THE JUDGMENT MINDSET TYPE
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 99.
Hello, my friends. I am back with another episode covering mindset traps that we fall into as moms navigating life with teens and this transition from motherhood to the empty nest, what I've been calling the empty nest straddle. So I've aggregated 14 mindset traps that all of us are susceptible to, and I've compartmentalized them into four mindset trap types.
The worry mindset type, the fix it mindset type, the validation seeking mindset type, and today's focus, the judgment mindset type. Now, once again, I want to remind you that there is nothing wrong with you if you fall into these traps. In fact, one of the most important takeaways I want you to get from any of these conversations is how normal it is for our minds to fall into these traps due to our instinctive motivation to stay away from danger, to find comfort and pleasure, and to conserve our energy.
These primitive motivators are still very much at play in our minds today, even though our day-to-day survival isn't threatened by predators or lack of food and shelter. I also want to say that these mindset trap types are not meant to label you as if they imply this is who you are. You are not an anxious person or a fixer, a validation seeker, or a judgmental person, simply because you at times fall into these traps.
This has nothing to do with your identity, but it has everything to do with how you feel and how you show up in your life. So from that perspective, understanding these traps has everything to do with breaking free from the anxiety, frustration, guilt, and shame that these counterproductive ways of thinking, these mindset traps, can create. Now, I've spent quite a bit of time over the course of this podcast talking about all of the ways that we judge ourselves.
They say that we are our own worst critic, and I think it's true. There's no one in the world who would dare talk to us the way that we talk to and about ourselves. When this issue of negative self-talk comes up with my clients, I remind them that you get to think whatever you want to think about yourself.
So why would you choose to call yourself names, to judge yourself so harshly? It can take some work for us to take responsibility for this self-talk, to own up to the fact that the terrible things we say about ourselves are not only not true, but they're a choice. I think that we're typically a bit more on to ourselves about the way we think and talk about other people. Consider this, you likely have all sorts of thoughts about the people in your life, the people you don't like, and even the people you love and care about very much.
You have some wonderful, lovely thoughts about all of these people. But if you're honest with yourself, you have some other thoughts too. Potentially even some thoughts that you wouldn't be willing to voice out loud.
You wouldn't want this other person you care about to know that you have these thoughts about them. When clients share these thoughts with me, they often say immediately, either before or after, I'm terrible for saying this, or I shouldn't be thinking this. We have a lot of judgment about ourselves for even thinking these negative thoughts about other people, particularly those we care about, but even people we don't.
Most of us really don't want to hurt other people or be perceived as mean. So we tend to censor ourselves when it comes to a lot of the judgments we automatically have about other people. But let's peel away the guilt and the shame for a minute, because my friend, I have these thoughts too.
And so I want to take a moment to explore what purpose this type of thinking can have, what benefit it offers us. First, when we judge other people and put them into categories in our mind, maybe based on how they act or the way they treat us, this helps us decide whether or not we want to interact with that person. Another way to think about it is that judgments about other people can help us set boundaries.
Think about how this has informed who you've called a friend over the course of your life. I'll bet that there have been times in your past where you've observed someone's behavior and whether consciously or unconsciously, you've decided to distance yourself from that person because their actions or behavior didn't align with the type of person you are or the type of person you want to associate with. And this doesn't have to be a bad thing.
It often doesn't even require a conversation. It doesn't have to be personal. This type of judgment helps us identify the type of person with whom we want to spend our time.
But it also has the benefit of protecting us from spending time with people whose values we don't share, or frankly, even with people who drain our energy. In extreme cases, this kind of judgment has kept us safe from people who might be aggressive or even dangerous in some way. I want to stop and also acknowledge that there are some people in our lives who we can't disassociate ourselves from just because we know they're not our people.
Coworkers or our bosses are one example. It can even include family members, in some cases our own children. There may even come a point when you have to make the difficult decision to cut off a toxic family member.
