How to overcome loneliness and self-shame
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Step One: Get to
Step One: Get to know what your inner critic is telling you
Notice when your thought process shifts and your inner critic starts to invade your mind. Get a hold of what situations trigger your critical inner voice and what that voice is saying to you in those moments.
Step Two: Think about where these critical attitudes come from
When people write down or say their voices out loud, they sometimes have insight into where these mean thoughts originated. Identifying where your voices may have originally formed can help you to have self-compassion and distinguish these old attitudes from your current reality.
By the time the
By the time the critical inner voice builds the case of why we’re such losers or no one cares about us, we’ve lost touch with reality.
We’re so quick to indulge its claims that we mistake them for our real point of view. Because of this, it can be very difficult to notice that this voice has seeped in and even harder to peel away it’s sadistic coaching from our true perceptions.
The best way to start fighting the critical inner voice is, therefore, to do two things: identify when it’s operating and understand where on earth it comes from.
Dealing with isolation and
Dealing with isolation and loneliness
The critical inner voice strongly influences feelings of isolation, loneliness and social anxiety.
Being alone isn’t necessarily the issue; it’s the filter of seeing ourselves as alone that must be challenged. People who feel lonely tend to view the world differently.
Some of the psychological effects of feeling lonely include focusing on exclusion instead of inclusion. Another effect is timidity.
Step three: Talk back
Step three: Talk back to your critical inner voice
Vocalize or write down a reply to your critical inner voice. You should aim to take on the perspective you would have toward a good friend. Write down a more compassionate and realistic response to your voice attack. Don’t listen to the undermining criticisms that come up as you complete this exercise.
Step Four: Think about how your voices affect your actions
As you come to know your voices, you’ll get better at recognizing when they pop up. You can actively try to divert your mind and start to notice how this voice influences your behaviour.
What is our “critical
What is our “critical inner voice”?
This “critical inner voice” exists in all of us, reminding us constantly that we aren’t good enough and don’t deserve what we want.
The critical inner voice tends to be louder and meaner in some of us than others, and it tends to pick on us more or less at different points in our lives.
As long as we are listening to this dangerous critic that twists our reality, we cannot really trust our own perceptions of what others think of us.
Step Five: Change your
Step Five: Change your behaviour
Once you’ve identified them, challenge the behaviours dictated by your inner critic. If your inner critic tells you to stay in seclusion you have to find a way to not indulge in the behaviour.
Challenging your voices will stir up anxiety and changing a behaviour pattern can make the voice seem louder at first.
However, the more actions you take against your inner critic, the more confident you’ll become.
It is this destructive
It is this destructive “voice” we are hearing every time we tell ourselves, “nobody likes me.”
It also instructs us to avoid situations where we’d get to know people. It shuts us up in social situations, makes us nervous, so we don’t act like ourselves. It confuses us with its ceaseless stream of self-shaming observations and self-limiting advice, leaving us anxious and stifled.
In turn, it bends us out of shape in such a way that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where does the “voice”
Where does the “voice” that “nobody likes me” come from?
The critical inner voice starts to take shape early in our lives.
It’s built out of any hurtful negative attitudes that we were exposed to in childhood. If a parent thought of us as lazy, helpless or as a troublemaker, we tend to incorporate these attitudes toward ourselves on an unconscious level throughout our lives.
We also tend to be influenced by how our parents felt toward themselves, if they felt awkward socially or had low self-esteem, we take on some of their self-critical perceptions as our own.
Challenging this precise feeling
Challenging this precise feeling is what will lead you to get what you want in life. It will allow you to shed layers that keep you from feeling yourself.
Slowly but surely your inner critic will weaken. Your real self will become stronger, more vibrant, better known, understood and accessible to the world around you.
There is perhaps no
There is perhaps no more painful thought in the world than that of “nobody likes me.”
It’s an easy feeling to indulge and dwell on, a terrible go-to self-attack in low moments when we feel isolated, depressed, anxious or insecure.
This feeling has almost no bearing in reality and no purpose other than to deeply wound us and turn us against ourselves and whatever our goals may be. And yet, this exact thought is extremely common to shy people and extroverts alike.
Finally, loneliness can actually
Finally, loneliness can actually lead to misremembering. So, when we think back on our day, we may distort things people said to us or how interactions took place in ways that would perpetuate the perception of ourselves as being isolated.
Lonely individuals are more likely to construe their world as threatening, hold more negative expectations, and interpret and respond to ambiguous social behaviour in a more negative, off-putting fashion.
Overcoming the critical inner
Overcoming the critical inner voice
Once we accept that we come by this inner critic, we can start to separate it from our real point of view.
We can notice the times it seeps in and tampers with the filter through which we see ourselves and the world around us and recognize how our actions are affected by this destructive thought process.
Here are five important steps to overcoming this inner critic.