Monday, January 17, 2005
It's a shame
Listened to a great interview with Tom Wolfe yesterday on CBC's Writers & Co.. They (he and Eleanor Wachtel) got into a discussion of humiliation, one of the most common and potentially formative and destructive human experiences. This led me to muse on my own life and on what I am trying to impart to my children. I have been humiliated in ways small and large very many times in my life, and it's excruciating. But I feel that I have reached a point where I have enough self-knowledge and sense of humour to get over (mildly) humiliating things fairly easily. The bigger humiliations, though, I don't know about.
Before he met me, my hubby's longtime live-in girlfriend left him for his friend. When we talked about that experience he told me that the overwhelming emotion he felt about it was shame. I thought this was strange; after all, they had done him wrong, why whould he feel ashamed? But I think I understand now what he meant. It's humiliating to be left, betrayed; it confirms all of your darkest thoughts about yourself, or seems to, and you know that part of it is your fault as well. You replay and reimagine all the things you could have done differently.
But ultimately, it becomes part of the past, and in retrospect even the most painful humiliations don't matter much except as learning experiences -- hopefully.
My daughter is getting to the age where kids try to hurt and humiliate one another every day. It's fucking hard to be in Grade 2. I tell her that bad things happen to everyone, and that knowing who you are and choosing the positive response is the only way to keep your dignity when it seems that everyone is against you. And talking about it -- talking about it makes it seem so much smaller and more manageable. Someday the feeling will just be a memory, and the kids who hurt you won't even be that.
As much as I hate humiliation, I would gladly take it on for her, so that she wouldn't have to go through it.
Listened to a great interview with Tom Wolfe yesterday on CBC's Writers & Co.. They (he and Eleanor Wachtel) got into a discussion of humiliation, one of the most common and potentially formative and destructive human experiences. This led me to muse on my own life and on what I am trying to impart to my children. I have been humiliated in ways small and large very many times in my life, and it's excruciating. But I feel that I have reached a point where I have enough self-knowledge and sense of humour to get over (mildly) humiliating things fairly easily. The bigger humiliations, though, I don't know about.
Before he met me, my hubby's longtime live-in girlfriend left him for his friend. When we talked about that experience he told me that the overwhelming emotion he felt about it was shame. I thought this was strange; after all, they had done him wrong, why whould he feel ashamed? But I think I understand now what he meant. It's humiliating to be left, betrayed; it confirms all of your darkest thoughts about yourself, or seems to, and you know that part of it is your fault as well. You replay and reimagine all the things you could have done differently.
But ultimately, it becomes part of the past, and in retrospect even the most painful humiliations don't matter much except as learning experiences -- hopefully.
My daughter is getting to the age where kids try to hurt and humiliate one another every day. It's fucking hard to be in Grade 2. I tell her that bad things happen to everyone, and that knowing who you are and choosing the positive response is the only way to keep your dignity when it seems that everyone is against you. And talking about it -- talking about it makes it seem so much smaller and more manageable. Someday the feeling will just be a memory, and the kids who hurt you won't even be that.
As much as I hate humiliation, I would gladly take it on for her, so that she wouldn't have to go through it.
# posted by becca : 8:34 AM