These are really hard choices to make. All this to point out that when you have these negative judgments about someone who you can't easily cut out of your life, who you don't actually want to cut out of your life, it's normal that you have this internal conflict in your mind. And this is a fantastic opportunity to really explore what's underlying the conflict, to take responsibility for how your judgments are actually creating the inner conflict in your mind.
Because you can't change the other person, and you may not even want to change the way you think about that difficult person. But then what? Believe it or not, you have agency here, even though you may not feel like it. And let me be clear, when I say take responsibility for your judgments, I'm not at all saying that you shouldn't have judgments, or that you should be putting your judgments in check.
Actually, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying it makes perfect sense that you have judgments about other people, even people you love. And rather than forcing yourself to let go of or suppress those judgments, I want to invite you to embrace them.
Embrace them for what they might have to teach you. Now before I dive into that and the judgment mindset type, there are two other benefits to judging others, in addition to identifying people who share your values, setting boundaries with those who don't, and protecting yourself from people who might harm you in some way. One of these additional benefits is an enhanced feeling of belonging.
I talked about this when I explored the comparison mindset trap, and also a during the discussion of the validation-seeking mindset type. Judging other people strengthens our sense of acceptance and belonging when we find a group that we judge to be similar to us. This is a beautiful thing, actually, and really fulfills that instinctual motivation we have to survive.
Remember, belonging is a form of safety. Even in today's modern world, a sense of belonging guards against feelings of isolation and rejection. Finally, judging others can boost our self-esteem.
On the positive side, we can feel a higher sense of self-esteem if we think we're wanted or appreciated. In other words, if we judge that someone's welcoming us or appreciating us in some way. In this sense, this judgment serves as a sense of validation.
Again, we touched on this in the validation-seeking mindset type episode. But we can also judge others negatively, in a way that diminishes them and simultaneously makes us feel a sense of superiority. Again, maybe even validation.
These feelings can come from a thought along the lines of, I'm better than she is, or I would never do something like that. Now, without judging any of this ourselves right now, the benefit of this judgment is a feeling of validation that counters feelings of inadequacy or insecurity. Now, I can already hear your internal dialogue.
As I've been describing these benefits, your mind might have gone automatically to the thought, well, that's not me. I don't get a sense of superiority or validation from putting others down. And I get it.
I'm not saying you do. But let's explore these concepts in situations that aren't as extreme as looking down on someone or feeling superior. In fact, let's explore these concepts in everyday situations with our teenagers.
So going back to that first benefit of judging others, that it helps us set boundaries and ultimately decide if we want to be around the other person. With our teens, this is a tough one. Can I be honest with you? And I'm speaking from a lot of personal experience here.
Sometimes our teens are not at all fun to be around. Can you relate? I mean, there are times when, let's say this was someone I just met, I would be like, no thanks, not my cup of tea. And I don't even feel bad saying this.
I love my boys with my entire heart. But there have been times over the years that I have just not wanted to be around them for whatever reason. But just think about the inherent conflict that comes up for us as moms who love our kids, who don't want to be thinking that we don't want to be around our kids.
It's painful. It makes us feel bad for thinking it. And it makes us feel bad about our kids too.
Like maybe there's something wrong with them. So how do we go about setting boundaries when we don't actually want to cut our child out of our life? The vast majority of us don't want to cut off our teens just because we're struggling with them. If anything, we want to be closer with them.
So the question is, how do you show up? Do you let their behavior go? Or do you try to set boundaries or consequences around certain behavior? Now, I'm going to come back to this. But before I do that, let me cover some examples of the other benefits of judgment quickly first. So I mentioned that the other benefit of judgment is they can play a positive role in your own self-esteem.
Again, this feeling of belonging. If we judge that we're good parents, if we judge that we're seeing evidence in our lives that our kids are thriving, this is an incredible boost to our own sense of self-worth. And I'm saying this from personal experience again.
