The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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How do I stop being such a judgmental midwit? I come from an average/below average intelligence family and happened to show signs of intelligence that were mostly cancelled out by my lows. However my father was such a narcissistic, hypercritical asshole that I developed a defense mechanism of reflecting his disdain towards me back onto him. It's been over 10 years and I'm mostly happy, but it's still a habit whenever I get into a belligerent mood, to quickly become dismissive of someone's intelligence and commit fundamental attribution error. On the one hand it works to de-escalate and allows me to physically relax, but I also feel bad afterwards because it's hypocritical, and smarter people whom I admire don't seem to resort to this.
You are not wrong to be dismissive. A lot of people who are held up by the media as being highly intelligent are seldom worthy of such acclaim or distinction.
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Find God, or yoga. This sort of development is best pursued in a spiritual context I've found, regardless of which context that is.
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You could try going to more presentations, either in person or online, where you think the presenter might trigger this reaction in you. In a presentation, you're not usually in a position to act on this mood and you're not likely to say something dismissive and make someone feel bad. Then try to consciously observe how you feel these emotions, have this reactionary judgment response, and then also observe how a few minutes later the response might disappear as you return to the present moment. The more you can observe that these emotional reactions are temporary, and more about your and your past than the person in front of you, the more you can ignore them and let them come and go without affecting the rest of your behavior.
You might even make a worksheet where your mark the time of the reaction, make a note of your feelings, and then later mark the time when the feelings have faded. This can help keep you in an observational mode.
I like that (CBT?) approach, but I'm not sure one way interactions will put me on the defensive. What triggers me is when someone initiates the blame game. Even if I manage to stay professional in the moment, I become uncharitable the rest of the day.
Maybe it would be helpful if you shared a specific story example of this happening. I understand if you'd prefer not to.
Maybe it would be clearer if I said this: My father was a bottom tier father, a hair better than deadbeats and abusers, but expected me to be a top 1% performer and grateful to him because he has delusions of grandeur and never accepts blame. Any interaction that reminds me of that mismatched dynamic, causes me to write the offending person off as unreasonable and someone who I shouldn't even bother engaging sincerely on any topic.
Example of being "unreasonably" blamed: A nearly finished project is running right on schedule. We would have been done if I hadn't been micromanaged by the client, which has been a huge pita and extra work for me. They suddenly want to move up the deadline and send us an email highlighting my "lack of progress" and cc's my boss. I push back (with full backing from my manager), but for the rest of the day, I feel combative and become noticeably short with people. And when I'm in such a mood, it greatly increases the chances of a fight with my girlfriend.
Examples of others rejecting "reasonable" criticism: My younger brother takes after our dad, and is a bit of a fuck up, but would always insist he'd be fine. He has immense confidence, I'll give him that, but when things did go south, he always blamed someone else and learned nothing. Similarly, I have childhood friends who have repeatedly fucked up or nearly fucked up our plans to do things together by being careless planners, but maintain cavalier "we'll figure it out" attitudes.
All these people are now labeled "idiots" in my mind, that's why their assessments of reality don't make sense, I tell myself. Fair and unfair is subjective, and the irony that I have become an even more extreme version of what I hate, complete with my own delusions of grandeur, scares me. That, and figuratively "taking my ball and going home" whenever someone triggers me is a losing strategy.
"You fast, but Satan does not eat. You labor fervently, but Satan never sleeps. The only dimension with which you can outperform Satan is by acquiring humility, for Satan has no humility." -- Saint Moses
I struggle with a lot of the same feelings. I don't know that I have an easy answer for you, but I'm trying very hard to be humble and to think about why other people do the things they do rather than just attributing it to their essential failures as a human.
I want to share a moment when I felt like I succeeded last week. I know I'm committing some complicated meta-sin by being proud of my humility, but I can't help it. Good Friday one of our tenants knocked on my door and said his shower drain was draining slow and could I call a plumber. He lives down the street so I walked over. "Draining slow..." the septic system was backing up into the basement bathroom. It had to be snaked, I had just had it pumped so it was almost certainly clogged. So I had to come back on Easter Saturday, when my in laws were on their way and I had a million things to do, and run a power snake down the clean out. Of course the tenants claim that they never flush anything bad down the toilet, but as I suspected it was a tampon from the teenage daughter. Inevitable.
I started to get mad at the fucking idiot that flushed a tampon down the toilet on a holiday and dragged me out there, then I remembered: her parents had gotten divorced a couple years ago, and it was just her and her dad now, her mom had moved back to Puerto Rico. No one was around to teach her not to do that, her dad probably either didn't really know what to do with a tampon or didn't talk to her about it. And once I realized that, I just felt sorry for her, and tried to explain it to her father without getting her into trouble. And you know what? It felt good, it felt much better than getting angry, I was in a good mood for the rest of the day.
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Have you ever written this out so comprehensively before? I find it can be really transformative to externalize things like this. I bet your dad never wrote anything so introspective and self aware. I bet you've changed a little just from writing this comment.
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