Giving another person your judgement, judging them, can truly be a gift. You are offering to share your thoughts, mind, feelings and greatest deductions of information available to you with another person – and that is beautiful – until you make yourself right. So long as you are able to see your shared judgement, your act of judging them, as simply your opinion that may or may not fit them as if you were sharing a pair of jeans, then all is well in the land of judging.
When we get into trouble is when we make our judgement right FOR others, when we have judged another person and they choose not to wear our “coat” and we then make them wrong for not accepting our judgement. This is being judgmental. Most simply examined, judgmental, which is an adjective, thus a description of a way of being, is the creation of right and wrong . Most often, the person being judgmental sees themselves as right and the disagreeing party as wrong.
There is no possibility in being judgmental. The door to other options is closed when things become right and wrong. Rather than connecting, judgmental is dividing. Right and wrong is black and white – there is no grey. Shades of gray can blend, whereas black and white are opposing.
You must use judgment to decide what relationships you will be in, what stores you will shop in, what foods you will eat (and which you will not), how much you feel is fair to pay for goods, etc. Judgement is good because it is for you and about you. As a state of being human, you will be judging of others and their choices and actions. You may even choose (or be asked) to share these thoughts with the person you are judging (you have to use your judgment to decide this) and so long as you aren’t making judgments right as the only possibility, then your judging can also be good. When you decide that you are right, when you feel righteous about your judgement and cannot consider possibility in others judgments of the same situation, then you have become judgmental.
Thus, all judgements originate in good and stand the risk of becoming bad. It is what you choose to do with your judgements that determine if they are helpful or harmful. It is your action which dictates health or harm in your judgment.
