To take the next step on this emotional journey to become another self through self-sacrifice, I want to offer another take on shame, other than how the word is typically understood, and that starts with the act of being humble. The root of the word humiliation is humility, which means abandoning pride. Let’s consider humans as humble beings by design who evolved into being social and collaborative, living harmoniously together in small communities. However, this humbleness is lost in modern competitive and patriarchal capitalism, where consumerism is often used to display our status. I imagine how this trend likely began thousands of years ago when we evolved from gatherers carrying everything we owned to becoming settled farmers. As wealth and surpluses accumulated, hierarchies emerged to distribute them. It makes sense to reward the behaviours deemed ‘good for the group’ but other hierarchies developed, representing different aspects of social life. Some hierarchies are based on educational qualifications that lead to better-paying jobs, thereby providing more power initially over oneself, eventually over others, and ultimately over society.
Thus, the ego was born, a mental construct that justifies our position in and rewards from society’s hierarchies. However, this ego has spiralled out of control, and now pathological diagnoses describe a ‘healthy’ ego as one which wants to compete. The answer to this problem is now to be found in self-help books, professional coaches, medical and recreational drugs, or, in less severe cases, cookie dough marshmallow ice cream and binge-watching reality TV shows to hide away in shame when our ego falls short. As a reaction to the glorification of the ego came the fascination with its destruction. Could it be that deep down, it still feels good to be humble? And can being humiliated take us back to that peaceful state?
Before modern psychology considered masochism a disease Christianity considered it the cure.
Lyn Cowan, Masochism: A Jungian View (1998)
Focusing on what the ego wants or on what others will think of it is both time-consuming and energy-draining. Not to mention attempting to navigate a multitude of hierarchies. In order to survive, then, we seek out ways to achieve balance. Religion might be the most common tool for ego destruction, from the central theme of Christianity with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and the good Samaritan parable to ideas of karma and ahimsa in Buddhism and Hinduism. In yogic traditions, one should place the heart above the head, physically speaking in upside-down asanas and as a concept when relating to others. Destruction of the ego is almost always the central theme of any religious sect.
Shame, Ego and Spirituality
While modern religion has provided a significant function in its attempts to tame the ego, it completely ignores the transformative power of the eros. However, it’s common in esoteric practices to use sex to reach God/Divine. Some examples are Taoism and Tantra, with roots in China and India around 400 AD, the Cult of Dionysius in ancient Greece around 200 BC and other more modern European forms of ‘sex magick’ in Wicca, Paganisms etc. It’s debatable how erotic these practices really were, or if this narrative only is a new-age hippie reason to fuck around. However, they do symbolise a clear distinction from modern religions, where sex is often controlled to merely a means of reproduction. I believe this is due to the paradoxical nature of contemporary religion, which dictates a dogmatic view of life and yet offers mystery and surrender for the ego.
Eros carries great transformative symbolism. It’s the practical reason for each individual’s very existence. It represents progression into adulthood. It signals success in society by who and what we attract. Eros allows us to live forever symbolically through our offspring. In many esoteric practices, sexual energy is the same as life energy. Surrendering the ego and embracing eros within has great transformative power.
The subconscious is a clever thing. Once it has learned about the transformative powers of the eros, it will act as a guide and reminder of what reward awaits. Sharing a moment of intense eye gazing or the intimate presence of touch brings arousal because of remembrance. Each time walking down the same path, the subconscious makes it more meaningful with details and colours. This is often experienced in recurring fantasies and dreams by how the defining details get stronger.
Physical and Emotional Masochism
Humiliation is a form of emotional masochism, similar to physical masochism, which has a physical reward (endorphins etc.) Emotional masochism happens in the conscious and subconscious mind. Some might even argue that it’s spiritual. It’s the enjoyment of being treated ‘badly’. Playing with humiliation is controversial as it touches the sore spot in everyone’s personality. However, we all do it unconsciously all the time. Dirty talking in bed is just this with words like slut, daddy, and dirty. They destroy our ego and allow us to become something else through egoless surrender to another person.
