The Judge Saboteur - all you need to know!
So I promised in my last prog that i will be posting more about Saboteurs and how these classify and impact your life.
The first one up in this series is the Judge Saboteur.
This is the universal saboteur and it afflicts everyone. It interacts by beating you up constantly about things you didn’t do or did wrong, any shortcomings and warns you about potential future mistakes. It finds faults with self, others and circumstances.
The Judge is the root cause of our disappointment, anger, regret, guilt, shame and anxiety. It is also responsible for the activation of other Saboteurs.
Characteristics of the Judge based on impact:
Self: Constantly puts you down for past mistakes and current shortcomings.
Others: Focuses on what is wrong with others, and does not appreciate. Focuses on constant comparison.
Circumstances: Insists a circumstance or outcome is “bad” rather than see it as an opportunity.
The most frequent questions you ask yourself when you are controlled by the Judge are:
What is wrong with me?
What is wrong with you?
What is wrong with my situation or this outcome?
And of course, the Judge is the one who answers them so you don’t really get a say in this. It tells you lies about yourself and others, such as “I am not good enough”, “What’s do they know? They are not important!” or “It’s all their fault!”. The most important lie the Judge says is “You’ll be happy when...” and that goalpost keeps moving at every stage of your life so you will never achieve that happiness if you let your Judge control you.
The feelings developed are all guilt, regret, shame and disappointment. These lead into anger and anxiety and will have an impact on self, others and they way things develop in a situation.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the Judge is omnipresent. It is shared by all, regardless of circumstance of our upbringing. It usually emerges in our early years, and one survival function we have developed to cope with its lies is the bias towards noticing, exaggerating or negative reactions.
People say negative reactions are wrong - well not really! They are out alert system: it makes us acknowledge something is wrong and prompts us to step away. Very much like a hot kettle - we touch it an feel the burn and immediately remove out hand. The same applies to negative emotions, because staying in a negative emotion for too long hurts our ability to see clearly and respond with empathy, curiosity, creativity or focused action.
You might have noticed throughout this blog I was calling the Judge “IT”. That is because it has no sex. For me, it’s a SHE, but for you it might be an angry little old man.
Irrespective of who it is, learning to control its impact through PQ reps is very important. Every time you feel those negative emotions, label them as Judge and do some PQ reps in response.
I hope this helped you understand the basics of the Saboteurs and hope you will be back for the rest of the articles on the Accomplices.