Why are the people around me judging me?
No one likes feeling negatively judged. For a few years, I ran a website called LDS.net. We had a robust internship program. Three semesters a year, I would welcome between four and ten college juniors and seniors and teach them how to write at a professional level.
About a week into the semester, the interns would begin brainstorming their first article. In their first batch of proposals, about 90% wanted to write about how their coreligionists should stop judging them.
In the beginning, I was curious about these experiences and what had happened. The interns usually told me about something they felt defensive about—often, a lifestyle choice that was within the bounds of Latter-day Saint doctrine but outside the norm.
I asked them how this judgment played out in their lives. There were two main sources of these young authors’ certainty that they were being judged. One was nonverbal signals. They would notice another person’s eye movements or hear an unusual breathing pattern.
The other came from things that didn’t happen. They were certain that they were not asked on dates, or given certain callings, or included in friend groups, because they were being judged.
Here are a few examples I heard over the years.
One writer complained that a group of women in her ward regularly judged her body. As an example, she recalled a conversation at a ward activity in which one of the women mentioned going on a morning run. My writer was sure the woman meant the comment as an implied criticism.
Another told a story about going to church with an older sister. This older sister had decided to wait to have children. A friend from their childhood, who was the younger sister’s age, was at church that day and mentioned she was “finally” expecting. My writer said that the friend’s emphasis on “finally” conveyed judgment about the older sister’s decision to delay having children.
One writer told me that he was judged by a young woman in his ward for having facial hair. He based this conclusion on an encounter after church. When he approached her to chat, she spoke abruptly and then left, but only after her eyes fell on his scruff. He assured me that her downward glance was “pointed.”
What interested me was that these stories were aggregated and presented to me as a common experience. My writers felt judged, or more often, believed that the people around them were judgmental. The details were subsumed in that description of the experience.
I know inappropriate judgment exists. People are fallible, even the ones I go to church with. But I also noticed that many of the specifics my writers used felt thin to me. I admit I didn’t know the context or the nonverbals, but most of these interactions seemed innocent to me as an outsider. Yet in the minds and hearts of these interns, these incidents amounted to such a strong and persistent problem that they warranted an essay directed to the general church membership.
Negative sentiment is often communicated subtly.
My purpose in approaching this subject is not to tell my former interns that I think they were wrong. Honestly, I don’t know. Negative sentiment is often communicated subtly. People can be cruel, status-conscious, self-righteous, gossipy, and exclusionary. Latter-day Saints are not exempt from these behaviors. And I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment.
But part of me wonders if, in addition to the many real cases of judgment, something broader is happening that makes the experience feel more pervasive than perhaps it is.
What if much of what we experience as “feeling judged” arises from the interaction between another person’s ordinary effort toward a goal we share and our own unresolved insecurity?
For example, if I feel insecure because I know I can be thoughtless, and I assume other people recognize this about me, then, when someone thoughtfully offers me a kind favor, I may begin to interpret the person’s tone or volume as a signal that their offer was actually a form of judgment for my own shortcomings.
Or if I feel defensive because I am not shaving as often as I believe I should while a student at BYU, and someone doesn’t want to talk to me, I may begin looking for signs that my shaving is the reason.
Because we are intensely aware of ourselves, we assume others are intensely aware of us, too. And because our coreligionists share so many of our aspirations, it is common for us to encounter people we judge to be doing better than we are. And we project our own judgments onto their sighs, comments, and eye movements.
Our Own Judgment
Insecurity is unreliable. It can interpret difference as disdain. It can interpret excellence as accusation, silence as contempt, and conviction as diagnosis.
I felt this keenly in the wake of my divorce. Although the cause of my divorce was rather obvious and entirely beyond my control, I felt like a massive failure. My children suffered daily as a result of my failure to keep my family together. And I was certain that the many happy families and successful husbands in my new ward would note this failure in their assessment of me.
I felt the judgment was largely in my head.
And one truly thoughtless comment, such as “Divorce is usually two-sided,” would then take on a life of its own, confirming in my mind that whenever people walked into the chapel and sat somewhere else, they must have been thinking about my failures.
I interpreted everyone’s behavior in relation to me.
In many ways, I was fortunate. I determined early on that Jesus could not be taken away from me by anyone. So I decided to try to ignore what I saw as everyone else’s judgments, because, in my case, they weren’t going to affect my behavior.
