Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice
 Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D., Lisa Firestone, Ph.D.,
 Joyce Catlett, M.A.
 (Sr. Associate Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
 2002 New Harbinger Publications
  ISBN: 1572242876


Learning to deal effectively with one's inner critical voice is central to all areas of life: personal development, healthy relationships, self-esteem and self-confidence, creative endeavors, and career success. Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice is a revolutionary program designed to counter negative thoughts and to demonstrate how to live free from imagined limitations.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice is a helpful & interesting book, designed to relieve the stultifying impairment of personality caused by negative internal voices.

The book poses a number of useful questions, such as: "Whose life are you really living?" & “Are you following your own destiny, or simply repeating the life of your parents?” It is helpful to all of us to consider these questions & discover the negative prescriptions by which we may be living our lives.

The goal of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice is to provide the reader with the insights gained by Dr. Firestone, in 25 years of investigating the critical inner voice of living, & the ways he discovered of overcoming its harmful effects.

Guidelines and exercises in the book help readers identify critical inner voices, to understand their source, & take action against them, so they can live a more fulfilling life, develop their own ideals & values, & embark on their own search for meaning in life.

The book is divided into three parts.

Part I, “Understanding Your Critical Inner Voice,” describes the self-critical voices & hostile wishes toward others that most people are familiar with. Chapter 1 explains how the voices originate in childhood. Chapter 2 describes how these inner voices diminish self-esteem, make us ashamed of real or imagined deficiencies, & restrict our lives. The chapter offers suggestions & exercises to help alleviate feelings of shame & guilt.

Each chapter in Part II, “Challenging the Critical Inner Voice,” deals with negative thoughts that interfere in various aspects of life, & provide guidelines for counteracting these voices. Chapter 3 identifies negative thoughts that contribute to nonproductive ways of working, Chapter 4 illuminates how such voices destroy our most intimate relationships. Chapter 5 shows how almost everyone has been damaged by the attitudes toward sex of family & society. Chapter 6 reveals the voices underlying certain forms of self-defeating behavior, including addictions. Chapter 7 helps identify the negative thoughts that lead to depression. Chapter 8 discusses the qualities one should look for in choosing a therapist.

Part III, “Guidelines for Living the Good Life,” helps parents to understand how the critical inner voice is formed in childhood, Chapter 10 describes the ongoing lifelong journey of self-discovery people can embark on, as they identify, challenge, & go against their critical inner voice.

All of us experience more or less divided self-feelings which include warm self-regard, as well as unfriendly, critical views of the self. Dr. Firestone calls the former "the real self" & the latter the “critical inner voice,” the part that is turned against the real self. The facet of personality uppermost at the time determines one's behavior & reactions to others. The nature of this division within the self depends on the kind of parenting received in childhood. The negative feelings parents have about themselves are often directed onto their children as well. Parents who feel they are bad, find it most difficult to believe that anything good could come out of them. Children, who learn to treat themselves much as their parents treated them, share their negative feelings.

Defenses, according to Dr. Firestone, are the ways we learned in childhood to cope with stressful situations. These defenses helped us protect ourselves when we were young, but limit & interfere with the development of the adult, & become more problematical than the original trauma.

Dr. Firestone believes that the most powerful & basic of defenses is what he calls the “fantasy bond,” in which children aggrandize their feelings about their parents in order to comfort themselves & ward off anxiety. When the parent is unavailable, the infant turns more & more to his or her fantasies of being connected. Such behaviors as thumb-sucking & rubbing a blanket, support the illusion of the presence of the good parent. Infants in the process of becoming united with the parent in their imagination unfortunately take on their negative attitudes as well as their positive ones. The doctor suggests keeping a journal in which one should record negative thoughts about oneself, followed by a more realistic, compassionate view. This procedure helps to bring destructive thoughts or voices to the surface, so that people can challenge them & change their behavior. Clients in therapy are taught to express their self-critical thoughts in the second person, in the form of spoken statements toward themselves, rather than about themselves. For example, instead of saying, “I don't think I'm an attractive person,” the doctor recommends saying to oneself, “You are not attractive.” This manner of speech helps to connect inner critical voices to the alien point of view acquired early in life.

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice is recommended for everyone who has ever been haunted by “inner voices” from the past. Since this includes just about all of us, it is a useful book which fills a needed slot in psychiatric literature.

In particular, it is a good beginning step for people who have never been in therapy, or who have been treated by therapists who are not in touch with Dr. Firestone's findings. The book is simply written, without much of the jargon that passes for scientific contributions these days, & reads easily & smoothly. The exercises are helpful in clarifying the meaning of each chapter, & in helping readers to identify & overcome their harmful introjects.

More from Dr. Robert W. Firestone: A Concept of the Primary Fantasy Bond: A Developmental Perspective; The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses; The "Inner Voice" and Suicide; Destructive Effects of the Fantasy Bond in Couple and Family Relationships; The “Voice”: The Dual Nature of Guilt Reactions; Voice Therapy: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior; Parenting Groups Based on Voice Therapy; The Bipolar Causality of Regression; Compassionate Chid-Rearing: An In-Depth Approach to Optimal Parenting; Prescription for Psychotherapy; What is Psychotherapy?; Voices During Sex: Application of Voice Therapy to Sexuality; The Psychodynamics of Fantasy, Addiction, and Addictive Attachments; A New Perspective on the Oedipus Complex: A Voice Therapy Session; Psychological Defenses Against Death Anxiety; The Origins of Ethnic Strife; Combating Destructive Thought Processes: Voice Therapy and Separation Theory; Suicide and the Inner Voice: Risk Assessment, Voice Therapy, Microsuicide and the Elderly; A Basic Defense against Death Anxiety; Behavioral Assignments for Individual and Couples Therapy.
(06/30/02)

Dr. Alma Bond
2002©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.