Thread by @mykola

Yes, this is a great question because it can be challenging to disentangle them! They are both "parts" of you, and a part of healing is recognizing how to listen to and appropriately evaluate what your various parts are telling you.

The trick to this one...

https://twitter.com/happifydesign/status/1469750165607047168

...is that the inner critic is trying to keep you safe by lowering your expectations of yourself and diminishing the value of what you have to offer to the world.

This way nobody else can hurt you more, right? If they don't like your art who cares, you already "know" it's crap.

The inner critic also frequently speaks in someone else's voice. For years mine sounded like my father, and it actively harmed my relationship with him in ways that haven't fully recovered.

I blamed him for what that voice was telling me.

The inner critic _puts you down_.

Self-awareness, on the other hand, can ALSO make you feel really bad -- but if you listen to what the part is saying, you'll realize it's not trying to put you down. It's trying to build you up.

A growth part is protecting you by helping to identify ways to get stronger.

Both the inner critic AND a healthy growth part can tell you things that cause you to feel shame.

That's why it's so important to learn how to process shame appropriately -- because when used correctly it's a tool for growth. But it can also be toxic.

Here are my current thoughts about shame, BTW. I hope some folks find this helpful, it really helped me to learn about this stuff.

coda.io/@mykola-biloko…

So, TLDR: growth and self-flagellation can feel surprisingly similar. You have to get at the underlying mechanism and figure out what the insight you're having is trying to tell you, and _consciously choose_ to filter out unreasonable inner critic bullshit.