The internal prosecutor and trauma recovery.

What some people call the “inner critic,” I call the “internal prosecutor.” 

I call him that for a reason. 

Critics can sometimes offer useful information. I often read critics’ reviews of movies or books before I decide to invest my money or time watching or reading them. If it wasn’t for critic’s reviews, I may not have watched some of my favorite movies or read some of my favorite books. 

Sometimes critics’ reviews can be harsh, but even negative reviews from real critics can be useful. 

The internal prosecutor, though, is not exactly a critic. 

He is an advocate. His game is persuasion. He has an outcome he wants to achieve. 

Do you know what the internal prosecutor’s outcome is? 

It’s to make you feel like sh*t. 

More to the point, it’s to induce emotional flashbacks in you. To get you feeling young, helpless, unresourceful. 

The internal prosecutor wants you to forget who the f*ck you are. He wants to replace your belief system about who you are, with a belief system that says you are somehow too much and not enough, all at the same time. 

You know what the role of the prosecution is in a courtroom setting. It’s not, actually, the truth. 

The role of the prosecution is to get a conviction. 

A prosecutor’s success is never defined by getting to the truth. It’s not even defined by serving justice. 

Successful prosecutors gain convictions. It’s as simple as that. 

Your inner prosecutor is no different. 

He doesn’t care about “truth.” 

He wants to convict you— of being “dramatic.” Of being “weak.” Of being “gross.” 

He wants to persuade the jury— which, ironically, is also you— that you do not deserve to live, let alone to recover from what you’ve experienced. 

And, like many prosecutors in many jurisdictions, the internal prosecutor is not above playing fast and loose with the facts to persuade his jury. 

He doesn’t give a sh*t about facts. He wants that conviction. He wants you feeling like sh*t. 

So will he lie? F*ck yes, he’ll lie. 

Will he mangle the context of certain things that have happened to you, certain memories, certain feelings? Of course he will. 

Will the internal prosecutor present a one-sided, biased, unfair case that ignores any mitigating circumstance that MIGHT have you NOT feeling like sh*t? Yes, yes he will. 

The internal prosecutor is fueled by trauma. Think of trauma as the fund from which the prosecutor gets paid. 

The more trauma you’ve endured, the more committed to his goal the internal prosecutor is— and the more creative and devious he is in his arguments. 

And make no mistake: the internal prosecutor is good at his job. 

He often speaks in language and tone that we recognize from way back when. 

His arguments often sound “right” because they are familiar. Sometimes he’s been inner ear for decades, “winning” case after case by making us feel like sh*t about ourselves. 

In trauma recovery we finally learn to deal with the internal prosecutor. 

He finally wake up to the fact that the internal prosecutor, for all he can do, cannot actually “make” us feel anything. 

He can make it very EASY for us to feel certain things— but he needs us, the jury, to convict ourselves for his prosecution to be successful. 

We don’t have to do that. 

Once we realize the internal prosecutor is a f*cking shill, once we realize his arguments, eloquent and persuasive as they can sometimes be, have NOTHING to do with the truth or justice or even the facts…the jig is kind of up for him. 

He’ll keep spinning. They always do. And sometimes we’ll backslide and start to believe his bullsh*t again. 

But once we’ve got his number, once we realize the truth about the internal prosecutor, we can’t un-see or un-know it. 

Your internal prosecutor’s probably mad that I told you any of this sh*t. 

That’s a good sign.