How to Forget About a Humiliating Experience

Co-authored by Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS

Last Updated: March 22, 2023 References Approved

Humiliation is a painful emotion that we all experience at times. It arises when we feel devalued, either because of something we've done or something that's been done to us. Sometimes humiliation is a response to a mistake on our part, but it’s not an effective method of discipline, and no one deserves to be humiliated.^{[1]
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Research source} Learn how to deal with the hurtful experience of humiliation and get back on track in your daily life.

Part 1

Part 1 of 4:

Accepting Yourself and Moving On

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Take responsibility when appropriate. Humiliation is painful and it can feel like your personal value is being diminished. However, it's important to accept responsibility if you’ve done something wrong. A common response to humiliation is to deny responsibility and push the problem on to others.^{[2]
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Trustworthy Source
Association for Psychological Science
Nonprofit organization devoted promoting trustworthy research and education in the psychological sciences
Go to source} Don’t let this defensive move prevent you from facing yourself and pushing through to the other side.
- Apologize for your actions if you've made a mistake, like an error at work that causes a lot of problems.
2
Allow yourself to make a few mistakes. A lot of humiliation comes from something called ‘’performance expectation.’’ This refers to expectations placed on your ability to perform a certain task well. The higher the performance expectation, the more harshly you can be judged for failing to accomplish the task.^{[3]
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Research source} Having a healthy sense of performance expectation is important. Failure is part of the learning process, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and don’t allow other people to pressure you either.

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3
Forgive yourself. It’s important to be resilient and forgive yourself when you mess up. Feeling bad about our actions can help us discover insight into problems with our behavior, but you can keep the insight and drop the humiliation. Ask yourself if you would repeat your actions a second time around. If you wouldn’t, then that points to the fact that you are genuinely remorseful.^{[4]
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- Tell yourself that making mistakes is human and you're trying your best to do the right thing.
4
Realize you’re not alone. Some people have called our time the “age of humiliation.”^{[5]
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Research source} Being humiliated is a common occurrence for a lot of people, especially with the popularity of the internet, where the intimate details of our lives can show up on public places like social media websites. Humiliation is a widespread phenomenon, although this shouldn’t minimize your feelings or the uniqueness of your situation.
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Learn to let go with mindfulness. If the humiliating experience is lingering in your mind and causing you a lot of pain, use principles and techniques from mindfulness meditation to help you let go of the emotional wound and move on with your life.^{[6]
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- Frequently, a painful emotion or memory keeps us feeling hurt because we are avoiding its expression. Practice facing your emotions without running or shrinking away. Think of the emotion like a wave that comes and goes. Try to observe the wave without interfering with the way it moves. This will help you create distance between yourself and the emotion without denying it.

Part 2

Part 2 of 4:

Protecting Yourself from Humiliation

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Avoid putting yourself in toxic situations. Sometimes protecting yourself from humiliation is as simple as figuring out which situations and people are likely to humiliate you. Identify these triggers for humiliation and extinguish them from your life. This could be an overly negative friend who always puts you down, a demoralizing workplace that is never happy with your contributions, or a family that tries to shame you at every turn.
2
Cultivate humility. Humility is about learning to accept and realistically assess your strengths and limitations. Being realistic about your character is a great way to protect yourself from humiliation, which tries to degrade you. A person with humility won’t fall victim to the illusion of worthlessness that humiliating experiences try to push on us.
- Make a list of your strengths and challenges. Have a close friend or loved one look over the list and discuss it with you. Ask for the person’s honest opinion and try to be receptive to his feedback.
3
Improve your self-esteem. Research shows that self-esteem can be a powerful defense against the humiliation associated with failure.^{[7]
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Research source} Follow these steps to increase your self-esteem:
- Avoid comparing yourself to other people. Your only competition should be with yourself. The reason you should avoid doing this is because you don’t see what goes on behind the scenes in the lives of other people. You may be comparing yourself to the way they are presenting themselves rather than their true identity.
- Adjust your self-talk. Replace negative thoughts like “I can’t do it” with hopeful statements such as “this is hard, but I can get through it.” Avoid putting unreasonable demands on yourself with thoughts about what you “should” or “must” do.
4
Get help for other mental health issues. Certain mental health conditions can make you more vulnerable to humiliation. Social phobia, narcissistic personality disorder, and major depression can leave you open to the experience of humiliation more than people who don’t struggle from these hardships.^{[8]
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Research source} If you’ve been diagnosed with any of these disorders, seek help in order to vaccinate yourself against humiliation before it happens.
- Social phobia is a strong fear of being judged by others, with symptoms like anxiety around people, feeling self-conscious, and having a hard time meeting people.^{[9]
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  Trustworthy Source
  National Institute of Mental Health
  Informational website from U.S. government focused on the understanding and treatment of mental illness.
  Go to source}
- Narcissistic personality disorder is marked by having a tendency to hold an unrealistic view of self-importance (such as thinking you're the best cook in the entire world even though you have never attended cooking school and have no practice in cooking), being preoccupied with yourself, and lacking empathy for others.^{[10]
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- Major depression shows up as sustained feelings of sadness, frustration, and other negative emotions for weeks at a time, interfering with daily life.^{[11]
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Part 3

