I shouldn’t judge but…

…I do anyway

coming to terms with judgment and understanding why it even exists

Many highly sensitive people who experience judgmental thoughts tend to also judge themselves harshly for having these judgmental thoughts…

“I’m being too harsh.” “I shouldn’t be thinking like that.”

Rather than beating yourself up for these thoughts, begin to inquire into the feelings driving the thought.

For example, could these thoughts simply be reflecting…

• the beginning signs of annoyance or irritation? Instead of labeling an emotion for what it is, we often get caught up in the narratives accompanying the feeling.

• vulnerable and hard-to-admit feelings such as hurt and disappointment? These feelings are often so threatening they immediately trigger the fight or flight response.

So instead of taking these thoughts too seriously, and taking them to mean something about you, try to figure out the underlying emotion instead.

Re-learning the language of emotion

This helps you to move away from the futility of judging yourself for having ‘mean thoughts’, and into something more workable. As you begin to identify what the underlying feelings are — and this step does take a little bit of detective work, especially at first — you can feel more empowered to take action.

Know that ‘forbidden feelings’ may take a bit of work to uncover — and a big one is anger. For example, when we’re told that we’re not allowed to be angry at our parents, that we should be grateful, we naturally learn to hide or repress our feelings. Our ‘shoulds’ tend to cover up natural, instinctive emotional responses that arise.

We tend to use guilt or shame to suppress or tamp down on anything we experience as ‘bad’, which leads to the thoughts of ‘I shouldn’t be thinking like this…’

Here’s an example:

Amy’s best friend Stacy tends to be late, or cancelling at the last minute. This is highly frustrating for Amy; yet each time she hears Stacy’s reasoning, she tends to feel guilty for being annoyed. ‘There’s just a lot going on in my life’, Stacy says, and Amy bites her tongue, telling herself that she should be more understanding. Yet, Amy’s starting to experience judgmental thoughts about her. ‘She’s always a mess.’ ‘If she can just try harder to get her life together, she wouldn’t be struggling like this’; and while it feels good in the moment to think this way, the guilt tends to creep in. ‘Am I being a bad friend?’ Amy wonders.

Once you wonder whether you’re a ‘bad friend’ or not, you start having an internal conflict, arguing either against or for yourself, leading to increased resentment and anxiety about the situation.

Here’s how it could play out instead…

Realize that these repeated instances of tardiness have been leading to feelings of anger. And once you’re experiencing judgmental thoughts about what someone else ‘should’ be doing, you’re probably more angry about it than you think! In a funny way, when we judge someone, we’re really saying:

If only the other person changes themselves, they can avoid being late, and *then* I can avoid feeling this way…

Judgment is a coping mechanism. We do it as a way of trying to control or avoid uncomfortable emotions and sensations. It’s often easier to make the problem about someone or something else out there rather than to try to work with those feelings in here.

Instead of making it about whether you ‘should’ be angry or not, accept that you are angry. (And that it doesn’t have to mean anything about you as a person.)

There can be many valid and legitimate reasons for anger. Repeated situations like the above can lead to a decreased sense of trust, breeding doubt about your friend’s trustworthiness or respect for your time, all of which that can lead to you question the relationship itself. Or, maybe it’s reminding you of the times a parent or caregiver figure let you down.

After talking it out with a trusted friend, Amy realizes that she has been building resentment towards her best friend because it feels like her time has not been respected, which is a threatening thought, as it calls into question whether or not Stacy values their friendship. ‘Are we drifting apart? Does she not really care about me as much as I care about her? Is this way she doesn’t seem to want to hang out?’ While vulnerable to admit, acknowledging these underlying fears led to a sense of relief.

With this new understanding, she’s now saying to herself:

“I accept the reality that my friend is often late. My anger tells me I don’t like it, I feel like my time is being disrespected. I can acknowledge that it makes me feel vulnerable. But I do trust my friend enough that I feel I can bring this up to her and she would probably listen*. I’m going to take a risk to let her know how I feel, because she’s an important friend to me. Maybe I also need more information about what’s going on with her, so I can really understand if there’s anything else going on in this situation.”

This reframing brings a sense of empowerment and creates more possibilities in the relationship, even though it could feel scary as well! Telling someone else how we really feel is an often fraught process if we haven’t had a lot of good experiences with it — which could be the underlying reason why most of us have defaulted to harboring silent thoughts of judgment instead. As you can imagine, a huge topic to unpack!

I’m going to leave that for another day, but hopefully this has helped to shed some light on a very human experience.

Do you often experience a lot of judgmental thoughts? How does judgment show up for you?

*it’s impossible to explore all the complexities within a blog post, but I just wanted to throw it in there that yeah, not every situation necessitates a conversation. What to do with your insight/emotion that you’ve just unearthed can have a lot of complexity to it — and I just want to acknowledge that!