Right...? Pete Walker is such a helpful resource for me... He's both a trauma therapist and has C-PTSD himself from growing up in an abusive family, so he just knows it all inside out, the way (IMO) you only can if you've experienced the crazy ride yourself, day for day, 24/7, over decades...
His "outer critic" concept is blowing my mind too... I've worked on the inner critic stuff for decades via trauma therapy too (tho I think his version - which is the C-PTSD version of the inner critic) is even more helpful for me). But yeah... the outer critic... yikes... Basically to me, the inner critic is the internalised abusive, toxic "you can't do anything right!" stuff that growing up with abuse taught us... that hyper-critical stuff. Where, if we do one thing "wrong" then we suck, we're useless, we're invalidated as human beings... It's such a high standard, that it's impossible to meet. Total no-win situation.
And realising that we also turn that *outward* and set unrealistically high standards for others too - they misstep, they say one unkind/ impolite/ unhelpful thing and we're like "That's it - I'm outta here!" is the same unreasonable standard as with the inner critic - any single thing that someone else does is enough to break trust, rupture the relationship, make us question the person, etc etc.
Pete Walker focusses a lot on the concept of "good enough". Am I a good enough human being? Is someone a good enough friend? Is my boss a good enough boss? Am I a good enough employee? I think that's such a helpful standard.
So maybe cutting yourself some slack and deciding that you're a good enough client (even if you don't do everything right) and deciding that your therapist is a good enough therapist (even if he doesn't do everything right) and asking both the inner critic and the outer critic to shut up in this particular case, might be a kind and compassionate thing to do and might yield more useful results compared to the "one strike and you're out" mentality of both the inner and outer critic.
Even then, you can still decide (calmly, thinking through your needs and your best interests) whether to continue working with this therapist or not. He can be a "good enough therapist" and you can still make a huge variety of choices of how to move forward.
But maybe it's a healing thing to move away from the ideas of "I'm a horrible client" and "he's a horrible therapist" that the inner and outer critic will let us spiral to on bad days/ in situations of overwhelm.
Being okay with us ALL being IMPERFECT but that we can still be "good enough" is a huge shift in thinking, IMO, compared to the toxic standards that many of us were raised with in abusive families.
And sure, any given person may be imperfect and NOT good enough - if a boss is an a**hole or a work environment is toxic or a partner is abusive, then no, they're not "good enough".
But I think the point is that a lot of thoroughly imperfect people are "good enough" and learning to move away from the toxic outer critic may be just as important as learning to move away from the toxic inner critic...?
Edit to add: Pete Walker's also got a quote somewhere about the outer critic being the detective+lawyer+judge used to find someone guilty... That's something I can definitely relate to - the detective pouring over their actions and their words, the lawyer reasoning how bad those things are and the judge condemning them as terrible... Ah yup... And that kind of ties into Rick Hanson's idea of "prosecuting a case" against someone in your head...
