Confession time
At some point along the way, I became a really judgy person.
It shouldn’t make sense. I’ve been judged by many people, and i know how much it hurts to be on the receiving end of that experience. I don’t want to be judgy.
What I’ve learned is that it’s a survival mechanism gone awry.
Our brains are hardwired to compare. Is it threat or is it safe? Will my tribe accept me or cast me out?
But when we go through experiences that genuinely do threaten our sense of safety, the mental comparison can go into hyperdrive. We can go into a state of hypervigilance, where there’s no turning off the continuous spiral of thoughts that are trying to help us survive. Even when they’re no longer helpful or relevant.
Coming out of the state of survival I’ve been in for years though, I’ve had a lot of these thoughts to sort through. I took on a jaded view of the world after what I went through. Constant suspicion and distrust became my baseline state, and with it came the judgment.
I’ve hurt probably a lot of people in my life because of how judgy I became, so it’s been important to me to work on this part of myself.
Thankfully, I had an epiphany today.
An inherent part of judgment is having a made up ideal in our heads that we use to devalue our own lived experience. The conviction that reality should be different than it is only serves to disconnect us from reality itself. By fixating on a version of “the way the world should be” in our heads, we lose what it actually is, and what we actually are. We are part of the world, so when we believe the world must change in order for us to accept it, what we are ultimately telling ourselves is that WE must change in order to accept ourselves. We tell ourselves we are not inherently enough when in reality we simply are.
But if we stop judging, how will we survive?
It’s not about stopping the mental comparisons — that’s an automatic brain function. What shifts is how we respond to those comparisons.
Do I see a red flag in a relationship and conclude that I or the other person must be inherently lacking something? Or do I see a red flag in a relationship and choose to honor my own experience by not subjecting myself to that dynamic further?
On the surface, it might look similar, but discernment is not judgment.
Judgment devalues experience; discernment honors it.
In learning to shift from judgment to discernment, my life becomes more expansive. My reality opens up when I’m not constantly fixating on the comparison game and using it to decide who’s worthy and who’s not, but rather using it for its evolutionary purpose: to help me stay safe and know when and how and what boundaries to set.
The internal Comparer is not a good leader, but it is a useful follower.
Realizing this instantly expanded my reality.
I have my reality, and you have yours. When we put the two together, we can triangulate a unique inference about a reality greater than our individually limited perceptions. This is why it’s important to learn how to stop judging, listen, connect, and be vulnerable. With ourselves first, with others next, in a greater sphere than the constricted “ideal” in our heads.
That’s the sauce, don’t get lost in it.