Crazy Quilt (ca. 1880–1900).
In my previous piece, I wrote about learning to be humiliated. There are shades to the spectrum that I didn’t address. For one, of course, humiliation is different from shame, which is different from embarrassment.
“Embarrassment results from violating one's particular persona; shame results from violating a shared, objective ideal.”1 While embarrassment is oriented around others’ perceptions of you and how those may diverge from the image you want to give out, shame is oriented around the measurement of yourself against socio-cultural ideals. And humiliation? “Humiliation involves abasement of honour and dignity and, with that, loss of status and standing.”2
From these definitions, it strikes me that humiliation is a mixture of embarrassment and shame — your persona, which has a certain status and image, is felled in front of other people, diminishing your sense that you are someone worthy of respect. It’s hard to be humiliated when you’re all alone (like embarrassment), and humiliation erupts from a failure to retain some ideal position of power or regard, which is socially constructed (echoing shame).
I used the word humiliation because it is the closest approximation of how I feel, even in situations where it seems more common to simply feel embarrassed. The short explanation goes: I was brought up to measure myself against steep slopes, and spent much of my young life thus far trying to scale them. It’s why I feel failures more intensely than they need to be — in my body, they signal danger. They signal that I’m falling down a hellish cliff which has been conjured and reinforced for so long that it feels real.
So much of healing from trauma involves turning what feels real back into distant fictions, and creating better stories that not only bring you closer to reality and other people, but also serve what you want for yourself (dreams, desires, better fictions). The fictions you spend most of your time realizing become real.
A key binary (or spectrum) to navigate is safety/ danger — the axis along which your mind and body determines what you are allowed and not allowed to do. The quest of learning to be humiliated is actually a lot about learning to be okay with the risk of a pricked, soured, crumpled pride or ego. And, in the long run, learning how to let such incidents glide smoothly off you, like water off a duck’s back.
Or at least that’s what I’d like. A less reactive ego. A lack of ego. If ego’s your game, though, growing the capacity to let such feelings flow through you, without too much resistance or panic, looks like a sweet solid spot to be too.
Approaching Thunder Storm (1859), Martin Johnson Head.
At the heart of it, we live in bodies that try hard to keep us (our spirits, our egos) safe — shielded from uncomfortable feelings or withdrawn from risky decisions (such as committed relationships, changing jobs, or being honest with another person). Many of us mistake relief for joy, and safety for desire. We are not naturally oriented towards our happiness when it conflicts with our sense of safety. This is even more acute in bodies that hold trauma, and which reproduce the beliefs and behaviours we’ve derived from traumatic experiences.
How does a body over-attuned to danger learn to be humiliated? It is a leap from one to the other, so don’t leap. Slow down and seek ease into discomfort first. Then a little danger, a little risk. Then, maybe, at some point, humiliation will become possible.
Ultimately, you (brave, wise, compassion you) decide what kinds of discomforts and risks you can accept. Sometimes the feeling of safety is more important, and so be it. You decide what is worth and not worth fighting for. What is a realistic and compassionate way for your body and spirit.
Very practical steps I’ve arrived at thus far, in rough chronological sequence:
Talk to people you trust about what you fear and find dangerous. Talk to many people if you can, especially people who you feel have either grown up well-adjusted or have worked on finding their balance. Perspectives that feel particularly rational or logical are valuable to consider. You want your feelings and fears acknowledged, but not enabled and reinforced.
Thank your mind and body for keeping you safe. Thank them for protecting you and helping you survive.
Learn to distinguish what is actually dangerous from what only feels dangerous. In keeping you safe, your mind inflates the consequences of certain actions or situations.3 The rational, logical people you spoke to before are going to be very helpful here. (You should basically keep them on a retainer contract throughout this process.)
Acknowledge and respect the functions performed by your fears, especially if they were inherited from previous generations. You may have outgrown them, but for some time they may have kept you and/or your family safe, or at least feeling so. If you can, generate gratitude for them.
Assemble, practice, and hone a few somatic and cognitive recovery processes that work for your body. Very often, you’re looking to signal to your brain and body that the danger is over.4 A few good ways to do this are to sigh/ yawn/ stretch/ dance/ sweat, then ground your body in space by paying attention to where it makes contact with the floor and/or other surfaces.
