Blog

One of the big disappointments during the pandemic has been the inability to hold traditional graduations. There is no doubt that is a big deal. I have heard so much sadness and anger around this loss. I have felt great empathy for families feeling robbed of this great milestone in their children’s development. My own daughter graduated from the eighth grade, a smaller milestone than high school or college graduation, but meaningful, nonetheless.

Approaching these graduations, I was also keenly aware of my own high school senior experience. While there was no worldwide pandemic, I too was forced to miss my senior week events and graduation. Would you believe I had the chickenpox?! The one downside to my senior project working in a day care was the exposure to all the childhood diseases I avoided as a younger kid.

Having had this experience, I wanted to tell people it would be okay. I have recovered from missing those events and managed to have a happy life despite the loss. I suppressed this urge because it felt invalidating. I was devastated at the time and I know people needed their space to feel the disappointment.

As my daughter’s graduation and our town’s high school graduation passed this week, I have noticed a different response. I am asking myself why we all assumed this was a huge loss as opposed to a change of approach.

I have previously written about the need to see change in terms of what we gain and not just what we lose (“Change Involves Loss and Gain”). Beyond that we also need to approach change with fewer assumptions about whether it will be “good,” or “bad.”

In DBT we encourage people to observe things without judgment. In doing so, we distinguish between discriminative judgements and evaluative judgements. Discriminative judgments allow us to distinguish difference such as this person is taller than that person. In contrast, evaluative judgments add value wherein one way is better than the other way when there is a difference.

With respect to graduations, many of us made the leap from the discriminative judgement that this years’ graduation would be different from past years to a more evaluative judgment. We assumed those differences would be bad.

My experience was quite the opposite. My daughter’s middle school did a great job with a drive through graduation that demonstrated far more enthusiasm and individualized attention than my son’s graduation from the school two years ago. Let’s be honest, graduations can be incredibly drawn out and boring. This was none of the above and my daughter felt as though we celebrated her, not a mass of kids we don’t know.

I also saw a great response to our high school’s graduation parade. It was definitely different. The differences, however, were not all “bad,” or “good.” I found a lot of people to be pleasantly surprised. Many people would have experienced a lot less stress and disappointment over the past few months had we all caught ourselves shifting from the discriminative judgment that things would be different to the evaluative judgment that it would be bad.

There is no doubt that some of the changes that have resulted from the pandemic have been negative. Yet, assuming a negative evaluation when change is predicted only increases the suffering.

This idea of discriminative judgments versus evaluative has come up for me in so many ways lately. Graduations and pandemic differences have been a great example. Yet, the message is a far more generalized one. We need to approach differences in general as just that…a discriminative judgment. Let’s try and hold off on the assumptions of better and worse.

Click HERE to follow Psychdiary on Facebook and receive links to weekly posts