The old saying Quae nocent docent, which is Latin for “things that hurt, teach,” applies to the description of humiliation. Indeed, quite often after the "lessons of fate" people become stronger, gaining life experience and wisdom.
Words and actions aimed at making a person feel inferior, as well as experienced fear and insecurity, are called demeaning. Humiliation, according to psychologists, can be a serious blow to a person's personality, as it suffers from his self-esteem. It happens that a person is humiliated in order to deprive him of the respect of others. And sometimes, humiliating, they try to increase their self-esteem in this way - this indicates that the tyrant himself has been offended and humiliated more than once in the past, and now he is not able to achieve confidence in another way, gaining it only during bullying others.
Humiliation: fear and pain
Almost anyone can find themselves in circumstances that humiliate human dignity: when faced with hooligans on the street, during conflicts in the family or at work, and with many other options. Both words and actions can humiliate. If they leave no trace for one self-confident person, then they can morally crush and break another. Verbal humiliation, as a rule, is based on the failure of a person in a particular area. For men, for example, hints that he is not able to provide for his family or is a "rag" can be humiliating, and for women - doubts about their attractiveness or ability to be a good housewife and mother.
Humiliation is especially acute in adolescence, when the emotional background is still unstable, and a small life experience and a desire to assert itself often do not adequately assess what is happening. When children are humiliated (unfortunately, many parents are guilty of this), the consequences can be very distant and unfavorable. In the first years of life, when the basic principles of perception of the surrounding world are just forming in a child, he risks not only getting sick with a neurosis, but getting wrong ideas about his own strengths and capabilities. Humiliation can not only lead to neurosis, but also disrupt the child's ability to adequately assess himself and his actions, developing self-esteem and forming self-esteem. Subsequently, children who experienced humiliation in the family in their early years can repeat a similar model of behavior, "acting out" on their loved ones and descendants.
Many people who have experienced serious humiliation, or have experienced it for a long time, can experience serious problems. Often, on an unconscious level, they try in any way to avoid repeating this in the future, starting to avoid communication and becoming asocial. They are reinsured and often themselves do not understand what they expect humiliation from others. In such cases, a person also runs the risk of becoming angry and cruel, compensating for his fears by humiliating others.
How to survive humiliation and become stronger
If an incident related to humiliation haunts a person, affecting his self-esteem, and you can't cope with the situation on your own, you should seek help from psychologists. Sometimes the consequences of the experience of humiliation can be so serious that a person runs the risk of simply “breaking down”, without eventually gaining neither strength nor wisdom. Some experts recommend various ways to "erase" an unpleasant incident from memory, visually imagining how the picture is washed off by water, or it simply melts, dissolving in water. You can imagine and concentrate on how the image on paper burns up or break the screen on which the experience is "shown" with a huge hammer - you just need to choose the most suitable one from a variety of options.
Having got rid of annoying memories that return a person to a state of humiliation, it is necessary to simultaneously work on self-esteem - try to remember the most successful and positive periods in life, "absorbing" the state of satisfaction, pride in oneself and confidence. It is important to identify all the factors and "clues" in the past that do not make you feel confident, and consistently eliminate them.
