FromChapter 4: Recognizing Judgment

Judgment is a way of describing part of the terrain of your inner world. If you pictured the world inside your mind as a landscape, different kinds of mental activity would appear as different kinds of terrain. For instance, there might be the lush jungles of fantasy, the geometrical cities of financial calculation, the flowing rivers of dreams, and the silent, expansive deserts of simple awareness. In this inner world, judgment would appear in various forms, such as the old, familiar neighborhood of your childhood, unchanged and lifeless. Or the surrealistic freeways that move you quickly from one place to another but never let you get off except for gas and food, because all exits are permanently under construction. Or the set of a Hollywood movie where the surroundings appear impressive and desirable but have no substance or reality.

Judgment is a central element of your inner dialogue, the way you talk to yourself. From that point of view, it is second nature to you, so close to you that it is hard even to become aware of its existence. "So I talk to myself—I rationalize, explain, justify, question, doubt, evaluate, scold, gossip, confess—all kinds of things. Why should I make a big deal about judgment?" It seems natural, and even when someone else judges you, if it is in the familiar terms you use with yourself, you assume that it is part of life, to be expected.

However, there is good reason to isolate this part of your inner process. Self-judgment is perhaps the greatest source of inner suffering and discontent. More than that—or because of that—it is one of the major barriers to change, growth, expansion, and transformation. In particular, it prevents you from simply resting in yourself from moment to moment. Presumably, you have picked up this book because you have recognized that judgment has a negative impact on you. We will see much more about what this means as we go along. This chapter will focus on recognizing the activity of judgment and seeing how it works in your inner life.

First, a preliminary definition: A judgment is a statement of evaluation that implies an assessment of one's value or worth and is felt as a rejection of one's present state. Here, present state can refer to an emotion or feeling, a particular behavior, a bodily experience, a self-image, or an idea about yourself—whatever the central elements are of your immediate experience.

The work begins with learning to recognize when you are experiencing a judgment. This may seem simple, but it is not. Certain judgments you are aware of and can describe. Most of your experiences of judgment, however, are unconscious. Your judgments of yourself are generally more visible to those close to you than they are to you. Generally, you don't want to see your self-criticisms; you feel your badness will be exposed. That fear is natural and to be respected. As you learn about yourself, you will become more compassionate and grounded and thus able to see more of what creates this fear. The process of self-acceptance takes time. Just be aware that any feelings or reactions you have now are part of the first steps in that process.

So the first task is to learn to recognize what a judgment is. A judgment may be felt as any of the following: criticism, condemnation, guideline, motivator, accusation, advice, rejection, suggestion, question, or praise. It may come from another person or from inside your own mind. However you interpret its intention and whatever its source, you are affected by it in a particular way that makes it fall under the heading "judgment." To see this more clearly, it helps to reduce the implied content of the statement or question to a single declarative sentence.

What Judgment Says

Step one of recognition is: Identify the judgmental statement. If it wasn't explicit, you need to make it explicit. Sometimes, someone will talk to you for five minutes and only if you boil it all down to one statement will you realize that you felt judged by her words. Similarly, you can tell yourself all kinds of stories in your head, but if the net result is that you feel bad about yourself, then you have been engaged in self-judgment. So if someone says to you when you are ten minutes late for an appointment, "Look what time it is! My four-year-old could have ridden his tricycle here by now. I hope you feel good about making me miss morning coffee," you can boil that down to "You are a jerk for being late." You begin to confront the judge by making it visible or, in this case, audible.

I recommend the following practice for verbalizing judgments: Put the judgment statement in the second person. Word the statement as if you were the judge talking to someone else. In other words, make "you" statements rather than "I" statements. This helps distinguish the judge from the one being judged, even if both parts are inside you. So instead of saying "I really screwed up" the judgment is "You really screwed up."

Note: On the surface, this seems to go against the current recommendation for self-expression, which is to make "I" statements. However, the purpose here is not to have you take responsibility for your own feelings, as it is when "I" statements are encouraged in interpersonal communication. The purpose is to clarify the fact that there are two different parts inside of you in dialogue. When you say, "I really screwed up," you are taking responsibility for something as if it were a fact, without acknowledging that there is a judgment involved and critical energy is being directed at you.

Let's look at some examples of judge statements. Notice that the judgmental quality derives from how they make you feel and is unrelated to whether or not the statements are true. Let's begin with obvious ones:

         You shouldn't have done that.

         You are such a weakling.

         I can't believe you made such a stupid comment.

         You'd better not let that happen again.

         If you don't get started now, you'll never amount to anything.

         Now you really blew it.

         You are so fat no one will ever be interested in you.

         You will never be a success, so forget it.

