Self-blame can be transformed only by coming to understand how your sense of who you are and the options open to you is determined by your past experiences and beliefs. In order to do this, you will need to explore some important questions. Can you recognize how you define yourself through a familiar pattern of feelings, conflicts, behaviors, and assumptions? How did you learn to know yourself this way? Will you always fight the same battles to prove your worth, gain others’ love, and feel deserving of rest and relaxation? Is there any part of you that is not subject to critique by inner voices? Relief from your suffering is not a matter of getting better at what you think you need to do. It is about finding out how you ended up where you are in the first place. – Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 2
Self-judgment is the constant valuation of yourself according to standards learned in the past. It manifests as attacking and engagement. The more you become conscious of the inner activity of attacking and engagement, the more you realize that almost any mental activity used to stop judgment ends up supporting rather than ending it. This is because the effort to stop the attack is initially motivated by the experience of yourself as the victim of the attack—that is, the child. But as you have seen, acting from that self-image of the child-victim always leads to some form of engagement. In other words, real disengagement requires disidentifying from the child self-image so that you can be truly effective in stopping the attack. – Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 16