There are times in life that shake you to your core. Your world is changed so much that you don’t recognize it or yourself anymore and doubts start to creep in that you’re ever going to recover.

That happened to me eight years ago when

Sometimes I don’t feel very good about myself.

In fact, I get depressed.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit since I am a therapist, you know.

But it’s true.

Like many people – maybe you included - I’ve had a lifelong struggle with the inner critic that takes up space in my head and a lot of my emotional energy.

Of course, since it’s been a lifelong struggle, I’ve also been on a lifelong quest to find some answer to feel better about myself. Let me tell you just a little bit of my story.

I want you to think carefully as we go through the story and see if any of these steps describes where you are now.

The mind is a tricky thing.

And, despite good intentions, yours might be laying a trap for you.

Broken hearts. We’ve all had them, or will at some time. I hope these quotes for the broken-hearted will help you bounce back from heartbreak in the most healing way possible.

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Remember that bouncing back from heartache is very much like bouncing back from other pain in our lives – you have to accept the loss in your life.

But remember this too: accepting something does not mean you have to like it.

One of the things I like about this quote for the broken-hearted from Edna St. Vincent Millay is that she has accepted the pain that accompanies heart break: I miss you like hell.

She is not using flowery, romantic language about the loss. She accepts it, but calls it like it is – a hole that she falls into every night, a hellish pain.

Burn-out \ˈbərn-ˌau̇t\ : exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.

Feeling exhausted? Numb? Helpless? It may not just be from the end of a long school year or stress on the job, you might actually be suffering from a case of burnout.

3 dimensions of burnout

Most of the research on burnout has been in the domain of work, but burnout can occur in just about any area of our lives. The leading researcher in the field, Berkeley professor Christina Maslach, has defined three dimensions of burnout:

Depression is insidious.

You feel sad, you lose your concentration, nothing is interesting to you anymore, and – to top it all off – your thoughts become stuck in an endless loop of self-criticism.

There are many ways to address depression. Researchers interested in decreasing depression and increasing resilience have found that using a number of intentional activities creates positive emotions and helps reduce feelings of depression.

The first step, though, is to work toward letting go of the critical rumination going on in your head. Why? Because it is very difficult to even consider pursuing intentional activities with thoughts such as:

“It won’t help.”

“Why even bother?”

“I’ll just screw it up.”

These thoughts make your mood bleaker and keep you on the sofa rather than feeling up for trying a new activity or intervention.

So, what to do?

You know that chirping little critic you hear inside your head sometimes? Most of us have one. It’s that voice that says,

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“Why even try? You know you can’t do it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite (loser, slob, dimwit, etc.)”

This voice – this inner critic – is often the main obstacle we face when trying to bounce back in life.

But that inner critic loses its audience and it’s power when we do something that most of us aren’t very good at: showing ourselves compassion.

Did you catch that switcheroo in the title of this post? Usually, it’s “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

But in our society, we tend to reverse that. We find it easier to be compassionate toward others than toward ourselves.

Being nice to others is a good thing, right? Yes, but it begs the question: Why can’t we be nicer to ourselves?

That Inner Critic

You know that chirping little critic you hear inside your head sometimes? Most of us have one. It’s that voice that says,

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“Why even try? You know you can’t do it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite (loser, slob, dimwit, etc.)”

Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion and a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, says this voice probably developed as a means to keep us safe, a basic need that we all have.

Also, she posits that we may think we need this voice to keep us motivated. After all, wouldn’t we just be completely out of control if we didn’t talk to ourselves this way?

You know the answer to that. We don’t need that inner critic to keep us in line.

A top girls’ school in London is currently engaging in an interesting experiment: Failure Week.

This entire week will be about failure and about “the value of having a go rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less.”

I love this. Here’s why: We need to become friends with failure in order to be able to bounce back in life.

Even though there is lip service paid to “it’s okay to fail,” the reality is that there is subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to do exactly the opposite – to be perfect.

Let’s expand a little bit on the idea of acceptance that I wrote about in a recent post. In that article, I talked about how important it is to accept the reality of the adversity you may be facing.

Now let’s talk about the aspect of acceptance that has to do with letting go. Many times when I talk about letting go, I can see people’s eyes start to roll back in their heads.

“Oh great, I’ve fought and fought to keep my house from going into foreclosure, and now she wants me to give up?”

Herein lies the common misunderstanding: letting go is not so much about giving up as it is about giving in. It’s not about just standing by, doing nothing, as your house goes into foreclosure. But it is about giving in to the reality of your current situation and letting go of judgments and expectations you might have about the outcome.