How Do You Cope With All Judgement?

[MarkHutt]

The trap that C-PTSD falls into, on top of all the rest, is that - of course people in general do not know your history, they judge you based on your behavior. Which naturally brings along huge problems - as if not having problems to start with!

During my life I've met strangers, who think I'm evil bastard, when somethings triggers, say at bar, overwhelming (infant) feeling of being insulted. When this happens, there are people who take it as your attack on people, and their response is a crushing attack on you. Talk about tragedy!

I think general thought of people is simple - people are all the way responsible of their own behavior - which is true, of course. But there is also varying understanding; in my opinion the most noble, intelligent and educated attitude towards a trouble maker is "well, give him/her a benefit of a doubt, that there might be something in his/her history, that makes him/her act that way". But, there are a great majority of people who don't give a shit about that kind of tolerance - *quite the opposite* -, they want to target and "give that shit back in double".

I have been a target of violent attacks many times during adulthood, (say, once or twice a year) , perhaps 4 times leading to injury (during 30 years). It's pretty hard to witness at court (under panic attack), when your testimony in so incoherent babbling due to trauma, and even amnesia about what happened. Certainly in sever cases of violence, it's like it's happening to someone else, and it's not hurting you at all.

BTW, just recalled a thought as a child; "Beating up is OK, it's the shouting that hurts".

 

[JohnnyM53]

People judge other people (we all do it to some extent) whether they have PTSD or not.

You don't have to behave badly to get judged either. It's human drama and human hurt.

We can't control what others think, let alone what they think about us - whether it is good or bad.

All we can control is how we judge others and ourselves, and the trick is to apply the same standard to them and us - and this is where understanding and compassion come in.

If compassion is putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, then perhaps self-compassion is remembering the journey we have been on and all that we have been through.

People judge us often. We can feel it in their words, their eyes. And it hurts and sometimes makes us angry.

But let us try to remind ourselves of the song "Walk A Mile In My Shoes".

Turn the other cheek; walk away if you can; thinking "if they only knew...".

 

[anni]

Hi Mark,

Having that horrible feeling of being judged is sooo just-plain-awful, isn't it? That is a very, very simplistic sentence for something so complex, painful, damaging and pervasive so I'm sorry. I have had your thought many, many times about thinking that there should be some inherent recognition by people when they witness someone in some out of ordinary behaviour. Tolerance for others seems to be less and less prevalent, no matter how enlightened our various societies claim to be.

COURT! WHOA! When I read about your experience there it gave me chest pains! That's ok-please don't do our PTSD 'thing' where you feel badly about having triggered someone else! It's part of being here in this forum that one gets triggered and is just plain able to see that you can get triggered and still be alive 5 minutes later. :) Court is a huge one for me in my original traumas, especially having to testify while not being able to speak coherantly while so incredibly terrified.

You asked how anyone out here deals with the judgement feelings. People are so different in what tends to help, and in how we develop various mechanisms to deal with these things so can only speak for myself. Something I only just started trying is to tell myself that yes, this feeling sucks, it's awful, I hate it and it's overwhelming but it's going to be over in 5, 10, or 60 minutes or whatever. Someone here suggested that and it's something that does get you through that moment. Sometimes, I just get plain old angry. Not acting-out angry but indignantly so. I gather my dignity around me, and muster up the resentment of 'why SHOULD they make me feel dreadful about myself? I am FINE, I'm a good, person, they don't know me and cannot judge me!'. I realize that many times we're over reacting to 'being judged' and in reality we're not really but it feels that way whether it's the case or not. Sometimes getting through those feelings is a matter of simply saying to myself 'Stop that!', which I think just reminds me that I have no use in my life whatsoever for these feelings.

Therapy, etc., of course will eventually dull all these edges we have, I know. I'm so sorry you had such a dreadful, violent time of it for so long. While we're getting to that point of healing where the PTSD doesn't rule our lives predominantly ( hopefully! :) ) there just has to be some WAY to deal with the destructive symptoms. I'm sure you'll read about many here in the forum, and hope some of them somewhere can give you peace with this.

Take care,

Anni

 

[TLight]

Hi Mark;

I've been horribly judged by my family for years and years. And they don't even know anything about me or the person I've come to be.

Judgment by others is extremely hard to understand, especially when you are doing your best to act honorably, even with this condition.

It hurts. I guess all we can do is to feel the hurt and then get as far away as possible from those people. Eliminate them from your life. Period.

 

[starshine]

Thankfully, alongside those strangers who see me as a freak and object of scorn and ridicule, I have those in my life who genuinely care, and accept me as who I am and value me and what I have to give life - and support me in my path to both contain and move beyond the damaging legacy of years of chronic emotional abuse both at home and school, and physical assault.

 

[Icy]

To Judge, To Be Judged

It hurts to be judged by someone when they don't really know you, and I am sympathetic to what you are going through Markhutt. I go through it too I suppose, just on different levels. My perceptions may be twisted sometimes, so bare with me please, but what if........

