The first and most important thing you need to know about your inner Bully is that no matter how distorted and false his attacks may be, he is almost always believed. When your Bully says, “God, you’re dumb,” and that voice inside your head fills you up with self disgust, this judgment seems just as true to you as the awareness that you’re tired this morning, or that you have brown eyes, or that you don’t understand the latest video game or computer software as well as you “should”. It feels normal to judge yourself because you are so intimately aware of what you feel and do. But the attacks of the Bully aren’t part of the normal process of noticing what you feel and do.

The inner Bully is a deceitful and misleading in a number of ways, one of his most significant deceptions is the idea that you should be equally successful in all areas of your life and when you are not, and then it is a “failure” in you! Anyone can have anything they want, but they cannot have everything they want.  The reality is that we live in a finite world, for an undetermined period of time.  This reality means that we simply cannot have it all. WE have to choose and prioritize and learn to mute the inner critic and the voice inside your head who says we should have it all and be able to do it all.

A loud, voluble Bully is ENORMOUSLY TOXIC. He is more poisonous to your psychological health than almost any trauma or loss. That’s because grief and pain wash away with time. But the Bully is always with you; judging, blaming, finding fault, making you feel worthless. You have no defense against him. “There you go again,” he says, “being an idiot.” And you auto­matically feel wrong and bad, like a child who’s been slapped for say­ing something naughty.

Another important thing you need to know about the Bully is that he speaks in a kind of shorthand. He might only scream the word “lazy.” But those two syllables contain the memory of the hundreds of times your father complained about laziness, attacked your laziness, and said how he hated laziness. It’s all there, and you feel the entire weight of his disgust as the Bully says the word.

Sometimes the Bully uses images or pictures from the past to under­mine your sense of worth. He shows a rerun of some awkward mo­ment on a date; he pulls out snapshots of a dressing-down you got from your boss, images of a failed relationship, and scenes of the times you performed poorly.

Although the Bully seems to have a will of his own, his indepen­dence is really an illusion. The truth is that you are so used to listen­ing to him, so used to believing him, that you have not yet learned how to turn him off. With practice, however, you can learn to analyze and refute what the Bully says. You can tune him out before he has a chance to poison your feelings of self-worth.

Do you suffer from an Inner Bully? Do you feel like you are your own worst enemy and suffer from low self esteem? End self judgment. Stop hating yourself and feeling worthless.