Criticizing Others For The Things We Don’t Like About Ourselves

Everyone is a combination of great virtues and a lot of shortcomings. Even you or I cannot escape this fact. There is a genius and a saint lurking in all of us, as well as a tyrant and an idiot. No one is able to go through life without making mistakes or doing something they will be ashamed of later. Therefore, people who criticize others have nothing to substantiate this criticism.

Yet many people act as if this is not the case at all. With no reason or right to do so, some people continue to judge others ruthlessly. They are always ready to make a detailed list of another’s shortcomings.

Sometimes they even go so far as to tell others what they should do to avoid making the mistakes they made in the past in the future. Or point out the path others should follow to overcome their shortcomings. These people have given themselves the luxury of being intolerant of the mistakes and shortcomings of others.

When another person’s criticism becomes constant and malicious, this person is probably unable to judge your mistakes in a healthy way. The criticism probably has more to do with the defense mechanism known as ‘projection’. They see you as a mirror; the things they criticize about you are the things they don’t like about themselves.

The things people criticize others for

We are all admirable in some areas and lacking in others. If you look for moral flaws in Francis of Assisi, you will probably manage to find a few. If you’re looking for some silly sayings from Albert Einstein, you’ll be able to find some of them here as well.

This is the crux of this issue: everyone chooses what they want and don’t want to see in other people. This choice is usually linked to the way we judge and perceive ourselves. If we can appreciate our own good qualities, then we will also be able to recognize the good qualities of others. The same goes for negative traits.

In some cases, however, critical people are not able to see only the negative qualities in everyone around them, but instead choose to focus their corrosive judgments on just one person or a small group of people. Why is this happening?

What they don’t like about themselves

Projection works as follows: the person has a certain opinion about himself that is not completely impartial or objective. He finds certain qualities of himself simply unacceptable.

For example, maybe this person is very selfish in practice and he proclaims to the outside world the value of solidarity, so that he comes up with unjustified arguments to justify his own selfish behavior. This person will say things like, “I’m really sorry that you’re lonely, but unfortunately I really don’t have time to visit you.” He wants to see himself as extremely generous, but his selfishness gets in the way.

In reality, such people are completely oblivious to the fact that they really only care about themselves or that they are completely incapable of making the slightest sacrifice for another or being somewhat lenient towards others. They truly believe that their apologies are worthy reasons to approve of the way they behave.

The problem, however, is that when they see others behaving selfishly, they will be the first to object and say something about it. They get angry and make it clear that they completely disapprove of this behavior. It is completely inconceivable to them that anyone could behave in such a way.

If you then pointed out their own behavior, they would say that their reasons for being selfish are completely understandable: “I didn’t want to behave that way, but the circumstances of the moment forced me to do this.” At the same time, they find the reasons others give to justify their behavior are nothing more than flimsy excuses.

What’s happening in the background

What happens in the background is that others’ mistakes remind them of their own. What they do not tolerate in others is what they do not tolerate in themselves. In other words,  they project their own mistakes onto those around them so that they don’t have to feel what it feels like to see these mistakes in themselves.

Criticism for the sake of criticism almost always comes from projection. It’s quite normal to criticize others for displaying traits we don’t like about ourselves. However, we do not do this on purpose, we are simply not aware of it.

We should therefore pay close attention to the things that we cannot vent to others. If we were to adjust these observations, we would probably realize that this aversion is directed at ourselves rather than others.

When we are criticized ourselves, we should therefore also take this criticism with a grain of salt. We should try to think about why the person who is criticizing us has chosen this negative trait to criticize. We will probably find out that their criticism is actually aimed at some hidden aspect of themselves and not at us at all.

–Images courtesy of Christian Schloe–