When you re a kid, your parents disapproval is a life and death matter, since they are the sole source of physical and emotional nourishment. You retain conscious and unconscious memories of all those times when you were punished and felt wrong or bad. These are the unavoidable scars that growing up inflicts on everyone s self-esteem. When your pathological critic starts pointing out how you ve made a mess, fallen short of a goal, or made a stupid mistake, it sounds perfectly believable because it harks back to your earliest memories of punishment, shame, and fear. The nastiness of your pathological critic depends on how frequent, rejecting, consistent, moralistic, and blaming your parents forbidding gestures were.
Damage is done when parents yell and hit or withdraw their emotional support.
When parents don t enforce the rules consistently, it makes it hard for you to figure out what is expected of you. When you re punished, you are more likely to assume it s because you re bad by nature, not just breaking a clear rule. If your parents considered being noisy, getting a low grade, or breaking something a mortal sin, you are more likely to have low self-esteem than if they expressed their rules in terms of preferences, tastes, personal needs, or safety issues. Careful parents make a clear distinction between their child s inappropriate behavior and the basic goodness of their child. Your answers to these questions can help you identify the origins of your critic.