pretending there is no judgment

[liveonearth]

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.

Other experiments already in process:
There is no "try", there is do and do not.
There is no "should", there is only IS.

Comments

[b-vainamoinen.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[b-vainamoinen.livejournal.com]

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.