Giving Up Your Need to Judge and Dominate Others
By Dr. Joe Rubino
Much of the struggle we encounter in our daily lives is due to feeling powerless. We somehow feel inadequate, unworthy, unlovable or incapable of getting everything we need to make ourselves happy and fulfilled. As a result of this chronic pain of inadequacy that exists in the background as we go about our lives, we are unknowingly driven to find ways to divert our attention from the pain. One way we do so is by judging others and finding greater fault with their lives than with our own. This allows us a temporary reprieve from the less pleasant habit of judging ourselves.
          By judging others as wrong, flawed, or defective, we get to feel superior to them. As long as our focus is on their flaws, we have less time to bother with our own. Ironically, we are only able to see in others those faults we also possess ourselves. When judging others, we forgo the ability to move our own lives in a forward direction with deliberate intention.
          One of the challenges we face when we judge others is we come from an egotistical perspective that is aware only of how we would act differently based upon our prior experiences and what we consider to be our superior wisdom. We completely discount how the experiences and perceptions of another may have resulted in their saying or doing something so much in conflict with how we would have acted. Because we are not privy to their history, to their painful childhood decisions about their own imperfections, and to the ways they have decided it is necessary to act in order to survive in the world, we have no ability to put ourselves into their world and therefore better understand the reasons why they acted as they do.
By judging them, we forfeit the empathy required to see the situation from their perspective. We do it because it feels good. Judging gives us the sensation of knowing more than they do and of being wiser and better. It provides us with a false sense of power and as a result allows us to temporarily forget about our own inadequacies and struggles.
          By judging others, we distance ourselves from the qualities we loathe about them. While doing so, we lose sight of the fact that we too possess those qualities. If we did not, we would not be drawn to recognize them in other people with such a degree of anger, sadness, or fear. When we judge others of being arrogant, our own arrogance increases. When we see others as ignorant, we ignore our own ignorance being manifest. We get swept away in the lie that only other people are capable of possessing such despicable traits to such a great degree. By doing so, we dominate them in our minds and tell ourselves that we are wiser, more evolved, more powerful than they are.
          The problem with this perspective is that it keeps us separate from others. When we judge others, we relinquish our ability to learn from their experiences. As long as we refuse to see in ourselves the same qualities that we detest in others, we will attract those qualities into our lives. Our attitudes have us put forth an energy that brings these traits to our awareness. The more we can’t stand people that are controlling, the more they show up around us. When we have no room for stupidity, we find ourselves surrounded by people we hold as clueless. To the extent that we can’t make room for the humanity of others to show, we become obligated to suffer through our own shortcomings and emotional reactions.
          By judging, we forfeit our ability to connect with others. We sacrifice intimacy and mutuality by placing ourselves on a higher level than them. As a result, our relationships and ability to influence those we hold as flawed suffers further. We give up our ability to understand how we might impact them to see or do things differently. Because we trade this authentic personal power for the false sense that we are more powerful than they are by virtue of being better than they are, we become less and less likely to influence them to act differently as time goes on. We also lose our ability to influence others we see as possessing similar faults. So, the chasm between us and others grows wider. We lose personal power rather than gain it.
The more we judge, the greater the pain we feel in our lives. To distract us from this pain, we then condemn others even more. We want desparately to connect on a deeper, more intimate level with other human beings but our superior attitude and destructive actions make such a connection impossible. A vicious circle of increasing pain, isolation, unhappiness, and ineffectiveness is thus created. This costs us our happiness, our physical and mental health (all illnesses are an outward manifestation of our internal state), our relationships, and our ability to impact others.
 

Giving Up Your Need to Judge
 

1.                           Notice each time you judge another harshly. In what ways does judging allow you to cover up your own feelings of inadequacy?
2.                           List all the supposed benefits that judging others provides you.
3.                           List all of the ways that judging is costing you those things that are most important to you.
4.                           Each time to judge another, ask yourself the question “What am I really angry about?”
5.                           Instead of distancing yourself from those you judge, what would practicing vulnerability look like for you?
         
          Dr. Joe Rubino is the best-selling author of TheSelfEsteemBook.com and 11 other transformational books available worldwide in 19 languages. To receive his complimentary newsletter entitled “The Power to Succeed” visit http://www.TheSelfEsteemBook.com . For more information on his books, audios, and coaching program, visit http://www.CenterForPersonalReinvention.com