Overcoming Humiliation: How to Stop Hiding and Start Becoming Real

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Humiliation is One of the Most Difficult Things to Overcome but It’s Also an Opportunity to Grow REAL

There are few things more difficult for a human being to overcome than humiliation because it touches us in some of our deepest, darkest places:

Pain can be endured, failure can be learned from, and even rejection can eventually be accepted but humiliation has an especially brutal quality because it seems to attack not just what we might have done but also who we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts.

There are all kinds of ways that we can be humiliated:

Perhaps someone laughs at us in front of other people or we make a mistake that exposes something we desperately wanted to hide from the world.
Maybe we’re rejected publicly or somebody somehow reveals something about us or claims to know something that we hoped nobody would ever discover.
Maybe we lose our temper and suddenly realise that everyone has seen a side of us that we normally keep hidden.

Whatever the particular flavour of humiliation that we taste, it always leads us to a place where something inside us freezes up and we find ourselves standing alone and powerless in front of a world we feel disconnected from.

Sometimes the incident itself might only lasts thirty seconds but the humiliation lasts thirty years because humiliation touches something much deeper than just mere embarrassment – it also touches on and exposes our shame to the world.

This article is about facing it all head-on so that you can evolve beyond whatever your past humiliation has revealed to you so that you can grow REAL instead.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Embracing your own darkness allows you to overcome humiliation because you also understand the darkness of other people.

Overcoming Humiliation: What We Cover in This Article

Humiliation is One of the Most Difficult Things to Overcome but It's Also an Opportunity to Grow REAL
The Anatomy of Humiliation
The Original Fig Leaf
What Gets Hidden by Shame?
When the Mask is Suddenly Torn Off
Humiliation and powerlessness
Humility is the Antidote to Shame and Humiliation
How to Overcome Humiliation & Start Growing REAL
The Final Word: You Can't Be Humiliated If You Stop Hiding

The Anatomy of Humiliation

Humiliation is generally understood as an extremely strong feeling of embarrassment whereas embarrassment itself can be understood as the shame we feel when our inadequacy or guilt is made public (that’s the dictionary definition, at least).

This distinction is important because it shows that we can experience relatively ‘ordinary’ embarrassment when we do something like spill a drink or forget someone’s name but that humiliation goes even deeper because it threatens the self-image we’ve constructed of ourselves and – more importantly in the context of this article – the hidden beliefs about ourselves that hide beneath this image.

If these hidden beliefs are rooted in SHAME which is the fundamental assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am” then humiliation can be particularly devastating because it ends up appearing to confirm all of the fears and doubts that this shame is telling us about ourselves.

When this happens, two things collide at once:

The fear that our secret shame might actually be true (which is the worst thing that a shame-driven person can imagine).
The powerlessness of having our supposed ‘inadequacy’ exposed before we’re ready for it (which causes us to ‘freeze’ up which ends up storing the associated trauma of powerlessness in our body).

Of course, most of us are never really “ready” to have our secret and hidden shame revealed to the world (which is totally normal) because we all have things that we believe – consciously or unconsciously – make us less valuable than other people in the world around us:

Perhaps we think we’re unattractive, weak, boring, unintelligent, unsuccessful, emotionally unstable, unsuccessful with women, unsuccessful with money, or simply somehow ‘defective’ in whatever other way you can imagine – to be honest, the specifics vary enormously but what’s important is the underlying structure which is always the same:

“I fear that I’m not good enough as I am (and I’m terrified of other people finding this out and confirming that it’s actually true).“

This is ultimately what lies at the heart of shame and it’s one of the oldest human fears there is.

The Original Fig Leaf

There’s a potent psychological image that helps us to understand all of this that appears in the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis.

It goes like this:

After eating from the tree of knowledge of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (duality), Adam and Eve become aware of their state of being “naked and ashamed” – exposed to the truth before they’re ‘ready’ for it – and so they hide themselves and their shame by using fig leaves to cover themselves.

