Originally Posted by
Dropsie 
Tats, In my view, we are never starting over, you are continuing your path after taking a detour. But the shorter the detour the better.
This was the kind of thinking that made the difference for me -- my AV would tell me, you are a failure so might as well drink more. But ME, the real me, ignored the AV and said yes I did drink and that was not so clever, but I can still be clever going forward. And that difference from all or nothing thinking to doing the next right thing, even when I had made a mistake, makes all the difference.
Thank you Drops, 🤗 I like your viewpoint.
Following your earlier book recommdation, I found this on Peter Michaelson’s website, for inner critic I read AV:
No, do not cozy up to the inner critic. Doing so diminishes us. We must tame it, render it powerless, not compromise with it or befriend it.
The best approach is to befriend our authentic self, not our inner critic. Our authentic self is, in the language of depth psychology, our secular soul, the throne of goodness, wisdom, and power. We want our consciousness to unite with our authentic self. Its values are the opposite of the inner critic’s. How is compromise possible when values are diametrically opposed?
And he goes on to say, which is so true of my AV experience:
The inner critic appears at times to be saying true things, and sometimes the things it says are true. It can mock us for being weak and passive when, in fact, we have indeed been weak and passive in some situation. But the punishment we accept (even for our slightest misstep) in the form of guilt, shame, tension, and anxiety often far outweighs the “crime.” We need to understand that the inner critic has no business at all butting into our life.