Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family,
A few weeks ago, someone close to me told me a story that has stayed with me.
A young woman, new to a sports team that she played with after work, was injured badly during a competition. The kind of injury that changes everything overnight. Surgery was needed quickly, and recovery would mean weeks without being able to walk, drive, or care for daily life in the way she normally did. She is a single parent to a very young child and works full time. Her family lives far away and could not come.
Overnight, the scaffolding of her life collapsed.
A friend of the woman stepped in, instinctively. Not because she had endless time or capacity, quite the opposite. She had her own demanding job, her own responsibilities, her own limits, but she saw clearly that this was not a situation that the injured woman could manage on her own. So the friend began to organize support: meals, rides, medical equipment, childcare, conversations with insurance companies and doctors’ offices. The quiet, unglamorous work that makes survival possible when someone is overwhelmed and in pain.
When this story was shared with others beyond the people directly involved, the response was swift, unanimous, and—in some instances—shocking.
Some commented that the injured woman was somehow responsible for her situation. Why did she ever choose to play a physically demanding, risky sports activity if she had a child to care for? She should have planned her life better. And now that she was injured and in need of serious medical care, why didn’t she get her family to help her? Why was she alone in the first place? Some remarked that the woman’s dilemma was her own doing and that others around her should not feel responsible for solving her problems. There should be limits to generosity, they said.
What struck me about all of this was not the absence of compassion for the young woman, but the absolute confidence and certainty with which some people made judgments about her and her situation, the speed with which a complex human life was reduced to a verdict.
Thinking about this, I reflected on a very different crisis that occurred in my own life years ago. After my husband died, people had a lot of opinions about how I should grieve, about how my children should grieve, about what was healthy, appropriate, strong, dignified, excessive, insufficient. Most of their opinions were offered with genuine care: people meant well and they wanted to help.
And yet, very often, the impact was the opposite.
Their judgments did not lighten the weight of what I was carrying: they added to it. They made an already painful and disorienting time heavier, lonelier, more confusing. The gap between intention and impact could not have been wider.
This is one of the great paradoxes of judgment. It is often delivered in the name of love, concern, responsibility, even morality, and yet it so often lands as violence to the soul.
I write about this topic with humility, because I am a judger in recovery.
I grew up in an environment where strong opinions were the norm. There was such a thing as “The Truth.” It was clear. It was obvious. It was not up for discussion. Anything that did not align with it was wrong, and therefore worthy of criticism. I also grew up in France, a culture that prides itself on sharp analysis and critique. Put together, you get a powerful training in judgment.
For decades now, this has been one of my core inner practices. Every morning, I remind myself not to judge. Every day, I fail at this to some degree, and every time I catch myself, I practice loosening the grip of judgment by deliberately finding opposing perspectives, alternative explanations, other possible truths. This practice works: I believe that I am far less judgmental than I once was. And still, this reflex remains one of the most deeply wired defaults in my nervous system. I doubt it will ever disappear completely.
Which brings me to the question at the heart of this newsletter.
What is Judgement?
Before we talk about judgment psychologically, it’s worth looking at the word itself. Judgment (or judgement) comes from the Old French jugement. From the beginning, it carried a double meaning: on the one hand, the mental faculty of forming opinions wisely, what we might call discernment or good sense (“sound judgment”); on the other, a formal decision in law or theology, a ruling, a sentence, a verdict. What is striking is how, in everyday language today, the word has tilted toward this second meaning. Many of its common associations evoke finality and authority rather than discernment, as if judgment were less about thinking carefully and more about pronouncing an outcome.
When something happens that you don’t like — you get a speeding ticket, someone cuts in front of you in a line, your boss scolds you for being late with a report, or you hit unexpected traffic on the way to an important appointment — that experience is already unpleasant in and of itself. That’s the event.
Judgment is what happens next. It is the additional layer of negative inner narrative we place on top of the event: the story we tell ourselves about what it means, about who is wrong, incompetent, inconsiderate, unfair, or at fault. And when we take that inner judgment and share it out loud, it often goes by other names: gossip, criticism, blame, complaining.
Yuck!
Psychologist, coach and author Shirzad Chamine, in his work on Positive Intelligence, calls the Judge the “master saboteur”, the one that runs the show, the one that hijacks the brain more powerfully than any other inner voice. Judgment, in his framework, comes in three directions:
- Judgment of self: the inner voice that constantly measures us against an imagined standard, telling us we are not enough, not doing enough, or fundamentally flawed, and keeping us trapped in shame rather than growth.
- Judgment of others: the reflex to reduce complex human beings to labels or verdicts, distancing us from curiosity and compassion while quietly reinforcing a sense of superiority or separation.
- Judgment of circumstances: the belief that life should not be unfolding the way it is, that something has gone wrong and is inflicted on us, which fuels resentment and resistance instead of helping us meet reality with flexibility and courage.
Alfred Adler would frame this differently, and more precisely. He believed that all human beings strive to overcome feelings of inferiority that arise naturally from our early helplessness, and that this striving is healthy when it is oriented toward belonging, social interest, and contribution. Judgment enters when this striving becomes vertical rather than horizontal, when the desire to become a better human turns into the need to be better than others (i.e. “superior). In that distorted form, superiority is no longer about growth or contribution, but about ranking, comparison, and power, placing people above and below one another. This has consequences.