First and foremost, let’s define the path to humiliation from a sadomasochistic perspective: shame. The dictionary defines shame as the painful feeling arising from an awareness of something dishonourable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. Shame works through social conditioning and is provoked by violating that conditioning, but most importantly, shame comes from the inside. It’s something genuinely believed to be dishonourable, improper or ridiculous.
Resting in Shame
Leadership mentor and speaker Christopher Avery has an excellent way of explaining why shame is a crucial part of society and its relationship to the ego. He talks about six steps when dealing with problems, and it goes.
- Denial
- Lay blame
- Justification
- Shame
- Obligation
- Responsibility
The first three steps protect the ego from feeling humble. The last three destroy the ego and take responsibility. This is usually a very constructive way to solve a problem. Here shame is a resting place after having admitted the fault but before obligation or taking responsibility to do something about it.
If shame is like a stop along the way before taking responsibility, then guilt is the opposite. Guilt is judged upon the ego from the outside. Of course, if one accepts the judgement, it might be transformed into shame, obligation and responsibility. However, in contrast, if one considers themselves innocent, it brings power to the ego.
Everybody’s innocent in here. Don’t you know that?
Andy Dufresne, inside the prison in the movie The Shawshank Redemption
Feeling guilty will likely bring martyrdom instead of masochism, similar to how fight or flight only brings an adrenaline rush. There may be an urge to fight back self-sacrificially, like in the case of martyr suicide bombers who believe they are opposing corrupt power. Some may explore martyrdom in a sadomasochistic context to feel empowered, but this does not involve surrendering the ego.
Playing with Shame
I will not consider the moral aspects of using shame to alter someone’s ego. For some, this will be gloriously helpful in surrender, while for others, it might be the destruction they always unknowingly craved. For still others, it might be something highly traumatising. Different sides of the same coin. The body will more or less always heal from the result of physical masochism, but emotional scars may last a lifetime. Therefore, it’s often considered edgier to play with the mind rather than the body.
However, if you decide to do this, the first thing to understand is that you and your fantasies are unimportant in this matter. Everyone’s social conditioning is different, so just because you find it very hot and shameful calling someone a worm doesn’t mean that it is shameful to them. Using your own fantasies instead of theirs might just push them into martyrdom instead. So best to forget about your ideas about shame and adjust accordingly to your partner.
A simple and efficient way is to function as a mirror of their behaviour and phrase observations in a neutral, descriptive way.
– Now you are drooling.
Instead of…
– Your drooling is disgusting.
As shame exists to enforce social conditioning, it gets even more powerful when put into a social context. For example, drooling on the pillow before falling asleep compared to drooling on the subway full of people when thinking about delicious food.
– Everyone can see that you are drooling.
People who are emotional masochists are very likely to have sexualised feelings of shame. This breaks even more social norms, potentially being even more shameful.
– Everyone can see you drool and how horny it makes you.
Finally, since it is probably more shameful to be horny from drooling than actually drooling, one can simply cut down the sentence.
– Everyone can see how horny you get by this
Then it’s not essential what social norm gave rise to the shame in the first place, which makes the whole thing much more effortless. Obviously, this only works if there is shame related to sexuality. For example, some people in my sex-positive community will go, “Yes! Isn’t that great!” while bouncing up and down. In that case, it is better to stick with the drooling part.
Protective Walls Shielding The Ego
Most are not aware of what they are ashamed of. This is because the ego is doing its best to protect itself. Walls are built to avoid embarrassment and, therefore, the vulnerability that enables surrender. There are two kinds, intellectual and emotional. The intellectual is usually consciously created by decisions – ‘this is me, and this is what I like’. While the emotional is usually unconsciously created by experiences. The response of these walls is similar to the trauma responses of fight, flight or freeze. The fight-response counters with martyrdom. The flight response is hiding, either by avoiding answering a question or acknowledging a fact. ‘Are you aware of your drooling right now?’ The freeze response simply shuts down in an apathetic manner. All these walls will block experiencing shame.
