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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1868 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 29, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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What to do about a fear of judgement? Is this the same thing as self consciousness? Caring what other people think is kinda hell.

Sublimate it upwards so you only care about what some Ideal Perfect Judge would say across an eternal span of time and with only a perfect concern for what matters. Could also help to stop judging other people by vain / unchangable characteristics

Self-consciousness includes focus on what you think of yourself rather than just on what others think of you, so it doesn't always have all the same failure modes, but it can easily be taken to excess no matter what form it takes.

For myself, I'd break down the emotional repercussions of the judgement of others into three categories. (noting that any one person's judgement can be any mix of all three)

  1. Some judgement is a matter of opinion, and opinions differ, and while it often can broaden your tastes to explore others' subjective perspective, ultimately it's not objectively bad for either of you if you still disagree afterwards. (cue Rogers & Hammerstein music here) If someone thinks it is, well, that goes in category 3.

  2. Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is correct ... and this is usually an opportunity! If you want to better yourself, you want to seek out people who can help you see your own flaws and how to overcome them, you don't want to fear that. In theory this might be an unpleasant process, because people who have insight into flawed human nature might also be rude and insulting about how they explain it, but in practice there's not generally a lot of overlap there, for obvious reasons. (among adults, at least - growing up you might have had a lot of peers who were starting to learn a few valuable insights but who had not yet counted "politeness" among them) I'm generally using "judgement" in the same negative sense that you did, but positive correct judgments can be useful too, not to help you better yourself but to help you identify negative incorrect judgments that might otherwise upset or mislead you.

  3. Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is incorrect ... and so why care about it? If someone tells you you have hideous purple hair, but you can look in the mirror and remind yourself that your hair is not purple, at that point you obviously shouldn't feel bad about yourself, you should feel sad for them. Most incorrect criticism isn't quite that blatantly wrong, but in that case just dissect it and save any bits that belonged in category 2 and then you still shouldn't feel bad about the rest.

Category 2 is an opportunity, while 3 is a bit of a waste of time, so obviously you'd like their ratio to be weighted heavily towards the former, so if you're more into corrective action than corrective introspection you might start to seek out friends/coworkers/partners/etc. whose judgement usually falls into category 2 but not 3. This becomes much more urgent if your problems include others' negative actions rather than just your own negative introspection - from the way you phrased your question it sounds like you're worried about damage to your psyche, but if you have a significant other or a boss or someone whose decisions matter and they're basing those decisions on wrong judgments, then ignoring them is not a good option and you'll have to figure out whether correcting them or leaving them is more practical.

To build on what other people wrote, how you value the judgement should have a correlation to how you value the person doing the judging. Don't worry so much about random people on the Internet. Especially don't pay attention to people who actively dislike you for other reasons than the particular action in question, or who have an ideology that they want to convert you to, or who seem to have bad judgement about you or in general. But pay more attention to people you respect, including mentors, your idealized/future self, or any relevant demigods or bodhisattvas. "Don't make baby Jesus cry." Maybe a question to ask is, "who does this person think I should become?"

The catch is that this works for narcissists and solipsists, too, because they don't value anyone except themselves. So you need to have empathy and humility and openness to the possibility that you might be wrong. But there are entire ecosystems out there built on exploiting this. Walking down the street today, I encountered panhandlers, crazies, and contractors soliciting for charities of questionable effectiveness. The world is full of people who don't give a shit what your personal experience is on the inside, as long as you act the way they want on the outside.

To use astrophysics as a metaphor, the stable Trojan points all seem to involve some form of religion, but it's possible to hang out at unstable Trojan points if you're up for making periodic orbital adjustments.

As others have said some judgement is helpful (example: a doctor telling you that you drink too much alcohol and it will cause health problems). It can help you see self-deceptive or self-destructive behavior that you can’t see on your own.

