Chapter 13: There Goes the Judge

Overview

We have seen how our meta-level judgments cause our emotional responses. Our brains are ever so ready to detect what might make us insecure . And we have seen how our troublesome emotional responses can be better managed, first by seeing them for the artificial constructs that they are, and second by specifically isolating and processing them when they strike. Now it is time to discuss how we can manage our judgments while they are happening. Managing our judgments, as we will see, decreases conflict and opens the door to personal freedom.

What does it feel like to have meta-level activity going on in our heads? It s actually an easy question to answer, since usually we are more conscious of our meta-level thoughts than our object-level ones. The direct experience of the facts of the world, without the meta-level activity going on, is a target human experience, as opposed to a common one. Very rarely do we simply concentrate on what we are doing. We are busy having other thoughts.

Those thoughts are given different labels by different people. Shad Helmstetter, a writer in the field of personal growth, refers to them as ˜ ˜self-talk. He says we are busy talking to ourselves in our heads and that this self-talk leads to our attitudes or outlook about things. He suggests that self-talk can be managed and, as a consequence, our outlook can be managed.

I prefer the term chatter to self-talk, because it bypasses the use of the word self . Self-talk implies that there is a self in there doing the talking, whereas I believe the experience of self is a result of the chatter. More specifically, I believe that the voice in your head is the activity of your meta-level thinking. When you are engaged at the object-level, consciousness is not experienced as internal chatter. It is simply consumed by the experience itself.

Try this great way to detect your own chatter. Stop reading for a minute at the end of the next sentence . In fact, I ll join you in this pause while sitting here at my keyboard.

Did you do it? I did. What were your thoughts during that minute? Here are mine:

I should stop writing soon because Dave is picking me up to go for lunch . I need to talk to him. I am concerned that he is not happy. I don t want to keep him waiting. I love Joan (my wife). I hated declining her invitation for lunch. I hope I didn t offend Amy earlier today. Wow, today is a day of possible offenses .

I experienced other mental events, but I wouldn t call them chatter. They weren t sentences or phrases in my head. They simply came to mind. I was aware of them, but I was not aware that I was aware. For example, I heard the main door of my office open and then the sound of two of my colleagues greeting each other. That s what brought thoughts of Amy to mind: She was one of the two people.

The idea here is that when things enter your awareness, and you do not have thoughts about them, you just experience them. These are object-level thoughts. But when there are thoughts that are over and above the experience you are having at the moment, these are meta-level constructions.

We don t necessarily want to eliminate meta-level activity. As indicated frequently in this book, it plays a key role in our lives. But sometimes it goes on a frolic of its own, as lawyers might put it, and from the metal-level activity flow our judgments of others and ourselves and inappropriate emotional pain. These judgments also make it difficult for us to interact with others.