You Need to Stop Doing This
and This Is How
People badmouth each other all the time.
- “She is so annoying”
- “He was wearing a dress?”
- “Their taste is horrible”
This is an immature and rude thing to do.
You have your own unique appearance, personality, preferences, and lifestyle. It is inevitable, then, that other people will be different from you. But this is not a basis to say negative things about them.
Someone else’s harmless peculiarities should not be badmouthed. If you feel so offended by another person’s “strangeness” as to talk about them in this way, you are only proving how immature you are. Rather than seeking to understand (or just accept) them, you are placing your own ideals and comforts above the safety and wellbeing of those who are simply living their lives.
In doing so, you reveal your own insecurities and shortsightedness. You wouldn’t feel the need to badmouth someone unless you felt threatened by them in some way — either to your own state of comfort or to the cultural norms that benefit you. But by voicing the supposed “flaw” of another person, the only wrong you are underlining is your own.
Fortunately, there is a way to unlearn this behavior.
Badmouthing vs. Constructive Criticism
There are two ways to criticize another person:
(1) Badmouthing means talking behind someone’s back about the things about them that you personally dislike, even though they are harmless:
- “She wears too much makeup”
- “He has this weird way of talking”
- “I think they might be getting desperate”
You feel threatened by them even though their behavior is harmless.
(2) Criticizing constructively means talking about someone to another person about the things they have done that are hurtful or immature, either to you, another person, or themselves:
- “She betrayed my trust”
- “He is being a bad brother”
- “They said something offensive”
You feel threatened by them because their behavior is or might be harmful.
Badmouthing makes room for hurt and pain, and constructive criticism seeks to remedy it. Badmouthing seeks to ridicule and degrade, while the other seeks to understand or solve. Badmouthing points out a “flaw” that hurts no one, whereas constructive criticism scrutinizes an actually harmful behavior.
I made this rule to live by some years ago, and it has worked wonders:
- Do not talk behind someone’s back on the basis of inoffensive traits
- Speak negatively about someone only on the basis of something they have done that is worth criticizing
If you really feel the need to air out certain thoughts or feelings about another person that are unconstructive, do so in a diary or in therapy or in some other intimate setting. These are arenas designed to make room for all such perceptions, in part to lessen their impact on people in real life. In these instances, it might actually be helpful to complain without reason, so long as you keep in mind that the goal in the end is to reduce the power of these thoughts and feelings on your behavior, and not to strengthen your own prejudices.
In the end, let people live their lives as they want, and you shall too.
