Humiliation vs. Humbling

How We Confront Evil Matters

No doubt that cowardice is a huge problem in the world. The order followers. The enablers of tyranny. The people who go along with evil because it feels safer to submit than to say no.

And while we might feel morally self-righteous about that, the best way to confront them is not through humiliation, shaming, or breaking down their ego.

To be honest, I’ll admit I’ve had thoughts like: “How can you be so stupid?”

But I’ll also admit I’ve said the same thing to myself at times about past decisions — especially when I froze or complied, and didn’t say no in personal relationships and business. And yet when I’m not reacting from my ego or primal brain, when I can observe from my spirit, I recognize that’s not a dignified approach toward self or others.

The deeper honesty is that underneath the layers of pride and anger about what happened in the early 2020s, I was heartbroken.

Not so much about the government and corporations being tyrannical. That was expected.

It was heartbreaking to see how quickly people enabled the tyranny and participated in abusing those who didn’t go along with it.

It was heartbreaking to see people put their own health and wellbeing — and that of their children — at risk under coercion and fear campaigns.

It was heartbreaking to see almost all of the world’s spiritual leaders enable tyranny and encourage their communities to exile those who didn’t go along with it.

It was heartbreaking to see almost all of the world-renowned trauma experts, psychologists, and narcissistic abuse experts enable tyranny — either directly in full support, or indirectly by staying silent when it most mattered.

It was heartbreaking to lose trust in all the teachers and mentors I had before 2020.

It was heartbreaking to lose family members and friends because we were no longer able to share reality.

It was heartbreaking.

It took me 6+ years to fully recognize that. And in some ways, I’m still mourning that trust will never be the same because the world moved on without ever telling the truth about what happened.

The wound is older than any of us. What erupted collectively in the early 2020s was a reenactment of something ancestral — and it landed personally because we were already carrying the template.

I also want to sound a voice of caution. Because I’ve been seeing something out there — a growing impulse to shame and humiliate the people who enabled tyranny. Whether that be the past events or the next ones coming our way.

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“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself don’t become a monster.”
— Friedrich W. Nietzsche

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Shaming and humiliating is not an effective way to reach or teach people. It makes people defensive and angry. That usually means they double down and continue the conflict.

A man who is continually humiliated by his mother often grows up to be violent. Many serial killers came from that kind of background. Men who are shamed and humiliated by their wives often end up doing horrible things to others or themselves.

A woman who is chronically humiliated often grows up to become either invisible — collapsing inward through self-destruction, compulsive people-pleasing, or self-erasure — or visible through social aggression and covert dominance by controlling and managing everyone around her so she is never at the mercy of anyone’s force again.

Think about a time when you knowingly or unknowingly shamed or humiliated someone you were upset with. That approach probably wasn’t well received.

So I reflected on how God handles it when we stray from what is right and true. While I know God has unconditional love for us, He probably also feels disappointed in some of the choices we make as individuals and humankind.

That’s the thing about unconditional love, though. God can be disappointed by our choices and still love us deeply. This is a kind of love most of us have never experienced by another human being, not even when we were children.

When parents shame their children instead of correcting their behavior, that programs kids to grow up into victims or abusers.

Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says, “I am bad.”

Shame is a spiritual agreement that collapses and immobilizes us. Shame isn’t about what you did — or didn’t do — it attacks who you are. Shame leads us away from our true self and into the false self.

John Bradshaw described that kind of programming as the death of children’s spirits rather than their bodies. That kind of upbringing produces kids who will likely grow up to be vulnerable to ideological violence.

Inferiority and superiority are two sides of the same coin that flip back and forth. Likewise, when we feel shame when we are down, we will feel grandiosity or pride when we are up. Superiority, pride, and grandiosity can convince us that we are righteous — and that blind spot can easily lead to ideological violence.

Bradshaw’s reflections on the societal implications of shame are incredibly relevant to what happens in abusive social systems and relationships. He contemplated the virtue necessary to know how to respond in such circumstances, “when sure knowing is lacking but our conscience or our circumstances demand we act.”

Bradshaw said that Aristotle called that virtue phronesis — moral wisdom in Greek. Aquinas translated it as prudentia, meaning prudence. Bradshaw advocated prudence, describing it as conscience in action.

