Integrating The Inner Bully
We all have an inner bully, or an inner critic, that lives inside of us.
You might recognise yours for that voice that always puts you down, tells you that you’re not good enough, berates you for making a mistake, or tells you that you always get it wrong.
It’s also the voice that tells you how you need to act, look, be, do, and live your life, in order to be acceptable. It tells you the things you don’t like about yourself and your body. It tells you where your life is lacking.
You might hear the voice as a parent, relative, sibling, partner, ex-partner, friend, yourself or a combination.
I notice that as much as this voice likes to complain, it never offers solutions either. There is no solution, right? You are just unloveable.
Every time I looked in the mirror that voice would have something to say. Every morning I woke up, or evening when I went to bed, it would start up again (it was going all day, but I kept myself super busy so I didn’t have to listen to it).
It told me I could never sit still because I always had to be achieving. It told me why people always left me, or will leave me. It told me the job I had to have, and then what my business had to look like (and that I was a failure if it didn’t fit that). It told me all the mistakes I had made that day and replayed scenarios of past conversations to show me where I went wrong.
Recently, I found some of my old journals where I was writing a lot about how I was trying so hard but could never get it right. It made me really appreciate how far I have come.
Because now, that voice is no longer telling me those things. Sometimes it kicks up, but it is so quiet and the energy is so low, that I don’t even have to try not to engage with it.
My ‘bully’ was, by far, the most challenging piece for me to work through on my self love and healing journey. It eventually became clear that my health issues were never going to shift unless the turmoil inside of me did, so, one of the things I had to do was face the bully and ‘disobey’ it.
I dived into one place I did not want to go - why was I so compelled to be busy all the time? Why could I never stop working or doing? I went there by slowing down. That showed me the reasons straight away!
My teacher called it the ‘slowing down’ demons. They kicked up hard. The shame, the admiration and respect I would apparently lose, the judgment, the berating - it was intense at times. But it did show me what was underneath it - and one of those things was, I was scared to lose love.
To be honest, this is under all our patterns to some degree. For me in this context, I wanted others to be proud of me and tell me I had done a good job. Somewhere in my life, I learned that this was a good strategy to stay safe, and I was still playing it out.
I needed that from others because I didn’t know how to give it to myself. Because I had so much judgment on myself.
The thing is, that voice, it’s really coming to you out of a place of love. It honestly believes that it is keeping you safe, loved, and accepted. The ego desperately needs these things. The soul however (which is you), already is those things.
Instead of resenting the voice and trying to push it away, I got to know it. I asked it what its fear were, and what it needed to feel safe. I comforted it, reassured it, let it know that I had this. I moved my body, journaled my feelings, wrote letters and asked for help.
Eventually, one day, I suddenly realised that the voice had gone. The energy of it had disappeared. I cried and let the last of it release.
And this is how we silence or dim the inner bully. We accept, witness and integrate it. After all, it just wants to be seen and heard, like we all do.
It kicks up when it feels like it is being ignored. So now, if I hear it, I listen, reassure it, and it dies down. We work as a team, not as enemies.
This was a slow process which took me several months of devoted inner work. It’s not an easy road to tame the inner bully, but it is so, so, worth the freedom and love waiting for you on the other side.
