We often mistake symptoms for root causes.
The addiction is the symptom. The underlying pain is the root cause. The self-judgement is the symptom. The subconscious narrative that creates it is the root cause. The resistance is the symptom. The deeply-rooted fear that triggers it is the root cause.
Telling the coping mechanisms apart from the root causes can be difficult and leads to doing self-work not on the most fundamental level—which is futile.
If you see self-judgement as the real problem, you may be trying to integrate more self-love and acceptance in response. But when the judgement is a symptom, there’s a deeper reason why it’s manifesting. And unless we identify it, the judgement will keep on appearing.
The symptoms are coping mechanisms that emerge in response to our limiting beliefs and subconscious narratives. To get to the root cause you need to understand what they’re there to help you cope with. When judgement is a symptom, it is there to protect you from a fear that your subconscious limiting narrative is creating. This is why replacing self-judgement with self-acceptance doesn’t work—because the judgement is there to actually “help” and “protect”—albeit from an imaginary threat.
It’s in seeing that the threat is a lie that you find freedom from the symptom. When you identify and transcend the fears that your subconscious narratives give rise to, self-judgement and all of their other symptoms dissolve. If you remove the threat, you no longer need to arm and protect yourself.
Conversely, if you’re solving on the level of symptoms, rather than root causes, you are only reinforcing the limiting beliefs. When you integrating self-acceptance in order to force self-judgement out, you are reinforcing the judgement. You’re looking through a perspective of “there’s something wrong”, which is the filter that renders your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Your actions, commensurate with that lens, are dictated and confined by it, and so you may be compelled to always get things right, make sure you don’t fail, be a perfectionist.
The behaviours that manifest, especially those that manifest repeatedly, point to your underlying constraints—the limiting subconscious narratives that create the threat that the behaviours emerge to deal with.
The judgement, which is the coping mechanism, is there to point to where you’re not free. What underlying ideas must you have about yourself or life that are giving rise to the judgement? What are the limiting subconscious narratives?