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“Prudence is our situational conscience, or conscience as applied in the unique, concrete situation a person is facing.”
— John Bradshaw, Reclaiming Virtue

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I was contemplating how God calls us to grow to the next level when He has a new assignment for us. First He prepares our character in private so we aren’t humiliated in public — because His love is deep and He wants to support us, not shame us.

God invites us into the secret place. Into the wilderness. And that is where we are formed into the person whose character can bear the load of what He is calling us toward. It can be brutal at times. But it is not demoralizing.

God doesn’t humiliate us. He humbles us. And humbling isn’t the same as humiliating.

There’s nuance here.

It’s not about softness toward evil. It’s discernment about means.

Humiliation doesn’t actually awaken conscience or courage. It attacks the part of a person that would need to become brave to overcome cowardice. It corners them: Submit or dominate. And that keeps a person in the same cycle.

Humiliation says, “You are small, disgusting, beneath me.” And when people feel that — especially if they already carry fear, shame, or fragile identity, which is usually why they’re submitting to evil in the first place — they don’t usually become more honest with themselves. They become more defended.

Humiliation is domination wearing moral clothing.

Humbling is truth, removing illusion without removing dignity.

Humiliation says, “I will make you feel powerless.” Humbling says, “Reality is larger than your ego, and you are being invited back into alignment.”

That distinction matters deeply.

We can name something real: cowardice, complicity with evil, appeasement, the false comfort of obedience. Those are real human dangers.

But with humiliation, the proposed remedy carries the same spirit as the disease.

Tyranny also operates through fear, degradation, public punishment, humiliation rituals, and forced submission. So when someone tries to fight cowardice by humiliating people, they may be unknowingly reenacting the very structure they claim to oppose.

Superiority isn’t a cure for inferiority — it’s just a temporary refuge.

Divine correction isn’t interested in crushing the soul. It exposes falsehood so the soul can be restored to right alignment. It may be painful. It may be severe. It may strip away pride, fantasy, and self-deception. But it does not degrade the person’s essence.

Humiliation attacks identity. It produces shame: “I am worthless.”

Humbling reveals misalignment. It produces repentance and clarity: “I was out of alignment with the truth.”

A person needs some intact dignity to face their own wrongdoing. If they are being annihilated, they can’t integrate the truth. They can only defend against it.

There’s a clean anger that protects truth. There’s also contempt that pretends to be truth — and a person can be right without being righteous. The difference matters.

Maybe the deeper nuance is this: complicity with evil should be confronted firmly, but not with the vengeful pleasure of degradation. Cowardice should be named, but not in a way that makes courage impossible. The goal isn’t to break the ego as revenge — to make the other person feel the smallness they made you feel. The goal is to loosen the false self enough that the real self can answer.

What in you recognizes the difference between righteous confrontation and contempt disguised as righteousness?

I’ve had teachers and mentors who broke me down through shame and humiliation. It was not effective. And it broke me for a while. It didn’t humble me. It injured me. It made me angry and resentful. I couldn’t assimilate the learning for a long time because the pain and loss of dignity was so distracting and destabilizing.

I struggled with pride most of my life. So naturally I attracted partners, teachers, and experiences that exposed pride — albeit in harsh ways that added another layer of pride around the wound. It was ineffective. It left me with the same sense of superiority, thinking I was better than them because they were so awful and cruel. The pride endured and developed thicker scar tissue.

Humiliation can actually strengthen pride. It can drive pride underground, make it sharper, more hidden, more morally justified.

Humbling, by contrast, makes pride unnecessary. It doesn’t say, “You are nothing.” It says, “You don’t need the false height anymore.”

That is very different.

After going through humbling experiences with God in recent years — and more recently emerging from a wilderness season — I see how God guides me to shape my character differently than those partners, people, and teachers. And even though the stripping and humbling was severe and brutal at times, God’s grace and love was always there.

Because God never humiliates or shames.

That’s the litmus test. And it has spiritual implications worth naming clearly.

It’s the adversary — what some call Satan (meaning “the accuser” in Hebrew), his minions, demons — who humiliate and shame. The dark forces aim to get us to make spiritual agreements that we are unworthy, that something is wrong with us, that we are not enough or too much, that we are a failure, unloveable, or bad. Tempted by those demoralizing attacks, it’s easy to either collapse in agreement or rebel in superiority and pride.

