Comments | liveonearth: pretending there is no judgment

liveonearth

pretending there is no judgment

May 30, 2008 08:40

Someone on my flist has decided to act/speak/think today as if there were no concepts of "good" and "bad" and no words for them either. I am joining him in this experiment. I will spend a day (maybe more) speaking as if there are only descriptive words in my language, and no judgmental ones. Perhaps I can integrate this idea on a permanent basis ( Read more... )

mind, values, consciousness, judgment, religion, language, censorship, culture, words

Comments 3

b_vainamoinen May 30 2008, 23:30:43 UTC

No "should." That's a good one. "Should" is very seductive.

I tried this with a therapy group as an exercise to look at cognitive distortions: Who can come up with the most outrageous, but still plausible sounding "should" statement.

Examples:

The sun should shine on your birthday.
Your dog should wipe his feet when he comes in the house.
Milk should be free.

liveonearth May 31 2008, 01:14:41 UTC

Hmmmm. Whenever I hear the word "should" I immediately think "according to whom?"

b_vainamoinen May 31 2008, 02:30:16 UTC

That's what makes them so seductive. On the face of it -- these statements are correct.

What's bad is that people start to ACCEPT these "should" statements as TRUTH and begin to feel that when they DON'T happen -- that some "consequence" is necessary and THEN when the consequence does not materialize they feel that SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG.