Wednesday, twenty-five past eight

It's twenty-five past eight on a Wednesday morning and you've just parked at work. You reach into your bag for your pass and your fingers find a folded sheet of paper. It's the consent form for your son Sam's school trip. It was due back yesterday.

The commentary starts before you've unfolded it. "You idiot. You absolute idiot. One form. Every other parent managed it. What is wrong with you? He'll be the only one who can't go, and he'll know it was you." It's fast, it's fluent, and it's in your own voice. You sit in the car with your heart going. Then you ring the school office. The secretary says it's no problem at all and to send it in with him tomorrow. The call takes ninety seconds. The commentary carries on across the car park regardless. "You got away with it. You always leave things. You're a mess."

At eleven you're presenting the quarter's numbers and you give one figure wrong. A colleague corrects it, pleasantly, and you thank her and move on. Nobody else appears to register it. Inside, it's "Stupid. They all saw that. They're wondering how you got this job." For the rest of the meeting you're half listening, because part of you is going back over the slip.

In the evening you catch sight of yourself in the hall mirror and there's a remark about that too. At ten to midnight you're awake, and the commentary is doing a review. It covers the form, the figure and the mirror. It adds the friend you haven't rung, the gym membership you don't use, and something you said at a party in 2016.

Now a different memory. A month ago your friend Anna rang you, upset. She'd forgotten her daughter's dentist appointment, the second one she'd missed, and the surgery had been sharp with her. You said, "Oh, love. You've had so much on. Ring them tomorrow and rebook, it happens to everybody. You're a good mum." You meant all of it. It wouldn't have crossed your mind to say, "You idiot, what's wrong with you, every other parent manages it." If you had said that, Anna would have been right to put the phone down and wonder whether you were a friend at all.

You have one way of speaking to people you care about when they fail, and another way of speaking to yourself. You've never really noticed that the two are different. If someone pointed it out, you'd have an answer ready. Anna needed kindness, you'd say. You need to be kept up to the mark. If you spoke to yourself the way you spoke to her, you'd let everything slide.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The commentary is the running stream of judgement you direct at yourself. A remark is a single instance of it. The double standard is the gap between how you speak to yourself and how you'd speak to a friend in the same position. The discipline story is the belief that the harshness is what keeps you functioning. Correction is noticing what went wrong and what to do about it. Attack is a judgement on what kind of person you are. The friend test is asking what you'd say to a friend who'd done the same thing, and it's what this book builds towards.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

It's automatic. The remark arrives before you've decided anything, often before you've fully taken in what happened.

It's about you and not about the act. It says "you idiot" and "you're a mess". It rarely says "that form was late".

It's sweeping. Its favourite words are always, never, everything and everyone.

It's out of proportion. A late form and a serious betrayal would get much the same vocabulary.

It doesn't stop when the problem is solved. The school said it was fine, and the commentary carried on.

And it's private. You'd be embarrassed for anyone to hear it, which may tell you something about it.

Try one thing before reading on. For two days, keep a tally of remarks, and write a few of them down word for word. Then read them back as if they'd been said by one person to another. Most people who try this are surprised by the number, and taken aback by how the words look on paper.