How My Inner Critical Voice Made My Relationship Worse

A Personal Essay

TW: A mention of childhood trauma and sexual assault.

A long time ago now, I found myself sleeping on my Aunty’s sofa after she took me when I was made homeless. That is a story for another day but one which left a massive abandonment wound inside of me. A wound I haven’t healed properly, and as such one of the very vulnerable things I shared with the person I thought I was my partner. When we made the decision to live together it was something they repeated often; ‘I know how important a roof over your head is to you.’ I believed them. It was one of the core wounds which affected who I had become at that point in my life.

The other core wound I also shared with them early on. I didn’t recognise it at the time but how they reacted would be a precursor to the relationship. I was badly affected by a simple text they’d sent. It activated a trauma response deep inside of me and I couldn’t control it. I was a broken shell for an evening. I told them we’d talk when they got to my house that evening but when they got there, I had thrown a blanket over my head and fallen into a restless sleep on my rocking chair. Like a bird in a cage. Ironic hm.
I awoke and they coaxed it out of me. I was stuttering, I was crying, I was a mess. I was trying to explain why a ‘joke’ had affected me so badly. I had experienced a sexual assault at a young age, something which I hadn’t shared with practically anyone (unless you count the two times Drunk Me spilled it) and I had long buried to hazy memories, heavily suppressed within my body.

‘You’re calling me a rapist,’ they snarled from across the room and I was balled in on myself, holding myself desperately as the trauma response was stealing my body from me. I could barely get my words out and I was trying to comfort myself and now, I was horrified that I had somehow called them one of the worst things. I tried to explain I wasn’t calling them a rapist at all, I was trying to tell them why their comment had affected me so much. They doubled down though; ‘You are, you’re saying I’m like one of those people. You’re making me out to be like a rapist.’ The anger was emanating from them. No amount of me protesting worked. I wasn’t likening them to a rapist and I’m sorry. I’m the one who is sorry, I’m sorry I upset you with how I reacted. I’m sorry it came across that way.

I was sobbing, I was hurting and now I was quite frankly an awful person.
The thing I’d told them, the very vulnerable thing that I had never willingly, soberly, lifted from my soul was forgotten among my apologies and their anger. I never told people out of shame, out of a fear of never being believed. As the years have passed, there’s been times I doubted it happened because I have experienced so much gaslighting in my life, I struggle to trust myself. What if this was one of those moments where it wasn’t true and I was just overreacting to a joke and trying to validate that? It was a mental minefield.
There was silence, and I said ‘Please, can you hug me, I need a hug right now,’ and they shook their head; ‘No, I don’t want to touch you right now.’ they spat in anger.

I sobbed harder, laid down on the bed and curled up even tighter. I closed my eyes and suddenly their arms were around me, their head nuzzling my hair. They held me tightly as I sobbed everything out of my system.

We never spoke of that moment again either.

I genuinely thought I had accused them somehow for them to react so strongly. That was when I started to monitor my words, and try to express things more carefully. Heck, I spent the next few weeks bending over backwards to apologise and make things better. I took the blame on to my shoulders.

I did it quite easily you see. After all, why else would someone react so strongly like that? I had to have caused it with my miscommunication. I was exhausted from the re-traumatisation, the crying, and then the burden of the Inner Voice telling me how I was an awful human for somehow calling them a rapist, for offending them, for hurting them and for ruining a simple joke when they were just trying to be a fun person.

The Inner Voice is a f***er.

The Inner Voice is wrong.

But I simply didn’t believe that then. I believed the Inner Critical Voice.

That voice comes from a lot of places; people who bully, people who aren’t emotionally mature and don’t guide you right, hurt people who are lashing out at other people instead of doing the work to heal their own goddamn issues. The Inner Critical Voice becomes enmeshed with your own voice as it develops, and then it becomes a ventriloquist. It’s throwing your voice at you, so you believe the things it says more easily.

My Inner Critical Voice amplified their voice. It amplified their anger. It also amplified that lens that was focused solely on me causing the issues. I had caused that anger that evening. My words. My behaviour. My Actions. I did not deserve comfort. I believed it.

I spoke before about the survival mechanism of freezing. I also fall into the fourth “f”, fawn. Fawning comes after freezing, where I needed to fawn to repair the relationship wound I had instigated.

This is a behaviour I, now upon reflection, understand was cyclical in this relationship. A burst of anger directed at me out of the blue, the burden of causing it on my shoulders, and my inner voice amplifying that, so I believed I had caused these issues, a belief that was coupled with their refusal to ever apologise, or take accountability no matter how hard I protested or held a mirror up to them. I then fawned to repair the relationship I had threatened.

The lesson I’m learning looking back through these memories? GUUUUURL!

I want to go back and hug the past me who took all that on her shoulders. I want to apologise for staying in that cycle. I want to grab her hands and pull her into the future ahead of US, and I say us because present me isn’t there yet. Present me is the one sitting at home crying in the silence thinking of these memories and hurting just as much. Present me is the one who is texting her friends randomly all day every day because she wants to stave off the pain she’s been left with.

Present me, the me who is writing this right now, might seem eloquent and able to articulate this revelation in words but she struggles with accepting this. The Inner Critical Voice still niggles away saying ‘you are the one who messed everything up and I present to you the case of You’re Unloveable’, but now through the act of writing it out and sharing it, I’m starting to fight back with a different voice. This is a new voice, one which is speaking from a different place inside of me.

This voice says ‘You didn’t deserve that, and you would have never treated someone as you have been treated.’
This voice is creating a new standard for me to live by.

There’s been far too much hurt in my past, both directed at me and unfortunately in my past as I developed coming from me, and I don’t want that to be my normal.
I want to live a life of kindness and softness. Of emotional safety and of peace.

That will be my foundation for Future me.

Inner Critical Voice can go fuck itself.