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For five years The Healthy Compulsive Project has been offering information, insight and inspiration for OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality, perfectionism, micro-managers and Type A personality. Anyone who’s ever been known to overwork, overplan, overcontrol or overanalyze is welcome here, where the obsessive-compulsive personality is explored and harnessed to deliver what it was originally meant to deliver. Join psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Gary Trosclair as he delves into the pitfalls and potential of the driven personality with an informative, positive, and often playful approach to this sometimes-vexing character style.
Hello everyone, Gary Trosclair here, psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and author of the Healthy Compulsive Project book, blog and podcast. Nobody likes to be humiliated. But no-one likes to live a life holed up in a fortress either. I’ve known too many people for whom avoiding humiliation, embarrassment or shame is the priority that they wrap their life around. And some people aren’t even aware that they do it. So in this episode I’ll be giving plenty of examples of people who’ve done this, many of them you know. I’ll also give suggestions about how to move past the avoidance so that you aren’t trapped in a small life.
So, join me for Episode 101 of the Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast: 4 Ways Perfectionists and Obsessive-Compulsives Try To Avoid Humiliation
One of the keys to optimizing the obsessive-compulsive personality is understanding what motivates it. There are healthy motivations like productivity, efficiency, and mastery. And there are unhealthy motivations, like trying to prove that we are decent, competent human beings–after all.
A related and more specific unhealthy motivation that can seize people who are obsessive-compulsive and perfectionist is trying to avoid humiliation, embarrassment and shame. This might seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but taken the point of living small, it’s a very limiting life strategy.
For instance:
Tom seriously injured his shoulder by relentlessly practicing his serve for an upcoming tennis match against Shawn the Showoff. He didn’t want to be humiliated again. Turns out he may never play tennis again.
Marissa stayed up all night trying to make her spreadsheet so perfect that Mike the Micro-Manager couldn’t humiliate her in front of the entire team. She was so exhausted the next day she cancelled the date she had been really looking forward to because she feared she would look death warmed over. Meanwhile, the date-that-was-not-to-be moved on and found someone else.
Even though she loved to sing more than anything, Mary refused to go back to choir in sixth grade or ever again. She had peed her pants in the extended dress rehearsal because she was too embarrassed to ask to go the bathroom. The Mean Girl Mob pointed and howled with laughter. Never again.
I’ve been struck by how central a motivation this is for many people. Some of us organize our lives around preventing these experiences. We pledge that no-one will have an excuse to humiliate, embarrass or shame us, and our life gets much smaller, because we limit what allow we ourselves to express or to risk.
We build a small fortress of competence and virtue and spend our energy looking out for possible humiliation. Building the fortress is exhausting and living there is constraining. Our world gets smaller.
All so that we can avoid something that’s actually ephemeral and really isn’t dangerous.
There are reasons that people with perfectionist or obsessive-compulsive personality may be more vulnerable to this. We make things more difficult than they need to be when we overestimate what we need to do to survive or succeed.
Which makes perfect sense since we all know that nothing exceeds like excess.
Contents
Distinguishing Humiliation, Embarrassment, Shame and Narcissism
Hubris, Humility, Humiliation and Putdowns
Humiliation in the Orchestra Pit: Gary Crashes and Burns
Humiliation Is Not An Objective Event
Four Types of Compulsives: Four Ways to Avoid Humiliation
Early Emotionally Wounding Experiences
Leaving the Fortress: Re-Framing and Re-Coding Humiliation
1. Identify Your Fortress: Your Particular Fears and How You Avoid them.
2. Do A Cost Benefit Analysis: Is It Worth Being Locked Inside?
3. Share With Those You Trust.
4. Expose, Gently.
5. Identify Your Values and Pursue Those Whenever You Want to Avoid Humiliation
Discover more from The Healthy Compulsive Project: Help for OCPD, Workaholics, Obsessives, & Type A Personality
Distinguishing Humiliation, Embarrassment, Shame and Narcissism
Much of what I’ll say about humiliation also applies to embarrassment. While humiliation is a more disturbing experience, we may go to similar lengths to protect against embarrassment.
There is also overlap between humiliation and shame. Typically, humiliation is seen as coming from the outside, whereas shame is seen as coming from within ourselves. And we don’t always buy into the humiliation someone may aim at us. It may make us feel more anger than shame. But these distinctions are not so black and white. We have no problem humiliating ourselves and experiencing shame at the hands of others.
Identifying motivation is also one of the key ways we can distinguish narcissism from obsessive-compulsive personality: narcissists aim to prove that they are special and better than everyone else; compulsives just want to make sure they aren’t seen as worse than everyone else so they can avoid humiliation and embarrassment.
