Fear of judgement can be debilitating to the point that it prevents a person from being themselves and leading the life they want for fear of what others may think of them.
Fear or judgement is such a waste of energy, talent and lives. It is paramount that we work to dissolve this fearful trance in our psyche. So what can we do? To dissolve it, we need to question it. We need to create clarity and clarity will give us freedom.
You might find it helpful to comprehend the following concepts. Spend some time pondering over them. It is a selection of concepts and questions to help you start exploring this area and create some clarity. Hopefully, you will see that you may be fearing something that is not true.
Who are they?
Who are these people whose judgement you fear? Who gave them authority over you? Who gave them the right to judge you? Why do you give authority and importance to what they’ve got to say?
Judgement implies a vertical order of people relating to one another, a hierarchy. One assumes a higher position of domination from which they judge and the other takes a lower position of submission from which they accept the judgement. Please consider if this is ok for you. How come we accept this vertical order in our lives? If we say we strive to live in an equal society, why do we agree to an unequal system of judgement?
Keep asking the question: “who are these people?” No matter how close or far they are from you, blood-related or not, no other person can have authority over you. You have the full agency over your body, your mind, your actions, your life.
They only see themselves
Very few people are deeply empathetic to others and so the majority see and understand life only through their own experiences, i.e. what they have learnt and understood about life through everything that happened to them. When we only look at life through our own experiences without considering that another can have a different reality to us, we do not see the other, we only see ourselves. So whenever people judge you, they are really talking about something from their own life, their own experience and not yourself.
They don’t know you
Developing the two previous concepts further, we can say that nobody can truly know another. We can only perceive what we see and make our assumptions. Assumptions are not the truth. Therefore how valid can their judgement of you be?
Do you know yourself?
Fear of judgement is a sign of weak personal boundaries. We are fearful because our sense of self is weak and distorted already so we allow these judgements in. This action destroys our sense of self even further. Stronger boundaries, however, mean that you know and fully accept yourself and therefore do not take someone’s assumptions about you as the truth.
Next time you notice you are fearful of someone’s judgement of you, please remind yourself that:
- you have the right to be yourself;
- you have the right to express yourself the way you want to;
- you have a choice not to take someone’s judgement in;
- someone’s judgement of you has got nothing to do with you and is about the judging person in the first place;
- it is just their perception or an assumption and is not the truth.
I wish you all the best and the freedom to be yourself!