But here’s the thing about rebellion: it isn’t freedom. It’s counterfeit freedom.

This is also a trap many dissidents fall into. When we are fighting evil, we can end up unknowingly enabling it.

We don’t have to fight evil. Because it’s illegitimate power. It’s counterfeit. Fighting it gives it legitimacy. And that feeds it our life force energy. So it becomes stronger and stealthier.

We have to stop making agreements with evil. And cancel the prior agreements made with it unknowingly. That includes the agreements our ancestors made with it because we are still carrying all of that too.

Rebellion can feel like liberation because it seemingly breaks contact with the oppressor. But if we are still organized around the oppressor — still defined by opposition, still fueled by contempt — we remain bound to the thing we despise.

That’s why dissidence can become distorted. The person begins by refusing evil, but then slowly starts borrowing evil’s tools: mockery, dehumanization, domination, purity tests, punishment rituals, the pleasure of watching enemies fall. And because the cause is “good,” they may not notice the spirit moving through them has changed.

There’s a clean no. And there’s a contaminated no.

The clean no protects truth without worshiping the enemy. It does not need to become cruel to be strong. It does not confuse mercy with weakness or severity with hatred.

The contaminated no is still possessed by the thing it resists. It calls its resentment justice. It calls its contempt discernment. It calls its humiliation of others “teaching them a lesson.”

There’s a force that breaks dignity. And there’s a power that strips illusion while preserving the soul.

The ego can’t tell the difference. The spirit can.

As the crises in our external world are intensifying, we are being invited to learn to distinguish spirits — not merely behaviors.

Shame has a particular signature. It contracts. It isolates. It whispers, “You are unworthy.” Then the person either collapses beneath it or compensates above it. Both are agreements with the same lie.

Grace has a different signature. Even when it burns with the fire of purification, it doesn’t sever you from love. Even when it strips you, it does not mock your nakedness. Even when it corrects you, it leaves a path to return home.

Humiliation exposes you without covering you. Humbling exposes you while still holding you.

My wilderness season with God taught me this from the inside. Not conceptually. Viscerally. I experienced the difference between being reduced and being refined.

Being reduced feels like someone is trying to make you feel less than human so they can control, punish, or feel superior to you.

Being refined feels like what is false, inflated, inherited, fearful, or defended is being burned away so what is truer can remain.

The pain can feel similar at first. Both can strip you. Both can expose you. Both can bring you to your knees. But the spirit underneath is different.

Reduction says: “You are small. You should be ashamed. Know your place.”

Refinement says: “You are beloved, but this cannot come with you.”

Reduction attacks your dignity. It produces bitterness, resentment, collapse, or rebellion. Refinement restores your dignity by removing what was never really you. It produces sobriety, humility, compassion, sovereignty, and true freedom.

Reduction makes you feel watched by contempt. Refinement makes you feel seen by love — even when the seeing is painful.

To be reduced is to be made smaller than your true self. To be refined is to be returned to your true self, through the removal of what is false.

Humiliation says, “This is what you are.”

Humbling separates the person from the distortion. It says, “This is what you have carried, chosen, served, or hidden behind — but it is not your deepest name.”

Humiliation degrades the person in the name of truth. Humbling dignifies the person by bringing them back into truth.

When we are used to being humiliated and shamed, we might assume the humbling is a punishment. But it’s not a punishment. It’s preparation.

Here’s perhaps the simplest way to tell the difference:

Does this breaking make me more honest, more surrendered, more whole, more loving?

Or does it make me feel smaller, harder, more afraid, more ashamed, more prideful, more contemptuous?

The fruit tells you what tree it came from.

And that discernment — between shame and grace, between humiliation and humbling, between reduction and refinement — is not just personal.

It’s the difference between a movement that liberates and one that merely changes whose boot is on whose neck.

The world doesn’t need more people wielding truth as a weapon.

It needs people who have been through the fire and came out less defended, not more armored.

That kind of person doesn’t need to humiliate anyone. They’ve already stood in the place where pride was stripped without dignity being lost. And they know — from the inside — what it costs to be made small, and what it means to be made whole.

That is what we’re being formed for.