Even from those beautiful moments back when our kids were babies. It's like we see our kids are okay. They've been fed.
They're sleeping. Everything's right with the world. Tell me you don't remember that feeling of gratitude.
And even I'll say this feeling of, I did it. I met my child's needs today. And just think of how this cycle has repeated itself time and again over the course of your child's life.
When they're hurt or they're upset, they have some challenge, you play a role in helping them get through it or overcome it. And then you get to think, you perceive, you judge that you did something important. What an incredible sense of validation you can feel by perceiving your life in that way.
And just to be very clear with this, your validation is coming from your judgment that everything's okay and that you played an important role. It's your perception of the situation that provides the validation. Because think of how many times you've also had the opposite perception or judgment that things aren't okay and that you fail to help or make an impact.
These judgments go both ways. There are these moments scattered throughout life as you raise your teens, sometimes when they pull away from you or even shut you down, shut you out. Or alternatively, when they tell you everything, but you realize there's nothing you can do to take away their pain or make the situation better.
Then eventually you get to that time when they really do need to go out into the world to find their independence. How dependent is your self-esteem on supporting your teen? Having the feedback from them that your role as a mom matters. How much of your sense of self-worth and self-esteem requires getting it right, confirming that your child is thriving and happy.
There are even times when we might feel a sense of superiority when we judge that our child is special in some way. That pride you feel when you see that your child is good at something or has accomplished something. Maybe it's a sense of superiority or maybe it's just a feeling of fitting in.
I remember being so agitated when my oldest was little because it took him a long time to learn to sit up. Longer it seemed than many of his six and seven month old peers in little Jim. And when he finally mastered the skill, which of course he did, I felt so proud, relieved even, that he had reached that milestone and we, or at least I, didn't have to feel awkward in little Jim around all of the other babies who were sitting up and even starting to crawl at that point.
We've all seen that mom who brags about her kids endlessly and of course we don't want to be that mom. But in your mind, you can't help it. You're judging, you're comparing, you're ranking your kids against the other kids you see to determine, does my kid fit in? Are they different ahead or behind? And here's the part where we have the opportunity to be really honest with ourselves as moms.
Because our kids exist out in the world and we're analyzing, comparing, and judging not just our kids but everyone. And again, I'm not setting this up as something good or bad. This is simply what our brains are doing on autopilot.
So let's explore it. We judge, we compare. This is human nature, a basic human instinct.
But here's the part where it can go really wrong, or at least the part where we can begin to build awareness around what's happening. But here's the part where it can go really wrong. We start to make this data about similarities or differences we see out in the world mean something.
Something about our kids, about us as their moms. And really, when we're making it mean something about our kids, it still always comes back to something about us. What do you make it mean if your child is struggling in school, for example? I mean, lots of kids struggle in school.
So why is your child any different? Why do you feel anxious and frustrated when your child is struggling as opposed to all of the other kids? Well, of course, we take responsibility for our own kid, right? This is my child, so of course I either need to do something to help them if they're struggling, or it's my fault, or I've let them down in some way if they're not doing better. We can also attribute our own emotions to the situation. So we think we feel anxious, disappointed, or even frustrated because our child is struggling in school.
This fact becomes the cause in our mind for our negative emotion. And so then the solution needs to be to fix the situation, to make sure that our kid isn't struggling anymore so that we can feel better. We think we feel stressed or terrible because something's going on with our kids, and how this is impacting both them and us in ways that we don't want.
But notice that the only facts here are potentially some grades, some numbers on a test or a report card. Those are the facts. Everything else is a judgment.
It's our mind's way of interpreting those numbers or those grades. And in this case, that one judgment, the thought my kid is struggling in school, ignites all of these other consequences, our anxiety and stress and our need to fix it. And again, I say all the time, just because we build awareness around this urgency we have, born out of anxiety to help our kids, doesn't mean that we shouldn't help our kids.