However, some judgement is unhelpful or mean-spirited. In that case here are some techniques to make you care less about judgement from other people:

  • Remind yourself of times when you were right and others judged you as wrong. This increases the confidence in your own judgement and decreases the confidence in the judgment from others.
  • Remind yourself that only you know what it feels like to be you in a specific situation (perspectival knowing). Nobody else has that same way of knowing the situation and therefore you are in the best position to make judgements about the situation.
  • Assume the person passing judgement is jealous/stupid/evil. Therefore, the judgement has far less weight.
  • Exposure therapy – Finding practice situations (without real consequences) where you will likely face negative judgments and practice not caring about it. It will desensitize you to judgement from others.

To reiterate another comment: judgement is something you need carefully and thoughtfully balance. If you are too dismissive of judgement it can lead you to having delusions of grandeur.

I have recnetly been trying focusing, the thing by eugene gendlin to help me in this context. I have low self esteem and care a whole lot about how others see and judge me. That and meditation are two things that should be of help.

Meidtation to stop me from thinking about anything besides what I am doing at the moment and focusing to ensure that I can address what exactly is bothering me.

I think you should remember that no one will invest as much time and effort in judging you as you do. Most people have better things to do than obsess over your mistakes.

Everyone says "don't be afraid of what other people think". This is bad advice. Few people achieve it, and as @Walterodim points out, the ones who do may be bad people.

We've evolved to be social creatures. Caring about the judgment of others is human nature.

But there is hope. The people who care most about judgment are those whose positions within the tribe are precarious. For example, a young academic must be slavishly devoted to the opinions of others. Even the smallest divergence will see him cast out of the tribe forever.

On the other hand, a person of independent means need not worry so much about the judgment of others.

So, if you want to care less here is what you need to do:

  1. Raise your status within the tribe

  2. Build your life so you are not the client or dependent of another person

While everything you and @Walterodim type out here is true, typically the person seeking a world free of self-consciousness is rather imagining a morning not fretting over whether his ears look big, whether her knees are too knobby for shorts, whether sunlight makes one's skin look washed out, etc. Not fear of discovery if one lies about speaking French (which as you say is a healthy approach to life and prevents all sorts of problems). In other words the hell of constant mundane fretting over the probably unimportant. (Admittedly even in the situations I have listed there is probably something to be gained by at least considering each question: A new hairstyle, different fashion choices, exposure to sunlight, etc.)

My advice would be to work on becoming skilled at something. Nothing like confidence in one thing to raise general confidence. What to work on will be a matter of individual preference up to @Oopz.

This is probably a "you should reverse any advice you hear"-type thing. I suspect it's also like psychotherapy, where a minority of the population really struggles with emotional regulation and needs to work rationally on their perceptions of the world, while most people do OK and would probably just be harmed and paralyzed by a more psychoanalytical approach to their life.

Some people probably desperately need to be told to stop worrying about the dumb things they think people care about, while others probably desperately need to be told they're screwing up and they need to start worrying about the way people perceive them. These two groups just need different things, and would be harmed by following advice necessary for the other.

@DuplexFields's advice last week is probably judicious for the first group, while @MaiqTheTrue's rejoinder serves as a necessary corrective for the second:

Sometimes I think self-improvement ideas can overfit just because the techniques are developed for those settings are developed to rehabilitate the sick and don’t necessarily carry that baggage for those who are not sick... I think a lot of mental health advice ends up that way: designed to help people with severe problems, and works pretty well there, then gets applied to the general population and not only doesn’t help, but can create the problems that it was intended to prevent.

Fearing judgment to some extent is good and healthy. If you behave poorly and show low character, people should judge you for it and you should change your ways. Any breakdown in that outcome is quite bad. On the flip side, you should reject incorrect judgments. The best way to do this it to build yourself into the kind of person that you want to be. Nonetheless, you should still be open to judgment and fear doing the things that would make people think worse of you. As with so many personality traits and emotions (anger, empathy, ambition) these drives must exist in tension and balance. People that either can't judge or fear no judgement usually suck.

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