Something as simple as someone saying something like:
can be received in a number of different ways regardless of the intention of the person who said it…
- Some of us would assume it was a ‘negative’ judgement and feel slightly deflated.
- Some of us might wonder why the person felt the need to share their opinion this way – and we’ve made an automatic judgement about what ‘this way’ is.
- Some might be triggered to respond in the same way we did when criticised by a significant adult in our childhood and become defensive. ‘I shouldn’t have been asked to do it in the first place’.
- Some of us might feel a bit upset but prioritise not looking so (possibly laugh it off) because we had been taught that expressing negative emotion was unacceptable.
- Some might be influenced by what they have been told before- that it was something they were good at, so this person must be wrong!
- Some people will attach a whole load of absolutes to this simple comment: ‘they don’t like me, they think I am useless, they never like what I do’ etc.
- Some will have anticipated this negative judgement before it was made.
- Some of us might go into ‘victim mode’ with, something like, ‘they don’t know how hard it was for me to even try to do this’ or ‘it’s OK for them, they find everything easy.’
- Some would receive this as an attack to their whole self, with shame triggered. They might go on the decide the person who said it was a ‘bad’ person – possibly even start complaining about them and/or avoiding them in future.
- Some of us might have had prior incidents with the person making the statement and these make us primed to assume the intention of what they are saying – as either supportive or critical.
- Some might not be able to ‘receive’ criticism at all, so unconsciously and potentially shame-inducing it is. They deny what was said, flippantly dismiss the person for saying it, and continue to selectively assess everything that gives them a positive bias and continue to believe they are great at whatever it is!
- Some of us might consider the subjectivity of the comment as an evaluation by another and therefore relative. We might consider that another person might think we were actually quite good at it.
- Some of us might be able to accept it as the objective truth. We might, indeed ‘not be very ‘good’ at ‘that’ compared to others and we might simply recognise our need to try harder to get better at whatever it is!
I use this as a simple example of how our emotions, triggers, thinking tendencies, prejudices, self-worth, sensitivities, levels of narcissism etc. can mean we often don’t receive things with capacity for objective judgement!
Stay curious!