Therefore to experience shame, one must lower the walls, and this wish must come from the inside, in a way, deciding to believe in the shameful words and actions. When it’s forced, it will only trigger guilt and bring martyrdom. It takes time and trust to allow the situation to penetrate the walls. That is why waiting and gently mirroring the shame is better than aggressively trying to push in as many words as possible. Time gives the hiding shame time to come out. Emotional and physical stress will help to lower the walls. This has been proven in countless studies of interrogation techniques. The pressure won’t trigger shame, but the following fatigue will create receptivity. I remember when I started to learn rope bondage in Scandinavia after returning from Japan. My teachers were a shorter older man and his valkyrie wife. She was empowered as fuck, so to touch her emotional body, he had to “break her”. So before we did any intimate erotic and shame-inducing tying, we would do painful suspensions.
Who Knows?
Shame and humiliation work from the inside and are dependent entirely on social context; they are dependent upon who knows. In everyday life, they are often hidden away to defend the ego and not lose face in front of others. But the humble feeling of surrender can only come when the shame is shared with others. Organised religions understood this aeons ago, and this is why their rituals often included a public admission of sin to some force larger than the self, like a priest or a god.
– Bless me, father, for I have sinned.
Drug addiction rehabilitation does the same.
– My name is Andy and I’m an alcoholic.
– Hello Andy!
The same technique is used in sadomasochistic play by having the submissive admit to their shameful acts and facts about themselves.
– I’m a drooling dog, and it makes me horny.
Verbalising or confessing the breakage of social norms has a much more substantial impact on the ego. It amplifies the feeling of humility and enables a deeper surrender to a god, a dominant, or a rehabilitation method. Because this is such a significant experience, it may be possible that increasing the audience would increase the shame.
Personal shame, on the other hand, is only experienced by oneself. It often involves hiding from others and detaching from society. It will build the intellectual and emotional walls stronger, feed the ego and hinder being humble.
Private shame is shared with one or a few trusted people. It can be a god, a dominant or a closed rehabilitation circle. It safely lowers the walls, leads to humility, and often creates a strong bond with those selected to share the darkest secrets.
Semi-public shame might be shared with many others but usually isn’t. It can be achieved by recording a shameful act or performing a scandalous act in front of others in a small circle, for example. Knowing that a recording exists or that the story might become public will amplify the shame.
Weakness In Our Egos Armour
In terms of what people feel ashamed of, I believe that there are general archetypes that correspond to different strategies for succeeding in the social hierarchy. The strength of one’s ego determines the strength of the archetype, and the more powerful the ego, the scarier it can feel to let shame take over and break it down. Archetypes can be described by appearance, behaviour and interaction.
Appearance visually reflects who we are, and it can be in subtle or overt ways. For example, wearing a perfectly ironed shirt can signal competence, while showing off our beauty can be a show of self-assuredness, and displaying political and cultural icons can indicate opposition. Behaviour is more about actions that validate social standing. We are experts at detecting when appearance and behaviour don’t correspond. For example, wearing that perfectly ironed shirt but constantly being uninformed and out-of-date about related facts will cue the observer that the person is not as competent as it first appeared. Finally, interaction is about the relational interplay with others, how friendships are formed etc. Keeping up with appearances, behaviours, and interactions can be energy-draining, especially in an environment with a lot of competition for power within the hierarchy.
Considering this, it comes as no surprise that there is an endless variety of sadomasochistic plays around each archetype. Some examples are:
Popularity as an archetype is pretty gender normative. In general, women aim to be beautiful, graceful and loving, and men strive to be cool, strong and dependable. The most common related kink is salirophilia, which is being dirty, drooling and disgusting.