But the distinctions are less important than observing how we react to these experiences, whether we let them go, or we allow them to become life-defining and life-limiting. Identifying what you feel and what motivates you is most important.
Hubris, Humility, Humiliation and Putdowns
Humiliation grew out of efforts to ensure humility. Humility isn’t such a bad idea. It protects us from such disasters as starting completely unrealistic startups, auditioning for You’ve Got Talent when you really don’t, and trying to impress others with your knowledge of multi-currency interest rate swaps with embedded options when you can’t even balance your own checkbook.
But you don’t need to humiliate someone to make them humble and keep them out of trouble. Some people do think it’s necessary, and they don’t hold back because they think putdowns are the Right Thing To Do. Afraid that people are getting too uppity, they feel that they have the responsibility to bring them back down to earth and humble before God. It was the antidote to the dreaded hubris, excessive pride and inflation.
Heaven forbid (literally!) anyone should feel too good about themselves.
I know one woman whose mother felt that it was her job to keep her daughter in her place so that she never became conceited, and instead she would become humble. This was virtuous in the mother’s eyes. She felt responsible for ensuring her children’s modesty and meekness, and so targeted any self-esteem that reared its ugly head with humiliating putdowns.
Understandably, the daughter developed a strategy, a fortress, to always avoid her mother’s putdowns by being The Good Girl and severely limiting her repertoire of behavior.
The fortress becomes a prison. You can’t be very expressive or take risks that way. And if you’re good at preventing putdowns once you leave your childhood home, you rarely get exposed to them, so that you never realize they won’t destroy you.
Let’s look at a personal example.
Humiliation in the Orchestra Pit: Gary Crashes and Burns
My own favorite and formative humiliating experience occurred when I was a substitute trumpet player for the New York City Ballet Orchestra. One evening I was called to sub for a rehearsal the next morning. I think we were playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
Knowing that I was low man on the totem pole, in the little time I had to prepare I practiced the 4th trumpet part. Turns out, I was subbing for the 1st trumpet player and therefore was going to be playing the 1st trumpet part. One solo in that part requires you to transpose the notes down one and a half steps as you’re playing it. You see F# on the page and you’re supposed to play Eb. While trumpet players have to transpose in orchestras all the time, this was a very tricky transposition on a very tricky part.
And I got tricked.
I crashed and burned. It sounded so bad the entire orchestra erupted into unbridled laughter.
It sounded like I had sauntered into the wrong rehearsal and thought I was playing with the wild, experimental and always discordant noise rock band Sonic Youth, rather than the staid and buttoned-up New York City Ballet Orchestra.
I usually like to make people laugh but this was altogether Not Pleasant.
The conductor stopped us and looked at me with stern disapproval and stunning disdain. It was humiliating.
“Again!” the conductor barked.
Crash and burn, again.
More laughter. More disapproval. More humiliation.
This disaster was surprising, to say the least. One of my strategies in life has always been thorough preparation. And I’d failed spectacularly to prepare correctly, much less thoroughly.
But you know what? I survived. Life ended up turning out much better than if I had kept playing in the New York City Ballet Orchestra. I’m having lots more fun playing Play That Funky Music White Boy with my dance/rock band than I ever had playing Swan Lake.
Humiliation Is Not An Objective Event
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” The quote has often been paraphrased to read ““No one can humiliate you without your consent.” The point being that it’s how we receive a comment that determines whether it’s humiliating or not. You can decide how much power you want to give to the venomous potential humiliator.
This is not to deny how cruel some people can be or whether they intend to humiliate us or not. It’s to highlight how much difference our interpretation and our response makes in how we feel.
We feel humiliated for different reasons because we are different. Some events would not phase some people, but they paralyze others. Our reaction depends on what we’ve experienced in life, how we identify ourselves, and what we value most. Our subjective reaction makes a difference in whether and how much we feel humiliated.
And whether we feel the need to build a fortress.
Four Types of Compulsives: Four Ways to Avoid Humiliation
One lens for us to view this through is how different types of compulsives respond: what humiliates us and how we try to prevent it.
In previous posts [episodes] I’ve described four different types of obsessive-compulsive personality. It’s very important to distinguish between these to really understand ourselves or our favorite obsessive-compulsive.
And that’s also the case with our different efforts to prevent humiliation. So, let’s explore how these four types respond to the fear of humiliation.
These types enlist their energy and perfectionism in different ways that are all obsessive-compulsive.
Each of these types has positive possibilities, but for now I’ll be looking mainly at the maladaptive versions.
