Humility is not humiliation

A child cowering from a screaming parent.

A wife covering a black eye with bad makeup.

The inner pain a person feels after being informed by someone the love that they aren't 'good enough'.

This is not humility, it is humiliation.  Humiliation works in negative emotions like fear and stress and often covers a wounded ego.  Wounded egos can transform a person.  People will over compensate in areas of their lives, to cover the void in another - pride in one area, to alleviate the humiliation in another.  Too often I see women who strive for 'perfection' in one area, to hide their pain in another - most often with their inability to deal with the pain of being alone, so they always need a man around.  Bad men, men who don't deserve them, men who abuse them, because it would be more humiliating to their psyche to NOT have a man.

Humiliation makes people do crazy things, like lead them down a merry road of self-deception. I like to call it the "Scarlett O'Hara Syndrome".  You know what it is, 'I won't think about that now, I'll just have to think about that tomorrow'.  These people get too busy with life to address the real missing elements they have, so they deflect the truth with a drive to protect something else.  Like Scarlett, who never wanted to admit that Ashley Wilkes was a mushy-mouthed man who never truly loved her, so instead her attentions refocused on her beloved plantation and in doing so... over looked the real love of her life, Rhett Butler. 

The book I'm reading made the statement that 'humility is not humiliation' and 'God will never humiliate you to teach you humility'.  We should never mistake humiliation for something that is good in our lives.  Degrading experiences are not a message from God to say 'you are too prideful'.  Most often they are the result of others in our lives who cannot handle their own feelings of humiliation, and so they visit their own pain on us.  I've studied enough human behavior to know that humiliation is the key factor in psychosis, psychopathy, neurosis, sociopathy, etc.  Abuse, plain and simple, that is all humiliation is.  So know this, all good things come from God, everything else from the sinful nature of man.  We have a choice in regards to how we handle our own humiliating experiences.  Forgiveness for ourselves and others, talking it out with a supportive friend or professional, realizing that the people who abused us are not right - we are good enough, accepting our faults but loving ourselves despite them, just a few ways to over come humiliation in our lives.  Don't let humiliation become an unclimbable mountain in your life.  Don't let humiliation stop you from being happy, really happy - not the surface happiness you have to talk yourself into every day.  Be real, be honest, and find joy in knowing you aren't in this alone, someone loves you and will listen and care.  If you can't find that person, contact me, I'll do it.

Be blessed, and enjoy this life that God has given you.  ~  KW