As a child, growing up in a world where there was only one acceptable “Truth”, I learned very early that belonging was conditional. Love was linked to approval. Parts of me that did not fit were inconvenient at best, unacceptable at worst. Like many people, I learned to twist myself into shapes that earned acceptance. I suppressed parts of myself and exaggerated others. Author and MD Rachel Naomi Remen describes this beautifully when she writes about how we contort ourselves to live up to other people’s truths. Over time, this twisting becomes exhausting, creativity suffers, vitality diminishes, and a “fixed mindset” takes hold, to use Carol Dweck’s language. Growth requires flexibility, and judgment produces rigidity.
There is also a cost to all of this that research has begun to document clearly. Studies in psychology, neuroscience, and psychoneuroimmunology show that persistent self-criticism and judgment activate the brain’s threat and stress systems in much the same way as external danger does, increasing physiological stress responses over time. Chronic activation of these systems is associated with higher levels of stress hormones and has been linked to anxiety, depression, and compromised immune functioning. Conversely, research on self-compassion and emotional regulation shows that practices rooted in kindness and acceptance are associated with calmer stress responses and greater psychological resilience. This is not philosophy. It is physiology.
Rachel Naomi Remen goes even further. In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, she writes:
“The life in us is diminished by judgment far more frequently than by disease. Our own self-judgment or the judgment of other people can stifle our life force, its spontaneity and natural expression. Unfortunately, judgment is commonplace. It is as rare to find someone who loves us as we are as it is to find someone who loves themselves whole. Judgment does not only take the form of criticism. Approval is also a form of judgment. When we approve of people, we sit in judgment of them as surely as when we criticize them. …”
Approval, then, is simply judgment wearing a gentler mask. When we live for approval, there is no resting place, no sanctuary, only constant striving, a subtle but relentless erosion of wholeness.
Remen uses a powerful image to make her point. When conditions are harsh, certain plants become spores. They contract. They wait. Children do the same. In environments where their uniqueness is judged or reshaped into what is acceptable, they wall off parts of themselves to survive. Spores endure. They do not grow and what was once a brilliant survival strategy eventually becomes a way of life.
This is why judgment is not a neutral habit. It is not just a personal quirk or an unfortunate tendency. It stifles life. It narrows possibility. It replaces curiosity with certainty and relationship with evaluation.
This is exactly what I witnessed in the story I began with. Faced with a woman in pain and overwhelm, some people moved quickly from curiosity to certainty, from relationship to evaluation, from asking “what is needed here?” to deciding who she was and how she should have lived her life. A complex human situation was flattened into a judgment, and with it, the possibility of presence, humility, and genuine support quietly disappeared.
Judgment becomes especially dangerous when it moves from private opinion to moral demand. When we no longer say, “This is how I see the world,” but instead, “This is how you should see the world.” This happens in families, in parenting, in churches, in politics. It is the moment when difference becomes threat, and disagreement becomes disloyalty.
I have had to confront this tendency not only in the world around me, but in myself.
My therapist once asked me, gently, “And when did you get your G.O.D. degree?” I laughed. And then I felt the truth of it. Who are we to assume that our private logic should govern someone else’s life? Adler was clear about this. Each human being develops a unique private logic, shaped by their temperament and DNA, their families of origin (parenting styles and siblingship), their experiences, and their culture. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when we try to force our private logic onto others.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) offers a simple but radical distinction. We can speak from our experience using “I” language:
- “I think,”
- “I feel,”
- “this is important to me.”
The moment we move into “you should,” we have crossed into judgment. We are no longer sharing. We are prescribing.
Understanding this distinction is important, but it is not enough. Judgment is not just an idea; it is a habit, often a reflex, and it requires practice to loosen its grip.
So, what do we do, knowing all this?
Working With Judgement
There are two places where judgment shows up most clearly, and where it can be worked with most intentionally: when we are the ones giving it, and when we are on the receiving end.
First, when we are on the giving end of judgment.
We practice awareness. Not perfection. Awareness. We notice the tightening in the body, the certainty in the mind, the impulse to correct, fix, explain. Maybe even a bad taste in the mouth or a bit of guilt in the pit of the stomach. We remind ourselves what judgment does to us and to others. And when we catch ourselves, we practice the opposite. We take a breath and listen longer. We ask questions. We allow complexity. We remember that we do not know the whole story, and that we do not have a G.O.D. degree.
Second, when we are on the receiving end.
We develop a kind of inner permeability. Not everything that is offered needs to be taken in. We can acknowledge care without accepting the verdict. “Thank you for your concern.” “I appreciate that you care.” And then we let the judgment pass through without lodging inside us, like water on skin. Presence without absorption.
I do not believe that letting go of judgment will fix the world. But I do believe it changes the climate we live in. It changes how safe people feel around us. It changes how alive we feel inside ourselves.
In the times we are living in, that feels essential.
