Life & Therapy

When I was in high school, all the bad-ass boys drove Mustangs.  My brother called them “bellybutton cars” because, like bellybuttons, everyone seemed to have one.  Of course, looking back, only certain heavy metal fans with mullets really had them at the time, but that’s not the point.  My real point is to describe a phenomenon that is just about as common as your bellybutton: judgments.  We all have judgments of one thing or another, even if we don’t want to admit to being “judgmental.”

A lot of judgment comes from fear.  Maybe we are frustrated by the person in front of us who is taking such a long time to pay for their coffee.  We get angry at this person, and make up some story about them- maybe we decide this person is stupid, or has some political bent that we hate, or is richer than us- piling judgments on top of judgments.  In reality, this person isn’t doing anything to us, and we know nothing about him or her,  but maybe we are afraid to get to work too late, and feeling as if we aren’t in control of the situation.  We may get so focused on our judgment of this person that we ignore the real issue: we are afraid of something.  

We can shine awareness on our judgments rather than trying not to have them.  We can notice ourselves judging someone and making up stories about them, and then ask ourselves how we are truly feeling in the moment.  Now we are giving ourselves much more attention than we were giving the person we were judging.  With this attention, we can actually give ourselves what we need in the moment, rather than allow our imaginations to carry us away from ourselves.