         I told you you didn't have a chance.

         It's about time you got that right.

         What makes you think anyone cares about you at all?

         No one will ever take you seriously.

         You think you're so smart, don't you?

Some less obvious but no less devastating ones:

         If only you weren't so slow, you could probably amount to something.

         How come you don't really care about me?

         You should be making more money at your age.

         I knew you could do better if you really tried.

         You have such incredible potential.

         Only really lazy people sleep in until 9:00 AM.

         How come you can't understand that I'm just trying to help you?

         You shouldn't be so hard on yourself.

         You really have a hard time accepting criticism, don't you?

Notice that many of these statements could be distilled even further to get a clearer judgment out of them. For instance, "How come you can't understand that I'm just trying to help you?" is more simply stated as "You are an ungrateful slob." Or "How come you don't really care about me?" boils down to "You are uncaring and selfish."

When you add the tone of voice of the one making the statement and your own history around being judged, all kinds of other seemingly innocuous statements can be felt as judgments. Ones like:

         You look tired. (Heard as: What's wrong with you?)

         I hate it when you talk like that. (Heard as: There's something wrong with you.)

         How old are you? (Heard as: You are over the hill.)

         You made a mistake. (Heard as: You're useless!)

One question often arises at this point: What about positive judgments? Should you only be concerned about statements with a negative content? This is a good question. The statements that cause the most difficulty are clearly the negative ones; in fact, if your own self-judgments were always positive, you would be unlikely to care about challenging the judge. Perhaps you are actually seeking a way to turn your negative judgmental statements into positive ones. That would undoubtedly make you feel better, but it would not change the underlying dynamic of engaging in self-judgment in the first place.

Life Lessons

Michael had worked hard on his dance piece for two months, and in the days before he was to perform, he became very anxious. However, when the night of the performance arrived, he was surprised to find himself calm and confident. Spurred on by the lights and the energy of the audience, he danced better than he ever had. As he left the stage, his judge was there to provide comment: "You showed them; man, you are great. I bet they were secretly hoping you'd fail, but you are the number one top dog! Now don't say anything, though, because you don't want anyone thinking you got a swelled head."

At the reception, he grinned when his girlfriend, Carla, came up to congratulate him. "You were so beautiful up there. I couldn't believe how perfectly you danced. You are so inspiring to me. Oh, I wish I could dance like that. I didn't see one mistake. And what was that wild music you used?" Michael just kept smiling, but his judge was talking again: "What did she mean she didn't see one mistake? This could be trouble. What if you blow it next time? After all, dude, you may have been good, but you weren't perfect. Who does she think you are anyway, Baryshnikov?"

A positive or negative judgment is different from a positive or negative feeling. A feeling is an emotional state arising in response to something. In contrast, a judgment is an evaluation of yourself as good or bad, right or wrong. Judgments and feelings are closely associated, as we shall see. However, you can like or dislike something without having a judgment about it.

When you say something like "I like the job I did, and I feel really good that I completed it," it might seem that the first part is a statement of feeling and the second is a positive self-judgment. Let's look more closely. If it is a self-judgment, you are saying: "I really am a good person because I completed it." This is clearly a defense against a judgment that you are not a good person. There is nothing wrong with this; recognizing you have value that is reflected in functioning is an important element in building self-esteem. However, it is not the same as knowing that your own value is completely separate from the results of what you do. In the preceding example, Michael's judge is clearly passing judgment on him, saying how great he is because he did so well and countering an implicit evaluation of inferiority.

On the other hand, "I feel really good that I completed it" might not be judgmental but instead descriptive of how you feel in a nonspecific way. It could then be restated as "Having completed the job, I feel happy [satisfied, expansive, excited, appreciative]." No judgment of self is involved here.

Negative judgments stimulate feelings of rejection, guilt, doubt, shame, and self-hatred, while positive judgments tend to arouse feelings of self-esteem, pride, excitement, self-righteousness, and superiority. Either way, these results are conditional, and you are left dependent on the judge to reject or approve of you. In this book, I am encouraging you to go beyond turning rejection into approval and to question the very assumptions underlying self-judgment.

There is no quick route to undoing this mental activity, which serves as glue for our psychic structure. The process is gradual and requires patience and commitment. Positive self-judgments are an important support and guide for life in the world and cannot be put aside until you discover and integrate the self-knowing for which they are a substitute. Negative self-judgments are generally less functional, as well as more painful and debilitating, so we put our attention on them first. For that reason, most of the examples used here are negative, but the principles of self-judgment apply to positive content as well. Learning to stop the effects of negative self-judgment will create a ground for considering the limitations in giving and receiving positive self-judgment.