Book Review for
Embracing Your Inner Critic :
Turning Self-Criticism into a Creative Asset
By Hal Stone and Sidra Stone

I had just finished Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism and was finally having some success dealing with my depression and anxiety when my wife gave me a copy of Embracing Your Inner Critic. She'd picked the book up a year or two earlier and lost track of it in the "to read" piles. This book really grabbed me. I've never really been comfortable with the various "inner child" labels I come across in therapy, but the term "inner critic" really resonated with me. I was all teed up and ready for this book by the optimism I was discovering within myself and starting to develop thanks to Seligman's book.

I think I wore out a couple of highlighters going through Embracing Your Inner Critic. My first thoughts were "How do these people know ME so well?" but I came to realize that I am not alone. That there are lots of us blaming ourselves in order to "protect" ourselves from outside criticism. I'm learning that beating my imagined critics to the punch by criticizing myself sooner and harder than anyone else would is not really helping myself but rather pushing me deeper into the muck of depression.

I realized my inner critic was a pretty good ventriloquist. I had been blaming everyone else for saying all the negative stuff I was actually saying about myself. The book helped me to start moving away from adversarial relationships with my critics, both real and imagined. Now I'm learning to listen to my inner critic as kind of distant early warning system, a helpful "heads up" rather than a broadside of self-loathing. For the first time I'm seeing a world full of potential allies rather than adversaries. The Voice Dialogue technique is a lot like cognitive therapy and like cognitive therapy it requires regular practice for full benefit. But the rewards of the techniques I'm learning from these two books have provided me with strong motivation to stick with it.