Learning to Accept the Inner Critic: Therapist Reacts to “Hi Ren” by Ren (featuring vocal coach Melissa Cross)
“Hi there, Ren, it's been a little while, did you miss me?
You thought you’d buried me, didn't you? Risky
'Cause I always come back
deep down you know that
Deep down you know I'm always in periphery.”
Taylor Palmby: Before we dive in into the lyrical genius of this, can we talk about the fact that his voice is actually playing two different characters?
Melissa Cross: From the voice production point of view, basically he's actually personifying these two parts of his personality. One is a very bossy, officious, parental figure with expectations. It’s saying, “come on, get yourself together and get rid of all this therapy crap. Just deal. Stop being such a wuss.”
But he's defending himself: “Wait a second, I've been doing some work here, and I'm really happy with it.”
There's a voice in me too that goes, “Ha! Who do you think you are? A voice teacher? Yeah, right.”
That is the voice of my parents. It is the voice of people who I'm afraid will judge me. It's a a memory of someone parental that says, “Oh Missy you're not qualified to teach that person.”
It’s that kind of patronizing tone. That’s part of my personality, the feeling that I just don't rate. It’s like I have a post-it note on my forehead that says, “damaged.” And I have to compensate.
Now as far as the voice goes, when you're singing, if you are authentic then it's like being an actor. You don't do stuff with your voice. You just allow your voice to communicate what you're thinking.
Taylor: Almost to be the instrument?
Melissa: Yes, you don't put a recipe to it. Like for instance, if I go, “oh my God, I didn't choreograph that right, UH uh.” I knew exactly what I meant when my voice did that. I didn't get caught up in, “Where's my tongue, how am I breathing?”
You have to let go of that. I’m going to get into this: that’s why voice training for screaming is therapeutic, because you have to disassociate from the inference of the sound. Otherwise, it's not sustainable.
Taylor: This song is so good. Like as soon as he says:
“That's why I don't think we should talk man
Cause when you're with me it never seems to help.”
The voice of that inner critic, that parental-figure voice, that voice that's mean to you? It ramps up. And it's like, “You think you can amputate me?”
That voice tries to make you feel like it always has to be this way.
“I am you
you are me
you are I
I am we
we are one
split in two
that makes one
so you see
you got to kill you
if you want want to kill me.”
That is what puts people into that place of suicidality and depression, because that voice tells you that the only way to reduce the sound, to reduce the impact of that inner voice, is to die. That's how people get stuck in that place of hopelessness.
Melissa: That’s right. But it sounds like he shut that voice out for a while and started to grow and evolve. He noticed that he's not a useless piece of crap, right? But then that voice comes in, because you know Murphy's Law: when it's out there to be eaten, the monster comes.
So that voice comes back and says, “You think you're getting away with this? It’s always going to be back and forth.”
If he's thinking about all the times that he's lost a record deal, he's in that parental place. But if he's writing a new song and getting off on it, he's in the Ren place.
I call it the seat at the head of the table. We have all our parts present at all times. Like there's me when I wet the bed in the third grade. There's me now. They're all sitting at the table, and they all have something to say. And I will listen to them, but the person that's at the head of the table? That's me! I know me, because I sit there, and I get to know it the more I sit there. The more I get familiar with me, not the parts that try to take over me
Taylor: That's the part that says:
“Yeah but my music's not commercial like that
but my music is really connecting
and the people who find it respect it.”
That's the part that knows what's important. That's the part that prioritizes love and connection and creativity, and values those things over Grammys and interviews with Oprah — all of the things that other voice is telling you that you need.
If you can relate to this internal battle where this voice is telling you that you're not good enough and you'll never make it, and if you're trying to fight against it, go to our anonymous forum and we will encourage you.
Melissa: The production with the lights in this video is pretty ingenious.
