Embarrassment
blogImagine the situation. It’s Boxing Day and my Dad’s side of the family are sitting around the table for dinner. I am getting a glass when I hear my sister’s voice beckoning my nephew. In front of me I see my sister’s exact hairstyle — colour, length, texture — and assume that auditory and visual inputs correlate. And so, just as any normal brother would do, I decide to muss up her hair. This is just one of the tactics I could have employed. On other occasions I might have tickled her or put her into a headlock, but she is pregnant so I thought I should just leave it at that.
She turned around and, instead of my sister, I found myself confronted by my Dad’s new girlfriend (who I had met for the first time the previous day). She had been standing in front of my sister and I hadn’t realized that they had similar hair. She looked slightly unnerved by my over-familiar hair mussing, but accepted my explanation and apology.
For me, it was embarrassment at its purest. It was the feeling you get when your social ego is pricked by its inability to accord to social expectations. People don’t get embarrassed with their families because they know each other well enough not to care about social expectations. A new addition to the family circle reintroduces the possibility of embarrassment and, like a fool, I pounced on it.
In non-family situations, a person’s susceptibility to embarrassment depends greatly they are wrapped in their own ego, a construct that only exists in relation to others. At first this seems counter-intuitive: the people we know who are most often embarrassed are those mousy, tentative people not brash egoists, but I would argue that the reason they are mousy is because they worry too much about how they appear to others.
Regarding confidence, we could say that there is two types of: the kind which is based on the world’s opinion of you and the kind which is based on not caring what anyone thinks. But which kind of confidence is better? The former is more fragile and liable to send you spinning into insecurity, but it is also more self-aware. The latter is more robust, but alienating.
Finally, how can we get rid of embarrassment? Devotees of NLP will tell you to imagine watching yourself in a cinema with the embarrassing moment playing out on the screen. You should drain the scene of colour, slow it down, reduce the volume and then shrink it until it disappears. This does seem to work, but often the embarrassment will catch before you get to the box office. In these cases, I find it best to get out of yourself — try to get into somebody else’s mind and forget about your own.