There are two types of judgments that we make:

• judgments that discriminate – copmparing two things to see if they meet a standard.
• judgements that evaluate – determing whether something is good or bad, valuable or not.

We usually use the word discriminate in a negative sense – usually relating to one type of people being treated worse than others, such as religions, disabilities, sexuality or ethnic background.

But to discriminate actually means to judge the difference between two things. Sometimes we need to discriminate – we discriminate between a swimming pool full of water and a swimming pool devoid of water, to determine which is the ‘good’ pool to dive into.

To evaluate is to judge whether something is good of bad, valuable or not. These are opinions, personal values, that we add to the facts – these judgments are not part of the facts.

The aim in non-judgmentalness is to learn to let go of judgments which evaluate, but keep those that discriminate.

We use the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in everyday life for describing consequences.

• If the meat we get out of the fridge won’t taste good or will make us sick, we say it is bad.
• When people hurt others, we say they are bad.
• When the sun is out, and people are happy, we call that good.
• When people make decisions that will have good outcomes, we call that good judgment.

In BPD, we carry that ‘good’ or ‘bad’ label with us into our own situations. People or situations are either good or bad, there is no grey area. We begin to treat these judgments as facts, when they are just our own opinions and values.

These judgments which evaluate good or bad are in the mind of the observer, not qualities of what we are observing – we can’t observe ‘good’ or ‘bad’. An important mindfulness skill is learning to not judge things in this way.

It’s important to learn to be non-judgmental for many reasons. Judgments have damaging effects on our interpersonal relationships, for example. Negative judgments cause conflict and can hurt the person we care for. We generally don’t like it when people judge us, so why should it be any different if we judge others?

Adding judgments like good or bad to ourselves and our situations, has a negative effect on our emotions. We apply our intense emotions to the person or situation we are judging. It can then be difficult for us to recognise that these judgments are not factual, and not part of what we can observe and describe.

Try this exercise. Take a few moments to think about judgment in your own life. Do you feel you judge yourself or others more? What kind of judgments do you make about yourself or the people around you? How do you feel when someone judges you?

Judgments don’t change the cause of things that have happened. Everything that happens in life has a cause, and changing the cause works better than judging. When we say things like ‘this should not have happened’, it’s ineffective and doesn’t change things. if we wan to change things we need to look at the cause rather than make judgments.

For example, if we want to end drug addiction, we need to develop programs and treatments that help people avoid or escape addiction. We can’t look at an addict and say ‘they are bad’ because that doesn’t change anything.

Non-judgmentalness is stressed in all mindfulness-based treatments, not just DBT. It’s central to mindfulness.

So how do we let go of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ judgments? We start be observing the reality of ‘what is’ and let go of evaluating people and their behaviours of good and bad. This includes the judgments you make of yourself and your behaviours.

The goal is to take a non-judgmental stance when observing, describing and participating. We need to learn to stop labelling and evaluating things as good or bad, worthless or worthwhile.

We must learn to replace evaluations with statements or descriptions of our factual observations. As a simple example, we may sit on our new couch and declare it is a ‘good’ couch, whereas the truth statement would be that we like this couch – the couch is in reality neither good nor bad.

When we talk about replacing evaluations, we mean the negative evaluations. If we feel someone did a good job, we should tell them, in a specific sense – ‘you completed that project really efficiently’ or ‘I am proud of you for your achievements’.

One important thing to note in non-judgmentalness is that we must let go of the word should. When we use this in the sense of how things should be, we must let go of the demand we place on reality for things to be just how we want them. We are also letting go of the idea that we ourselves should be different.

You can replace the ‘should’ statements with more positive descriptions of our wants and needs. We can describe that we want things to be different, or that we want to change.