This final attention piece is important. Learning to meditate, or at least properly register your sensory body in its environment, is vital. Practice this frequently. Five to ten minutes a day is good.
Find people you can talk to about your humiliation. Ideally people who you can be honest with, and who you trust to be compassionately honest with you. (It’s important that you trust them to say what they think and not what they think you want to hear. But also that they don’t say these things with asshole brutality.) More often than not, they’ll probably tell you that you’re totally okay. Your feeling of humiliation is certainly real and valid in its way, but it’s probably invalid in the concrete social world, where people do not in fact think you’re any kind of idiot. The few who think so are probably not people you value very much, anyway.
Eventually, you must learn to narrow down your range of what is actually important to you. The opinion of Xiao Ming on Reddit is probably not. Neither is that of the mini version of your mother that lives in your head, despite the throbbing vehemence of her voice. (I can vouch for this.) Neither, for certain, are the inflated and optimised images of life and relationships on social media. While being as gentle as you can with yourself, exorcise these voices and turn your attention towards your needs.
Do not buy into the idea that you need to become an independent, selfish baddie without a care for other people in order to love yourself and be your own person. Life is inherently lived with and in collaboration with other people.5 Your task is to learn how to be your own person who can live alongside others.6
Sometimes you need to assert your sovereignty and autonomy, really put your foot down. Try to do this more in (a) situations where you feel powerless or at the mercy of another person, and when people try to force your hand — by reinforcing your boundaries; and (b) relationships where you tend to blame the other person for your unhappiness — by considering where you can take responsibility and act to change things.
Learn to differentiate between these two broad types of social situations.
Around this point, you can start to do more embarrassing things. Find low stakes situations where you can feel super embarrassed and safely recover, like complimenting a stranger, or trying to crack jokes with acquaintances you don’t see often anyway. Your version of this may be even lower in stakes. Go at your own pace.
When embarrassing, humiliating things simply happen, as they sometimes do, sit with the feeling for half a second more. Notice that you might actually be safe, and are probably still loved. Even if you crumple up, or need to disappear. It gets easier the more you practice.
Improve your somatic and/or cognitive recovery process. Journalling might help. Exercise helps a lot. If you’ve not done so, finding a therapist may be helpful. Don’t force yourself to move too fast or too hard.
You’ll probably have to repeat a number of these steps, or leap around. Go at your pace. It pays to take the time you need.
Eventually humiliation will become possible.
At this point, you can consider a few more terrifying possibilities, like becoming a Youtuber, or trying to be a stand-up comedian. You could try showing your work to an artist you like, and asking for feedback. You could publish fanfiction online. You could confess your feelings for your crush.
Pick one, especially the one which you’ve put off for a long time. Get ready to be humiliated, or at least risk it.
This catches you up to roughly where I am, so that’s all for the time being. A stock-take of my path here. You might take a different path, since we all have our own, so don’t force anything. Either way, this list is my strange little blessing to you. Advice from someone under 30 who’s lived as fiercely as she could till now. And will probably keep doing so to the end.
Till my next piece, all the very best. Let your journey be what it will be. In my experience, at least, it will be quite serious, and then it becomes rather funny.
˗ˏˋ ♡ ˎ
thank you for reading slow species. to support this project further, do consider pledging a subscription. I won’t be opening paid subscriptions until my subscriber count hits a sizeable threshold, and I have the bandwidth to reasonably sustain the content flow here. but I’d appreciate knowing that you’d be happy to pay for my work here when that happens.
either way, it’s good to have you here, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
more about me & my work @ kyatos.com
Babcock, M.K. and Sabini, J. (1990), On differentiating embarrassment from shame. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., 20: 151-169. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420200206. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ejsp.2420200206
Burton, N. (2024), The Psychology of Humiliation. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201408/the-psychology-of-humiliation
I’d recommend watching this video by HealthyGamerGG on neuro-economics and how loss aversion works in the mind.
Watch this video by Therapy in a Nutshell to learn more about triggering the parasympathetic response in your body.
Read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga for more further meditation on this.