Replace judgment with curiosity month

Historically, I have an FA attachment style – fearful avoidant.

The FA has two sides to them: an anxious side, which goes into activation when the partner pulls away (for example if the partner is a dismissive avoidant who takes space), and a dismissive side, which deactivates.

How does deactivation look like?

For me, deactivation looks like being judgemental about the woman, picky, and looking at her mistakes and (small) problems.

For example, her voice might annoy me. Or I might become worried that she is neurotic, which (I have read) will predict a less happy relationship than on average.

Basically I judge the woman. I judge based on little data, and I focus on the negatives.

Which leads me to lose interest in her.

All of this, of course, is a self-protection mechanism. One which tries to keep me safe – and instead keeps me miserable, and out of (romantic) relationships, as I’ve been for most of my life.

How can I solve this?

Deactivation to me, seems tricker to resolve than activation – I was able to tackle the anxious side by diligently applying the emotional processing tool, looking for proofs where the other person was showing me affection and showed me that they liked me.

Having been pushed away in dating by several women, or several women not having responded, I can now safely say that I have resolved the anxious side.

I am in balance – if a woman doesn’t want to proceed – for whatever reason (fears, disinterest, overwhelm with her life), I do not chase. I let her go, even if I am fond of her and had been open for further dates, and even a possible future together.

Resolving activation spoke to my logical side.

My logical side seems to work “against” me on deactivation – because I fall into “building a case” against someone, as fellow IAT coach Asmaa would say.

My goal is to get into balance here as well, and actually convince myself that pushing women away “as a protection” is costing me happiness.

I am working on the deactivation using the emotional processing tool, and questioning my stories about the women (against a certain internal resistance I feel).

An additional idea which I am going to get started is “Replace judgment with curiosity”. (Another idea by Thais Gibson!)

How does that look, replacing judgement by curiosity?

Just now, while checking the link for the Personal Development School, I saw that their main page (still) has “Start your journey with Thais Gibson, today”

I am interested in marketing, and have read a lot about it – but am by no means a professional marketer.

I had shared with Thais herself before (in a group feedback session) that this slogan could be replaced by something more tangible, which people would understand / which kind of benefits they would get.

That thought flashed across my mind just now – “they still haven’t replaced it”.

But can I be sure of that? Maybe they had discussed this internally. Maybe they had already tried more generic things.

Fact is, the name Thais Gibson is a brand to her social media audience (on YouTube and other channels). It would be natural for these visitors to see her name appear in a very prominent spot. The actual motivation for these people to purchase happens through Thais’ YouTube videos.

Instead of assuming that they are doing a bad job with the slogan, I could inquire and show interest, possibly even get feedback from their marketing team – I could ask for the reason they put this there, and their thoughts.

May: replacing judgement with curiosity.

This month, I am focusing on replacing judgement with curiosity.

Today is the first day, and already I am aware of many small micro-judgements I am running in my head about situations and people.

For example, a woman I had one phone call (can you call a phone call a phone date?) turned up late to the phone call, asked me to shift one video date one hour back, and wrote to me whether we could have the video date today one half hour later.

I immediately noticed my mind going into judgements – e.g. “she is unreliable” or “I am unimportant to her, she’s not that keen on me”.

The video date with her, and these judgements sparked the “replacing judgement with curiosity” month.

In our video date, I actually asked her about this, and mentioned that I’m working on replacing judgement by curiosity. She explained some of the reasons behind her being late, and said that she usually wants to be on time – this is due to current life circumstances in her life.

Thanks to the question, and her answer, I felt more connected and interested in her in our conversation – I was less reserved.

The magic has started to work. Let’s try to find out the reasons other people have, instead of assuming reasons for them. This will work towards healing the way the interactions with my father have played out, where I was judged and my father often had an opinion about why I did certain things in a certain way – instead of listening to my side of the story. I internalized this, and kept applying this to myself, and to other people … there is always more healing to do.

Photo by Wesley Balten on Unsplash