For myself I think it's possible that sometimes I expect too much from others when it comes to how they should perceive me as an individual. I sometimes realize that during those awkward moments when I find myself hurting over being judged, I realize that in that very moment, that I am judging them for judging me. I find myself assuming that they are uncaring and so forth (when maybe that's not really the case). It then occurs to me, when I am able to catch myself, that maybe, they have reasons for being afraid of, unsettled by, etc., which cause them to react towards me, because of my reactions, as they do. Is any of this making sense to you? As they do not know me and judge, I do not know them and I judge them as well. It's a cycle I think. Maybe like johnnym53 stated "Turn the other cheek; walk away if you can; thinking "if they only knew..."., trying to let go of it would be best maybe, let it go or communicate about it and try to resolve the issue through kindness and a little compassion and understanding on your own part as well.

Now the comment he made about "if only they knew", well at the same time, the person who is judging you could have possibly themselves been a victim of a very traumatic situation.....and maybe they are in a way thinking the same thing about you....about how if only you knew.

In todays world, it seems that sometimes people get too wrapped up in the "ME" syndrome, to the point that we lose our own compassion, understanding, and tolerance for the difference of another. We can't expect everyone to believe the way we do, or live the way we do, or even perceive the world around them, or even deal with the painful aspects of life, the way we do. It's all quite personal. So how do we fix it? Communication? Any suggestions?

It's hard to be understanding, compassionate, and tolerant all the time. My biggest enemy in my own personal life seems to be myself. I judge me, and look down on me more than anyone else out there, so why do I keep expecting them to not look down on me, when I myself am shouting to the top of my lungs through my actions sometimes, that I hate myself. What you send out sometimes, you attract. I am starting to believe that.......even though I don't think that it applies to everything all the time. I just know that it applies to a lot of things.

We are all hurting my friend, maybe some more than others, and not one of us can truly minimize the pain of another. Life is too complicated sometimes, or maybe it's not life that's complicated, maybe it's just people who are complex.

An old friend told me once, years ago
"Never expect more from another person, than you are willing to give of yourself."

I have been trying my best, to keep it realistic and fair in my head. For my own sanity...... And though I continue to have those inner conflicts when I feel selfish and angry, I continue to fight ME. I don't want to allow my own anger and hurt, to become someone elses torture, because that would make me more like the ones who hurt me. Then what right do I have to feel sorry for me, when I am emotionally hurting someone else because of these problems I have.

Ever hear of emotional conditioning? Part of my 17 year trauma was being conditioned "brainwashed".

maybe walking away from a bad situation (being judged) is better than always trying to resolve it, because most of us aren't as understanding as we would like to convince ourselves that we are. Humans clash like titans when it comes to personal boundaries....

Wow I typed a lot of crap and I'm not sure that I even made my point.........

 

[Tinyflame]

Hi Icy,

That's how it's helped me to view it, too, painful as it can be.
What I don't know fills volumes.

-Thanks.

 

[helena]

"Never expect more from another person, than you are willing to give of yourself."

I like that quote Icy.

As for judgement, it does hurt but the judging is often done by ourselves - that inner voice doing playback!

 

[raku]

Since other people can't read our minds, I don't know how they're supposed to relate to us other than by our behavior. Behavior is our primary interaction with them. I don't think we have a right to expect unconditional love from people if we aren't treating them well.

 

[Tinyflame]

I think you're right raku, behaviour and communication.

 

[MarkHutt]

Well, what I meant was: - Say you see someone get hit by a street, you don't wonder why he's very upset, acting strangely immediately after that. But if there's just someone very upset and acting a bit strangely, it easy to judge that person as immature, unable to control his issues, or even evil - without a thought that in some way his actions are logical. The Big Hit was just so long time ago and behind a corner, that most people don't even realize such a thing is possible. Or many people even refuse to recognize such phenomena exists.

Let's take another description of this C-PTSD "additional punishment": Say there's 100 boys going to school, and one of them is taken and tortured before school starts. Naturally that one by is showing sympthons because of that, but teachers and school mates would judge him as "difficult", "oversensitive", "mad", or even "evil", and inflict disciplinary and all kinds of punishments on him.

The worst thing would be - which happens all the time - is that he's targeted for further victim because of his sympthons. Kids can be very cruel to kids that are different.


"Never expect more from another person, than you are willing to give of yourself." That has kind of been my "intuitive golden rule" all my life, but the problem is I'm different. For example, I'm very bad in punishing people. It's against my nature. I go mad if I see say children punished physically. For me it's wrong, period. A trigger.

If I except people to act as I do, I get very upset - say some people just stare at you in public places. So, for me, I have to accept that I'm different, and therefore many people act in ways which I consider very rude.

 

[JohnnyM53]

That was quite the post Icy. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You make a lot of sense and raise some good points.

As you point out, we haven't got a clue what others are thinking, so maybe because we are overly sensitive, we might wrongly guess what a look or word might mean.

And when we do sense we are being judged, I wonder if it's not so much the perceived judging that hurts , but rather that playback voice Helena describes that consciously or subconsciously "agrees" with what we perceive, sense, hear, interpret, etc.

Some of us are so used to feeling judged, it becomes an automatic response to not only look for judgment/rejection, but to instantly agree with the other person's assumed judgment.