humanist.com

Essay 6 of 8 · By Andrew Conru

Self-Dehumanization and Dehumanization Cycles

Your guilt isn't proof you're bad; it's proof you're good, and learning to treat yourself like a friend can break the Dehumanization Cycle.

About 7 min read

You’re stupid. You’re a moron. An evil person. Worthless and dumb.

Harsh words, especially when you say them to yourself. And we’ve all said them, over things we did that hurt others or ourselves. We should have known better. We should have been better.

The bad news: we can’t change the past. The good news: we can learn why we did what we did and, through mindfulness, keep it from happening again.

Our propensity to dehumanize is wired into us. It evolved to help us outgroup, which was valuable in tribal times. Today it mostly lets us be cruel, objectifying, and downright unempathetic. In short, it makes us behave like assholes.

But guilt and shame are in the mix too. We only feel bad about hurting someone once we see them as human, so feeling guilty for hurting someone we dehumanized is evidence that we are rehumanizing them. That’s the first step toward learning from the experience. In this very important way, guilt is good.

So congratulations on feeling guilty! That isn’t a platitude. Guilt is an admission that you did something bad, and the first step to realizing that we all have a dehumanization problem. It’s a bit like religion’s “Original Sin,” the idea that people are born sinful, except that ours is an evolved instinct, and we can learn to manage it.

The Dehumanization Cycle

So you feel terrible. What do you do with that? Most of us go straight to the words at the top of this essay. Worthless. Bad. An ass. Good people don’t want to do wrong, so we’re hard on ourselves. We start seeing ourselves as inferior. We self-dehumanize.

And once we’ve made ourselves sub-human, dehumanizing other people gets easier, because now it feels normal. That brings more guilt and shame, and a spiral of increasingly bad behavior (by our own definition). We become more of an ass even as we wish we were nicer, which makes us self-dehumanize even more.

The spiral can take over fast, until we take it for granted that we are less than good, less than worthy of love, less than human. Unwittingly, unwillingly, and unintentionally, we become bad people in our own minds.

It works like addiction: you do something you can’t seem to stop, hate yourself for it, then do it again because you give up on giving up. But in one way it’s worse, because it spreads. Your dehumanization of others makes them resent you, which triggers their own dehumanization mechanism. They treat you badly, then feel bad about it and dehumanize themselves, while you dehumanize them back in revenge.

That’s the Dehumanization Cycle. It’s contagious, it’s poisoning our communities, and it’s all driven by guilt over something instinctual.

Dehumanization begets dehumanization, to an ever larger degree.

But the cycle can be stopped with mindfulness, awareness, and kindness to yourself and others. Here’s how.

Treat Yourself Like a Friend

Start with how Humanists treat our adversaries: we humanize them. We see them as complex, mostly good people with complicated reasons for what they do, including dehumanizing you. Everyone has dehumanizing tendencies, and sometimes those tendencies drive their behavior.

Just as they drive ours.

Now picture your best friend coming to you having done exactly what you did, and every bit as remorseful. You’d console them. Reassure them. Show them you can see past the muck in their brain that sometimes makes them mistreat people. You’d tell them they’re a good person who, like everyone, sometimes gets lost in innate tendencies and learned behavior.

Now look at how you treat yourself. Stupid, worthless, less than human. Guilt and shame have a use: to trigger learning, not to paralyze us. Letting them push us to dehumanize ourselves, and then others out of our own lack of self-worth, wastes them.

We are often our own harshest critics: harsher than our enemies are to us, harsher than we are to anyone else, over actions and brain processes that are at least partly involuntary.

Our guilt isn’t telling us we are bad. If we were bad, we wouldn’t feel guilt. Our guilt tells us we are good, because we wanted to be good and failed this time.

So treat yourself as a good person who sometimes fails, because we are all hard-wired to dehumanize and trained by society to do it. Compassion for yourself isn’t a pass on bad behavior; it’s what lets you learn from it without devaluing yourself. If you and your friend switched places, would you call your friend less than human, the way you’re talking to yourself now?

Good people and bad people both do bad things. The difference is that good people don’t want to, and feel guilt and shame when they do. An ass won’t care, or may even celebrate the damage. The fact that you’ve read this far tells you that you are, in fact, good. You can learn from your guilt and shame without letting them paralyze you, and make the world better off for having you.

That would be a nice thing to say to your best friend. Try saying it to yourself.

Humanism and Suicide

We see life through our own filters. We categorize and judge everything reflexively, and all of it shifts with our state of mind. Sometimes, facing what we see as the consequences of our actions, we self-dehumanize. We see ourselves as failures, not victims. We look in the mirror and see someone less than human, less than valid, less than forgivable.

Suicide is not a price to be paid, or an escape from life’s hardest moments. When the pain comes from emotional struggles, from an illness that isn’t terminal, or from circumstances that can change, ending your life doesn’t reduce suffering. It takes away your chance to heal, and to do good for yourself and others in the future.

We are all complex, and time really does heal wounds. However much pain you’re in right now, there will be times when it is less. In those times you will be able to do good for the world, make peace with your faults and failures, and live a life that is still very much worth living.

If you are low and thinking about suicide, please remember that you can still do a lot of good for yourself, for the people you love, and for the world. You can recover. You can heal. Your life may have changed permanently, but that doesn’t make you evil or bad or useless. You are complicated, so is the world, and living in today’s society is hard.

Remember, too, that you are seeing the world through an emotional filter (none of us ever sees it objectively). If the world looks dark and the future bleak, that is how it looks through your filter in your current state. It’s probably better than you think. Give it time, lots of it, and let the future brighten over the coming weeks and months. Recover, let your brain grieve, and heal. Healing beats death, and you deserve to heal.

You don’t have to do it alone. Talking to a friend, a doctor, a therapist, or a crisis counselor is a sign of strength, not weakness. You can call or text 988 right now.

If someone you know seems to be suicidal, reach out to them. Don’t wait for them to come to you, and don’t just tell them to reach out if they feel bad. Take the initiative: ask how they’re really doing, listen, and help them connect with support. If you’re not sure what to say, you can call or text 988 yourself for guidance on how to help.

A Separate Question: Terminal Illness

End-of-life decisions for people with a terminal illness are a different matter. Humanism holds that people own their own lives, and we believe that physician-assisted dying, where it is legal and carried out with medical safeguards, is consistent with Humanist values for a terminally ill person nearing the end of life. That is a considered medical decision, made with doctors over time, when death is already near. It has nothing in common with the pain of a crisis, which can feel permanent even when it isn’t.

Resources

Adapted from the original humanist.com essays. See the original.