When I used to teach mindfulness workshops to folks, the idea of practicing nonjudgmental awareness tended to be a lively topic. Isn’t it important to judge certain things and behaviors? Shouldn’t we judge when people are doing harm? Underneath this was often a feeling of threat by the idea that completely giving up all judgment would be making ourselves vulnerable to victimization, a very valid concern.
Engaging with these conversations helped me to refine what the practice meant to me.
As a therapist, what seems clear to me is that people heal when they can move past their shame to be witnessed and accepted as they are, and this healing leads to greater integrity. Few people enjoy their own suffering and find little relief when that suffering is met with contempt, even if it’s “deserved”. People make choices based on what they know, and often under stress those choices are short-sighted and create more suffering. Helping people to slow down and soothe the stress response helps them to access their executive functioning to better reflect on and make choices, and mindfulness practice is one way of doing this. Much of this would be easier if we lived in a society where people had access to healthcare, housing, and food as needed.
Things that get in the way of moving out of the stress response are emotional cruelty, physical violence, and a certain energy of scorn or contempt. All of these are essentially social threats that exacerbate shame and distress and make people more reticent to share their true feelings. What we often call “being judgmental” is this attitude of scorn or contempt, communicating a belief in some essential badness in a person for their choices rather than offering curiosity to understand why they are as they are.
In mindfulness practice, the primary work is to practice offering to ourselves that inner witnessing, kindness, and acceptance with presence. We notice our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and the stories we tell about these things. We do not act on them, except to be with the practice and continue breathing.
When it comes to our behaviors, we may wish to make judgments, though it is helpful to move past a simplistic binary of “good” or “bad” and into a deeper reflection on how we feel about our behaviors and the consequences of our actions.
If you are an alcoholic, for example, you could practice nonjudgmental observation of the craving to drink, and in many ways that okayness makes it easier to be with the craving without doing anything about it, until it naturally passes. What could be not okay is having the drink, and it could be not okay because you know from history that having the drink leads to a whole host of unwanted consequences and harms to you.
Inner acceptance is the primary work that allows all of our conflicting parts to better work together. If we can offer that to others, that is lovely, but we cannot do that without boundaries, which requires judgment.
Here we approach the paradox that I’ve been mulling over for most of 2020. There are limits of nonjudgmental tolerance, and there are limits of judgmental rage, and we’re sitting in all of it. Whether you think masking is a government conspiracy or you think anti-maskers are dangerous sociopaths, we still have to be in the same space with each other and we cannot control each other.
Ruminating on how much you despise the other person’s beliefs and actions has very limited returns for one’s emotional equilibrium and wellbeing. At the same time, simply minding one’s business and not judging others’ actions may mean experiencing unwanted harms and risks.
For example, I have great compassion for whatever people living alone are doing to get through the pandemic emotionally. Some of them have a pod, some of them are hooking up with people, some of them are prioritizing family.
But if that person wants to come inside my house to hang out with me unmasked, then we encounter judgment and boundaries. I don’t think they are bad, but I have a risk management protocol that for me is doing reasonably okay at both helping me not to constantly ruminate every time I clear my throat (“This is it! I have COVID!”) while also not being utterly isolated. That protocol is a work in progress, but I need to have it, and it does not work for me to disrespect it. For us to meet, we would both have to renegotiate our boundaries and risks.
It is easy to be kind and nonjudgmental toward another person’s choices when the consequences do not impact our own wellbeing and stability. And when those consequences do impact us, it is not wrong to have judgment and boundaries about what we will accept.
This is one of the reasons why, even if you have a therapist friend or partner, you need your own therapist. In a social or intimate relationship we ideally meet to care for each other in a mutual way, to make decisions together that affect each other. A therapist has clearer boundaries and greater distance from the impact of your choices. Your professional therapist would not be personally hurt when you break relationships agreements. Your therapist lover would be.
The kind of judgment that comes with boundary-setting feels harsh and angry to those of us unused to it, and when we try it out we may err on the side of too much rigidity and anger after years of too much timidity. We may set those initial boundaries from a place of making it about ourselves, like their behavior is something they did to us. Often we may feel our own guilt about having the boundary, which may lead to more brittleness. These conversations tend to communicate more of the contemptuous judgments.
There are certain problems, such as a global pandemic, when we cannot escape being impacted by others’ choices. If you think COVID is a hoax, you still have to deal with the economic contraction of stay at home orders and people being unwilling to risk their health. If you diligently follow all the public health recommendations, you still may be impacted when the hospitals are filled up with active COVID cases. Collective navigation of what we judge, what we support, can only be done through collective process, but on a personal level we need to find what we can do for ourselves within that process.
It takes practice to get to a place of directness and dignity, and it may be surprising to learn that kindness and firmness need not be enemies but may indeed be very good friends. We do no one a service when we let ourselves be torn to shreds by our own caring and compassion. Firmness is also about being clear in what you are willing to offer and what expectations you have and accept. Kindness is also about not allowing people to disrespect and violate your boundaries in a way that will lead you to hate them if unchecked.