We can’t stop people from judging us. But…

Rough truth: we will never be able to stop people from judging us. 

Human beings LOVE to judge other human beings. 

We love it so much we create reality TV shows that revolve around increasingly creative ways to judge contestants. 

Many of our conversations revolve around judgment: how good or bad we judge our pops stars, our athletes, or our internet psychology influencers to be. 

Trauma survivors are particularly sensitive to being judged. 

CPTSD survivors in particular tend to come from backgrounds where we were harshly judged in a million and one toxic ways, big and small. 

Add to that the fact that we CPTSD survivors are absolute champions and judging the sh*t out of ourselves for BEING CPTSD survivors. 

We judge our symptoms, we judge our feelings, we judge how we’re functioning. 

For many of us, harsh judgment isn’t even like a second language— it’s our native tongue. 

It’s true that we’ll never live in a culture that doesn’t love to judge, and it’s true that we’ll never be able to escape others’ judgment. 

It’s also true that others’ judgments about us will often be uninformed, unfair, and unkind.

Welcome to that category of stuff the Serenity Prayer identifies as “things we cannot change.” 

What can we do? 

We can work on that “judging the sh*t out of ourselves’ thing. 

Mind you: we judge the sh*t out of ourselves because we’ve been taught and conditioned to judge the sh*t out of ourselves. Getting OUT of that habit isn’t easy, or a one moment or one time decision. 

It takes work and time and patience and persistence to get INTO the habit of meeting our pain and past with compassion. 

Luckily, you and I and every trauma survivor reading this are hella skilled at doing things that are hard. 

Just notice when it’s happening. 

Notice when it’s happening, push pause, and leverage the tool of self-talk to affirm to yourself, “Naw. That’s the old thing. I’m going to do the new thing. The patience and acceptance and self-compassion thing.” 

Mind you: your system isn’t going to love this. Trauma Brain might literally laugh at you. 

Which is why we manage our expectations, why we don’t expect miracles, and why we remind ourselves we’re going to have to do this again and again (and again) to get into the self-kindness habit. 

Don’t demand or expect perfection. Just do your best. 

People are going to judge us. 

We don’t have to play along in our own head.