Humiliation was the driving emotional experience for my father when I was growing up. I didn’t know this at the time and I don’t know when I realized it, but it now seems obvious to me that his constant raging was a desperate attempt to fight off the ever present, crushing humiliation that he felt. He was constantly fighting back against what he perceived as attacks on his dignity: if someone cut him off on the road he would speed up and intentionally cut them off, or he would drive up beside them and scream at them to pull over. His meltdowns in public were embarrassing and revealed him to be a man without any self-control, but they were actually an attempt at restoring his dignity, at defending himself from a larger experience of profound humiliation that haunted him.
Recently I made the decision to see a hypnotherapist about my extreme emotional block about learning French. I have about an A2 level in French comprehension but I absolutely can’t bring myself to speak it, even in the ample, readily available, low stakes situations I regularly find myself in, in the bilingual city of Montreal. I also haven’t been able to bring myself to go to classes because I know this will involve speaking French in front of other people. The emotional response I have to the idea of this is much more complex than anxiety: I feel a strange mix of helplessness, fear, shame, and anger, and it is so intense that my entire body and brain go into a danger response. I thought maybe hypnotherapy might help me get through this extremely sticky block.
In my consult with the hypnotherapist I told her that the experience of trying to speak French felt profoundly humiliating. In our first session together, she brought this up again and mentioned that humiliation seemed to be the issue for me, not shame. When she said these words I knew they were true, not just in this situation with learning French, but in so many areas of my life. Humiliation is the issue, not shame. Shame is often talked about as a component of complex trauma, and I have written a lot about shame over the course of my career. But shame and humiliation are often mixed together when we discuss them, and they are rarely separated and understood as distinct. This therapist saying the words Humiliation is the issue, not shame caused me to see shame and humiliation as distinct, and caused me to realize that it is humiliation which is so sticky for me.
Humiliation can produce shame, and a lot of shame can be understood as the internalization of humiliation, but shame and humiliation are not the same thing. Humiliation is something that is done to you by someone else. Humiliation is enacted against a person through the use of power. To humiliate someone is to publicly strip them of their dignity, to lower them in the eyes of the collective, to make them lesser than. Attacks on dignity are humiliating. Violation of basic rights like privacy, boundaries, and personal integrity are humiliating. Denying people their basic needs like food, shelter, and a place to use the bathroom, is humiliating. Ridicule, mockery, and scorn are humiliating. Degradation and debasement are humiliating. Humiliation is an experience that sets you apart from, and below, the collective, that communicates to you that your dignity will not be protected, that you cannot expect the same basic treatment as others because you have been fundamentally devalued.
Shame is one response to humiliation. Shame is the internalization of the belief that you are lesser than, that you deserve the humiliating experience, that it is your fault. But not everyone develops shame in response to humiliation, and even in those that do, shame is not the complete emotional experience of humiliation. The experience of humiliation also includes other key elements: anger, a feeling of injustice, helplessness, and thwarted power. In a paper titled “Losing trust in the world: Humiliation and its consequences”Phil Leask writes “Since power is central to humiliation, the victim of an act of humiliation can be described not as feeling but as being humiliated, as the victim of an act of power. Humiliation is something actively done by one person to another, even if through institutions or directed in principle at groups. It is a demonstration of the capacity to use power unjustly with apparent impunity.”
The focus on shame in trauma recovery can risk pathologizing and individualizing the experience of humiliation. When we understand shame as a feeling, we can miss the importance of understanding humiliation as an act. People do not feel humiliation for no reason. Humiliation is not a feeling that originates inside an individual; humiliation is a feeling that originates inside a social dynamic, an act of domination of one person over another, an act of victimization by one person of another. There is no humiliation without a social context and without an act of domination. It is true that people can feel humiliated when they aren’t being humiliated (the person who accidentally cut my father off was not trying to humiliate him, the Francophone who looks bewildered at my broken French is not trying to humiliate me), but the humiliation my father and I are feeling is older and started in a real experience of humiliation: my father being caned at school, me being made to submit to my grandfather’s sexual advances.
Overwhelming experiences of violence are humiliating. Sexual violence, in particular, is profoundly humiliating. When someone assaults you or otherwise profoundly violates your boundaries, it is being communicated that you are lesser than and are not deserving of basic human rights. When violence, and in particular sexual violence, takes place in a social context such as the family, the repeated humiliations are co-signed by all the witnesses who do not intervene or defend the dignity of the victim. This produces shame (there is something wrong with me) but it also produces simmering rage and feelings of helplessness. Helpless rage, as Lance Dodes points out, is at the heart of all addictive behaviours.