Some of you may feel that you exhibit traits of two different types, which makes perfect sense because there are hybrid types. And none of these types may resonate with you, which is also fine. My main hope is that these terms will encourage you to look closely at what you fear will cause you humiliation and how you try to prevent it from happening.
The Teacher/Leader (Healthy Version) and the Bully/Boss (Unhealthy Version).
In the unhealthy type of Teacher/Leader the individual deals with their fear of being inadequate by telling others what to do. The best defense is an offensive offense. They attempt to stay on top by pointing down at others. They always know better than everyone else.
They may genuinely care for others or feel some responsibility for their welfare, and so they tell them what to do. But too often the telling takes on a sharp edge because, in addition to feeling responsible, they also feel fear and desperation that if they fail to protect them, they will be accused of failing in their responsibility or they will accuse themselves of failing to protect others. And that would feel humiliating to them—especially since they are supposed to know it all.
For a good example of this let’s talk about Richard Williams, the father and coach of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. He was accused of being far too hard on them, to the point that child protective services was called in. His explanation was that he always felt a responsibility to protect them, and his daughters confirm this in the film they made about him: King Richard.
The family lived in Compton, California, a city not known for its safety. The girls were vulnerable in many ways. Had they been hurt or fallen into meaningless lives, he would have felt severe shame for failing them. Being the boss was his strategy.
This worked out well for Venus and Serena, but how many other fathers have tried the same domineering approach and their kids didn’t win Wimbledon, grab a Grammy, or even happen upon happiness? Too many.
Too many have lived lives based on a fear of failing to protect rather than finding fulfillment.
The Worker/Doer (Healthy Version) and the Workaholic (Unhealthy Version).
The unhealthy Worker/Doer feels immense pressure to produce. They may feel that if they don’t, they are inadequate, vulnerable to shame, and are probably destined for Skid Row with all the other bums, slackers and derelicts. After all, God helps those who help themselves and abandons the rest.
The protestant work ethic can infect people of all religions, including atheists.
I remember one man telling me that someone else might be smarter than him (which was unlikely in most cases) but no one would ever out-work him. That would have been humiliating to him because working hard was such a foundational part of his identity.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, serves as an example of a workaholic trying to stay 10 steps ahead of embarrassment. He was a hybrid type in that he was both an autocrat and a workaholic. He had a precarious relationship with his family, which probably contributed to his deep sense of insecurity and a need to prove himself. He worked long hours and expected others to do the same. He was extraordinarily meticulous.
Several product failures were humiliating to him, and he seems to have been strongly motivated never to experience these again. Perhaps this is one reason why he preferred pure white for his products and packaging: the perfection was visible and obvious—beyond reproach.
The Server/Friend (Healthy Version) and the People-Pleaser (Unhealthy Version).
The unhealthy Server/Friend type of compulsive enlists their energy and perfectionist tendencies to make other people happy or to make them like them. To decide whether it is healthy or unhealthy, look for the motivation: Is their behavior out of love, or a fear of being rejected and thereby humiliated? Approach or avoidance?
It might seem that Server/Friend types are an exception to the idea that obsessive-compulsives construct a fortress of perfection to protect against humiliation. Perhaps so. We could say that instead they throw open the doors of the fortress and give away their soul far too easily.
But it’s also the case that their efforts to ingratiate others can also be a form of control—controlling what others think of them. Pleasing others can be a form of control in that they show very little of what they really feel to others. This fortress prevents authenticity, which is a loss to everyone.
Michael Jackson is a painful example of this type of compulsive. He was obsessed with getting people to like him. While his love of music and talent are clear, he was quite frightened of disappointing people, mostly his father but everyone else as well, and he enlisted his talent and natural perfectionism to avoid the shame he would feel if he did disappoint someone.
After his success with his album Thriller, he feared not living up to the expectations the album created. He said that the love his audience gave him was his source of happiness. His fear of losing this was profound.
His father had mocked his son’s appearance, and he never lost his fear of being humiliated by how he looked. As a result, he had multiple medical procedures on his face. Even as an adult, he would become physically sick when his father came to visit.
He toured extensively even when he didn’t want to or should not have for medical reasons. He didn’t want to disappoint fans and managers. Injuries, extensive use of pain killers, and an early death were the result.
While his music gives us immense pleasure, it’s tragic that he felt he had to go through what he went through to deliver it. And it makes me wonder if we truly knew him, or we just knew the beautiful fortress he put up.
How much more he might have pleased us if he didn’t need to be a people-pleaser.
The Thinker/Planner (Healthy Version) and the Obsessor/Procrastinator (Unhealthy Version).
Some compulsives utilize thinking and planning as a strategy to avoid humiliation, embarrassment and shame. They ask themselves, “What will the neighbors think if I don’t think of everything?” Not to mention their own self-attack if they fail. The thinking they use to try to avoid this ends up being low-quality and circular. And tormenting.