Our judgments about what's happening could be very valuable to us in determining what might be wrong or where there might be opportunities for us to help and support. Judgment itself isn't a bad thing. Even anxiety and frustration aren't bad emotions, although they feel uncomfortable.
But here is where we run into problems. And now I want to get into the mindset traps of the judgment mindset type. There are four mind reading, labeling, overgeneralization and emotional reasoning.
I'll cover each of these briefly here, but I invite you to check out the podcast episodes I've recorded on each of these individually. So the first mindset trap in the judgment mindset type is mind reading. This is making assumptions about what other people are thinking or feeling without any concrete evidence or direct communication.
Remember that one of our basic motivations is safety and uncertainty is one of those realities of our life that our brains perceive as dangerous. So our minds will try to fill in the blanks by interpreting words, body language and actions, everything around us, to try to know what people are thinking. I was actually just speaking with a client the other day and she was telling me that she was angry with her husband and she really didn't know, based on his actions, whether or not he was really sorry.
I asked her if he did say sorry to her. Would she trust that he was, that he was going to change? And she said she wasn't sure. Notice how even when someone says the words, I'm sorry, we can interpret this as not good enough.
And that's not to say we have to accept everyone's apologies and blindly trust that they'll do better. But the point here is, we think that it's the person's words or actions that create our mistrust. And so we put ourselves in a position to be constantly evaluating them for evidence that we can begin to trust them.
Ultimately, we're mind reading. We're trying to judge, is it safe? The mindset trap here is actually trusting your interpretations, the results of your mind reading. It works both ways, actually.
We can be reluctant to trust someone again. So the bar for them to prove that they're trustworthy becomes really high. We judge them, continue to believe what they're doing isn't good enough.
This is on the one hand. And on the other, we can trust too easily. Take the simple apology as good enough and then be disappointed later if they fall through.
This is probably the scenario we most want to guard against when someone has hurt or disappointed us. But here's an interesting way to think about it. If you always have agency about whether or not you stay in a relationship with someone or about how you set boundaries with other people, why keep yourself in this painful state of waiting for evidence, constantly mind reading so that you can find the proof you're looking for that everything's going to be okay? Think about how you show up when you're constantly judging and evaluating someone else's behavior to keep yourself safe.
It's exhausting, actually. What might look different if you were able to step out of the mind reading mindset trap and just take the person's actions at face value? For example, communicate your expectations and boundaries. In other words, if you do X, I will do Y. If you cheat on me, I will leave you.
Full stop. End of story. But in the meantime, if I'm with you, if I haven't left you, consider that I am choosing with my actions to trust you because I'm here.
You can never truly know what another person is thinking, but you can always decide how you respond to them. This is your power. There are two other mindset traps in the judgment mindset trap that are closely related.
Overgeneralization is when we draw broad conclusions or assumptions about a person, a situation, or an experience based on limited evidence or a small number of instances. Now look, these conclusions aren't always entirely off base. If your team doesn't have friends and they never go out socially, maybe even communicate that they don't have someone to sit with at lunch, it might seem logical to draw the conclusion that they struggle socially.
The other related mindset trap, labeling, is when we give a typically negative label to a person or group of people based on a particular behavior, trait, or characteristic. In the example I just gave, we might label our teen socially awkward or antisocial. So here's the interesting thing.
The actual label and the conclusion we might draw about our teen or any situation, these words are less important than what we make those labels and conclusions mean. In other words, when you think your teen struggles socially or you label your child socially awkward, what does that mean exactly? Why is that a problem? Here's a simple example. For a really long time, I had this perception of myself that I wasn't good at team sports.
I might have even labeled myself unathletic. And to be honest, for a really long time, I believed those conclusions and labels. But I didn't really make it a problem.
Being good at sports wasn't really something I'd ever put a whole lot of time and effort into. And my girlfriends weren't necessarily athletic, so I didn't make these conclusions or labels mean anything about me. But consider what might have been different if I had really tried to be good at sports or if my friends were all really athletic.
