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Judging People
FairyFeller
Veteran
I've been looking into Buddhism for a while now. This is my first post and it's something that's had me wondering for a while.
I work in a busy Emergency Department and I am supposed to make judgements about people. Whether they are genuinely in pain or trying to get a fix of certain meds, I'm supposed to notice how dirty/scruffy they are because it could be a sign that they may not be coping. I know that I can judge their situation without making a judgement about them but sometimes I have to see the worse in people to protect them from themselves.
I work in a busy Emergency Department and I am supposed to make judgements about people. Whether they are genuinely in pain or trying to get a fix of certain meds, I'm supposed to notice how dirty/scruffy they are because it could be a sign that they may not be coping. I know that I can judge their situation without making a judgement about them but sometimes I have to see the worse in people to protect them from themselves.
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Comments
And welcome, by the way!
Because you're a human and you're not perfect you're going to judge them as well as assess, but as long as you keep your intention and focus on doing your best for them then these are just silly thoughts (that we all have) that are not worth paying attention to.
I think the "judgement" that one wants to avoid comparison oriented. For instance, if you feel that you or the other person are more or less "worthy". If you discern that someone is addicted to something, and they don't qualify by your employer's criteria for a specific medication, that doesn't mean you are judging them as people.
That being said, as the prior poster pointed out- we're human and we all probably have moments of judgement... but the goal, I think, is to catch ourselves, and understand that we are all the same, that we are all on a path, and to feel compassion for yourself and the other person, rather than superiority or inferiority, or anything in terms of relative worth... we are all connected, and we are all potentially and essentially good.
Because it's very easy to judge someone and make decisions about their life based on misreadings of data; I've read accounts, and also seen this trope used as a plotline in films, of persons being in a position where the data they provide to say, a mental health worker, while being merely idiosyncratic or incidental, is interpreted as pathological.
e.g. At a job interview a normally calm person who bought a coffee, not expecting it to be particularly strong, taps their fingers on a table and is thus thought to have a nervous disposition. Asked if they are on edge, the person may become defensive, thus cementing the way they are seen by the interviewer.
Now, a job is important, sure, and interviewers have to be savvy, but to an even greater degree, I think that people in public positions who are called upon to make important judgements about people need to be incredibly, painstakingly careful not to jump to conclusions which could alter the course of a life entirely.
There are also cultural differences. There was a time when a woman bearing a child out of wedlock could be seen as weak minded and placed in a sanitarium. Given that most of society at that time looked down on single mothers, and given that becoming a single parent put a woman in a very difficult situation, was this judgement, in the sense of a self-fulfilling prophecy, correct? Of course not. We should never mistake courage, or simply being stuck in a difficult situation, for craziness. It's not crazy to choose to defy a crazy society, or to accidentally be put in that position.
I don't drink alcohol, and I am forever having to explain and excuse myself for not conforming, even though in this case, conformity is madness.
I think it's worth cultivating fluidity in our judgements of others, a willingness to see how ideas like 'coping' or 'functional' are defined in lives whose challenges and value systems are different from our own.
There are very broad categories of behaviour relating to dysfunction; most of that behaviour is also displayed by well adjusted people, and sometimes all it takes is a penstroke from an official to call which box a person is going to be cast into, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
But if you were deciding whether or not to exclude a child, that would indeed be your responsibility.
So being almost oversensitive to possible misreadings is, in my view, really essential for public officials.
It was bad writing on my part - I didn't make the distinction between a job interviewer as a private person, and a public official, very clear, and you got confused because your job involved being both interviewer and official.
I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I just put their arm in plaster and sent them home for them to come back the following week because they'd collapsed again when I could gave had a chat with them about how they're coping and put some support in place if they felt they'd like or needed it.
federica said it so well: "I have to remember that they're behaving like a jerk, rather than they actually ARE a jerk..."
Any one of us may behave the same way if we were in that situation.