How Our Inner Critic Impacts Couple’s Fighting
Eckart Tolle wrote a great article in the Huffington Post recently. In his article “Living in Presence With Your Emotional Pain Body”, he does a great job of communicating a key concept that’s important for couples to understand, especially if they want to learn how to reduce fighting in their relationship. The gist of Tolle’s article is that we each have what some of us refer to as an Inner Critic lodged within us. This plays a GIANT role in couples’ fights, in couples hurting themselves and each other. In fact I would venture that 99.9% of couple acrimony comes out of what Tolle refers to as the pain body. This is a wonderful perspective on an aspect of being human that few people consider. Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, LCSW
From Tolle, Huffington Post 10/6/10
There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “painbody,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.
It lives in human beings, and it is the emotional aspect of egoic consciousness. When the ego is amplified by the emotion of the painbody, the ego has enormous strength still — particularly at those times. It requires very great presence so that you can be there as the space also for your painbody, when it arises.
Read the rest of the article here – I think you’ll find it very compelling.
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