TRANSCRIPT
What does it mean in conventional society to be judgmental? Well, I would like to share an example, very painful in my life, where I was labeled as judgmental by quite a few people. It went back over 25 years. I was spending quite a bit of time with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, at their home. And what was very painful about this is my grandfather was having an affair openly. It’s actually very disturbing. He was having an affair with one of his former psychotherapy clients. He had been a psychotherapist when I was a child, even before. So he had seduced one of his former psychotherapy clients. He made sculptures of her. He later, when he quit being a therapist, became a sculptor, and he had all these nude sculptures of her all around his property.
This woman, who I actually knew very well, I knew her from my whole childhood. She would come over to dinner all the time. My grandmother would cook meals for her. My grandmother would often get drunk when she would come over, just so my grandmother could deal with her horrible conflicted feelings about this woman. My grandmother was expected to pretend that she was friends with this woman. This woman would pretend she was friends with my grandmother, even though this woman was, what, 35 years younger than my grandmother? She was younger than most of my grandmother’s children.
And so what happened is I was in a place in my life, on an emotional level, where I was really exploring my own self, my own history, my feelings. I was exploring what it meant to be honest in a family system, in a world where I had never been allowed to be honest. So I started talking about what I observed. I remember bringing it up with one of my grandfather’s friends, a younger woman who he was friends with. I said, “What do you think about this affair that my grandfather is having with this woman who had been his therapy patient?” I said, “I think this is really disturbing and sick. I see how it affects my grandmother. I see how it affects my whole family’s system.” And this woman jumped on me. I remember what she said, and this is why I bring it up. She said, “Daniel, you have no business being so judgmental. You need to take a look at yourself and stop being so judgmental.”
I remember just withdrawing into myself, feeling so stung and hurt and pained, feeling like I felt so often as a child, realizing that I wasn’t allowed to have a voice. I wasn’t allowed to share my observations. I couldn’t talk about what I considered to be reality. And I remember trying to talk about this with her a little bit more and just realizing this conversation was over. Once I’d been labeled as judgmental, there was no more discussion that was going to be had.
And so for me, this really highlights this whole thing about being judgmental. What I see as being judgmental, what gets labeled as judgmental, is to criticize someone else, to criticize their behavior, to call out someone else. And what’s so interesting about being judgmental, about being called judgmental, is it doesn’t matter if you’re right or not. It doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is true or not. What I realized with this woman who called me judgmental is she was not interested to know if what I was saying was true or not. Often, actually, when people get labeled judgmental, it’s because they are telling the truth, because their critique, their criticism of something they’re observing is actually correct. And other people don’t want to think about it, don’t want to know it, want to avoid it, want to not have to acknowledge that someone maybe that they care about or like is doing something that’s really bad or harmful or pathological or dangerous or sick or hurtful.
And so I learned then, I mean, I learned it long ago, but I learned then more carefully that if you are going to critique people, especially critique people who you might be close to, be careful because you can get labeled judgmental. A lot of people have no interest in discerning whether your critiques are true or not. Instead, they just want to maintain the status quo. And if you go against the status quo, you risk being labeled judgmental.
Well, what was so confusing for me at that time is I was just coming more strongly into conscious connection with my judgment, my ability to use good judgment, to trust my judgment, to realize that I had some ability to assess reality, to assess behavior, to say, “Is this healthy or is this not?” And it’s not that I was just going around criticizing everyone outside of myself arbitrarily. Actually, really, the main person who I was criticizing was me. I was looking at myself. I was looking at my own behavior. I was saying, “Am I healthy? Am I not healthy? Where is my behavior not healthy?” And part of why I was doing it is I realized I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like myself that much. In some ways, I hated myself. I disrespected myself. I behaved in disrespectful ways toward myself and toward others. I saw a lot of that in my behavior, and I realized I would never have self-respect if I kept behaving that way.
The reason, when I looked inside myself, the reason I was behaving that way was because of how I was treated as a child, what I observed around me as a child, the way my parents treated me, the way my mother treated me. And then I saw, well, gosh, the way my mother treats me is exactly how my mother’s parents treated her and how my mother’s father treated his wife and treated his girlfriend. I mean, he took advantage of one of his therapy clients. At the basic bottom line, it’s like he really abused this woman who became his girlfriend, who was his client, who was 35 years younger. That’s sick. That’s unethical, even illegal in a way. And he disrespected his wife doing that. And yet my whole family system accepted that. My parents brought me into this environment and had me witness this year after year, every holiday we spent with them. It’s like this really negatively affected me. It negatively affected me that everybody around me called this normal.