Part 3 of 4:

Using Self-Help Techniques

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Research self-help techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy. If you have a hard time forgetting about the humiliating experience, use techniques like attention shifting, relaxation, and repeated exposure to help you move past the memory.^{[12]
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Use attention shifting to rewire your emotional reactions. Attention shifting is where you use a particular phrase or action to help you deal with the memory, such as thinking "this is just one experience in my entire life" whenever it comes up. Attention shifting has been shown to help reduce anxiety in situations, because it allows you to freely choose what you pay attention to, rather than being compelled to focus on negative thoughts and feelings.^{[13]
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Trustworthy Source
PubMed Central
Journal archive from the U.S. National Institutes of Health
Go to source}
- Whenever the humiliating memory pops up, say to yourself, "everyone feels humiliated at some point in their life. I know I can recover from this experience."
3
Experiment with relaxation techniques to help yourself let go. Progressive muscle relaxation is where you tense and then relax your muscles one area at a time. Start with your toes, curling them downward. Do this for a couple seconds and release. Next, tense your foot and lower leg. Keep doing this, moving up your body all the way to your forehead.
- You can try other methods as well, such as guided imagery. Picture one of your favorite places to be when the humiliating experience starts to bother you. This could be your living room with candles lit, a football field, or a sunny beach.^{[14]
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- Keeping yourself relaxed will reduce the likelihood that you dwell on the humiliating experience. It will also help you process and cope with the humiliating experience when it does come up in your memory. Usually, this memory will show up with a lot of anxiety. Relaxation techniques will help you reduce this anxiety and extinguish the memory.^{[15]
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4
Try the technique of repeated exposure. Repeated exposure is a technique for exposing yourself to situations so that you gradually begin to realize they aren't that dangerous. You can do this with the humiliating experience, for example, if it happened on a stage at your school, or in a specific room of your house. Spend time in these places and let the panic or discomfort subside.
- This kind of exposure therapy requires that you spend enough time in the stressful environment for your mind to adapt to the fact that there's no danger present. If you walk into the room where you were humiliated, start to feel upset, and quickly leave, then the exposure likely won't have an effect. Try to enter the room or face the situation and let yourself slowly relax into your body. Deep, even breathing can help you calm down and accept where you are.^{[16]
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Part 4

Part 4 of 4:

Understanding the Experience of Humiliation

1
Understand where humiliation comes from. The first step to moving past an humiliating experience is to grasp what the emotion is and why it shows up. Humiliation is the experience of losing a piece of your status as a valuable human being. This diminishment has negative consequences for your life because your status as a worthwhile person affects what you think is possible.^{[17]
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Research source} If you feel intense humiliation, it may change what you think you can do with your life, such as your ability to pursue an education or potential to have the career you want. Some common humiliating experiences are:
- Being publicly shamed, like being laughed at or mocked.
- Being denied basic needs, like food and clothing.
2
Recognize the effects of humiliation. Research shows that being humiliated can have powerful negative effects on a person’s self-esteem and quality of life. It can result in major depression, symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder like high anxiety, and suicidal desires.^{[18]
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Research source} If you feel yourself slipping into serious mental health problems because of a humiliating experience, contact your doctor or local psychologist about getting help.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy can help restructure your thoughts and lead you to a healthier, more realistic understanding of the situation. It can help you recover your self-worth and belief in your abilities after a bad case of humiliation.^{[19]
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- Find a local therapist by clicking here.
3
Determine if you’re at fault. Sometimes a person may try to humiliate you despite your innocence in a situation. For example, he might be jealous of your accomplishments and want to make you feel poorly about yourself. It may have nothing to do with you. Before you accept responsibility for your actions, which is different than accepting being humiliated, make sure you actually did something wrong.^{[20]
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4
Put the humiliation into context. Many of us may feel humiliated at relatively small things. These failures can feel like a disaster and we may think that people are judging us harshly, but in the bigger picture they probably don’t deserve the significance we place on them. Avoid sweating the small stuff.^{[21]
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- For example, botching an interview or a live musical performance can be embarrassing, but they shouldn't usually carry the weight of humiliation.
5
Avoid giving in to humiliation. If someone is humiliating you, even if you did something wrong, you should realize that humiliation is not an effective technique for changing someone’s behavior. Humiliation is a form of punishment, rather than discipline.^{[22]
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Research source} There’s no excuse for humiliating someone, even a criminal, so avoid giving in to the person’s tactics by accepting the humiliation.^{[23]
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Warnings

Avoid being hard on yourself if you can't get forget the humiliation immediately. Sometimes it takes time to get over a hurtful experience.

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