Creativity and the Inner Critic: Why artists are hard on themselves and how to find another way

“The light is given life by the darkness.”

I have noticed that many of the creatives I know are horribly self-critical. I don’t just mean writers or painters, I mean creatives of every stripe – people who make things ad put their creations into the world. It seems that a harsh inner critic is often a companion of the creative soul. Observing this again, when I joined a writers’ group a few months ago, I got to wondering why that is.

Sat with a group of other writers, I felt like I had a moment of insight. I shared it with them, and it seemed helpful, so I want to share it with you.

The Magic of Archetypes

The insight sprung out of reflecting on the issue through the lens of archetypes. Archetypes, if you don’t know, are building blocks of our psyches, the characters which people our inner worlds and which sit so close to the foundations of human psychology that they seem to be cross-cultural. Jungian Psychologist, Carol Pearson, has written extensively about archetypes and in how she works with them, they come in complementary opposite pairs like The Caregiver and The Warrior.

When I studied Carol Pearson’s work some years ago, and used a psychometric she developed, I found that The Creator archetype is the one that shows up most strongly in my character. That was not a massive surprise as, left to my own devices, I would keep writing books and crafting things and inventing stuff and making and creating until I drowned in a sea of my own creations! That creativity can be a huge gift but I have just described the shadow of that gift: the obsession with creating can be suffocating for the creator and you can lose sight of the potential for sharing the work with others until you brick yourself in with a tottering castle of your own creations.

To Create, Destroy

The balancing force, then, is The Destroyer.

The Destroyer might not sound like an archetype you want to have anything to do with, but as with any complementary opposite, it has a vital role. I think the Destroyer archetype has got a bad rap because so many people who embody it, do so unskilfully and even brutally. I think we have a scarcity of positive role-models. If you look at the ancient world though, if we look to myth and folklore, there are some beautiful examples. The Indian Goddess Kali springs immediately to my mind, a figure whose image is scary but while she is the Goddess of destruction, she is also the Goddess of creation, often referred to as the Divine Mother.

What is the link between creation and destruction? In order to create, we have to cut away that which is not helpful, necessary, or good. Discernment is a form of cutting away. If you have The Creator archetype powerfully present in your psyche like me, then you will need a strong, healthy Destroyer archetype to stop you drowning in your own creativity! But right from the start of the creative process, how do you choose what to work on? It is normal for me to have at least 5 or 6 projects I am working on at any one time and that is after I have narrowed them down a bit! In the past, it was not unusual for me to have 10 or more book ideas filed in folders being worked on in parallel. Even if I was free to write those books full-time, I would have struggled to get anything finished with that many projects, and it’s not like I didn’t keep coming up with more ideas!

All of us only have so many hours in the day and so many years on the planet. If we are to do our best work, then we need to be discerning. We have to choose what we focus on and where we spend our time and energy. Those are both functions of a healthy Destroyer in our psyches. I trained originally as an actor, and in theatre we had a saying: “Shoot your darlings.” What that meant was that you should be ready to get rid of your most treasured little moments or details in a scene, character or piece of work if they did not ultimately serve the work. You might have fallen in love with a particular way of saying a line but if your getting a laugh in that moment throws the scene off its rhythm or doesn’t serve the overall meaning of the piece then scrap it. I’d say that a healthy, well developed Destroyer lies at the heart of the best creative work.

When is An Inner Critic, Not an Inner Critic?

(This isn’t just a zen koan, promise!)

How does this all relate to having a harsh inner critic?

Well, I think many of us have not developed a powerful and healthy enough relationship with The Destroyer archetype. I think there are ways – for understandable reasons as I have mentioned above – that many of us who wish to be creative have a wonky relationship with The Destroyer. Either we have learned from broken role-modelling in our culture that The Destroyer must be a harsh, brutal figure in order to be effective (just look at that phrase from my drama days – “Shoot your Darlings!”) or we have come to believe that in order to be creative we must not be destructive.

The problem with the latter is that, if you suppress something in your psyche, it doesn’t go away, it just leaks out sideways, unconsciously.

In either case I think The Destroyer ends up doing an unhelpful job, either through miseducation or through being forced into the shadows of our being.

Rewriting the Story and Learning to Love Your Inner Critic

I have begun to wonder if part of the energy that underpins a harsh inner critic in the creative psyche is a misdirected Destroyer archetype. For want of better things to do, the Destroyer turns inwards and starts to Destroy us. It’s like a dog that has been poorly trained, ignored or mistreated: eventually through neglect, the dog that could be a loving companion and guardian becomes an aggressive beast that will bite anyone, even the hand that feeds it.

The possibility in this, then is to be able to redirect our Destroyer and find it a healthy home in our psyche. What if, every time we experience the voice of the harsh inner critic, instead of either getting crushed by it or trying to get rid of it, we could say: “Hello, thanks for your input, that kind of thing isn’t helpful though, but I have this great job for you to do!” What if we could rewrite and rewire our relationship with the critical voice and, with love, transform it into a fierce warrior who cuts away at distractions so we can focus on our best work? What if that could be the new job we give that critical voice, a job where the critical eye is helpful rather than judgmental and destructive?

Off the back of talking about this in our writers’ group, we did a writing exercise: we wrote a story where we met The Destroyer. I found this incredibly rich, both as a start to this journey towards a healthier relationship but also because, as is so often the case for me, I discovered things by writing that I didn’t consciously know. I wrote my way towards healing.

I’ll share my story below. That feels a little scary, but I think it may resonate for some of you so want to be brave with it. How about trying it for yourself? If this article has spoken to you, if there are things in here which intuitively make sense and you want to shift your relationship with the inner critical voice, why not write or paint (or whatever you do!) your way into an encounter with The Destroyer and see what you discover? There might be a whole new relationship, a new ally waiting for you in the shadows…

Meeting the Destroyer

As she steps out of the shadows, the light catches her Kohl-darkened eyes and penetrating gaze. She is not sharp in her attention, but I feel skewered nonetheless, not so much by her eyes but by the gravity of her step.

She is there. She is more there than anyone else I know. More real somehow. I feel insubstantial by comparison, a fluttering, guttering flame, a butterfly next to a cliff-face.

“How can I compete with you?!” I say, “How can I ever create enough, be clever enough, be brilliant enough, shine bright enough to match your darkness?”

She stands, stock-still and steady eyed.

I begin to cry. Not because I am scared, or hurt, or even ashamed, but because the child in me is grieving. All those painful years trying to beat back the darkness with brilliance. All those painful years desperately trying to make it alright, to fix all the hurts, to fill the void with success and admiration and validation.

She sees me.

I breathe.

She sees me.

I breathe.

And I know.

I know that in the darkness is life. Not the flourishing show-off kind of life but the deep-rooted life of the Earth. The living rock that makes mountains. The Earth which even the mighty oak clings to for support.

And I feel that place in me.

The solid core, the deep well, the dark night, the silent chamber, the stillness of deep peace, the bright clarity of the pole-star on a crisp winter’s night.

The light is given life by the darkness.

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