Dehumanising talk is a strange concept: How is it possible for one to be less than human? It’s not, unless you’re in the mind of someone that is judging. We use dehumanisation all the time to make someone else ‘less than’ us, in doing so, we can feel superior, more successful, or better about the mistake we have just created.
It’s the concept that allows one tribe to fight each other; it’s the mechanism behind awful things like genocides, systemic oppression, and racism.
Here’s the thing, we have all internalised voices of authority that use these languages, we have all socialised in dehumanising conditions. How many times has a voice popped into your head that you recognise as someone else? We take what is happening in our immediate environment, mix it with our values and then assimilate ourselves to it, it’s a survival mechanism.
Remembering a traumatic memory at 28, this became clear to me, as I healed from the sexual abuse that I experienced in childhood, I could clearly distinguish between the language of my oppressor and the language that rose from my soul. It’s a little more nuanced for the white supremacy model that a lot of the world’s population live under, and that’s why it survives, but it’s there.
I’ve been studying a few courses with Sandra Kim around healing from this supremacist behaviour of white mentality. The method that she offers is: Healing From Internalised Whiteness, alongside an offering called: Liberating Organizations Handbook.
During this study, I have learned about the everyday aspects of dehumanisation and how it helps to uphold a system that keeps all of us a little less than human.
Here are the three ways we commonly dehumanise ourselves and others:
Deny people’s internal realities — through projecting, minimising, dismissing, etc.
Anything that is a projection of myself, and my struggles, onto others, minimising someone’s reality to present them as unworthy of time and attention, or dismissing someone outright is a form of denying someone’s full existence. It’s a tactic of judgement that we all use to some extent. Sometimes out there in the world we have to make snap judgements, we might feel that we don’t have much time, or we might be faced with a pressured situation where multiple people have different agendas based on their own culture and life experience. Most of the time, we might not even be aware of our own conscious and unconscious reasoning behind our actions. It can be tempting to dehumanise someone so that they fit into what your assumption or expectation for the situation is.
It’s essential to cultivate space in your own life so you can begin to invite this practice of response into your world. Once you have the freedom to respond, you can witness people as they are entirely in that present moment. You can gain the wisdom to know that some people don’t need a response; they need an ear to listen to them; they need two pairs of eyes to witness their pain. They need to talk until the energy in motion dries up for them.
Cultivating space also means space to witness and be aware of your thoughts and emotions, not to let them spill out into environments in an unconscious projection.
We don’t always have space and time containers to do that, so sometimes it’s best to state clear boundaries around that: I hear you, and I understand your need to express that. However, we are limited with time, so do you mind if we find another time to discuss that?
That’s a respectful and humane expression, and it’s consensual as well. The question maintains dignity. It might not be the desired outcome that they wanted. However, they have been met. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: The critical aspect is to meet someone as they are, and not classify them as wrong.
Have you ever caught yourself saying: “Yes, well, it’s because they are shit at their job”?
The presumption is that someone is talking behind another person’s back. Something of this nature is dismissive and paints the person as inadequate and unskilled. It minimises and objectifies them as just their skillset. It fails to mention any of the broader contexts of life that will exist in that scenario, and it could also be a projection of the person’s fear that they are the inadequate ones.
Life can be complicated, nuanced, and demanding. There are many reasons why this person might be underperforming at work; they might have an unwell partner, be struggling with an illness themselves, or merely be attempting to learn something new as part of the job. It’s not our job to analyse why someone is doing the thing they’re doing. It’s our job to ask them how they feel and whether they need extra support at this time. We are all very capable of responding to a stimulus when we’re placed in a safe and secure environment.
Make people wrong as human beings — through judging, blaming, shaming, vilifying, etc.
Judging, blaming, shaming, and vilifying is so common in our human existence that it can so quickly go unnoticed. It’s acting out of disrespect, or fear. It’s labelling someone as something rather than truly seeing them. The label is more comfortable for us to understand and place next to the thing that also contains the same title inside of our own experience. In this way, judgement can be a positive thing, as long as we realise that it is not the end position, it merely gets us closer to a connection.
Making people wrong makes for a conflictive situation, and will activate the sympathetic nervous system; this is part of our human experience that manages and reacts to stress. We can train ourselves to exist practically in this function. Yet, we won’t reach the levels of connection and intimacy that exist in the realm of communication in the parasympathetic state.
Try to coerce people into agreeing or changing their behaviour — through insisting, demanding, pushing, manipulating, making them, etc.
I have to admit and own something, I have exhibited a lot of this behaviour in my life, partly through maintaining a shame dynamic that I was a part of, and partially to hide the secret of the trauma that I experienced from myself and therefore others. I would demand, push, manipulate, and insist, and I would use my big frame to impose aggression on a situation. Not always you understand, but I have used this tactic. I mostly use this tactic on myself. I demand so much from myself, and I never used to acknowledge or celebrate any achievements.
Through the healing in this course, I am learning how to open the space up to do that now. It’s liberating to have a moment of pride and worthiness over an achievement. A moment that might have taken courage and intentional effort to achieve. That might have been a team effort; navigating the waves of emotion together through fluctuating tasks. These moments are what enjoyment of life is.
Coercing people, as you might imagine, does not build intimate connection. It does not allow people to have agency, or to exist as a sovereign human being, or to share themselves outside of rigid roles; it keeps people in their boxes, working on the same things, over and over again — the space where resentment breeds. We are not designed to stagnate, but to breathe and create.
Closing thoughts
I have to admit, taking this course has been a challenging endeavour, it’s hard to process all the ways that I dehumanise myself, let alone all the ways I dehumanise others. It will come slowly. I have begun to realise most of the times that I use these tactics on other people, and some of the time, I use them on myself. I have started to process the emotion of living in this way for so long, in a way that often ruptured my relationship to my trust.
I sincerely believe all of us must do healing around these traits; it doesn’t make us a good or bad person; it’ll just make us more whole. More connected and free to live the life that we choose to live, rather than being controlled, or condemned, or crushed by the weight of responsibility to uphold this system. That’s a heavy weight, dear ones, and it’s exhausting.
I urge you to start small today, even if it is just getting curious. Seek out support if you don’t feel ready or able to do this, have a conversation with that friend like me who has dived into it headfirst without knowing where it will take them. The first step, to re-becoming human, is to take one.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash