enough business I will have to go back out into that world. The thought of that sets me into a depressive suicidal thoughts....so my inner critic keeps me doing what I can to hold that off. I told him this.

How do you feel about not knowing what the family finances are? That would be very hard for me.

It is said that knowledge is power. I'm sure it's not universal, but I find it easy to believe that knowing more about your finances might be one way to conversate with the inner critic with reason rather than just relying on emotion.

I have all the bank information and my H tries to show me what we have in savings and retirement and that we are fine but for some reason it causes me extreme anxiety.

I have lots of anxiety with finances, too. And I'm in a similar situation, with H the main breadwinner (though at one point, pre-daughter, I was), and I do freelance work (though in editing). H will express his concerns about finances at times, I take on more work, he gets annoyed at me for taking on more work. But I want to help more. And I feel guilty for what I spend on therapy and things. Finances can be a really challenging issue. So I get it...

Thank you for understanding. I feel my T is riding all my issues on this one thing. I literally texted my H today:

ME: I am doing the best I can do. I am sorry I can not bring in more money than I do

H: When did I ask you to? Im fine with your job.. you’re doing great.

ME:I did bring in more than last year but geez I just looked at my expense. With school and all 16,000

H:But no school this year, so you can relax a bit. No school for me either.

ME: but I brought in (this much) only…$5,000 more than last year

Well I know I do not say it enough but thank you for taking care of me

H:I have no problem with your income. We’ll be fine.

ME: Well I always feel inadequate and get really anxious and depressed and can’t relax when clients cancel or do not sign back up. I panic

I am always trying to better myself the best I can.

H:You’re taking initiative and finished class. Relax a bit and enjoy life on weekends.

Those self hate episodes are the pits.

I found these self hypnosis videos and thought of you.

Erick Brown Self Hypnosis Downloads

I listen to them at bedtime now. They are great! There's even one for your harsh superego. Maybe listening to them will replace the negative self talk with the positive messaging in the recordings.

You can find a couple of free ones on Youtube, but I bought one on Amazon Audible.

And who needs therapy when you have these? jk, but I love these, they are my new thing now.