Gemma Speck

Parents, teachers, siblings, peers, they kind of help us build the first draft of how you understand yourself by offering suggestions, but sometimes also offering criticism and also by displaying self-criticism towards themselves.

This is what we call, this first sense of self is what we call the evaluative self.

We learn about what it means to be human by seeing what others are doing, thinking about what others are doing, copying other people's behaviors and also comparing our own behavior or our own little lives to what we see around us.

At some point, we become aware that there is an audience.

We're not always performing for the same audience, though.

We become aware as children there is an audience.

Some of our childhood audiences were a lot meaner.

Some of our parents weren't very nice.

Some of our peers weren't very nice.

Some of our teachers weren't very nice.

If those early environments are warm, you often learn that mistakes are survivable and that your worth will remain intact even when you get things wrong, even when you're not perfect, you're happy to explore, you're happy to bounce back, you're happy to, you just are resilient.

Like I think about my friend's kid, right?

Yeah, she didn't like her art, but just because she didn't like it when it was compared to like the idea of,

Somebody else's picture, right?

Not because her parents were like screaming at her that she was terrible at everything she does.

Like she didn't like it from a comparative sense.

For some people though, like their environment, like the inner critic was always external.

It was a highly critical, rejecting, humiliating, unpredictable, cruel, completely disengaged person who was like speaking things in their ear, telling them they were terrible.

Children are watching so closely.

They are listening so closely and they internalize the tone of our own language, not just towards them, but towards ourselves as well.