If this had been the case, you could see how I might make that label that I was unathletic a problem. Because I would be thinking, I'm not good enough. I don't fit in.
Everyone else is athletic except for me. Now these interpretations of the labels cause me to feel insecure and left out. The mindset trap here isn't necessarily the judgment itself, the label, or the conclusion.
It's making the judgment mean something about you. Let's go back to that awkward teen. Okay, some teens are awkward.
In fact, most teens are awkward at some point when they grow up. But if you're a mom who sees her child struggling to make friends and you label them socially awkward, now there's a problem. In your mind, their sense of belonging is threatened, and this equates to a loss of safety.
You think they'll feel hurt and isolated. On top of this, you can either take the blame or take responsibility. Some moms will tell me, he's just like me, or I should have put her in a different school.
Others will even take responsibility by trying to push their child to make friends, maybe even ask teachers to step in. Basically, try to fix the awkwardness out of their teen. Consider the stress and anxiety we cause when we make our judgments about our kids mean that there's a problem with our kids.
Finally, I want to touch on the mindset trap of emotional reasoning. You might have noticed that this trap shows up in several of the mindset trap types. In fact, it plays a role in all of them.
But in the context of the judgment mindset type, emotional reasoning reinforces our belief that our judgments are a problem. Here's how this works. If you feel anxious because you're thinking your child is socially awkward, in this trap, you use your anxiety as evidence that your child's ability to fit in is in jeopardy.
Emotional reasoning is when you believe your emotions reflect reality, that you believe your feelings represent the truth. So you get anxious, you spin in worry or wanting to fix the problem, and the cycle only entrenches you further into the labels, judgments, overgeneralization, and mind reading that created your anxiety in the first place. Now going back to an earlier question I asked, how do you set boundaries with your children when you judge that there's a problem? I want to broaden this to ask, how do you decide to help support, teach, or set boundaries with your team when you judge something's wrong, that there's a problem, either with their behavior or something going on with them? Because look, I know you want to help.
You want to do the right thing. And this is true in your life with kids as well as with every other person and situation in your life. The mindset traps of mind reading, labeling, overgeneralization, and emotional reasoning have the tendency to make us hyper-focus on those areas of our life that we think are a problem.
The way our teen is acting, how her husband treats us, whether you feel included when you go to that volunteer meeting, or whether or not you think your boss appreciates your hard work. Your mind is constantly judging all of it to see if it's a problem. And our minds will always find what they're looking for.
They will find danger. The question is, are you onto yourself about it? When you take the time to be honest with yourself about how you might be mind reading, overgeneralizing, or labeling, then taking your emotions as further evidence that there's a problem. If you can notice how it's your mind's perception of reality that's creating your anger, resentment, insecurity, or anxiety.
If you can separate yourself from your mind to notice that the way you're interpreting the situation as a problem may not be the full story, you start to create the possibility of peace. And here's what happens when you're able to look at the situation with a clear, managed mind. You're able to be very clear with yourself about what part of the situation is truly a problem.
For example, if my son came to me and said, I'm having a really hard time socially and I need some support, I would be all over it. I would be a partner with him in getting him the help that he needs. But if I notice that he's struggling to make friends, but then when I checked in with him about it, he said to me, Mom, I'm okay.
Just a little lonely. I might realize that there's nothing here for me to fix. I might start seeing how strong and resilient my son was instead of seeing how he might be broken.
You are looking at your life through a pair of tinted sunglasses, my friend. Do you even know how they're coloring your world? If you haven't already, go to my website at www.thesmalljar.com to take the mindset trap type quiz. If you score high for the judgment mindset type, take a listen to the companion episodes on mind reading, labeling, overgeneralization, and emotional reasoning.
You always have a choice about how to respond or act. But are you aware of how your judgments might be clouding your view of what you really want to do?
Until next time, my friend.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
