Feeling Without Judgement

“No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical,

but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to reason or fail to conform. The

heart never takes the place of the head, but it can, and should, obey it.” C.S. Lewis in The

Abolition of Man

We often place judgements on what we feel. We have unconscious beliefs that inform

our relationship to certain emotions. We label some emotions as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’. We

may refuse to call our anger what it really is, because we don’t want others to view us as an

angry person because we have decided or learned that anger is not an acceptable emotion. We

may avoid expressing the depth of our sadness, because we prize being seen as a joyful person.

In short, we tell ourselves it is not good to be sad and it is bad to be mad.

Albert Ellis, the person behind Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, called this labeling

of our emotional experience as doubling the negative. For instance, if you have anxiety about

your anxiety, you have created anxiety squared (anxiety 2 ). You tell yourself, “I should not feel

anxious. It is terrible to feel anxious! I am a lousy person for feeling this anxiety.” So, not only

are you coping with your base level of anxiety, but you are also now having to cope with the

anxiety about your anxiety! We spend so much of our energy dealing with how we feel about

how we’re feeling, we seldom get to work on dealing with the thing itself.

Ellis advised that we challenge the irrational beliefs behind our labeling of emotions. For

instance, instead of beating up on yourself for feeling anxious, you could tell yourself, “It is

unfortunate that I suffer from anxiety, because I do not like feeling this way, but a bad feeling

does not make me bad.” By doing this, we are allowing ourselves to do away with our self-

criticism long enough to sit with our emotions, good or bad, and do something about them.

When we view all of our emotions as tools we can use to love and meet ourselves better, we

can take each of them as they come without unhelpful and unnecessary judgement against

ourselves.