Taylor: To me, the lights represent how quickly this internal battle between parts happens in all of us, especially when we're really activated. It's going so fast that it almost feels hard to track. When it's going that fast, it can feel like our truest self is this part that is so mean to us. It can feel like that is the most consuming. It can feel like if we kill that part, then we die. And the truth is that we don't actually have to kill that part. It can stay
Melissa: And it does stay. You can't kill it.
Taylor: Yes, it does stay. You can't kill it, you really can't. But you can change the way that it impacts you. You can also learn that this part, even though it's being really mean and gets really ramped up, it actually wants something good for you.
It tells us in this part of the song where it's like, “You need me to help you manage expectations.” That's what it's doing.
Melissa: It's parental, yes.
Taylor: Yeah, it's trying to protect you. If that's what it's doing, if what it wants is ultimately to protect you, then it can stay. We can just redirect it.
If you want to be someone that helps someone else learn how to dance with their darkness and their light, check out my top five songs to be a good supporter of someone who is struggling.
Ultimately, Ren says, “I know who I am. And I am hope, and I have hope.”
“This is the voice that you hear
when you loosen the noose on the rope.”
This part of me, this self, this truest part of me is also something that cannot die, that will always be there. I just have to feed it.
This section is so powerful! This part was trying to to kill Ren's hope. It had started to do that, to beat it down a little bit.
Melissa: For my whole life, that voice tried to beat me down too.
Taylor: You can tell he's just started to work on his healing, so he's just starting to build up this inner voice of hope, of belief in himself, and of self-love. When that sprout is new, it can really easily be smashed down. So it’s like Ren took a pause to go back and let that voice rebuild up inside of him. That is the part that he's speaking from in this section: the one that has come back to that belief of hope.
Melissa: We're humans, so we have to change from minute to minute. In other words, we're not gods, we're not icons, we are malleable, experiencing beings that come into lessons and realizations and improvements — and then unimprovement! We evolve like a pendulum. It's not that I'm striving to be perfect and then I'm perfect forever. It’s dynamic.
Taylor: The idea is so powerful: that you don’t need to kill the darkness inside of you. That's not at all what you have to do.
Melissa: It’s learn.
Taylor: It’s learn, like a pendulum.
“The more intensely that the light shone
the darker the shadow It cast
it was never really a battle for me to win
it was an internal dance”
You don't need to kill this voice inside of you.
Melissa: No, let it stay!
Taylor: You need to accept it and dance with it.
Melissa: Let it teach you how to dance. It's a slow dance.
Taylor: This song is so powerful because most people would think when they listen to this song, that Ren would need to just destroy the other voice at the table, the parental voice. But what he is saying is that that is absolutely not the case. That voice does not need to be destroyed, it needs to be accepted. And with that acceptance, when you stop trying to kill the voice, you start to learn how to be able to dance with it. That is where the power is: is through the acceptance of your light and dark.
Melissa: That's right. It is the extremity of thinking, the black-and-white thinking, that makes our reaction to that parental voice so rebellious. But also so self-supporting. It's like, “Stop attacking me!”
If you stay in that feeling of being attacked, then that becomes your reality. Instead of seeing a lesson to be learned, you feel like something's attacking you, and then you act out on that and you kill yourself, because you feel the world is after you.
But it's a dance lesson. It's hard to see that when you're young though. God, it's hard.
Taylor: I think it's hard to see it for a lot of people. They want to completely amputate this part of them, you know? That makes sense, because it feels like it's this part that's causing me so much pain. But we can get down to the reality that this part is trying to protect us in its own way. It's just a part of us, because we are a human and we are light and darkness, we're not just evil like a demon or good like an angel. When we come to accept that reality, it gives us so much power. Because when we stop fighting the battle and we stop fighting for bloodshed, then we get to choreograph the dance.
Melissa: Then we get to choose — it's not chosen for us based on our misunderstandings. It’s evolved from our lessons learned.
If you want to help others embrace their inner critic, here are 5 songs to help your friends with their mental health.
