There are instances when people act terribly towards us. We react from their ill-treatment or misbehavior with snap judgments or deeply-held prejudices. We meet anger with anger, because of our own stress, fears, and anxiety. Thus, we need to take the time to stop reacting and look squarely at the situation with an open mind.

The Need To Stop Making Judgments And Observe More

Our need to defend ourselves from people's misbehavior and unkindness are our way of surviving their varied forms of attack or offense. The defense is a natural reflex, especially in a violent and toxic generation as our time.

We don't have the time and luxury to think and observe what lies behind people's offensive stance. Stress and challenges bombard us in all directions. Before we have processed the information necessary to arrive at a correct assessment of a person's character, we have taken the shortest routes to make snap judgments.

We Project Who We Really Are

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism that happens when we take and convict the traits, qualities, emotions, or tendencies in us and assign them to another person. More often, these qualities in us we judge as morally wrong, hurtful, unlawful, or offensive.

Because we are scared of our capacity for this behavior, we fear the worst consequences. And yet, we are frustrated because we can't act on them, and we feel guilty because of these tendencies. We then subscribe to our personal beliefs and notions that a person may engage in some type of bad or offensive behavior with the same motivations or intentions as ours.

Watch Out For People Who Make Snap Judgments

Because there are people who believe that the best defense is a good offense, they zero in on the opportunity to judge others for bad or offensive behavior. They usually think that these people do things wrong out of cruel or intentionally bad and selfish intentions. They use their own experience of their inherent moral, convicting compass to evaluate a person's character. What is wrong is that they are not aware of their own tendencies revealing themselves in their own judgments.

We all do bad or wrong things. Some of us cheat, lie, and most of us are insecure. But the thing we need to consider is that we all have different intentions, motivations, thoughts, and emotions behind our actions, whether good or bad. Instead of judging people, the best thing to do is to look inwards and reflect on our personal values, because the only person we can change and control is ourselves.