And when I grew up, it’s like I had some warped ideas about what is healthy, what is reality, what is good, what isn’t good, what is respect, what isn’t respect. And some part of me was stronger, some part of me was more honest, some part of me just wanted to know, “Who am I really? What is healthy? How can I become healthy?” Now, what I found interesting is when I told people, when I shared in the world with my friends, with my family, even the same woman who called me judgmental, when I told them about my burgeoning self-reflective relationship with myself, how I was beginning to call out myself, critique and criticize myself for my bad behavior, I noticed a lot of them, most of them, perhaps all of them to one degree or other, they didn’t like it. They said, “Daniel, why are you so harsh on yourself? You’re so self-critical.” Now, they didn’t say, “Daniel, why are you being so judgmental of yourself?” Because somehow it’s like I think in our society people are allowed to criticize themselves. They’re allowed to attack themselves. Somehow that doesn’t get labeled as judgment. So it only gets labeled as judgmental if you’re calling out other people.
But what I realized is that my salvation, my salvation, my ability to redeem myself as a person, to return to being a person who I loved, in part came down to me really looking at myself, looking clearly at myself. So why shouldn’t I go and look at the whole world like this? In a way, I felt it was the most respectful thing to do, to shine the light of reality on what I was observing. And in one way, it really did help me. It helped me really be clear on who these people are, to take my analytical abilities, not to say I was necessarily right, but just to open the door to asking questions. What is my grandfather’s relationship with this woman? What is my grandfather’s relationship with his wife? Later finding out, actually, he had had lots and lots and lots of affairs going back to when my mom was a teenager. It actually devastated my mother. It devastated her siblings. It devastated his wife. By extension, it devastated me. It devastated my mother’s relationship with my father.
It wondering why did he do this? Where did this come from? What made him think it was okay to treat other people like this? This was part of my salvation in figuring myself out, but also in understanding human behavior, human psychology.
Well, what I realized as time went on is that I had to be very, very careful about sharing my good judgment. Because I later came to realize my judgments, the more especially I studied myself, became really truly connected with who I was, connected with my feelings. My brain got better; my ability to understand human dynamics got a lot better. But I had to be very careful about sharing my good judgment. A lot of people didn’t like it, and I see that in the world a lot. I see a lot of people out there who have sometimes excellent judgment, and even when they have excellent judgment and they talk about it, often they say things like, and I do the same thing, “Well, I don’t want to sound judgmental, but…” and then they share their correct observation of reality. Or, “Sorry for sounding judgmental, but…” and that sort of softens the blow.
A lot of people, well, again, they don’t want to hear reality. They have that reflex to just call anyone who calls other people out as judgmental. So what I’ve learned from myself is to be careful, to be careful about what I share and who I share it with.
Now, one could say I put myself at a certain risk by sitting in front of this camera and talking so openly about things like this, and I know this. I get called judgmental all the time. People say, “Why don’t you forgive them? Why don’t you let it go? Why don’t you move on?” Or maybe you weren’t seeing things correctly, or maybe you don’t understand x, y, and z, or you do too much blaming x, y, and z.
Which brings me to probably my final point, and this is something that I found very interesting. And I’ll go back to tie it in with what this friend of my grandfather’s said to me when I called out my grandfather and his behavior. What I’ve seen is a lot of these people who are calling me out for being so open, for actually having a correct ability to assess reality, is actually they’re incredibly judgmental of me by their own definition. They’re criticizing my behavior, they’re critiquing me, they’re shutting me down, they’re calling me pathological. They’re saying, “You should not do xyz. Don’t talk so openly. You’re a critical person. You should forgive.” And why aren’t they calling themselves out as judgmental?
And I guess this brings to my final, final point: that when people get labeled as judgmental by society, often they’re in a position of less power. And when people have more power, the power to call other people judgmental, they themselves, because of their more powerful position, maybe because they’re siding with the norm, they’re siding with the parents in the family system, even siding with the grandparents in the family system, they have the privilege of being able to be absolved from having anyone call them judgmental. In fact, by being the defenders of the power structure, they’re free from being labeled as judgmental, but they have all the right in the world in their mind to call others judgmental.