How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt

What It Covers

Amita Schmidt, psychotherapist and Buddhist meditation teacher, explains how to combine Internal Family Systems therapy with Buddhist meditation to work with your inner critic and difficult emotions through psychological healing and spiritual transcendence.

Key Questions Answered

• •Internal Family Systems basics: IFS views the psyche as containing multiple parts like an inner family, with a wise self that can lead them. The goal is self-leadership where your wisest version drives the bus, not your critic or anxious parts, making decisions while other parts inform.
• •Working with the inner critic: Ask your critical part what it fears would happen if it stopped criticizing you. This reveals the underlying protective intention. Meet it with curiosity and compassion from your wise self, not another part that wants it gone, to avoid creating internal civil war.
• •Accessing wise self through expansion: Make your mind as wide as the sky or envision your 80-year-old self to access wise presence. Check if you have an agenda to change something—if yes, you're in a part, not wise self. Wise self exhibits the eight c's: curiosity, compassion, calm, connectedness, courage, creativity, confidence, clarity.
• •Labeling technique shifts brain processing: UCLA research from 2007 shows that simply labeling difficult emotions like "inner critic" or "anxiety" moves processing from the amygdala (fight-or-flight) to the prefrontal cortex (reasoning center), creating immediate space and reducing emotional reactivity without requiring meditation experience.
• •Acceptance enables transformation: Schmidt's chronic depression from age five ended after twenty years when she surrendered the fight against it. Paradoxically, accepting "if I live with this forever, it's okay" preceded the insight that depression was empty—just energy and thoughts with no solid substance—causing the pattern to unhook permanently.