Dealing with humiliation - and how it's different from embarrassment

Continuing on from the previous post about guilt vs shame, I wanted to write a bit about humiliation and embarrassment, other feelings which can get confused for shame. Most of us are experienced at dealing with humiliation... The way you feel when a friend notices your fly is unzipped… Or the way you felt when you said something wrong in front of the whole classroom, and everybody laughed loudly at you.

These are examples of classic situations which can trigger emotions. Guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and shame... We typically mix up these words as a catch-all, but the truth is they describe very different feelings. Brene Brown talks about these feelings in her book I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).

Embarrassment can be healthy, and is generally the least harmful of the emotions discussed above. Think about the scenario of walking out with your zipper down, then laughing along with your best friend as they point it out (like “Oh my goodness, whoooooops hahaha”). We have all had these situations and they are uncomfortable. The difference is that if we let ourselves feel safe with the other person, and they are reasonably kind about the situation, the feeling is typically short lived, and can include a funny side. We are able to recognise it as a normal emotion and something that we all go through. Embarrassment links more closely to guilt; Because we feel less threatened about our mistake when we feel genuine embarrassment, we are more likely to then feel open and curious about how it happened, and how to improve in future, leading to growth like genuine guilt can do (e.g. starting a habit to always double-check our clothes before leaving the bathroom).

Humiliation is like the nasty version of embarrassment, when we perceive that someone else has made an unjustified attack on us socially. Humiliation might include getting bullied in school, put down by a parent, or in some way attacked in front of others. Humiliation is a problem because it can genuinely damage the person being humiliated, and is related to toxic shame. Consider a parent who tells their child “you’re useless” in front of others when the child forgot to do something. Rather than focusing on bad behaviour, the parent attacks the child’s character, making it personal. This language can become so ingrained in the child that they start to take on the message ‘I am a bad kid’ instead of ‘How can I remember to do my chores?’. This point when the child comes to believe the comment is when they move from humiliation to shame.

We can practice getting better at experiencing some challenging situations through the lens of embarrassment and guilt (leading to connection and growth), rather than always going with humiliation and shame (which lead to suffering). Have you ever had that experience when you met someone new, figured you’d remember their name, then a week later you called them the wrong name in front of others? The default response might be to believe that everyone present is thinking you’re an idiot, and the situation as further proof that you’re no good as a person. But it’s worth working to interpret the situation with embarrassment, remembering that everybody has forgotten a person’s name at least once, and then lean into guilt- realising that our name-remembering practices aren’t consistent with who we want to be, and deciding to start writing down names and brief descriptions for the people we meet, and to check the list once a week or so. This is using the discomfort as fuel to commit to better practices in future, and is helpful for aiming to grow into the best version of ourselves.

Which situations have you been experiencing as humiliation and shame, which you could start practicing to experience as embarrassment and guilt instead? Feel free to contact me if this article struck a chord with you, or if you'd like to work together on managing the times when you've felt humiliated.