We just don’t need it!  When someone looks at us and in our head we think “I know what you are thinking……”.  We might, but we might not, it might just be that that is the look on their face, because that it their face!

Sometimes people say what they think, it is well intentioned, but not always helpful.  If advice is needed, it can be sought.  Advice can be suggested, but it is helpful if expressed in a gentle way of “this (X) might work, but the decision is yours”.

People make mistakes, it is actually the vulnerabilities of others that we find attractive, that we like (although not all of them) because if someone else can get something wrong, then so can we.  It is the permission to be human.  We all love a scandal, a bad boy, a troubled girl….. Because we can all relate to a time when we got something wrong or did something wrong.  Our mistakes are human, we are not machines that turn out a widget in a factory line, never deviating from the task, we are not robotic.  We will have good days and bad days.  On our good days, we can be and are amazing, but these days are fleeting.  Fortunately the days we get things wrong are also fleeting, the day ends and a new day begins and we get to have a fresh start.

So judging someone else is hard on both parties, as if we can judge someone, then they (or someone else) can judge us.  We all have days were we do things we are not proud of, that if we had the chance to do it again, we would do it differently.  This might even come as the response to some well-intended comment.  We can receive the comment and respond with “$&*! off, you don’t know me / you don’t understand” or we can say “please don’t cross my boundary of commenting on my actions, unless I ask you”.

The judgement of others is hard to receive, even when it is positive, because if we believe the positive, we must also believe the negative.  And chasing approval is a never ending hamster wheel that we can never get off, as there is always more approval to gain, someone else to please.

So this means that judging others is also hard, because this is the reverse side of receiving it.  If we don’t receive it well, then it is not something that we should give out.  In the end it only hurts us.  We don’t know the background, the history and even if the person is your family, we still weren’t there for every minute of every day.  Even siblings can have a different experience as the older one might have left home for some of the experiences of the younger one.  And in that time of the age difference, lots of things can happen within a family.

Everyone is just doing their best, on some days that might be pretty good, on other days, we all fail at times.  This is true for people with dementia and it is true for their carers.  Just give other the benefit of the doubt, they might be having a bad day.  Leave judging them to their own conscience.