We don’t have to look at this as a ‘religious’ thing to be able to see that the metaphor is a really powerful one for the human relationship with shame and humiliation:

Basically, Adam and Eve became ashamed of themselves and their immediate reaction was to find a way to hide which is pretty much what all human beings have had a tendency to do throughout all of human history.

The usual way that we go about this is that we discover something about ourselves that we judge to be ‘unacceptable’ and then we construct some kind of covering so that we can hide whatever it is from ourselves and the world.

This ‘covering’ is just a metaphorical fig leaf and it can be pretty much anything:

The fig leaf might be your career.
It might be your relationship.
Money.
Physical strength or size.
Your intellect.
Social status.
Your reputation.
Your ability to be more ‘spiritual’ than everybody else.
Your ego/identity as a whole.
Etc. etc. etc. (literally anything can be a ‘fig leaf’, pretty much).

None of these things are necessarily ‘bad’ – in fact, many of them are very ‘good’ things that only start to cause problems for us once we treat them as the ultimate thing that’s going to be a ‘fig leaf’ that saves us from ourselves (when the only ‘thing’ that can actually do that is returning to a foundation of truth which is the opposite of shame itself).

When we start to act like these ‘fig leaves’ can somehow be used to hide from the parts of ourselves that we believe would make us unworthy if anybody saw them then we just end up losing ourselves to the ego:

The ego is the fragmented image we construct of ourselves so that we can perform in the world as though our shame does not exist – in other words, it’s a MASK.

Masks can sometimes be useful because they help us to navigate social situations and perform different roles but when we FORGET that we’re wearing a mask and become IDENTIFIED with it then everything underneath it gets pushed into the shadow self.

This is ‘bad’ news because the shadow self holds the key to returning to wholeness and overcoming shame once and for all.

What Gets Hidden by Shame?

Almost anything can become a source of shame – for example, you could be ashamed of certain qualities of your personality, emotions that you’ve judged and put ‘meaning’ onto instead of just feeling like your anger, sadness, fear or neediness or maybe even ‘positive’ emotions such as excitement, joy, affection because you learned that expressing them made you look weak in some way.

The list is pretty much endless:

You might be ashamed of your body or a particular part of it.
You might be ashamed of how much money you have in the bank.~
You might be ashamed of what you really think about politics, relationships, sex, family, work or society.
You might be ashamed of your past.
You might be ashamed that you don’t actually know what you’re doing (spoiler: nobody really does so don’t worry about it).

The list is inexhaustible because there are as many ways to be humiliated as there are human beings (probably more, in fact, because we all have multiple possible sources of shame).

Either way, this brings us to the heart of the matter which is the core point of this article:

Humiliation is what happens when the fig leaf gets ripped away.

When the Mask is Suddenly Torn Off

Sometimes, we rip our own fig leaf away and inadvertently reveal the ‘truth’ that was hiding underneath it – when we make a mistake, for example, or when we lose our temper, say something stupid, ‘fail’ in some spectacular way, or behave in a way that contradicts the person we have been pretending to be in order to keep the mask on.

Sometimes, life does it for us – like when we lose a job, the relationship ends, the money disappears, we get a chronic illness, or we fail, get rejected, or make a mistake in front of everybody and they get a ‘glimpse’ of who we really are.

In the worst cases, we find ourselves in a situation where someone deliberately tries to tear our fig leaf away in order to distract everybody else from their shame – in these instances, they expose something about us in front of other people by mocking us, revealing something private, or attacking the identity we have spent years constructing to the extent where everybody else ends up questioning its veracity.

Whatever the circumstances, the psychological experience is always pretty much the same which is as follows:

We’re exposed as being real before we have accepted our own realness.

This would be fine if we weren’t still carrying those shame-based beliefs that tell us we need to be perfect, infallible and impressive in order to be worthy.

When we do carry that shame, though, the humiliations just ends up destroying whatever confidence we thought we had because because it reveals that our confidence was never really rooted in truth but was, in fact, rooted in a FIG LEAF.

Humiliation and powerlessness

A humiliating experience can linger with us for way longer than might make ‘sense’ because it’s actually traumatic in that it can make us freeze, feel powerless, and become hyper-aware of both other people’s judgement and the fact that there’s nothing we can do about except be paralysed in the face of it all.

