Nonjudgmental doesn’t mean artificially positive or optimistic, however. It just means we take a more neutral attitude and refrain from making sweeping emotional appraisals of things, ranking them, interpreting them, or denouncing them on moral grounds. Examined closely, these judgments tend to contain a whole world or distortion of the plain facts. Try to remind yourself of this next time you’re feeling emotional. If you were a completely neutral third-party observer, what would you see? Describing things in this way will take a lot (sometimes all) of the sting out of a difficult situation.
