(Disclaimer: This transcript is using AI technology. Please excuse any errors.)

Music 0:02
Welcome to this special Writing Bravely podcast series where we write our way through to the other side. I'm your host, Dr. Adina Silvestri join me here and at writing bravely.com to talk about how a creative act like writing can move us through the healing process.

Adina Silvestri 0:23
Hello all and welcome to the second episode in the writing bravely series. How to tell when your pain is protecting you dialoguing with our emotions, what we're going to be talking about today. And the pain that I will be referring to is guilt, shame, remorse, maybe judgment, self judgment caused by the inner critic. This is something that comes up a lot in my practice. And let's dive in. Everyone messes up. Me, you, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, it's important to acknowledge mistakes, just show remorse and move on. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness. They're unfairly self critical. And I'm gonna bring up a concept that is not new. Actually, Dix Schwartz came up with it in the 1990s. And it's really caught on and oh, well, the world of therapy. But also now it's moving to the world of business, and then other realms. So it's, it's been kind of cool to see that. But so let's just talk about our mind for a minute. And the fact that we have many sub personalities. For example, some of us have a go getter part, and an anger part. We have an inner critic part. And we also have a protector part, we have many parts, and an each part has their own feelings, and thoughts. And no, I don't think we're all multiple personalities. But you know, just just think about it for a minute. When you have the go getter part, and you're doing everything you can for your job and doing everything you can for your family. That feels really good. That Golgotha part is very useful. But there's another part that jumps in and says, Hey, what about me, you're giving yourself to all these other people and organizations, but and then I get nothing left in return. And then there's the anger part that says, you know, this is unfair, this is unjust, we need to fight back. So if you just kind of think about it, you'll recognize that you have many different parts with many different voices. Let's focus a little bit on the inner protector part. So this inner protector really puts your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective. You know, the inner protector highlights, your good qualities encourages you to keep getting back on track tells the inner critic to take a hike in a very friendly tone. You know, like you got this. Thanks for protecting me. With the support of your inner protector, you can see your faults more clearly without fearing that they will drag you into a pit of feeling awful. Clean up whatever mess you've made as best you can and move on. The only wholesome purpose of guilt shame and remorse is learning not punishment. And that's great. The inner protector does a lot of great things. How do we listen to this inner protector? How do we dialogue with it because I feel like a lot of the listeners here really will continue to beat themselves up way past the point of it being healthy. Sort of sink into the guilt or the shame or the remorse or the judgment. How do we listen to these signals? Well, writing is one way. Writing helps us to identify and acknowledge these sub parts.

If we were to use prompts to help us bring out some of these inner protector parts or talk to some of these inner critics, the prompts would probably look something like this. So if you have a pen and paper, you want to write this down. You want to get to know some of these more undesirable parts. So you would ask things like, a prompt would be things they don't want to forget. And maybe then you ask yourself, things I'm responsible for things I'm not responsible for. For instance, you're not responsible for other people's feelings, or mis judgment misjudgments, or whatever they have going on, right. You're responsible for you and the mistakes that you make, and the wrong turns that you make. And those are the only things that you can repair and make amends with. So you acknowledge what you've already done, to learn from these experiences and to repair things and to make amends, and then you let that sink in. And at the end, you appreciate yourself, appreciate yourself for all the work that you've done. Because dialoguing with these parts with these sub parts. So it's not easy work. This is not easy work, but it's necessary work. The pain is always trying to tell you something, always trying to sell you something. And you could link it back to earlier memories. Earlier memories earlier experiences when you first felt these things, and that will give you some great insights. I'm also going to link to an air podcast in the show notes that gives three or four other prompts that I think would be useful with talking to your pain and dialoguing with these critical parts. Okay, guys, well, I hope you enjoyed episode two. And I hope that you head over to writing bravely.com If you liked these prompts, if you think you'd want to do more prompts, and more writing on these prompts, but you want to do it in community. I think that would be great. It's so much easier, it's so much more healthy. So much more necessary to heal and community. So you can go to writing daily.com schedule a call. We could talk about the group, the beta round and the beta pricing even more importantly, maybe for some will begin June 27. And we just have a limited number of spots available. Okay. Thanks so much, guys. Bye.

Music 8:28
Thank you for listening to the Writing Bravely podcast series. Join the Writing Bravely community over at writingbravely.com