All my therapist said seemed like criticism when I initially started seeing her. She said almost everything, and I took almost everything as criticism, character assassination, or a failing grade. I was thinking, ‘I’m paying this woman to help me, and all she’s doing is putting me down. How impolite.
This is a made-up example, but it has a lot of reality to it: if I told her that I was panicking because I lost my phone, she may say something like, “You crazy woman, can you not be more robust? How can something as simple as misplacing your phone overwhelm you? How cool can you get? More durable? Thank heavens, not all of my patients are this simple.
But she hadn’t actually stated that. After what seemed like an eternity, I was able to realize via therapy that her words did not match what I had heard her say. She had stated something along the lines of, “I believe you felt overburdened.
I now believe that she provided me with a genuine comprehension of my inner reality. She was correct: I had experienced overwhelm. However, I was using her comprehension as a means of punishment; I was hearing my own voice rather than hers. My higher self.
Freud identified this voice, which he named the über-ich, or superego, in 1923 when he mapped out the components of the human mind. The superego can be compared to an internalized parental figure. The superego may appear, as he wrote, “to have made a one-sided choice and to have picked out only the parents’ strictness and severity, their prohibiting and punitive function, whereas their loving care seems not to have been taken over and maintained.” Nevertheless, the internal parental voice frequently looks very little like the parents’ real voices.
Understanding your superego is important if you want to create a better, more lovingly cared-for existence. This is because, if you are unable to recognize and identify your own inner voice, you will unavoidably hear the voices of those around you reflecting your own. Finding out that the criticism you hear others voice comes from yourself instead of them could completely change the way you interact with people like your father, friend, coworker, or lover. Then, you might be more receptive to any tender care that is offered.
You can discern what is coming from you and what is coming from others after you get to know your superego and can identify its tone, inclinations, and intensities. You can consider if you are really imposing the standards you feel obligated to reach, or if you believe others are imposing them. In any case, you can then decide whether to keep up with those expectations or, if you find they are causing you pain, you might want to try letting them go.
But living a better life isn’t the sole benefit of understanding your own superego. It’s possible that you unintentionally treat those around you poorly if you are that critical of yourself. Catching your judgmental thoughts will help you stop the generations of inherited criticism that an unbridled superego can unleash. This is especially true if the thoughts are directed at any children in your life.
It’s critical to recognize that multiple things can be true at once. For example, your critical friend, who may also possess a very critical superego, may take great pleasure in picking on you because you readily accept their harsh criticism. It seems like a revelation the first time you see this. To protect yourself from their abuse, you may have an innate desire to distance yourself from them. However, it’s important to consider whose cruelty you’re actually attempting to escape – your own or theirs? Occasionally, I come across critical individuals who effortlessly assume the role of the punitive superego that I have already assigned to them. These are the folks who most appeal to me. irritating and make you want to flee right away. Naturally. since they make me think of myself.
But I am aware that escaping oneself would not help you create a better life. I have been able to gain a deeper understanding of my superego and the constant strain and demands I have been living under by getting to know myself better in my psychoanalyst’s milieu of containment and freedom of thought and feeling. That, I believe, has played a significant role in helping me feel less anxious after decades of suffering.
It is worthwhile to consider your über-ich now, even if you have never done so previously, since it increases the likelihood of living a better life. Of course, finding out you have a crazy creature within your head won’t feel pleasant. However, as they say, and as experience has taught me, you know your superego better than anybody else.