Who’s to judge: How to stop judging people around us
You never know what someone is going through, so you might as well be kind
A disappointing but harsh truth: being judgmental about other people might feel good sometimes, but it doesn’t make us kind people. And honestly, it isn’t that great for you either. Because by judging other people, you sort of turn into a bitter and angry person who doesn’t allow other people to live their own lives. But with that, you deny yourself a full and happy existence too.
I don’t consider myself to be a judgmental person. I always try my best not to judge.
But I get so unbelievably judgmental about small things sometimes!
These small things annoy me to the point of losing all sense of compassion and condemning them – and the person responsible for them – with everything I have. These things get me completely worked up and sometimes make me want to scream and throw the biggest tantrum. A huge fit to make these small things into something really big.
Something we – and especially me – are trying to learn, is how to not let other people get to us too much. To not let others cause us any emotional distress. But that is usually about the things others do to you; things they say or leave unsaid, actions they execute that harm you in some way. That is not what this is about.
This is about the little things other people do to themselves that annoy the crap out of me without it having anything to do with me. Things that make me judge someone just for making their own choices.
Like my partner who forgets to return something he did not want to keep and now he is too late and can’t get a refund anymore. A refund that would have been transferred to his private bank account. He paid for this mistake with his own money.
This is one example of something that has nothing to do with me at all but still frustrates me when it actually should not. Then why does it?
Short summary for quick readers
- Sometimes we judge people close to us more harshly than strangers because we see a lot of them and want them to make the 'right' choices.
- The 'right choice' usually translates to the choice we would've made for ourselves. Because we judge others the way we would judge ourselves when we made the same choice or mistake.
- We make people we love into an extension of ourselves, feeling like their actions in some shape or form reflect on us.
- Sometimes we do it cause it makes us feel better: look how ignorant they are being. We would have NEVER made that choice.
- Other times we claim we judge out of love; a feeling of protection. But the truth is that judgement never makes someone feel loved and therefor isn't an effective strategy to show affection.
- The key to stop judging is compassion towards yourself: if you can start forgiving yourself for mistakes, then it becomes easier to forgive others. This is tied to self-love and confidence.
- It is important to accept that we're all different and that there isn't a 'right' way to handle certain situations. 'Normal' doesn't exist and you aren't the only one who is right.
- Make sure you stop judgment before it becomes contempt which is more personal and vile than judgement. It creates hierarchy in which you start to feel better than others.
- Compassion isn't just for the people we like. It is needed for all people. Even the ones we don't like. No matter how hard it is to find common ground.
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We judge the people we love the hardest
Even though I try to be a kind person, there are a million things that make me throw out all feelings of empathy and benevolence. Especially with the people closest to me. It is almost as if I judge them more harshly than the hundreds of strangers that surround me every day.
It is not that I do not like the people who do these small things. Me liking or loving them has nothing to do with it. My partner is one of my favorite people on this planet. He just sometimes ruins his own t-shirts because he does not clean them properly and now they have stains in them that won’t come out anymore…
I even get annoyed while typing this.
This all might sound familiar to you. If so, you probably also have thought of yourself as a bad person for having these thoughts. You feel guilty about being annoyed with the people you love.
You are not a bad person. I’m guessing the people around you get annoyed with you sometimes too. People tend to judge others, it is something we all do or have done at some point in our lives. And the people closest to us are the people that we see the most of. We see them living their lives every day, making mistakes, doing things differently than we would have…
And that is exactly where the source of our judgment lies.
Do you judge them or yourself?
You might consider this question to be irrelevant. You know you have been judging your best friend for making out with three different guys last night. Why would this be about you? You’re not the one offering your lips to anyone who asks. You would never!
Let’s get off that high horse for a second so we can see what is happening.
The key is that it is different from how you would have handled it. The way we evaluate others is by holding them up to the standards we have for ourselves. This means that when we look at the things others are doing, we also think about our own behavior in that situation and what we would do if we ourselves would have done that particular thing.
Like in the example with the t-shirts and the stains: if I stained my shirt and did not properly clean it, meaning that I’d basically have to throw the shirts out, I would have been so upset with myself. I would have been annoyed by the fact that I ruined the shirts even though I could have solved the issue before it even became one. I would have been frustrated by the fact that I would have to buy new shirts which then feels like a waste of money.
And hold it over my own head for days to come.
And that is the reaction I feel whenever my partner does something like that.
We judge ourselves harshly
My annoyance with myself becomes the annoyance I feel towards him even though his behavior is completely separate from mine. The issue isn’t even mine (the day he ruins my shirt will be a dark day indeed).
