The Problem with Salvation by Humiliation

How my foundation became my cage, and what happened next

Humiliation taught me to value humility, but shame can’t carry a life. The sustainable foundation is trust given and received - being seen fully and loved anyway.

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At some time in my past I began to experience humiliating error as the baseline state of my life.

My youthful experience was the exact opposite of this state. To me, back then, my assertions surpassed the wisdom and insight of everyone else alive and everyone else who ever existed. Human history was one big blur of worthless ignorance. The only good things in the past were those that directly led to my particular existence and my particular beliefs. All good things in the future would owe their goodness to me, seeing my genius as the only inflection point worthy of study. History began and ended with the time that I called mine.

To put it mildly, I’m grateful to have survived this era of my life. Such a desperately brittle self-image set me up for profoundly painful shocks as my “I have to be god or I’m worthless” standards came into contact with reality. I did not handle these shocks well. I did not take them as learning experiences. Instead of reflecting on my sorry state I saw these shocks as failures of the world, failures of others to recognize my necessity and my destiny. And I drank to deal with how all of this felt.

At some point these shocks built to a point of critical accumulation, and I collapsed. The compass spun around to point in the opposite direction. I saw, all at once, that my attachment to an error-free self-image had actually permitted a great deal of error to accumulate. What I had thought to be power was merely denial. I found myself with no idea how to live, or even how to learn how to live. My own powers had failed me, doubly - not only did I fail to learn, I failed to even recognize that I needed to learn in the first place.

The Gift of Humility, the Trap of Humiliation

So, I began life anew with a very different self-image. I made a commitment to stop drinking, and to reorient myself towards a sober life. Instead of approaching the human experience with the attitude that I already knew everything and that everyone who differed from me was stupid and corrupt, I approached life with the understanding that I knew nothing and that I had to humbly ask for help from those with a better grasp on being human than me.

This humility, in another irony, brought me the success that my arrogance never did. I acquired useful skills, approaching shared work with a curiosity regarding the needs of others. I began to honor my commitments, rather than surrendering to every passing impulse.

I can measure this transformation in concrete terms. I have gone from someone who couldn’t be trusted to check the mail without getting loaded to someone who can be trusted to spend the rest of their life keeping every promise they make to someone. The shift from chaotic unreliability to profound trustworthiness happened through the accumulation of humble actions, day after day, for almost ten years now.

What complicates this is a certain stuckness, a new sort of stuckness than the one I knew before. I am grateful for being able to acquire such virtues as humility, curiosity, self-discipline, etc., and I am grateful for the patient support of everyone who helped me develop them. Where I have gotten stuck has been the fact that, for me, humiliation had to be the foundation for these virtues, the access that I have to all of the above. It has been difficult for me, now, to develop a relationship with myself that does not begin from that humiliated place.

The Prison of Self-Suppression

I am an individual human with individual needs, particular preferences, a self to express. The shock of humiliation led me to become someone who can regard my own needs and preferences and individuated self as sources of chaos and isolation.

This humiliated attitude has not made those needs and preferences and self go away, obviously. Nor has it abolished the pain and torment that led to that humiliation in the first place. Where before I existed in an oblivious state of self-worship, generating chaos and pain in the lives of those I interacted with, the new pull is to exist in a miserable state of self-suppression. The pain of self-discipline is more morally bearable than the pain of chaos, and more predictable. I know what one more miserable day of self-suppression looks like, and I know that I can survive.

There’s truth in this attraction, but it’s incomplete. The very humiliation that led me to appreciate the virtues of curiosity, integrity, resilience, and self-discipline also led me to have a half-committed relationship with them. Founding virtue on humiliation may have brought me good things, but it also made it such that every good thing also reminds me of myself at my worst.

The Parts That Need Witnessing

This certainly isn’t the vision of recovery that anybody offered to me. Recovery offers a profoundly simple principle: Those parts of me that I most want to hide are the parts of me that people most want to see. I learned that I need love the most where I feel like I deserve it the least.

There are still parts of me that are impulsive, parts of me that are self-centered, parts of me that are cruel. With a good chunk of recovery time, I’m not “cured” of these impulses. What has changed is not their existence but what I do with them, and crucially, who gets to see them.

Out in the world, I am profoundly concerned with being a good citizen. If I feel angry, frustrated, impulsive, whatever - I keep a lid on it and do what I need to do to keep the world moving and make it a better place. This isn’t self-suppression in the miserable sense anymore. It’s context-appropriate discipline, discipline that serves love rather than fear.

But I’ve also found spaces - intimate spaces, witnessed spaces - where those parts don’t need to be suppressed at all. Where not only is it okay for me to acknowledge those parts, but where someone finds them beautiful, worthy of love no matter what, all because they love me and even those “difficult” parts are mine.

The Foundation Renewed

Miserable self-suppression is not what life calls for, and I think I knew that even from the moment I first felt it. But still - that shock, that categorical leap of realizing that not only was I capable of error but that my presumption of perfection had left me soaked in error, has never quite left me.

My understandable impulse afterwards was to devote myself to preventing any kind of shock like that from happening again. This then leads to the question - does that new state leave me vulnerable to a comparable, inverted shock? Will I realize that my attitude towards myself has deprived me of the very thing I have sought to create with that attitude?

The answer, as I see it, is that the foundation needs to shift. What matters is the good things - curiosity, humility, discipline, trust. Even if humiliation led me to value those good things, humiliation isn’t a necessary foundation for that appreciation.

The real foundation is trust, given and received. It’s love, especially where I feel I deserve it least. It’s the profound experience of being seen exactly as I am - arrogant past and disciplined present and cruel impulses and generous actions - and being accepted, being wanted, being trusted with another person’s future.

I couldn’t have found this alone. I am who I am because of who I belong to, because of who belongs to me. The integration I was seeking wasn’t waiting inside myself to be discovered through pure introspection. It was forged in relationship, in community, in the risky act of letting other people see me fully.

Rather than wait for some new shock to shake me out of my miserably-complacent stability, I want to take some ownership of this counter-humiliation and see what happens. Yes I can err, yes I have a lot to learn from the wisdom of others, yes I can never claim categorical superiority over anyone.

And yes, I get to be proud of the self that I am, the self that sought to improve itself when it finally saw that it could be better. I get to be proud precisely because that pride doesn’t stand alone anymore, brittle and defensive like my arrogance once was. It’s held in relationship, witnessed, trusted. It’s a pride that can acknowledge the parts of me I’m not proud of, because even those parts have a place now, a context, a witness who loves them.

The journey from humiliation to integration isn’t a solo trek. It’s a path walked with others, stumbling and steady by turns, learning that being seen is more powerful than being perfect ever could be.