Is judgment making your life miserable?  In this article, we’ll explore how releasing judgment will accelerate you towards your intentions and goals, and greatly enhance your experience of relationships and life.

Do you judge yourself and others, thus adding stress to your life?

Do you judge yourself for not meeting your own self expectations or the expectations of others?  Do you judge others when they don’t meet the expectations you’ve inherited through conditioning?

Has judgment helped you resolve your relationship problems, fears of not being good enough, insecurities, day to day challenges, etc.?  Or has it added to the pressure, stress, and anxiety of an already complex and increasingly demanding life?

Have you been conditioned to believe that through judgment and punishment, you could whip yourself and others to comply with your expectations and ensure that you would achieve your goals?  Think again.

The pressure of judgment does not bring about better results

Judgment, which the precursor to punishment, does not lead to better results.  On the contrary, it tends to lead to resentment, anger, misunderstandings, confusion, victimization, negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions, feelings of despair, disempowerment, etc.

Overall, judgment keeps you stuck in the cycle of control, pain, and emotional disempowerment.

Judging yourself for judging isn’t useful.  It distracts you away from releasing the original judgment

It’s not bad, or wrong, to judge.  It just isn’t useful.  It’s important to not judge yourself for judging.  When you do that – i.e. judge yourself for judging – you stay stuck in the judgment cycle.

And when you’re stuck in judgment of yourself, it makes it difficult to understand why you judge in the first place.  Your attention is now diverted away from the original judgment, which holds the key to releasing it.

You can’t possibly judge yourself out of judgment.  That pressure doesn’t work.  It distracts you away from actually resolving the underlying emotions that were creating the judgment in the first place.

Why it’s important to understand why we judge

So if judging isn’t useful, what is?  How about understanding why we judge?  Is that something you’d like to start understanding better, so that over time you can permanently free yourself from any and all judgment?

As impossible as it may seem to you right now, you can resolve all the pain and fear that trigger judgment and no longer feel the urge to judge yourself, others, or anything for that matter.

Why do we judge?

Why do we judge ourselves?  Why do we judge others?  Why do we judge things, places, situations, anything and everything that triggers our judgment?

Does a part of you thinks, or even believes, that if you judge you’re going to get what you want? Does a part of you judges what doesn’t meet your expectations, thinking that somehow that will give you control over it?

No matter the situation, and the judgment, we judge when we feel unsafe.  We judge when we feel out of control.  We judge when we believe that things should be different than what they are.  We judge when we feel threatened by ‘what is.’

Does judgment help change anything?

Does the judgment help change anything?  Does it create positive momentum for conscious change to occur?

What we judge has already happened.  It’s already in the past.  It is the past.  So why dwell on something that can’t be changed?

Judging doesn’t help build the momentum, energy, and intentionality that are necessary four us to achieve constructive and fundamental change.

Things are what they are for a reason, a reason that we haven’t fully understood yet.  If we had, we would have been able to effect the change that we want to see.  When you break it down rationally, the belief that judging what’s happened is going to help us resolve it falls apart.

Judgment leads to negative mental and emotional states and a loss of objectivity and discernment

When you judge, you go into a negative emotional state (arrogance, comparison, pride, anger, victimization, hatred, resentment, despair… the list goes on.)

When you go into a negative emotional state, your ability to perceive reality is clouded.  You see through the eyes of your own judgment.  You become unknowingly biased to what you are looking at.

And when your ability to perceive reality accurately is clouded, you lose the ability to gather as much objective information about what has happened and why it’s happened – which is actually what you need in order to effect positive change in your life.

Judgment keeps us stuck in a victimized and disempowered state where we can’t effect constructive and fundamental change

We all have freewill.  That is our God given birthright.  None of us are victims to any circumstance, situation, person, no matter how painful we perceive our situations to be.

When we judge ourselves and others, we experience ourselves as victims to external circumstances that we thus perceive we can never fundamentally change.  That’s NEVER true.  And it’s counterproductive to any goal or intention that you may have about extricating yourself from a challenging situation.

No matter how disempowered you may feel about your situation right now, there is always something you can do to effect positive change.  Judging is not one of them. No matter how victimized you feel by anyone’s behavior or your situation, judgment is not going to change that.  Judgment doesn’t work.  It never has – though you may have believed it would or did.  It never will.

Judgment is an attempt to control that which we do not fully understand

To begin with, our judgments come from our inability to perceive all of what has created our circumstances.  If we truly understood why things are unfolding the way they are, we wouldn’t be judging them.  We would be working towards implement conscious and actionable change to our situation.

This incapacity to objectively perceive ‘what is’ keeps us stuck in judgment.  Without understanding, we feel powerless and hopeless in our capacity to change what has happened, and so we try to control it through judgment.

We have been conditioned to believe that through judgment, we can then apply punishment, and ultimately get what we want.  But all punishment does is, bring about resistance, anger, resentment, add to the layers of ignorance and misunderstandings, and creates additional barriers within ourselves and between ourselves and others.

A non-judgmental evaluation of why things have unfolded the way they have

If you don’t like what’s happened or what is still unfolding in your life, then the first thing you can do to change it is to look without any judgment of yourself, others, or the situation at what has brought you to where you are.

By re-understanding what you’ve previously judged, you can find a way out of it.  Your focus is redirected from avoiding and distracting away from what has happened through judgment to actually looking at ‘what is’ and what brought it about.  Certainly, it wasn’t always like this, otherwise you wouldn’t have made the choices that you did.

Without judgment, you can retrace all the steps that have occurred along the way in your relationships and life.  The pressure of judgment, which comes from fear and feelings of being unsafe as you are now will prevent you from being objective in this inquiry.  When you release the judgment, then you can ask yourself how each step you have taken have contributed to the situation that you are in.

That’s empowerment.  That’s what’s going to get you to where you want to be in your relationships and life.

You can’t get there from here

Without objective information and understanding, you can’t get there. Without self awareness, self love, self acceptance, and understanding, you stay stuck in judgment, accumulating more pain, blame, punishment, and misunderstandings in your relationships and life.

Wishing that things were different than they are, or demanding that they be, is just wishful thinking.  It won’t get you anywhere smoothly, intelligently, and without pain. Undoing what has created pain, deconstructing the dysfunctional parts of your relationships and life, and releasing the past will.

Building healthy relationships with unconditional love, acceptance, and forgiveness, keeping and enhancing what works and what makes you stronger, more understanding, and more connected also will.

DYI approaches often do more harm than good

All these steps are logical, healthy, constructive, wise, discerning, and intentional.  They will ultimately take you to where you want to go.  This process of consciously deconstructing what creates pain, letting go, and understanding your pain and other people’s pain is a complex and delicate process that requires expertise.

DIY is great for toys or home improvements (sometimes.)  DIY is not so great for fixing relationship problems or major life crises.  Honestly, it rarely works.  If you try to figure this all out by yourself, most often than not you’ll get caught up in your own thoughts, fears, emotions, fear projections, fear reactions, and the biases and misunderstandings that is accumulated from years of conditioning and unknowingly looking through distorted lenses.

This can actually lead to more damage than good.  It can even lead you to think that nothing works, or that it won’t work for you because you, people around you, or the world are ‘broken.’

If you’ve been struggling for a while, overwhelmed with self judgment or judging others, and objective reality feels like a blur, we’d be happy to help you become free of judgment, and gain clarity over the most direct, effective, and enjoyable path to your deepest intentions and goals.  Find out how we can help here: Coaching with Us