"The Origin of the Inner Judge"
When we're little, there are two parts of us. There's a masculine part and a feminine part. We could say just in general that the feminine part is the feelings, the intuition, and the emotional body. The masculine is more the connected, sun/spirit, logic part of being. (That's not meant to be a description of women and men but just two ways of taking us apart and looking at parts of us.)
One of the aspects of the masculine is "protector." If we think about the old days, way, way back, people lived in caves and there was a door at the cave. The man, undoubtedly "the masculine," was the one at the door of the cave with a club, protecting, going into the world, getting food, and bringing it back to the feminine who was at the fire with the food and the kids. In that model, which probably still exists in our DNA, "holding a container" is an important part of that masculine aspect. In working with couples I've often found women, deep down inside saying, "I wish you could hold a safe space for me and not judge me." When he doesn't do that he's in the cave attacking her when he's supposed to be at the door of the cave protecting her.
What happened to that little protector masculine when we were little?
The one we've been calling the Inner Child is really the feminine side of the child - the feelings, the emotions, the part that gets hurt. The masculine side of the child, when we're little, shouldn't have to protect. It's the parents' job to protect the child. Imagine being born into a family where the parents say, or the dad says as the masculine, "I'm so delighted and excited that you're here, and I'm here to provide a container - a safe container - to find out what magic God sent you to do in our lives. I'm going to hold a safe physical space, a safe psychological space, for you to become who you came here to be and we are just delighted to be the stewards of that, and we're excited to find out what that is." Imagine who you would be if that had been the welcome you'd gotten.
The feminine side - the feeling side - would grow up knowing that she was safe and that she could express her feelings without having them abused or made wrong. The masculine side would have no job. The protector part of the masculine in a boy or girl could simply coast along and mature in the container provided by the parents, and in the process learn what it means to be protected, and learn the job of the protector from that experience.
An apprentice told me about a girlfriend of his when he was a young man. She was from Sweden, and her parents were very liberal about what she did, but they liked her to do it at home. So the young lovers spent a lot of time at her home. Her parents would go to bed early. If Dad needed to get up and go into the kitchen, he'd make his presence known, and my apprentice knew that if he did anything that freaked his girlfriend out or upset her and she made the slightest noise about it, Dad would be right through that door and my apprentice would be in trouble. She knew she was safe, she knew she was protected, and that's how most of us didn't grow up.
In that model, the little protector masculine can grow up just learning what it's like so when, for example, a female human with that experience goes into the world or maybe she's sitting on the couch, and a new guy comes to the door and Dad opens the door - the container - and looks the guy over - tattoos, cigarette hanging out of his mouth - says, "Nope!" and slams the door shut. But say he gives the guy a chance and lets him in, and goes into the other room and closes the door. If the guy reaches over and puts his hand on her leg and it's not comfortable, she has full permission because of that container she grew up in, to go, "Aaaah, I don't like that. Get your hand off me."
So by the time she's in a bar at 25 and some guy comes over and touches her inappropriately, there's no question about her response. The masculine is right there. The feminine says, "I didn't like that" to the masculine and the masculine says, "That's not right," to the guy.
When, however, the masculine side tries to protect us when we're four, and says, "Stop it, I hate you, you're mean! I'm not going to my room! It's not fair!" That's the masculine trying to protect the feminine side whose feelings are hurt by the outside judge. And what happens to a 4 year old child - could be a boy or a girl - when they say, "I hate you, you're mean, leave me alone, I'm not gonna do what you say?"
Dad says, "Dont' you talk to me like that! Don't you ever think of doing that again!" or maybe we got punished, or whatever the family dream called for to stop that kind of talk.
I've had people tell me, "Oh, when I was four and my dad was beating up my mom I jumped on his back and tried to pull him off and Dad threw me against the wall, and said, "Don't you ever interfere again, this is not your business."
What's the message for the protector? The message is, "I can't protect." "I can't protect her feelings." But he still wants to be a protector, so what he does is instead of looking at the outside world to protect, he turns around to the inner world, and tells the feminine to shut up.
That is the origin of the inner judge. The wounded masculine side, unable to protect outwardly, turns inside to protect by saying, "shut up, don't cry, don't do that, don't ask for that, don't need that, don't take the last cookie, you know they don't like that, you better do what you're told, why are you blowing this? You should have thought of that, you shouldn't have broken that, you shouldn't have spilled that, I can't believe you don't pay attention." It's a preemptive strike inside to avoid being punished and judged from the outside. That's how the masculine protective part tries to protect us when we're little from Them.
That voice stays with us as we grow, and becomes the inner judge when the outer judges are gone. It then projects the judgments out onto everybody on the outside world saying, "They don't like you" or "They're not going to like you if you keep doing that so you'd better stop doing that." This was for me the biggest "ah-hah" part of the puzzle. The answer to, "How do we get rid of the judge?" is, we don't get rid of it. We heal it!
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This article was transcribed from a talk I gave to a group that was in hypnotherapy training at The Alchemy Institute in Santa Rosa, CA. They were learning about all the characters in our inner world, and the Inner Judge is one that we are all familiar with. If you'd like to heal YOUR judge, we have some great resources to do just that in my
Online Toltec Community.
You can also get in touch with me. I offer counseling via phone, Skype, or in person. (707) 528-1271
IN Love,
Allan