This feeling of being frozen and powerless can end up getting ‘stuck’ in our body (because “the body keeps the score”) and so then we can actually become even more sensitive to humiliation as we’re more likely to get triggered by it.

What this essentially leads to is the situation where something happens that resembles our original humiliating incident and suddenly the old feelings return.

Again, it could literally be anything:

Someone laughs at us.
Someone criticises us.
We make a mistake in front of people.
We walk into a room and feel exposed.
Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever it is, we’re suddenly transported back ‘there’ again to those underlying feelings of shame and our own sense of powerlessness without our ‘fig leaves’.

This is where we can take a really important lesson from the mechanics coming into play with all this:

The original humiliating incident didn’t create all of your powerlessness – it simply revealed the sense powerlessness and shame that was already there before you were ready to face it.

Understanding this can actually be transformational because it shows you that if you’d already accepted your realness – in particular your imperfections and fallibility – then something or someone exposing the truth about you would probably still be uncomfortable but wouldn’t destroy your identity and be experienced in your nervous system as actual physical danger.

Instead of fearing the revelation of whatever was being exposed and judging it as being ‘bad’ then you would instead be able to accept it as just being REAL.

The bottom line is that humiliation only becomes catastrophic when we believe that whatever has been ‘exposed’ somehow ‘proves’ that we’re whatever our shame has told us we must be instead of what we actually are.

Humility is the Antidote to Shame and Humiliation

The opposite of humiliation isn’t to overinflate ourselves with pride – it’s HUMILITY:

Humility isn’t about thinking that you’re worthless or making yourself smaller and letting people walk all over you (that’s shame again) – it’s about learning to accept your limits, imperfections and fallibility without turning them into evidence that you’re fundamentally inadequate or flawed in someway.

In other words:

Humility is accepting the truth that you can be imperfect without being worthless.

This kind of humility brings the freedom of your own realness because when you no longer need to maintain the illusion of perfection then there’s nothing left to protect and so you can give up performance mode and shift into actually being present within yourself and your life.

This doesn’t mean you stop caring about your behaviour and just do whatever you feel like doing because you’re so present – it just means that you can start showing up in a way that’s aligned with REALITY:

It means that you can take responsibility for your mistakes without making your mistakes into your identity, that you can apologise for the things you’ve done ‘wrong’ with without collapsing into shame, that you keep learning and evolving without needing to defend yourself, and that you can be criticised without automatically assuming that the criticism defines you or your worth as a human being.

In other words, humility allows you to finally be ‘seen’ without having a fig leaf to hide behind.

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How to Overcome Humiliation & Start Growing REAL

The way out of humiliation isn’t to keep running away from the feeling but to turn towards it so that you can start to see it in the light of truth (instead of the shadows of your own fears about yourself and life).

The process of Awareness, Acceptance and Action can helps us to make this practical:

1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)

A good place to begin is by raising awareness about the ‘mask’ that was threatened by your humiliating experience (or the fig leaf that was helping you to stay in hiding).

Start by asking yourself this simple question:

“What exactly was I afraid people would see about me?”

Don’t just give yourself a surface level answer but try to dig as deep as you can without poking around at too many old wounds:

For example, if you were embarrassed about making a mistake then ask what the mistake supposedly proves about you.

Maybe it means that you’re “incompetent” – go a little deeper and ask yourself what’s so bad about this:

People won’t respect me.

Go deeper and explore what this might mean:

I’ll be worthless.

Keep going until you find the underlying judgement of yourself and the thing that you’re most afraid of facing.

When you can’t go any deeper then ask yourself another simple question:

“Where did I learn this judgement of myself?“

What you’re ultimately looking for is all of the ‘scaffolding’ that keeps your ego in place in its current form – all of the beliefs, expectations, and conditions that taught you what you supposedly had to be in order to deserve acceptance.

The goal isn’t to blame your past or the people in it but to see the machinery that’s driving you so you don’t have to be controlled by it and can start making real choices instead.