Instead of seeing them as a separate person, I make these people into an extension of myself, holding them up to the same standards and judging them just as harshly whenever they step out of line. As if they need to live their life the exact same way as I would have lived it. As if them kissing every other person on the planet affects me in any way at all.
Judgment makes a smaller woman look big
Sometimes we like to mentally knock the people around us down because it makes us feel bigger. A very twisted idea, but one that always keeps popping up when we let insecurity get the better of us.
Because whenever we feel low, we want others to be even lower.
Unfortunately people can get a kick from feeling better than others and whenever we feel like we’re not good enough and everyone else around is doing better than we are, we will make sure we won’t feel inferior.
The little voice in our head will judge an talk them down until they’re way below us, too far down for us to see. That’s how we get a feeling of success: by kicking someone else to the ground. I don’t have to tell you how this does not qualify as being kind and loving.
But it does very much qualify as being human.
We all judge
There’s no need to feel ashamed. There are so many options, opportunities, ways for us to feel like we’re not doing enough or underperforming in some way or the other. Social media has us seeing people succeed all around us, looking great all the time and being amazing at ‘human-ing’. It’s no wonder we feel inferior at times.
All of the things you think you lack, you want to compensate for. So when your partner does something that you would have never done, you get out your looking glass and turn this ant-sized mistake into an enormous error. ‘How could they be so stupid?’ leaving you to feel better for a few hours, cause ‘you could never!’
You’re lucky if the joy even lasts five minutes.
Because just when we get used to the feeling of being big, someone else will come along who will seem even bigger and we’d have to either buy stilts or choose the easier option: judge them until they shrink six sizes and wait for the next giant to come around.
I judge you for love
Other times we claim to judge others from a place of love. Because we want them to be safe, to be unhurt, to never know pain. So we place our judgment on the people we love because we love them. Talk about a backwards notion! It would make way more sense to be more accepting of the people close to us. Because acceptance is what love should be about, among other things.
If my friend does something that I would not have done myself, judging them does not really help them, does it?
We claim to hold negative opinions about others because we love them. Sure, okay.
Let’s go with that.
Let’s think about how we would feel when others hold negative opinions about the things we do. I don’t think you’d have to think very hard to imagine a scene in which this could happen. I don’t even think you would have to imagine. We have all tasted the bitter taste of judgment disguised as love.
Is it really love?
Now tell me, whenever someone told you how they thought whatever you were doing wasn’t the ‘right’ thing to do, when you were minding your business spending your own money on something useless that you never really needed, and someone told you that you shouldn’t be so irresponsible with your finances, did you feel loved then? Did you find comfort in their hard stares and their disapproving tones?
I’m guessing the answer is no.
Because that is not what love is about. If we truly wanted to practice love and kindness, we would show it to them when they needed it the most: during mess-ups. Big and small. Instead we look at the mistakes they make and add more guilt and shame to the pile that already exists. Or we create feelings of shame where there weren’t any to begin with.
The things we do for love…
How do we get more compassionate?
Compassion is key in this case. You might think I’m stating the obvious right now: being compassionate towards others is a way of showing more kindness and love towards them. But we forget that compassion towards others is intertwined with the compassion we feel towards ourselves.
Compassion for others comes from the compassion you hold for yourself.
To first forgive yourself for ruining the shirts would mean that it would be easier for you to forgive the other person for ruining the shirts. Because we evaluate others according to the standards that we have for ourselves. If we can love ourselves when we make a mistake, then we would be more inclined to love others during their mess-ups. And it would be a genuine and kind version of love. Not the one wrapped in judgment that we present as a much needed gift.
More about self-love
I have written about loving yourself before. You can find the article here. Loving yourself is the first step to being more compassionate towards the people around us. To accept ourselves fully means we can also accept others fully.
This means we will let ourselves get away with not being perfect. That we won’t judge them for their actions. It will lead us to accept that the people around us aren’t perfect either. No one is.
The self-love skill is the one we want to master first and foremost because it will help us master almost every other part of living a full and ‘carefree’ life (of course life can never be completely carefree).
When you live and breathe the endless tale of self-love you won’t be bothered by the things other people do. Not the things they say or the way they treat you, nor the things they do that have nothing to do with you. Because you know that those things, the small things that used to get under your skin, are not in any way related to you and your life.
So why bother?
