Negative judgments you make about other people

Harsh judgments about other people are usually serving a protective function for the client. They keep the client distant from people who’ve hurt them, they offer a narrative that explains painful relationships, they preserve a self-image of being right where someone else was wrong. The function is real. It’s also costing the client more than it’s protecting.

This worksheet runs as a structured cognitive log specifically for other-directed judgments rather than self-directed ones. The client logs the trigger, the judgment that ran, the feeling it produced, the behavioural cost, and a more balanced view. The cost column is the lever. It surfaces the avoidance, the lost relationships, the ongoing anger, the time spent ruminating about a person they could have stopped thinking about. Clients who have never explicitly looked at the cost are usually surprised by the size of it once it’s written down.

Use it for chronic resentment cases, social isolation driven by harsh assessments of other people, family or workplace conflict where the client is stuck in a position of grievance, and depressive presentations that have tipped into a generalised “people are awful” filter. Don’t use it without consideration in trauma cases where the harsh judgment is a protective response to genuine ongoing harm. There the cognitive restructuring isn’t appropriate yet.

The clinical pattern to read. The gap between the original judgment and the more balanced view tells you whether the cognitive work is engaging. Clients who can’t generate a more balanced view, even when prompted, usually have a deeper belief about people in general (“everyone is selfish,” “people always disappoint,” “you can’t trust anyone”) sitting underneath the surface judgments. Surface restructuring won’t dislodge a core belief. The conversation in session moves to that deeper level before the worksheet can do clinical work.

A second pattern: clients who balance the judgment cleanly on paper but report feeling no different about the person. That’s the cognitive-emotional gap that tells you cognitive work alone isn’t enough for this case. Behavioural experiments with the actual person, where possible, tend to do what cognitive challenge can’t.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it from the case file with a personal message naming the specific relationship or pattern the client is working on. Submissions save in the case file and the cost column across multiple entries gives you the running total of what the judgments are taking from the client’s life.