We Are Nothing but Discerning Beings

And why to stop self-criticism we have to stop criticizing others also

How much do you criticize yourself?

Very often I encounter people experiencing a profound dose of self-criticism, to the extent that it has become the rule. And I am not an exception. I also fall victim to my own self-criticism sometimes, though I have made deliberate efforts to mitigate this habit in the last few years of my life. Our human tendency to self-criticize is one of the things I focus on the most in my relationships with clients, friends and family, to help them flip a mindset of self-negative to self-positive.

How?

Before I share some ideas you could experiment with, allow me to build a short story.

Discernment: making sense of ourselves and the world around us

Recently I wrote about identity formation and our process of individuation, where identifications play a central role as emotional attachments we carry towards traits of others. I have also talked about polarities as the idea that we generally craft our understanding of things in dualistic ways — such as hot vs. cold, good vs. bad, I’m enough vs. I’m not enough, and so on.

In our process of individuation, we develop an understanding about who we are and who we are not, including the things we like and don’t like (which on its own is a form of polarity as well). Embedded in this process lies an important skill: our ability to discern between things, options, and choices, and eventually select what we resonate with. It is worth to mention that not always does this happen consciously, though.

Discernment is, therefore, central to our human experience and to our development because it’s through it that we can determine between such things as crossing or not crossing a street, studying or not for a test, and voting or not for a given candidate. Quite often, we vacillate in what I call our spectrum of discernment, between its positive and negative sides, moving from noting all the way to judging, respectively. As follows:

(positive end) Noting — Naming — Labeling — Judging (negative end)

Why is this so important? More so, why moving farther right on the spectrum above ends up hurting us?

Naming

In my mother tongue, Portuguese, we have some words that do not exist in English. “Adjectification” is one of them, as in the act of making something an adjective. In language, naming has this function and it aids us in justifying to ourselves and to others the reasons for our choices and stands in life. It is mostly a neutral way to describe, meaning that ideally naming alone should not start a debate or denote prejudice.

Sticking to the examples from above:

• I’m not crossing the street because the street is busy.
• I study for the test tomorrow because the test is hard.
• I will choose candidate A over candidate B because A is a democrat (or whatever).

Not always, however, this is the case. In context, our naming of things/people isn’t always limited to merely describing things as in the examples above. It is an expression of how we see the world — manifested through language.

Labeling

Things get dicey when we are faced with people who happen to have a different perspective than ours, which is not unusual, right? We often end up carried away by our credos and worldviews, and quickly our naming takes another tone and dangerously shifts to labeling (which is a form of publicly generalizing or stereotyping).

Another example:

When at work we adjectify colleague “A” as “incompetent”, even if it is done silently, we are using our own frame of reference to qualify another individual according to what we see as (or subscribe to) a standard. At this point, we might believe we are merely naming that person, but how to know if we’re not making our view of them, them?

Let’s say that at another instance you find yourself in a conversation with colleague “B”, who you happen to get along well with. The two of you are talking about colleague “A”. Turns out that colleague “B” asks about your view on colleague “A”, and you respond “He is incompetent”. To me, this is when things begin to get troubling because your naming has gone (publicly) into labeling, and even worse if the two of you agree on it. How many times have you seen yourself in similar situations, just in the past week?

Labeling proves to be problematic because not only it implies a standard that might be relative, but it traps us in a fixed mindset that boxes colleague “A” as “incompetent”, and most often in opposition to our presumed competence.

The captivity of judging

As we navigate through events and experiences in life, we interact with people and things around us. We enact our worldviews and make our voices heard. At each and every moment, we make conscious and unconscious decisions where our structure of interpretation of the world quite literally directs us on what we want and what we like.

If labeling takes the conversation to dangerous territory, then judging is our ultimate nightmare because it keeps us identified with just one side of a polarity. It frames someone or something in a particular way, while reinforcing who we are. It makes hard to bridge and understand others’ point of view or motivations (let alone emphasizing with them). In this day and age, this identification is precisely what is behind the commonly found polarized debates around politics, religion, climate change, borders, and refugee crises, to name a few.

We know when we have judged people/situations when we feel overly comfortable with our own opinions/conclusions of them.

And that is when our comfort really traps us.

Things backfire when we cross paths we someone we gauge as “more competent” than us — like colleague “C”, in the example above, who just got the promotion you desired for so long. What happens then is our switching of roles and suddenly we are the ones thinking “I am not as competent as that person”.

What I want to highlight here is that the source of our criticism towards others is the same source of our criticism towards ourselves. And you are not going to stop criticizing yourself unless you stop criticizing others too.

Self-deprecation & the habit of comparing

In our sense-making process, we seamlessly vacillate from naming to labeling, eventually judging others, without much effort or even realizing. In doing so, we are subconsciously placing people on a scale (or spectrum), comparing their skills and attributes, including our own.

On one side, this discerning calms us down because it positions ourselves as presumably more capable than some. Although on the other side, it imprisons us in a state of anxiety and neurosis, constantly thinking we are not as capable as others.

And when we don’t see ourselves as enough as we see other people, we know very well that it hurts us. This is self-deprecation.

And this is a habit. Essentially, it translates to endless amount of time we spend in spiraling ruminations of our past (the things we could/should have done differently) and projections about our future (what we would like to happen).

If nothing else, these thoughts rob us from the present moment, from the people and things right in front of us, and from the experiences we live. Besides, they bring a great deal of internal pain because they reinforce our ideas of inadequacy or insufficiency in life, according to what we think of ourselves and what we think of others.

Dangerous territory, indeed.

The good news is that like any habit, once it becomes visible, we can play with it.

Noting: embracing difference and befriending yourself

In my work with clients, I frequently resort to a few ideas to try and mitigate negative identifications that lead to beliefs of not being or not doing enough. Usually, the opening for this comes in the form of stories, where I spot some level of naming that is, in fact, labeling (if not judging). When in moments like this, I use of some provokative prompts to elucidade the idea of noting, and have them ask themselves:

• Every truth is partial: has it occurred to me that my truth is not other people’s truth? So what I think of someone is just what I happen to think about that person, and nothing more than that.
• The calm of difference: what if instead of naming someone “x” or “z”, I could consider the fact that they are just different from me, just as I am different from them as well. No value judgement, but note how the acceptance of difference instils a feeling of calm.
• Integrate the whole polarity: we all are beautiful mesh between positives and negatives, and we need the negatives to enjoy the positives. In accepting differences, I find more space to integrate both sides of the polarity.

Augmenting your humanity

These practices fall within what I call, in Life Design, Augmented Humanity. In other words, is the step-taking journey of becoming better humans with peace, purpose and power. To befriend ourselves is a fundamental starting point because nothing really works well in our lives when we are at odds with who we are. Moreover, there’s no way we can fill a more purposeful role in the world when we are putting ourselves down so much or questioning our capacities all the time.

Being able to see our inner truth as just one possible truth in a world of billions is an imperative aspect of self-awareness. It keeps us away from arrogance and closer to humbleness, curious about exploring what other different ways to see the world are out there. More than that, what different ways people might see us in relation to how we see ourselves. This is powerful inquiry.

There’s a liberating feeling that stems from our embracing of difference. All of a sudden, it seems like the pressure is off because the comparisons are dropped. What this does is it allows us to find comfort with who we are, with where we are in life, conscious that we are a constant work-in-process — and so are others around us. We will always have our developmental edges, and there will always be opportunities for our development.