7–8 minute read
We often think other people are judging us when what we're really experiencing is our own judgment of ourselves. This article is about seeing that clearly, taking back the authority to decide who you are, and realizing that no opinion, including your own, determines your worth.
Most of us spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think of us. We read their faces, analyze their tone, and look for signs that we've disappointed them, annoyed them, bored them, or somehow come up short.
But how we feel about ourselves in those moments doesn't come from what they think of us. It comes from what we think they think of us. And hiding behind those opinions is what we already think of ourselves.
Sometimes people do judge us, misunderstand us, or give us feedback worth taking seriously. This isn't about pretending that never happens. It's about noticing how often an ambiguous moment becomes painful because our mind fills in the blank with an old conclusion about who we are.
We think they're judging us. We're judging ourselves through them.
It Starts Before We Had a Choice
When we're small, we don't have the ability to evaluate what adults say about us. Somebody tells a five-year-old he's too much, or she's difficult, or that he's not the smart one in the family, and that child has no way to determine the truthfulness of that. He can't say, “Well, that's your opinion, and you were in a bad mood, and you might be wrong.”
So he just takes it in as fact, because the people saying it seem to be the ones who know things.
Nobody ever sits us down and explains that we have a say in this. That we're allowed to have our own opinion about who we are. So we grow up carrying verdicts we never agreed to, and after enough years they stop feeling like opinions at all. They feel like the truth about us.
The strange part is that eventually we forget where the verdict came from. It just sounds like us.
The Verdict Becomes a Voice
Eventually we don't need anyone around to deliver the message. We've internalized it. There's a voice inside that already knows the charge, and it's been building its case for decades.
Call it the accuser, the inner judge, or maybe the prosecuting attorney. The name matters less than seeing what it does, which is this: it isn't looking at the evidence and drawing a conclusion. It reached its conclusion a long time ago and now it collects evidence to support it. That's a prosecutor, not a witness. And a prosecutor is never neutral.
Give the accuser enough time and it can turn almost anything into evidence. Someone doesn't return your text for three hours and suddenly the trial of your entire worth as a human being is underway.
Here's the Part Most of Us Miss
Someone gives you a look. A text comes back shorter than usual. A conversation ends a beat early and they seem distracted. There's a blank space in that interaction, and the mind fills it in.
And what does it fill it in with? Usually the verdict it already carries. It takes what you already believe or fear about yourself and projects it onto the other person.
Then it says, “Look, that's what they think of you.” Now you're upset about their opinion, except the opinion started in your own mind.
Except it was never their opinion. It was yours, wearing their face.
Imagine a man named David who already carries the belief that he's boring. He goes to lunch with a friend, and halfway through the conversation his friend glances at his phone a couple of times. That's all that actually happened. David doesn't know that his friend is waiting for an important message from his daughter. What David knows, instantly and with remarkable confidence, is that his friend is bored with him. By the time lunch is over, David feels embarrassed and rejected. His friend never said David was boring. His friend may never have thought it. David took his own belief that he was boring, imagined it was what his friend was thinking, and then felt hurt and rejected by an opinion that had actually come from himself.
That's the trick. We write the script, hand the other person a part, and then get hurt by the lines we wrote for them.
And then comes the line that gives the whole thing away: “See? I told you there's something wrong with you.”
That's not new information. It's the same old belief finding another reason to say, “See, I was right.”
Why It Feels So True
If someone's comment bounces off you, there was no hook inside for it to catch on. If it stings for a week, there was.
That's an important part of how it works. Other people's opinions often have the most power where they touch something we already fear or half believe about ourselves. The sting isn't necessarily the discovery of something new. Often, it's the confirmation of something old, and it hurts in that particular way because part of us has been afraid it was true the whole time.
Which means the sting is useful. It shows you exactly where the old verdict may still live.
Instead of asking only, “Why would they think that about me?” you can ask the far more revealing question: “Why does the possibility that they think that about me have so much power?”
