Why Do We Judge?

Plus, if you want one, an antidote

I watched her walk past my window with a big watering can and I judged her.

Photo by Doncoombez with thanks

She was growing flowers at the bottom of the steep temple garden. It was only a scrappy piece of land, far from an outside tap. It was often in shade. Surely she could find somewhere closer to her own home where she could grow a cutting garden? What was the point in lugging the watering can up and down all those steps?

I often judge people. Sometimes the judgement is only fleeting: ‘oh, that’s the cardigan you’re choosing to wear today’ or ‘I wouldn’t cut the mushrooms like that’. Sometimes the judgement crashes down like a dropped pile of dishes - shards splintering off and sometimes drawing blood.

What is judgement? Why do we do it? How does it differ from discernment? How would it be to live without it?

One of the many things I love about my psychotherapeutic model, Internal Family Systems, is the proposal that everything always makes sense when we know the context.

I’ve always had a sense of the correctness of this, but I didn’t fully understand how it worked. Before I found IFS, I tended to agree with the conventional wisdom that we all have behaviours that are ‘self-sabotaging’ and that the key to a smooth life was to root out these self-critical behaviours and drive them away - by force if necessary.

Now, I see ‘self-sabotage’ and self-criticism (and anything else that leads to harmful side-effects) very differently. These behaviours are carried out by parts of us that are desperately trying to help us in some way. When we get to know these parts and understand why they are doing what they’re doing, it suddenly all makes sense.

A self-critical part might be trying to shame us into becoming ‘perfect’, before someone else spots our imperfection and shames us. Maybe a self-sabotaging part is desperate to protect us from success because then we’d be seen (and found out) by others. Parts that keep us addicted to substances or people are trying to distract us from pain that may overwhelm us. And so on.

This isn’t to say that our parts have all the correct up-to-date information, or are doing a good job, or aren’t causing great harm to ourselves or others. The point is that it’s the only thing these parts know how to do, and they are terrified that if they don’t do it, something worse will happen. This is true even of suicidal parts, who (as a last resort in our systems) see an absence of pain as preferable to the overwhelming pain of currently being alive.

How does this theory fit with making judgements?

In my experience, it is always ‘parts of me’ that make judgements. This is partly because these parts don’t understand the full picture yet - they are only working with a few pieces of the jigsaw. It is also because they have an agenda - they might be trying to protect me from something, or they may hold a strong belief that needs to be bolstered.

A few examples. If I have a strong judgement that my colleague is overworking, it may be because I tend to overwork myself and I’m trying to ‘drown out’ the parts of me that are berating me & saying I should be working harder than I am. If I judge a new group of people as not worth knowing, it may be because I am secretly worried that they won’t like me and I want to ‘put them down’ before they have a chance to reject me. If I judge someone who’s late as lazy or disrespectful, it might be because I hold a strong view about the importance of punctuality and my parts want me to feel smug about my own ‘good’ behaviour.

‘Self’, that compassionate, spacious essence that sits behind all parts, never makes judgements. When Self-energy encounters something or someone that it doesn’t understand, it gets curious instead. ‘I wonder why that person is always late.’ ‘I wonder why they overwork.’ ‘I wonder why I’m feeling dismissive of the people in this new group - what’s up with me?’.

This gentle curiosity - if I follow it for long enough - always takes me to a place of understanding. If I don’t get why a part of me or a person is behaving in the way they are, then I haven’t got to know them well enough yet.

Of course, we humans need to be able to discern - to gather information from our senses and brains and hearts, and to see things as either ‘this’ or ‘that’. We need to discern the mug in order to pour boiling water into it. We need to discern that our neighbour is a bottomless pit of needs, in order to set appropriate boundaries around him. We need to discern our own limitations, in order to manage the expectations of others and to protect ourselves from over-promising or over-stretching.

Judgements are discernment on steroids. They usually (always? I’ll have to think about that!) include an element of self-protection. They tend to close things down, rather than opening them up. They tend not to lead to good things.

Of course, knowing all this doesn’t make me immune to having judgements. I still make them; left, right and centre. Also, these days, I hold onto them a little less firmly. I’m quicker to notice when I’ve fallen into a feeling that ‘I know best’. I have greater access to my curiosity, and, hopefully, that makes me a little easier to be around. It also feels better from the inside.

The woman with a watering can was Kat - a member of our Buddhist sangha. She is a textile artist and she creates intricate and breath-takingly beautiful pieces using natural materials.

A few weeks after my internal judgement of her, I heard from another sangha member that she had been drying the petals of the cornflowers she’d been growing in the temple garden to use in her artwork. The flowers were grown on sacred ground, and would add their own layers of meaning to her pieces.

All at once, the unusual location of the flowerbed made perfect sense. I said a mental ‘sorry’ to Kat (which I can repeat with this piece of writing).

There are always reasons why people do things in the way they do them. When we judge, it’s because we don’t know them all yet.

Love, Satya <3

Tell me: When are your strongest judgements most likely to arise? What might you be protecting in yourself? Can you tell the difference between discernment and judgement? How does it feel inside you when you judge? What does it tend to lead to? How might it be to imagine that all actions, even the most awful, make complete sense when we understand the history and the self-protection systems of the people concerned?

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1. Here is Katerina with one of her lovely ethereal pieces. You can see more of her work here.

   

2. If you’d like to see what Internal Family Systems therapy can look like (of course it looks different with each person every time) here’s a half-hour session between Soren Gordhamer and Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS. There are plenty of resources online if you want to follow up or maybe try my courses.

3. A photo of Ralph & Aiko’s bed-share, just because.

   

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Satya Robyn is a writer, IFS psychotherapist & Pure Land Buddhist teacher. She co-founded the Bright Earth temple and has written ten books. She lives happily in Malvern Wells in the UK with her spouse Kaspa & her two little dogs.

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