How to Handle Humiliation Like a CHAMP
If you’re anything like me, you probably handle humiliation by fleeing the scene, crawling into bed under the cover of darkness, and not showing your face in public for the next three to five years. And that’s normal! Well, okay, not normal, but you’re hardly the first person to suffer some sort of embarrassment and think, “TAKE ME, DEATH. I’M READY.”
As someone who humiliates herself roughly six times every day before 10 AM, I’m here to walk you through the process of handling humiliation without wondering if there’s a place in hell for people like you, because there’s not and you’re going to be fine. Let’s do this.
Accept that you’re going to embarrass yourself, in some form or fashion, EVENTUALLY.
I’ve embarrassed myself once or twice in my time, which is to say I’ve got a whole cache of embarrassing stories that my scumbag brain likes to save for conversational lulls on first dates. But humiliation (much like death, or looking at Chris Evans’ glistening abs and crying) is just a part of life. There are socially acceptable ways to behave in public, like when you’re eating corndogs at a theme park. When we deviate from those behaviors and commit a faux pas, like when you’re vomiting corndogs on screaming children mid-rollercoaster, we tend to get embarrassed. Our cheeks flush, our heart races, and we deduce that we are no longer welcome in polite society. It’s just something that happens, and it happens to all of us. It’s happened to Chris Evans, glistening abs be damned.
Realize that nobody is thinking about the humiliation nearly as much as you are.
We are all, essentially, narcissistic trash goblins drowning in our own self-awareness. I don’t think this notion really hit home for me until I saw a friend of mine flub a conversation with her co-worker. She and I laughed it off when the co-worker left, but fifteen minutes later she said, still visibly embarrassed, “God, I can’t believe I said that!” It took me a hot second, awash as I was in my own magnificent ego, before I realized what she meant. I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner that night, despite the fact that we were literally in the process of eating lunch; her embarrassment could not have been further from my mind. Your moment of personal mortification may seem huge and significant and like the moon landing of our time. But rest assured—it was merely a blip on everyone else’s radar.
Give yourself the same amount of slack you’d give somebody else.
When you see someone else commit a heinous social blunder, do you store the memory in your brain and hold it against them forever? Of course you don’t. If I saw someone erupt with corndog vomit at a theme park, and another person was still giving them a hard time about it five years later, I’d think that person was a total bully who needed to be barfed on immediately.
Science says humiliation can actually make people like you more.
Provided you didn’t accidentally set someone’s cat on fire or drop a baby into a bucketful of sharks, there’s a phenomenon in social psychology called the Pratfall Effect. It states that when competent people screw up, it actually makes them more likable and attractive. I’ve decided to say that the corndog thing was strategic rather than horrifying; I was trying to be more attractive.
Laugh it off, or at least acknowledge it.
Sometimes you can find humor in humiliation, but sometimes you haven’t yet lived far enough beyond the incident to laugh about it. That’s okay. Just acknowledging the thing—”Well, that was embarrassing”—is cathartic and helps relieve a little bit of the discomfort.
HUMILIATION IS UNIVERSAL. I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH.
Allow me to reiterate: everyone from Jennifer Lawrence (Oscars tumble) to President Obama (messed up the Oath of Office, TWICE) has been embarrassed. Nobody is tallying up the amount of minor to major transgressions you commit over the course of your lifetime. There will be a voice in your brain saying, “Remember that time you did this horrible, awful thing in front of everybody? Yikes. It would really suck if we re-lived that thing right now and EXAGGERATED EVERY SINGLE DETAIL.” Tell that voice to shut the hell up; literally think or say the words “It’s okay to make mistakes,” then repeat it, because this goes a long way in rewiring your anxious brain’s auto-negativity response. On the surface, you may recognize that dwelling on humiliation is silly, but that doesn’t stop your brain from chanting, “BE PERFECT OR DIE! BE PERFECT OR DIE!” over and over again. Look, there’s no shame in making mistakes, no matter how dumb and humiliating. And you are not lesser for having made them.
The takeaway here? You’re allowed to mess up. You’re allowed to be embarrassed. You’re allowed to barf on a bunch of schoolchildren on their field trip to the theme park. Like, I wouldn’t recommend it or anything, but you’re allowed to, I guess. No one can stop you, really.
Have you ever embarrassed yourself? HAHA, RHETORICAL QUESTION. How did you handle it? Did you employ Chelsea Dagger’s notorious BARF acronym? How much sobbing was there?
