But deep inside a little voice cries out "Negative Reviews Suck!"

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I find then to be the most helpful. They force you to look at what you couldn't, or didn't want to see.
They make you wonder about the reviewers motives. They may be looking for fault but if they find it, then it's probably something that will need to be looked at.

Another thing I liked to do was see if the negative response applied similarly to the reader-responder's writing, when or if available to me. Often, the response was somewhat ahead of the reader-responder's attention to similar defects in their writing, which parallels my development experiences. It's easier to see the failings in others' writing before we see it in our own, thus the writing workshop paradigm of peer review.

I wasn't improving as fast as I wanted from reader-writer responses. In the early months and years, it was helpful, but grew more limited in penetrating insights. An approach that kept me in the loop longer than would have if I'd abandoned it as the usefulness of being critiqued was waning was to seek out a prominent favorable feature in the stories I responded to and then write balanced responses as much as possible. I lapsed too often, though, out of frustration at identical, recurrent flaws. My responses were sounding like broken records. I wasn't growing, and I was causing more harm than good.

Another method that made me feel better was to critique published stories from the same approaches, what's working, what's not, for personal purposes. I still do that last, but I'm generally burned out on the critiquing process. I ultimately learned why a writer's pilgrimage is a solitary journey. Not submiting a reading response removed a lot of heartache. Not offering my fledgling efforts for critique eliminated more.

Seeking out and studying up on new avenues for growth and development distracts me from depressing moods.

All along, I've sought tools for evaluating my stories so I didn't have to rely on outsiders to grow as a writer. I've found the tools, in disparate places and at great efforts.

I believe I've gathered a complete synthesis of processes. Now, applying what I've learned is taking up my creative efforts through knuckling down on a breadboard story that's worthy of the effort. May it be the gateway to my breakthrough.

Reviews revealing flaws in my work or my assumptions about how readers view my work are the MOST helpful. I appreciate them the most after licking my wounded ego.

Not that I've gotten that many.

Let's not get off on a tangent - unfortunately, I'm too good at that. My point is that one must balance his/her ability to give and accept negative criticism with how it is affected by or affects personal psyche.

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One area that I do have trouble with just about any time is how to deal with opposing critiques. I have often experienced two people giving me completely opposite advice about a story. Then someone else might tell me something completely different from either of the first too. At that point, I begin pulling my hair out.

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Steven King has said that he doesn't generally bother with points that different critiquers disagree on; it's when several people are giving you the same advice that you need to pay attention.

I try to view reviews and critiques as information, raw data as it were, rather than as conclusions or judgments on the writing. I draw my own conclusions from the information. Reactions to any given piece of writing are likely to be all over the map. I've read award winning fiction that I thought was really boring or flawed in some way. A single piece of writing is not going to please everyone.

Someone ripped me to shreads, deservebly. They did it with a smile and curtesy, but they said the truth. This story is no good.

That made me stop and process.

It hurt, but hurt the way it does when it hurts to grow. I withdrew and stopped writing, throwing of the ideas that snagged, until I found one I couldn't shake.

I had to write it. I couldn't help myself.

By this point I learned enough to be careful. I reviewed others work, and in others work, like extrinsic said, I found truths and things that would help them grow. When finally I let someone else read my story, they showed me the inconsistencies of what I told them as opposed to what I wrote myself, and I had another breakthrough.

Bad critiques both given and recieved have helped me know how I need to improve, and have helped me get better. Though I am not to the point, yet, to recieve all glowing reviews, I am improving and climbing that tree to success.

If it's the first, I try to just ignore it. If I don't agree with the things a critiquer recommends, I just move on. Ideally I get 3-4 crits on each project, I look to the next reviewer for input. Occasionally I've encountered bad reviewers - people who are either unable to communicate their points effectively in a way that can help me fix problems, or people who don't seem to know much about writing, or people who don't care for my writing content, style, genre. Thank them for the review, table it, move on to the next.

The second kind of critiquer is harder, but they're the ones who you need to pull closer. Find out why this part didn't work, what about your characterization was weak, why the dialogue fell flat. You will still have pieces of their feedback that you'll disregard because they suggest things that aren't in line with where you're going with the story, or they complain about something over here which you realize you can fix with better foreshadowing over there, etc. But these crits that help identify your weak spots in writing, that help identify weak spots in a specific story, or otherwise make you feel uncomfortable and inadequate as a writer...keep those ones! They're, as someone else pointed out in their response, the ones that make you grow. It's that uncomfortable painful kind of growing pain, but...it's the good kind.

A few fellow hatracker's have given me these kinds of reviews in the past, and I wouldn't be half the writer I aspire to be/think I am (lol) if it weren't for their honest, direct, and pointed feedback. I keep going back to these same reviewers time and again because the end result is so great, and by now the places they point out as weak don't sting as bad because honestly, if you asked me I would agree "I know I flubbed the characterization here, do you have any suggestions for me?" - oh, the value in having writing mentors like this is unmeasurable! Good luck in discerning which you have!

I had one from a critic that was picking apart a piece of history represented in my book--claiming I got it wrong. I didn't. I did a TON of research and have the facts (and interviews) to back me up.

This reviewer was basing an opinion on assumptions--that were flat out incorrect, but printed the review as fact.

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extrinsic, as you say, the tools you refer to are not found in a single place, but are there any you would heartily recommend, saving some of us great efforts?

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Please, see the topic thread "Freytag's Technique of the Drama." That book contains more useful information in one place than any other I've found. Freytag's signal wrinting tome is not likely to save much effort beyond not wasting time, though. It's difficult to read and dense beyond the densest of modern-day textbooks and scholarly theses.