Apr 24 2010
VIEWPOINTS
Jean Austin-Danner, MSW, Licensed Clinical Social Worker
As a counselor at Life Skills Resource Group in Orlando, I meet many people and hear lots of different perspectives expressed, especially about the rightness or wrongness of others. When I was a young girl, I used to listen to adult conversations around me. I heard lots of judging and criticizing in those conversations. Often, it seems, people are sure they know what is right and when other people aren’t (right, that is).
As a child, peoples’ judgments scared me. I tried really hard to listen to all the criticisms and use them to form a set of rules to live by–so I would be exempt from judgment, so I would know how to be right. As I grew older, though, I discovered that there were going to be too many rules to follow. Even worse, I learned that the rules could be contradictory, because different people had different ideas about what was right. It became quite a dilemma for me. The other problem was that there didn’t seem to be any space for me to make my own decisions about how I wanted to live and act—I was just jumping through the hoops of everyone else’s determinations about what’s right.
