After going over the homework, we spent time discussing the importance of judgement in our lives. In light of the work we'll be doing on reducing judgement, it seemed important to make sure that we understood exactly what judgement does for us. Some of the relevant points that people made were:
- Judgement helps keep us safe
- Being judgmental allows us to make decisions more quickly
- Judgement can help us correct our behavior
We, of course, also discussed ways that being judgmental makes being mindful hard.
- Being judgmental makes us compare our current experience to past and/or imagined situations, moving us from being present in the moment to being elsewhere
- Being judgmental generates extra emotion; emotion that we probably don't need help creating
- Being judgmental also makes us focus on details to the exclusion of the bigger picture, again making it hard to see the whole situation as it is
Tying the non-judgmental stance work we're doing to the next module to be covered in group, Distress Tolerance, homework was to answer two questions:
- How does being judgmental create distress?
- How does being unmindful create distress?
Next week: beginning Distress Tolerance module.