Accept the differences
Despite what society is trying to force on us, there is no such thing as being ‘normal’. We are all completely unique human beings. We might share some similarities to others but where you would have decided against eating another slice of cake, someone else might choose otherwise.
And surprise: that is completely okay.
If you can truly accept that other people might do things differently from how you would’ve handled it, you won’t let anyone’s actions turn you into the green monster called ‘judgment’ (I imagine it to be just as green as the monster called ‘jealousy’).
If you can fully accept the fact that other people’s choices have absolutely nothing to do with you, then you can let go of all the opinions you have about them and their actions (I wrote more about this kind of judgment that might be jealousy in disguise in this blog).
But the bottom line is: people are different. Even the people that you consider to be your closest friends and family. They will not always make the same decisions as you would have and that does not make them a lesser person. It does not make their decisions ‘bad’.
Just different.
You need some good old confidence
When I feel confident and comfortable in my skin, I don’t feel jealous. I don’t feel the need to judge. When I feel good about myself I am too much at peace with all of me to be bothered by the things that the people around me do to themselves.
Now, self-love and confidence are closely linked to one another but you don’t necessarily have to master one in order to be able to get the other. When you don’t love all of you just yet, you can still feel confident in certain ways. Because your level of confidence can alter day by day and isn’t the same for every aspect of your life.
Yes, usually when I have low confidence days I don’t feel particularly confident in most of the things that I do but there are still ‘points of confidence’ to look for.
So look for them and make them big. Big enough that you can not ignore them any longer.
Find your confidence
A confidence boost is something you can give yourself whenever you need it by doing exactly what comes to mind when you think of a confidence boost. For some people it’s putting on a certain outfit or getting a compliment. Do it. Put on the outfit, give yourself a compliment, do something that makes you feel secure in your skin. Go dancing, sing in the shower, run around the block or work on some other ambition you have; do whatever you need in order to feel like your best self.
Because when you feel comfortable in your skin there is no space for discomfort that others would usually give you. You are filling your skin up nicely and there is just no room left for anything else than your own bullshit.
And to be fair… isn’t your own bullshit enough to be occupied with right now?
Stop judgment before it becomes contempt
To be kind to yourself and others is not the only reason you should focus on getting rid of judgment. Judgment can turn into something uglier. And it can happen fast.
Some would claim that judgment by itself is not really something to fear. Because we do need to quickly assess situations and people around us. After all, to judge is just to form an opinion or to make a decision about something or someone. But the tricky part is that a lot of the time we don’t base this judgment off of careful consideration. Judging something is about weighing all the options and forming an opinion based on those options, but that is usually not what happens.
More often than not do we look but don’t really see, we hear but we don’t listen and we judge without thinking.
This rash judgment usually entails little distinction between the action and the person executing the action. It is the difference between: ‘they did something stupid’ and ‘they are stupid’. When we don’t actively make this distinction, contempt slowly comes creeping in.
And contempt is friend to no one.
Contempt is personal
Contempt is disapproval – aversion – aimed at the people we judge. It means we kicked them down to the point where, in our eyes, they could never rise above us again. As soon as we start to feel contempt towards someone or something, we put aside their humanity and lose all respect we had for them. Contempt is what makes us slowly hate the other up until the point we can’t even bear the sound of their breathing anymore.
Your feelings will turn into acts of condescension, into an attitude of superiority, and slowly the relationships you have with the people around you will crumble. Contempt is friend to no one, least of all to a loving and respectful relationship with friend – or foe.
Compassion isn’t just for the people we like
I know, I know. This isn’t the fun part. And I don’t want it to sound like a stern talking to, but usually we get the message and carry it on to others. We carry it on as far as the people we like and love. But even though compassion is hard, it is fairly easy to be compassionate towards the people around us who we feel deserve compassion.
It gets a little bit harder when we would have to practice that same compassion towards people that we don’t love that much. People that we judge without even really knowing them.
But if we really want to be kinder and make the world a ‘nicer’ place, compassion is needed for all the people around us. Even the annoying colleague we hate so much and the neighbor who bothers us every day. All those small things others do also include the small – or big – things the people that we do not particularly love, do. This might even be where we need compassion the most. For the people we are close to feeling contempt towards.
How you ask?
The exact same way we would with the people that we do love: with a healthy dose of self-love and confidence to not let anything get to us, to accept our differences and to find compassion and kindness in our hearts to refrain from judgment even in the face of the gravest annoyances.
That way we let those small things that people do to themselves everyday, all those tiny inconveniences that have nothing to do with us, slide. So we can go on living our lives.
Fully and unbothered.