The Question to Ask
Most people, when the accusation shows up, go straight to “Is it true?” and almost immediately become defensive. They argue with it, try to prove it wrong, shut down, withdraw, or go into some version of fight, flight, or freeze. That seems like the reasonable response, but it keeps you in the courtroom. Now you're on the stand, gathering evidence, defending yourself, hoping for a favorable ruling. You've already accepted that the court has authority over you.
The next time you feel bad about yourself, treat that feeling as a clue. Somewhere in that moment, you've accepted an opinion about yourself that diminishes you, judges you, or makes you less than.
Ask yourself: What am I believing about myself right now?
And then ask the question that matters most:
Who would I be without that thought?
Sit with this one longer than feels comfortable. Not who you would be if you replaced it with a nicer thought, and not who you would be if you finally proved it wrong. Who you would be if it had never been there at all.
People are usually surprised by what comes back. Lighter. More willing. More themselves. Whatever shows up in that space is closer to who you were before any of this got installed, and it gives you something real to walk toward instead of just a belief you're trying to argue your way out of.
Don't Argue the Charge. Throw Out the Court.
This is the shift.
Disproving the accusation leaves it in charge, because you're still the defendant and it's still the judge. Refusing its standing ends the proceeding. There's nothing to defend when you're not on trial.
You don't need to spend the rest of your life presenting character witnesses to a court that never had jurisdiction in the first place.
And you can't do this from a blank. If you tear down the old verdict and put nothing in its place, the mind will go looking for someone else to tell it who you are. That's why the second half of this work matters as much as the first.
The Thing to Take Away
If you remember nothing else, remember this.
That opinion you've been suffering over may not even be their opinion. It's your opinion of you. You've made it about other people your whole life, worrying what they think, reading their faces, replaying conversations looking for what you did wrong. You may have spent years trying to change opinions that existed primarily in your own head. But the whole time, you were projecting what you believe about yourself onto them and then experiencing it as their opinion of you.
That's why reassurance never really resolves it. You can't change a belief you hold about yourself by getting someone else to tell you something different. Their reassurance may feel good for a while, but the belief remains because they weren't the source of it in the first place.
Which is hard to hear and also the best news in this whole thing. If it were their opinion, you'd be stuck waiting on them to change it. It's yours. That means it's yours to look at, and yours to put down.
You Get an Opinion About Yourself
That's what nobody told us as kids, and it's the real work.
Decide who you are. Decide what you're about, what you stand for, and the kind of person you choose to be. Let that come from you, not from whether other people approve, agree, or understand. When your sense of who you are depends on other people, it changes with every reaction. When it comes from you, it has something solid to stand on.
This doesn't mean deciding you're wonderful and ignoring every criticism that comes your way. That's just another kind of bullshit. It means listening to what other people say without automatically turning it into a verdict about who you are. Take what's useful. Learn when there's something to learn. Make amends when you've screwed up. But don't confuse feedback about something you did with a definition of who you are.
Once you have your own opinion of yourself, other people's opinions become what they always were. Information. Sometimes useful, sometimes not, often more about them than about you. But not evidence, and never a verdict.
They don't get to determine anything about who you are. They never did. And neither does the voice in your head pretending to speak for them.
You thought you were afraid of what they thought of you. You were really afraid of what you thought of you.
That's whose opinion that needs to change.
Nobody gets to decide your worth, including you. Your mind can have an opinion about you. That doesn't make the opinion true, and it doesn't make it you.
When You Know It Isn't True, But Still Feel It
Sometimes seeing the belief isn't enough. You can recognize that an opinion you hold about yourself came from somewhere else, know intellectually that it isn't true, and still feel its power over you.
If you have a persistent belief about yourself, or a pattern in your life connected to that belief, that you haven't been able to change no matter how much you understand it or work on it, Get Unstuck may be for you.