All humans do both; we blame, judge, and project our judgments out. It’s just what people do. And because it’s what people do, I am prompted to seek the function or role of these, often seen as negative, acts for how it is they may actually serve FOR us; I’ve come to see that both judgment and projection play vital roles in the consciousness process – either serving to perpetuate victim consciousness OR to evolve past out limiting judgments into greater awareness and consciousness.

Here’s how negative judgment and projection work together:

As soon as we see something about ourselves that we disapprove of, or find unacceptable, we tend to criticize and judge ourselves harshly. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t be that way … that it indicates that we’re not doing the process right … or that we’re not evolved enough, that there’s something wrong with us, that we are dumb … and so on ad infinitum.

Such self-critique & condemnation is very painful so we find ourselves avoiding these harsh self-criticisms; it’s sorta like we go unconscious around the thing we’ve judged as unacceptable about us! Certainly we push it down.

But, of course the painful judgments don’t just go away because we don’t like them – if anything the resentment we feel towards ourselves festers and gets bigger the more we judge our ‘shortcomings.’ Sooner or later, we need an escape from our own self-judgments. The pain of self-criticism drives us inevitably to denial, which does not resolve our self-criticisms, or lead to a place of healing through self-acceptance – but leads automatically to the act of projecting our self-negating judgments onto some other “lucky” recipient.

In other words, we inevitably judge others for the very things we have condemned & rejected about ourselves!

We then start resisting them, trying to shame, control, or eliminate them altogether from our lives – as if, by getting rid of them, we can rid ourselves of similar unacceptable qualities (that we’ve denied). Sometimes we take them on as a project and even try to fix them for the very thing we have not a accepting in ourselves) for that which we are holding against ourselves.

This is how our inner judgments end up taking on a life of their own.

But there is another option rather than the cycles that we have just described: self-condemnation (leads to) judgment (leads to) projection (leads to) blaming others/persecution (leads to) their retaliation (leads to) reinforcement of our belief which proves us right!

Rather than condemning ourselves & blaming others, we can come to recognize when we are blaming others, and follow it back to our judgment, or inner condemnation of ourselves … and intervene there! Instead of insisting on blaming someone outside us for that which we have not made peace within us, we use judgment, projection, and blame as tools to clear our own blossoming, and peace-seeking consciousness.

May it be so.

Blessings, Lynne