Competence as an archetype is about providing value by completing challenging tasks, being trustworthy and always doing our best. Commonly related kinks are objectification, which is being treated as a commodity, functional object, pet, slut, independently of gender, or given impossible tasks and then punished.
Leadership as an archetype is about being authoritative, protective and providing guidance. The most common related kinks are falling from a high social status into slavedom.
Opposition and Feminisation
Another kink that touches upon all three previous archetypes is the feminisation of straight, heteronormative men. Typically, this is expressed as the man wearing lingerie, make-up, fake long hair and nails. Or maybe also being locked in chastity, fucked in the ass, and forced to give blowjobs to anonymous strangers. There are endless other methods to reduce him to essentially a slut. Such play is extremely common but also problematic. This kind of humiliation for a hetero-identified man will truly work if we accept as a group or culture that there is something inherently wrong or shameful about a man forced into a scenario wherein he adopts a female look or position, or in which his standard masculinity is debased to the lowly levels of a woman, or a homosexual or transgendered person.
Similarly, the last archetype is opposition. Again, it’s about protesting against certain hierarchies and fighting others. I’ve met many feminists who during the day are in radical resistance against the patriarchal structure, and paradoxically, their biggest nighttime fantasy is to be a manhandled, sexy slut in bed. The eros is not very politically correct. This is possibly an analogue to feminisation, as one person’s kink is another person’s everyday battle.
So simply lowering these archetypal masks or having them lovingly ripped away is a humbling experience. It can be transformative when it’s done consciously and consensually. The opportunity to let go of popularity, beauty, the safety of gender norms, competence, leadership and opposition, and just for a moment, rest in surrender instead of fighting for that place of power in the social hierarchy. If just for a moment, let me soak in shame, let me become your dog, and I’ll love you for it. That shit bites hard as it fucks with the ego’s ideas about itself.
But it’s just a game. No one wants to experience shame for real.
Of course, it’s just a game. Or, well, not a game, because a game has a clear winner and loser, but a play for amusement, but that doesn’t make the experience any less potent. More importantly, it doesn’t make the attraction to the sadomasochistic play any less real. On the contrary, it’s attractive because it mirrors the everyday outside. It promises to learn and accept something about oneself and perhaps not take things so seriously anymore.
It’s tempting to believe that the play doesn’t impact anything outside the framework of the play situation. Still, every experience shapes our beliefs, personality, and destiny. That’s why playing is so powerful. The just-a-game mentality is a protective mechanism to make the play more accessible and less scary. Still, the same mentality is also dangerous because it could invalidate a bad or traumatising experience. It is far more beneficial to understand the ego’s protective wall. When we gently lower our protective walls during play, valuable lessons can be learned. O. Fred Donaldson expresses this much more beautifully than I ever could in his book Playing by Heart: The Vision and Practice of Belonging (1993).
Imagine a human being as an artichoke. The artichoke’s tough, spiny leaves are the innumerable shields we put up to defend that which is most tender and sought after – the heart. We can tear an artichoke’s leaves off to get at its heart, just as we can attack a person; but there is a much easier and more effective way. If we steam the artichoke, it surrenders its leaves, exposing and sharing its heart with us. In the same way, play does not attack a person’s defences. Play creates an environment in which we drop our shields and share our tender human heart, which is what we all want in the first place. But if our shields are ripped off from the outside, we try to build even stronger ones.
O. Fred Donaldson
Through my experiences with shame and humiliation, I’ve learned that love, compassion, and empathy are equally as important. In most cases, I think we feel the shame of others, and we want people around us to be humble. Everyone knows the feeling of wanting to turn off the TV when someone in a sitcom makes too much of a fool out of themselves. That no-no-no-don’t-do-that-feeling when the empathy screams as high as it can. So it’s reasonably safe to play with shame when it triggers compassion. The deeper the submissive surrenders through shame into humiliation, the more empathic the dominant’s response can be. This creates a beautiful dance between the dominant invoking shame and the submissive surrendering to it. It’s a dance where the ego is abandoned in favour of humbleness.
