On 2005-03-01 08:59:00, Perrigaud wrote:
"Yes, but at the same time the people have a choice to disclose what they want to or what they don't. Confrontation? No, challenged but not forced is the correct description. Humiliation? No, people allow themselves to feel that way. Shame and guilt is also a choice. The fact that people blame others is also an easy way out. "They made me talk about myself." What? No gun was held to their head. It's a choice. If they weren't ready then they should've kept their mouth shut.
Shame and guilt are strong feelings. Sometimes it's so severe that the slightest mention of an event, person, place or thing can set them off. [ This Message was edited by: Perrigaud on 2005-03-01 09:01 ]"
Perri, if you directly speak to someone and either criticize their behavior specifically, or through "I experience" passive-aggressive bullshit, that is a confrontation. For example, in saying this, I am confronting you right now.
Humiliation is *not* just something you do or don't choose to feel. When some person or group treat another person in a way that is not respectful of that person's human dignity: such as watching that person dress or undress or shower or use the bathroom (even for suicide watch); such as watching the person cry without allowing them to leave the room and go to the bathroom or somewhere else non-punitive; such as depriving the person of their own clothes that are different and an individual expression of personality; such as defining small things as infractions against a long list of rules and assigning draconian punishments to them---all these things are humiliating. Some of them may sometimes be necessary, but anything that deprives a person of fundamental physical liberty, freedom of association, or free expression, deprives that person of their human dignity and is humiliating. Anything that forces someone to experience, in public, invidious comparison with others or public punishment or public "dressing down" is humiliating.
"Humiliate" is a verb that takes a subject, and a person or people as an object, and represents actions of the subject performed on the object.
Your believing this is not so is evidence of damage you've taken by having your mind twisted by others to the point that you excuse the actions of a person who humiliates someone else by embracing a definition that inherently blames the victim.
When a teacher calls a student's question "stupid" in front of the class, she has humiliated that student. Any deliberate snub or public criticism is a humiliation. A key component of humiliation is that it is inflicted by a person who has some sort of power in their relationship to the person humiliated, and that that power is used to somehow degrade or embarrass the victim in front of one or more witnesses. Sometimes the only witness is the person exerting dominance over the person being forced/coerced/required/pressured/induced to submit.
We all get humiliated and embarrassed occasionally. It's part of human interaction that you can never completely avoid. Some people may develop a thick enough skin that they can sometimes resist the emotional impact when someone tries to humiliate them by rejecting that person's attempt to exert dominance over them, but it's the attempt to exert dominance in a way that emphasizes the relative lack of value or lack of power of the person dominated that is the essence of humiliation.
Shame and guilt are *not* a choice. Feelings are natural responses to our interactions with others. Resistance or suppression or redirection of those natural responses is a learned skill. The only people capable of never feeling guilt and shame are sociopaths. That's one of the key symptoms that defines sociopaths.
While if I have the skill I can *choose* to reject my initial assessment of guilt or shame in response to a situation, or to reject other people's expressed perceptions that I am guilty of or shamed by something, the normal, natural human response to others believing we are guilty or have behaved shamefully is to have those feelings of guilt or shame induced in us by our human empathy with that person.
A skilled, fully grown adult can frequently independently evaluate whether guilt or shame is a rational response to an interpersonal interaction---whether he or she really has behaved badly or failed in a duty--and can reject guilt or shame if he or she believes the assessment of the other (or initial assessment of self) is inaccurate.
Children cannot do this. This is why child abuse leaves long term scars on the child long after any physical damage has healed. Children blame themselves for any abuse that happens to them *unless* helped to do otherwise by a competent therapist.
Older children, adolescents, and even adults respond to situations in which they are in the complete control of others by blaming themselves (or some other powerless person in the situation with them) for anything bad that happens.
They do this for the same reason children do, and it takes active training and an act of will to refuse the shame and guilt naturally induced by this process. Alpha personalities are also generally better at it than beta personalities.
That is, it takes active training and an act of will unless one is a sociopath--in which case one *cannot* feel shame, guilt, regret, or remorse. One can only pretend to feel these things, and usually the pretense is imperfect.
Your theory of human emotion is wrong.
Whether you came up with it yourself, or you were told it by some other person or people, it's flat wrong.
I mean that in the sense of "wrong" that means "false," not in the sense of "wrong" that means "evil."
People may, with skill, *sometimes* choose to feel something other than those things naturally induced in them by the situation. People may, with damage, feel things in response to the combination of damage and the situation that are different from what people without the damage would feel.
But the mere fact that *sometimes* people can choose to change their emotions *does not* mean that people choose their emotions in the first place.
This is, in set theory, a case where we have examples of some elements of set A that are also elements of set B, but that does NOT imply that the elements of set A are identically equal to the elements of set B.
Just because I can cause the grass to become wet by turning on the sprinkler, or keep it dry on high ground by putting a waterproof tarp up over it, doesn't mean all cases of wet grass are caused by my turning on the sprinkler or all cases of dry grass are caused by tarps. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it's sunny. Given my brown thumb, it is *substantially* more likely that wet grass or dry grass in *my* yard came from the weather. :smile:
Timoclea