Child neglect, whether physical or emotional, is also humiliating. Children are, by definition, helpless, and require their caregivers to meet their physical and emotional needs. Child neglect is violence because children are dependent and cannot meet these needs themselves. This is why the desperate desire for love is often underscored with a helpless anger as we see in anxious preoccupieds and those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. While these people are not (necessarily) being humiliated in their adult relationships, the feeling of needing love registers as humiliating because the early experiences of being unable to access love were humiliating.
Sexual violence is particularly and profoundly humiliating. Sexual violence survivors, particularly survivors of child sexual abuse, are likely to live with profound feelings of humiliation and may not understand that what they are feeling is the lasting impact of humiliation because we rarely talk about sexual violence as acts of humiliation. Even if the perpetrator is not saying degrading or contemptuous things, sexual violence is inherently humiliating. Stripping someone of their most fundamental boundaries in order to feel pleasure and power over them is inherently degrading. It communicates to the victim that they are less than and not deserving of the most basic and fundamental human rights. The fact that we don’t talk about sexual violence as acts of humiliation reveals a worldview that upholds and normalizes sexual violence through misogyny and the denial of rights to children: we don’t understand sexual violence as humiliating because we really do see women and children as lesser, as not actually deserving of the human rights enjoyed by adult men. Men who are sexually assaulted are feminized; to be feminized is synonymous with being humiliated in a misogynist culture that devalues and humiliates women and children.
Masculinity in a misogynist culture is literally produced through humiliation and organized around a terror of humiliation. The socialization of boys in a misogynist culture takes place through a series of humiliations in which they are taught to cut off aspects of their humanity in order to avoid humiliation. Boys are taught that showing emotion, vulnerability, or weakness will result in being humiliated. Anyone who has experienced violence from a man will know that men are most dangerous when they feel humiliated. Racism is also fundamentally about humiliation, it is the denial of the recognition of the full personhood and specificity of racialized people; it is an attack on dignity and on basic human rights. The experience of not being seen for who you are, of being treated as interchangeable with others who share your phenotype, and literally being seen as a lesser type of person is profoundly humiliating.
We are often taught that healing shame is about developing self love, self respect, or self-esteem, but this approach erases the injustice inherent to humiliation. Many people who think their problem is shame may be perplexed by the simmering anger and the learned helplessness that shape their experiences. The results of humiliation: chronic anger, learned helplessness, shame, avoidance of possibly humiliating experiences, pervasive lack of trust, and desperate attempts to avoid overwhelming sensations in the body map onto the “symptoms” of complex trauma exactly, suggesting that humiliation plays a key and foundational role in complex trauma. Gabor Maté’s focus on healthy expressions of anger, the development of agency, and authentic expressions of self, are all important components of recovering from humiliation.
Another extremely important component of healing from humiliation is truth telling: it must be stated and publicly acknowledged that the humiliation happened and it was wrong. This is fundamental to rejecting the lowering of status that happens during humiliation. The victim of humiliation must say I am not a lesser person who it is acceptable to dominate, violate, and hurt. It was wrong to treat me like that because I am deserving of dignity and human rights like everyone else is. I am a member of the collective and a sovereign person. You are not entitled to treat me this way. While it may be impossible to convince the one who enacted the humiliation of these truths, it is both possible and necessary for the collective to hear these truths and join the survivor in restoring her dignity through denouncing the act of humiliation as unjust. Healing from humiliation is not a personal matter, it is a political and collective matter, because humiliation is not a personal experience, it is a political and collective experience. Humiliation results from an act of domination which lowers someone’s status in the eyes of the collective, therefore healing from humiliation requires that the domination be confronted and the lowering be corrected.
So much of my life has been shaped through the experience of humiliation. So many of the sticky aspects of my complex trauma are the results of humiliation specifically. I learned, through repeated humiliations, that people aren’t trust worthy and vulnerability is way too risky. I learned that learning new things and making mistakes must happen in private. I learned that need and desire are themselves humiliating. These are some of the lessons that are the hardest to relinquish despite all my hard work in recovery, because I am terrified of being humiliated again. (I won’t even get into, in this essay, how profoundly damaging being cancelled (publicly, ritually, and collectively humiliated) was for me as someone with intense humiliation trauma from child sexual abuse.) I carry with me the chronic simmering anger at having been humiliated, and the overwhelming helplessness of having been unable to protect myself from humiliation. I understand now that I have to look at my trauma, and my healing, through the lens of humiliation, and I must work to reclaim my dignity and to confront the humiliation of incest and of child abuse as the injustices that they are.
