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Extracted from “On Apology” by Aaron Lazare: a solid source to learn about people and how things like apologies, if done right, along with things like “grudges” all help us understand others leading toward a better ability and skill set to avoid and deescalate things before they become, dangerous. In addition, it helps in every day encounters with others.
Humiliation (Kutsujoku [屈辱]), anyone who has experienced it can easily identify the components of the reaction as follows:
- Immediately following the offense, one feels “stunned or blindsided” for several minutes.
- Thoughts about the event seem to multiply, intensify, and persist leaving one annoyed and perplexed.
- One often experiences a sense of powerlessness,
- a feeling that there is little or nothing one can do to change things.
- Anger follows, often, the humiliation offense - humiliating rage - is intense and distressing.
- behaviors motivated by the rage like sending a nasty email, an outburst of anger, terminating a relationship, threatening psychological and/or physical harm that will seem rational and appropriate… at the time, while as time passes and we calm down that irrational behavior and feeling becomes evident to us.
Grudges are a form of residual or dormant anger, a combination of resentment and memory that continues for a long time after the offense occurred and forgotten. It takes very little to return to that residual anger and memory into the full blown rage that ensued the original event.
Grudges are common in every day life and it is possible to find long-standing grudges in most extended families, groups and social constructs. It may appear to an outsider as trivial.
War, according to one historian, “has three causes, i.e., honor, fear, and interest.” - Donald Kagan. We as a species tend to understand honor to mean, “deference, esteem, just due, regard, respect, and/or prestige.” Assaults on honor are understood and believed to be humiliations. The single most understood effect of humiliation is conflict and violence.
It is very hard to detect another humiliation because it can be humiliating to acknowledge or express or project one’s humiliation. We humans do NOT or are RELUCTANT to admit a loss of standing, or powerlessness, at the hands of others. We tend to want to appear strong and unaffected by the offense, while seething with anger and just waiting for an opportunity to get even.
It is critical to avoidance and deescalation efforts to be aware of situations that can cause other to feel humiliated so the list that follows is a guide to that understanding:
- Are you overlooking or taking another for granted?
- Are you rejecting them?
- Are you denying others of social amenities?
- Are you manipulating or treating others like an object?
- Are you treating others unfairly?
- Are you verbally abusing others?
- Are you causing others to feel a loss of status or role?
- Are you betraying them?
- Are you falsely accusing them?
- Are you causing them to feel psychologically or physically threatened?
- Are you physically or sexually abusing them?
- Are you denigrating their beliefs or affiliations?
- Are you violating their boundaries or are you violating their privacy?
- Are you excluding them from the group?
Use this list to help understand human nature and then avoid being an asshole, i.e., avoid humiliating others then consider an appropriate response, words or actions or both, such as responding with an appropriate apology.
For reference and sources and professionals go here: Bibliography (Click the link)
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