Talk to Yourself Like a Friend, Not a Judge

The voice inside my head uses words I would never speak aloud. It calls me failure with casual familiarity, addresses me as disappointment like it’s my given name. This internal narrator has been with me longer than any friend, more constant than any lover, yet speaks to me with a cruelty I would never tolerate from strangers.

We are our own worst conversationalist.

Standing in the bathroom mirror this morning, applying shaving cream with mechanical precision, my inner voice catalogs perceived inadequacies with the dedication of an archivist. “Look at those lines around your eyes. Another night of bad sleep because you can’t stop your mind from racing. Why can’t you be normal?” The commentary runs constant, a background radio station of self-criticism I can never fully turn off.

Yet thirty minutes later, offering comfort to my wife who’s struggling with her own morning anxieties, my external voice emerges warm, patient, encouraging. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” I tell her. “Everyone struggles with these things.” The same mouth that was just prosecuting me for inadequacy now speaks defense for someone else’s humanity.

We speak to ourselves like enemies and to others like diplomats.

The split is surgical, precise. To my son, I am all patience and gentle guidance: “It’s okay to make mistakes. That’s how we learn.” But when I make similar mistakes—forget an appointment, misplace my keys, stumble over words in conversation—my internal response is savage: “How can you be so careless? Other people manage these simple things without effort.”

I wonder if we develop this dual vocabulary as protection, saving our kindness for others while using ourselves as repositories for all the harshness we cannot express outward. Perhaps cruelty toward the self feels safer than cruelty toward others—a contained violence that damages only us.

But the mathematics are wrong. Self-directed cruelty doesn’t stay contained. It seeps out in the way we accept treatment from others, in the standards we believe we deserve, in the risks we won’t take because our internal critic has already convinced us of inevitable failure.

The longest relationship you’ll ever have is with your own thoughts. Why do we make it the most abusive one?

My wife catches me in these internal conversations sometimes, notices the way my face changes when I’m alone, the particular expression I wear when listening to my mind’s harsh narration. “What are you thinking about?” she asks, and I realize I cannot translate the cruelty of my inner monologue into words I could speak to another human being.

The thoughts are too brutal for external consumption, too intimate in their precision-targeted disappointment. I know exactly which of my failures sting most, which insecurities create the deepest shame. My internal critic has been studying me for thirty-nine years, learning the topography of my vulnerabilities with obsessive dedication.

“Nothing,” I tell her, because how do you explain that you’ve been having a conversation with yourself that would end any friendship, destroy any relationship, violate every principle of basic human kindness?

Yet sometimes—rarely but memorably—my inner voice surprises me with gentleness. Usually in moments of genuine crisis, when the stakes are too high for its usual performance of psychological warfare. When my mother was dying, when my son was born, in those profound moments that demand all available emotional resources, my internal monologue shifts registers.

“You’re doing the best you can,” it whispers during my mother’s final days, offering comfort with the same tenderness I try to extend to others. “This is hard, but you’re handling it.” These moments of internal kindness are so rare they feel like visitations from a stranger—a glimpse of who I might be if I spoke to myself the way I speak to people I love.

What if we treated ourselves like guests in our own minds rather than prisoners in our own psychology?

I’m trying to learn a new language of self-address, borrowing the vocabulary I use with others and turning it inward. When I catch my internal critic beginning its familiar litany of inadequacy, I sometimes ask: “Would you speak to your son this way? Would you address your wife with such contempt?”

The answer is always no. The same mouth, the same mind, the same capacity for kindness—but different rules for different recipients. We are bilingual in kindness and cruelty, fluent in both but somehow convinced that only one language is appropriate for self-conversation.

What conversations are you having with yourself right now? And what would change if you spoke to yourself with even half the compassion you offer others?