To Create with Volume and Enjoyment, Integrate Your Fascination with Self-Judgment

Why your problem isn’t a lack of skill but a lack of self-awareness

As a creator, you know the fulfillment that comes from entering a state of deep immersion in your writing, drawing, music making, or whatever you do.

But often it feels like a gated garden stands between you and your immersive, flow state. You’d like to create a large body of work, but sometimes an ominous sense of dread colors your creative process.

It’s not as if you dislike what you’re doing: the feeling comes from the looming tyranny of critique and judgment. While you try to concentrate, you hear voices saying, “Who do you think you are to say this?” or “Here we go again…”

If you were to look for advice about dealing with self-judgment, you’d likely be told to carry on and recognize the critical voices will get quieter the better you become at your craft.

This is true, but just suppose that it wasn’t the full story. What if the fuller story is that your self-criticism is playing a function in your psyche that is purposeful, constructive, and profoundly necessary for your growth as a creator?

Why Believing the Problem is External Keeps You Trapped

If you contend with self-criticism — or any repetitive emotional pattern — your automatic tendency is to see the problem as arising from “out there” in some external circumstance.

But when you focus exclusively on solving an external problem, it usually doesn’t go away but simply takes on a new dimension.

For example, as a creator navigating self-judgment, you might initially feel upset because no one reads your work.

If you assume the issue lies only in the external world, you’ll be disappointed to find these emotions take on a new form when your work receives an onslaught of critical comments.

If you want to address the root cause of your self-criticism, you need to see it as an emotional pattern, fundamentally separate from your circumstances.

Are You Responding in the Present Moment, or Reacting Mechanically to the Past?

For a moment, consider whether your self-judgment — or whatever emotion holds you back — is a conditioned emotional response rather than an accurate reflection of your skill level.

In transactional analysis (TA), these automatic emotional responses are known as rackets, habitual emotions people exploit every situation to feel.

TA is a mode of psychotherapy that focuses on how caretakers shape their children’s life overtly, through spoken communications, and covertly, through veiled forms of communication that convey ulterior motives.

TA describes rackets as emotional attitudes we adopted in childhood to find emotional stability or protection.

In Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts, Claude Steiner uses this example of a racket:

A woman with an “I’m not okay” position elaborated it into a “Nothing I do ever works” racket and would use any situation to feel bad.

Whenever she went to a meeting, she played her racket as follows: If she got there early, she felt bad because she could have used the additional wash at home, if she arrived late, she would feel bad because everybody noticed her with disapproval; and if she came on time, she felt bad because no one noticed her.

Thus, no matter what the situation, she used it to promote her racket.

In early life, our rackets helped us get what we wanted, form a self-concept, and make sense of what happened to us. The issue is these patterns became so automatic that you fell asleep.

Through a combination of social programming and your lived associations between certain outer circumstances and your feelings, you learned to view your problems as outside and separate from you.

You now struggle to see your emotional reactions as anything but perfectly justifiable, natural reactions to your circumstances.

How Your Early Experiences Shape Your Current Perceptions

So, if your favored emotional patterns (rackets) are leftover, habitual responses learned in childhood, you might wonder, how exactly did your parents encourage them?

It’s not that your caretakers celebrated your self-judgment or feelings of inadequacy — if they did, they wouldn’t haunt you now.

As explained in What Do You Say After You Say Hello?: The Psychology of Human Destiny by Eric Berne:

“From ages six to 10, [a person] makes definite decisions about what kinds of feelings they will work for.

He has previously experimented with this, feeling by turns angry, hurt, guilty, scared, inadequate, righteous, and triumphant, and has discovered that certain of these are treated with indifference or outright disapproval by his family, while one of them is acceptable and gets results.

This favored feeling becomes a sort of conditioned reflex which may persist for the rest of his life.”

You may have formed a self-criticism racket because when you expressed a perception of inadequacy, your parent slowed down, listened more closely, and gave other signals of warmth and presence.

Or maybe the self-critique racket is part of your family inheritance, and your caretakers responded because self-criticism represented a complicated, sensational pattern for them too.

You might feel attached to a given racket because it did indeed help you solve problems in the past: perhaps your inner critic helped you spot holes in your past thinking, and now you’re afraid of what you’ll miss if you let it go.

The problem is your self-criticism has become more limiting than useful, and it’s holding you back.

Why You Should Relate to Your Rackets as the Story-Less Sensations They Are

The more you accept your rackets as emotional patterns fundamentally separate from your life circumstances, the more constructively you can respond to them.

You can relate to them as patterns of sensation in the body, rather than trying to suppress them as they inevitably take on new forms.

So, using self-criticism during art making as an example: the problem isn’t that you judge yourself because you lack talent or are under lots of pressure to succeed financially.

Those things may indeed be true, but they’re not the root cause of the problem. These circumstances are cover stories you’re exploiting so you can experience the emotions you’ve become habituated to.

Note that I’m not implying you shouldn’t aim to improve at your craft or that your self-judgment is baseless.

Yet when you understand it as a racket, you’ll become more prolific — you’ll stop expecting the feelings will just go away once you get published, find enthusiastic fans, or receive some other stamp of approval.

Instead, you accept self-criticism as part of the deal, which paradoxically frees you of its grip.

When You Celebrate Your Rackets, They Evaporate

Most people resist the idea of having rackets. It can feel defeating or like a kind of “victim” blaming that deflates the lived realities of their suffering.

But when you believe outside circumstances are holding you down, you operate from a place of powerlessness. Your only resort is to fight, control, and manhandle until your circumstances become how you want them to be.

When you fight reality, you tell a story that frames you as a victim. You are generating the very darkness to which you throw your fists. — Kelly Brogan

The paradox is that when you give up the story that the world, the past, or some other external force is holding you back, you realize you don’t have to wait until your outer circumstances change to feel better or respond differently.

You can just go directly into the emotions of inadequacy or self-judgment, experiencing them as sensations that dissipate when you’re present with them.

The truth is this — whenever you tell yourself you’ll only feel better when you fix the unpleasant realities “out there,” it’s a form of suppression. And as many students of human nature have noticed, the more you attempt to manage your emotions into oblivion, the more power they exert over your life.

As psychologist and mystic Carl Jung famously said:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”

To break free, you need to identify and make peace with your rackets.

How to integrate your rackets

In addition to meditating on the sensations that arise in your body when you judge yourself, letting them play out without identifying with them, I’d invite you to experiment with questions like…

• What did self-criticism, inadequacy, or (another racket) help you accomplish in early life?
• What does it protect you from feeling or experiencing now?
• What has to happen before you can give it up?

These questions will help you make your (previously unconscious) rackets conscious, creating a psychological distance where you can embrace them for what they are (patterns of sensations in the body).

With this separation, your rackets no longer hold the power to compulsively direct your behavior.

Cultivating this attentive awareness sets you free because you stop devoting your energy to managing your story about who you are and what you need to break free of your creative blockages.

The more you allow your rackets to simply be, the less domineering they become, and the more naturally and automatically you enter satisfying easeful flow states.

If this stirred something in you, leave a comment and I will give it the piercing light of my attention ; )