2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)

The next part of this process is to train yourself to stop fighting the ‘parts’ of yourself that you have been trying to hide behind your ego and all of the ‘fig leaves’ that help keep it in place:

If you’re ashamed of being afraid then allow yourself to acknowledge your fear.
If you’re ashamed of needing people then acknowledge that this is just a basic human need that isn’t going anywhere.
If you’re ashamed of your body then stop making war against it.
If you’re ashamed of having failed then admit that you failed, learn whatever lesson it brings, and move forward.
If you behaved badly then acknowledge that too, learn, and level up.

Acceptance doesn’t mean saying that everything you’ve ever done is ‘good’ but it does allow reality to be reality so that you can actually build whatever comes next on a lasting foundation.

This is where the idea that “you have to feel it to heal it” becomes more than a cliché and something that can actually help you to let go of whatever you’re holding onto that humiliates you so that you can start building flow and being real instead:

The only reason that humiliation lingers is because you’re still afraid to feel through the original feelings of powerlessness that you picked up way back when – what you need to do, then, is to finally feel them so that you can either integrate or release them.

Here’s a simple process that will allow you to do this:

Sit somewhere quiet, get into your breath, and allow your memories of whatever humiliating thing happened to come up to the surface.
Pay particular attention to the physiological sensations in your body and see if you can just feel them without any stories attached to them (i.e. just as physical sensations in the body).
Let the embarrassment, fear, anger and sadness move through you without immediately creating another story about what they ‘mean’.

What you’re most likely to discover by doing this is whatever physiological sensation you work on feeling is going to be survivable (because it’s just emotional discomfort which we can all handle – not actual physical danger).

The only thing that makes this sensation unbearable and seem like a ‘threat’ instead of something you can handle safely is the stories that you’ve attached to it when you’re not paying attention (for example, “this proves that I am inadequate” etc.).

When you stop adding the story and allowing your ego to feed into it to sustain itself, then the emotional charge can begin to dissolve and you’ll see the truth which is that you were never inherently inadequate but that you have been acting according to learned judgement instead of actual acceptance.

3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

The final step is learning to act from your power which means to deliberately start doing things without hiding behind your old ‘fig leaves’:

Speak honestly and in a real way.
Admit when you don’t know something.
Let people see your uncertainty and doubt.
Apologise when you’re ‘wrong’ or not acting in alignment with your values and integrity.
Try things you might ‘fail’ at and learn to be outcome-independent.
Allow yourself to be imperfect in public.

The goal isn’t to manufacture situations where you’ll humiliate yourself but to stop organising your entire life around preventing it having your fear about yourself and life being triggered (especially when most fear is just F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”, anyway).

Every time you discover that you can survive being seen as imperfect, you teach your nervous system something REAL which is that you don’t need to hide to maintain the illusion of ‘safety’.

This allows you to trust yourself and life more so that you can finally start to live your REAL life.

The way to overcome humiliation is to experience whatever emotional discomfort comes with it and to not judge yourself for being human.

The Final Word: You Can’t Be Humiliated If You Stop Hiding

The cruel irony of all this is that the more you desperately try to prevent humiliation, the more vulnerable you become to it because your entire sense of worth becomes dependent upon maintaining the mask of ego.

The alternative is to step up and integrate the shadow, accept your realness, and start to see the ‘threats’ in a much more real way which means that someone can expose your weaknesses because you already know about them, somebody can point out that you failed because you already know and embrace it, and somebody else can make the grand discovery that you aren’t perfect because it’s already old news to you.

In other words, there’s no devastating revelation left to blow your life up because you’re no longer relying on fig leaves to outsource your sense of security in the world.

This is probably the deepest lesson humiliation has to teach us about growing real:

The thing(s) that you’re most afraid of people discovering about you are simply be the ‘parts’ of yourself that you haven’t yet learned to accept.

When you accept reality, you always take your power back – not because you become invulnerable but because you stop requiring the world to protect you from the truth.

That’s humility and it’s the path to realness.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to go deeper and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start ‘seeing’ yourself and building flow.

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