As a result, I became less hyperaware of others’ judgments. And soon it began to seem that there was much less judgment. Many of the acts (or lack of acts) that I had previously attributed to judgment, I now ascribed to people being busy, or self-consumed, or any of a million other reasons that had nothing to do with me. It soon seemed that almost no one was really judging me in a sustained, cruel, or unfair way.
I still think there was some judgment. There are a few people whose patterns of statements make me think they still see me as less than. But once I had learned to limit the problem, it didn’t seem very big. What did I care if a couple of people in a ward of two hundred people didn’t like me?
My feeling of being judged was real and pervasive. But within about a year, I felt the judgment was largely in my head.
The feeling of being judged is internal, but it attempts to explain the external world. When I felt shame, my mind searched for the cause. And there were lots of sighs and eye twitches I could point to as signs of judgment.
I don’t think every instance of feeling judged is imagined or self-imposed. But in my case, I eventually concluded that was most of what had happened.
Social Spotlight
Feeling more judged than we are is actually a pretty well-known phenomenon in social psychology.
Researchers use the term “spotlight effect” to describe the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and behavior. Relatedly, researchers have identified what they call a “liking gap,” in which people underestimate how much their conversation partners enjoyed their company. We tend to remember our awkward pause or failed joke more vividly than others do. Adults readily recognize an exaggerated form of this tendency in teens, but it continues into adulthood.
We are more acutely aware of the gaps between where we are and where we want to be.
These social-psychological effects may be heightened in high-demand religions like ours. My thought is that this is because high-demand religions are aspirational, and so we are more acutely aware of the gaps between where we are and where we want to be. It also means we tend to share similar aspirations with those in our congregations.
This doesn’t mean every fear of judgment is misplaced. Genuine cruelty, self-righteousness, exclusion, and gossip exist. I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment. But it does mean our social perceptions are not nearly as neutral or accurate as we think. We may be poor judges of just how often others judge us negatively.
The therapeutic tendency to validate others’ observations can create a cycle. It starts when we feel judged, and others in our circles then validate that observation in their efforts to make us feel better. In turn, we double down on the narrative our circle has validated, which can make us even more certain that we were judged.
This tendency is a form of self-focus, but not necessarily selfishness. We each live within our own consciousness. Our anxieties are loud to us, while other people’s anxieties are mostly hidden. When we enter a room, we are preoccupied with what people are thinking about us, while they are also thinking about what people are thinking about them. We can interpret this distraction as disapproval, while they may be concluding the same. And a room full of people worried about being judged may well be a room full of people too busy to judge anyone else.
Leaving the Imaginary Courtroom
Latter-day Saints are in many ways yoked together in a great work. We are not adversaries trying to outdo one another.
Just as judgment can be corrosive, so too can the rhetoric around judgment.
The next time we feel judged, perhaps we can start by wondering whether the source of that judgment is internal. What insecurity do we have—what in our own lives do we feel defensive about—that we are putting into the minds of others without their permission?
This does not mean our experiences of judgment aren’t real, but given how many pressures there are to see judgment where it doesn’t exist, perhaps an honest gut check in the other direction can help us see things as they really are.
I am unaware of any comparative evidence suggesting that Latter-day Saints are any more judgmental than any other group. But there are reasons why we might feel that they are. Part of the project of The Church of Jesus Christ is personal improvement, which gives us many opportunities to recognize the gap between where we are and where we strive to be.
Ultimately, I succeeded in pushing through my own feelings of judgment in my new ward by redirecting my attention. Rather than being concerned about what they thought of me, I started thinking about who in my ward needed my friendship and attention—who was lonely or in need of help. I stopped complaining that I was the one lost sheep, wondering why no one was coming to minister to me as Jesus would, and I started looking for the other lost sheep around me. I started inviting other rather than wondering why no one was inviting me.
One of the greatest freedoms Jesus offers is a secure identity. We no longer have to appoint everyone around us as judges that we have to please. Human approval matters, especially within relationships, but it does not create or destroy our divine identity.
That understanding releases us from the impossible task of managing and worrying about every opinion in every room.
Most people aren’t judging us. They are worrying about their own lives. Their own groceries, deadlines, bodies, disappointments, and families.
And once we can grasp that, we realize that we’re not going to church with a jury, but a congregation. A bunch of imperfect people, trying their best. Just like you.
