Escape the Prison of Judging
Without Understanding
Thinking is difficult; that’s why people judge. – Carl Jung
To counteract the inherent bias of negative judgments, we must consciously look for evidence that contradicts them.
For example, if you think that your spouse is selfish, make a list of your partner’s behaviors that are fair and considerate.
Consider Alternative Explanations
Almost everything of importance is too complicated to yield simple judgments. Exploring alternative explanations is the closest we can come to genuine confidence. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, those who know only their own perspective know little of that.
Dialectics synthesize opposing explanations to obtain something closer to truth than either position yields separately. The classical form is:
Thesis-antithesis-synthesis
Examples
Thesis: The world should be governed by people’s needs rather than profits.
Antithesis: Free markets bring about the innovation and technologies that improve everyone’s lives
Synthesis: Free market capitalism must be regulated to meet people’s needs, even at the cost of profits.
Thesis: Government must maximize individual freedoms and not intrude on people’s lives.
Antithesis: Individual freedoms must be subservient to communal well-being.
Synthesis: Government must strike a balance between individual freedoms and communal well-being.
Although voices in the media seem opposed to public dialectics, we can practice the skill individually. Below are examples of applications in family issues.
Thesis: My wife is yelling at me.
Antithesis: She wants to feel heard.
Synthesis: It’s important to the health of families that all parties feel heard.
Thesis: Our children need more discipline.
Antithesis: Our children need more nurturing.
Synthesis: We’ll administer discipline in nurturing ways that meet the physical and emotional needs of our children.
Practicing a dialectic approach to life engenders humility and turns self-obsession into self-awareness.
Judging without Understanding Follows Preoccupation with Feelings
If you have trouble seeing other perspectives or looking at yourself with relative objectivity, try the following.
Write a description of your most common feelings. (Example: I feel resentful because my feelings aren’t important to anyone in my family.)
Read your description aloud into your phone or a digital recorder. Listen to it as if it were someone else saying the words.
Revise what you’ve written according to how you want to feel and what you will need to do to feel the way you want. (Example: I want to feel more connected to my family. I will appreciate them more and show that I care about their feelings.)
Describe an interaction when your partner said something that hurt or offended you. (Example: My husband said I was irrational and obsessed with my feelings.)
Write what you said immediately before the hurtful or offensive remark. (Example: He said I was irrational and obsessed with my feelings after I said he was narcissistic.)
Recognize that, like you, other people have unconscious guilt, shame, anxiety, and sadness. To paraphrase psychologist, Harry Stack Sullivan, we’re all more human than not.
Look for people and things to appreciate.
Practice compassionate and kind behavior toward yourself and others.
Embrace uncertainty. An inward search by itself can never provide certainty. If we focus on ourselves, we can’t accurately see anyone else, and if we focus on others, we can’t accurately see ourselves. This creates a natural state of uncertainty, which, in extreme cases, drives us toward isolation or seclusion.
Self-defeating ways to cope with uncertainty include attempts to conceal it with dogma, superstition, delusions, drugs, ego, attempts to control other people, perfectionism, or anger.
The self-enhancing path is to accept uncertainty and use it as motivation to learn about yourself, in relation to others, with the goal of growing smarter and healthier. Humans are inherently ambiguous. We’re better off striving for consistency and improvement than certainty.
Humility and true self-awareness include an acceptance of uncertainty and appreciation of the self in relation to others. Genuine self-awareness precludes self-obsession.
Exploring feelings is the starting point of self-awareness, but by no means is it the end point. Feelings are like the surface of a lake that reflect its surroundings but conceal what lies below. The authentic self lies beneath surface feelings.
How to Drill-Down Feelings
Drill-down means examining the perceptions, coping habits, core emotions, assumptions, beliefs, judgments, and values that underlie feelings. When these align, authenticity is automatic. When they don’t, authenticity is elusive.
Start by writing down your feeling, then write what underlies it:
Perception(s)
Coping habit (blame, denial, avoidance)
Core emotion (guilt, shame, fear, sorrow)
Beliefs/assumptions/judgments that accompany and support the core emotion
Your fundamental value(s).
Below is an example of the drill-down process for feelings of anger or resentment.
Perception: Unfairness, dishonesty, or ego threat
Coping habits: Blame, denial of responsibility
Core emotion: Fear, shame, guilt, or sadness
Beliefs/assumptions/judgments: The world’s unfair; this is a bad, selfish, or inconsiderate person, and the world’s filled with them.
Fundamental values: Care and appreciation are good; harm is bad.
Perceptions, beliefs, assumptions, and judgments are not always accurate of course, but they are always biased.
Perceptions of ego threat diminish in the drill-down process and vanish by the time we get to values. (When our egos grow bigger than our values, inauthenticity reigns.)
As a rule, we don’t reflect on the beliefs, assumptions, and judgments that underlie anger and resentment. Instead, we waste mental energy justifying the feelings, which guarantees frequent repetition of them. The beliefs, assumptions, and judgments that underlie anger and resentment rarely align with fundamental values.
Arriving at the core emotions beneath feelings isn’t always easy. This exercise can help. I’m using anger and resentment as an example.
Think of a time when you felt anger or resentment toward someone you love.
What might you also have felt guilty about?
What might you also have felt ashamed of?
What might you also have been afraid of?
You should notice when you get down to the core emotion, feelings of anger and resentment dissipate. Core emotions are self-regulating if we follow their motivations.
Guilt moves us to make amends.
Shame moves us to try harder to succeed. (In love relationships, shame tells us to be more compassionate, kind, and loving.)
Fear tells us to make ourselves safe. (Anger makes us feel temporarily more powerful, not safer. Chronic anger breeds paranoia.)
Beliefs, assumptions, and judgments must align with the most fundamental of values: care and appreciation are good, harm is bad. When they do, feelings serve an authentic sense of self rather than distort, inhibit, or harm it.