Many of us struggling with addiction and mental illness are also coping with wounded egos and all the fears that come with our woundedness. We fear we’re not good enough. We fear we’re in competition with other people. We feel easily threatened by other people and inferior when we think we’re falling short. When we’re consumed with a fear of inadequacy, we often will try to put others down in order to make ourselves feel better. We judge them, critiquing them on everything from what they say and do, to how they look, how they behave, and how they live their lives. We belittle other people in an effort make ourselves come across in a better light. We knock them down to try and lift ourselves up. We don’t realize that in judging other people, we’re actually hurting ourselves.
Judgment is damaging to us mentally, emotionally and spiritually, whether we’re judging ourselves too harshly and beating ourselves up for our mistakes, or judging others in an attempt to feel better about ourselves. No matter the form of judgment, or the rationale behind it, judgment hurts us. We often will end up up feeling sad, embarrassed even, that we were so judgmental, critical, negative and cynical. We regret being unkind to people. We feel ashamed of this other person we’ve become, this unkind person we never wanted to me. Our judgment of other people can impact our mental health. We bring ourselves down and cause ourselves unnecessary stress and anxiety from all the comparing and competing. We contribute to our own depression by having expectations for ourselves and other people that we feel should be lived up to, and we’re disappointed in ourselves when we can’t meet our own expectations, haughty and condescending when others don’t. Any validation we feel from having brought other people down is temporary and superficial. It is quickly replaced with feelings of regret and remorse. Judging others hurts us far more than it might hypothetically hurt the person we think we’re up against, the person we feel threatened by and in competition with.
The truth is, competition is an illusion. It is one of the many illusions created by our ego minds out of fear. We fear rejection. We fear not receiving praise and validation. We fear inferiority, and we panic when we think we don’t measure up to other people. We develop patterns of mental and emotional self-sabotage that morph out of our fear. As we’re working to recover, one of the habits we’ll want to address is the very harmful practice of judging other people unkindly.
At The Guest House Ocala, we have personal recovery experience and over 12 years in the recovery industry. We have helped countless people recover, and we’re here to help you too. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information.