George Costanza, a character on the television show Seinfeld, obsesses constantly about how to avoid humiliation, or at least how to strike back after it attacks him. He overthinks everything, thinking that thinking will save him.
But the price of obsessively avoiding insults is far higher than the actual cost of the insults themselves. One of those expenses is that it also leaves him oblivious to his impact on those around him. Like many obsessives, he is consumed with the details of his life, most of them meaningless, and misses the forest for the trees.
This may be funny on television, but it can be agonizing in real life. Your head is filled with the project of avoiding humiliation and there is no room in there for pleasure or meaning. It’s like a country that spends all of its resources on its military and doesn’t care for the wellbeing of its citizens. The fortress might keep out some bad players, but it also keeps out the good ones.
Each of these four types try to cultivate a self-image of virtue as a defense against humiliation, shame and embarrassment. This can make it difficult to be flexible and open to feedback.
Early Emotionally Wounding Experiences
With each of these conditions, there is some chance that the individual had specific, emotionally wounding experiences in childhood that lead them to react this way. Here are just some examples of how that could work:
Bossy types may have been blamed for something that happened to a younger sibling who had oppositional defiant disorder and crawled out their window to go play basketball, fell down and had a concussion.
Over-workers might have been shamed for relaxing and watching an episode of Miley Cyrus before starting homework. They were labelled lazy.
People-pleasers might have been excluded or shamed for being selfish when they ate the last cookie that had been sitting there for four days.
Over-thinkers might have been accused of being stupid, rash or impulsive when they spontaneously spent their allowance on a blouse to wear to their friend’s birthday party.
So, in each case they would have developed a strategy to counteract what they were accused of, leading to overcompensation. I’m reluctant to assign any one-to-one correspondence between childhood experiences and adult behavior. It’s rarely so simple, but it is a factor to consider.
And it is important to remember that any of these tendencies, mentoring, working, serving or planning all usually exist in a natural, genuine form before they get hijacked to avoid humiliation.
Leaving the Fortress: Re-Framing and Re-Coding Humiliation
Here are five steps you can take to free yourself from the fortress of humiliation avoidance.
1. Identify Your Fortress: Your Particular Fears and How You Avoid them.
I described four types of compulsives in order to help you zero in on what you typically avoid and how you try to avoid it. As with any skill, it takes practice to develop this sort of vision. Set an intention for a week and write in your journal about every time you found yourself getting bossy, overworking, overpleasing or overthinking. Were you trying to avoid humiliation, shame or embarrassment?
Is what you fear objectively humiliating and dangerous, or is it a fear that your usual way of avoiding humiliation or embarrassment (e.g. telling, working, pleasing, planning) may not be good enough to prevent it?
All of this calls for self-compassion, which is the most effective tool we have.
2. Do A Cost Benefit Analysis: Is It Worth Being Locked Inside?
What has your fortress cost you? How has it limited you? Is that worth it?
3. Share With Those You Trust.
I’ve shared my own experience of humiliation so that if you’ve experienced humiliation because of imperfections, perhaps you won’t feel alone. Making mistakes is a sure sign that we’re human. And I’m sure that most of you have had more painful experiences than mine.
If we can share our painful experiences with others we trust in a comfortable setting, the memory gets coded differently in our brain, and when it gets activated again, it’s not as disturbing.
4. Expose, Gently.
Many people have found exposure therapy to be helpful in becoming free of their limitations. You very gradually set up experiences similar to the one you fear, and work your way up from the least disturbing you can imagine to The Worst you can imagine. Once you stop avoiding the things you fear, you realize they aren’t going to kill you. They’re just uncomfortable, not dangerous.
If you use mental exposure, that is, imagining the worst-case scenario of what happens when you leave your fortress, be sure to take it all the way to its logical conclusion—which is—you survive the humiliation. Don’t leave yourself stuck halfway.
One reason some people don’t get over their fears is that they are so good at preventing humiliation that they rarely have the embarrassing or humiliating experiences which could give them the realization that we survive them. They remain in their fortresses.
Welcome your mistakes as opportunities. Let ‘em happen. Spend less time bossing, working, pleasing and planning and more time singing and dancing.
5. Identify Your Values and Pursue Those Whenever You Want to Avoid Humiliation
What’s most important to you? Does it stay outside of the fortress of perfectionist protection? What are the original intentions of your passions that have been hijacked for security? I wouldn’t dare say that no one will try to hurt you if and when you step out of your fortress, but I do dare say that if you replace avoidant behavior with fulfilling behavior, your life will be much more satisfying.