The Quiet Payoffs of Self-Deprecation

The implications of self-shrinking (from your nervous system’s perspective)

Have you ever used self-deprecation to relieve social pressure?

A stranger says, “I like your stripped sweater!” And you say, “This old thing? I dug it out of my uncle’s closet.”

Or your best friend says, “What a mind you have!” Your cheeks flush, the moment feels charged and weird, and you’re eager to say, “No, you’re the one with the mind!”

Self-deprecation saves us from the intense sensations of being witnessed.

The choke point that throttles personal transformation in its tracks

From a somatic experiencing perspective, if you have developmental trauma (cough, nearly all of us), you experience ANY kind of emotional charge as a threat.

This charge can be positive or negative, but if it’s intense, it’s scary. And it can tempt you to squeeze yourself into the tight crawl space of who you already know yourself to be, rather than expanding into the freedom of the present moment.

I sometimes feel an urge to self-depricate when fear comes up that if I’m perceived as powerful or resourceful, I may one day prove that assumption wrong, thus disappointing people.

Though this is usually unconscious, I see why it feels safer to fit within a smaller container — if someone sees you as incompetent right away, it’s hard to go lower.

Self-deprecation also runs rampant among artists who suddenly rise to fame, for example. Or people who blow up on YouTube, suddenly getting much more attention than they ever have.

You may know about the three ways the nervous system responds to stress: fight, flight, or freeze. Yet there’s a lesser-known, more controversial response: Fawning.

Fawning: A brilliant way to be everyone’s hero (except your own)

Fawning is a way we protect ourselves from the intense sensations of another person’s discomfort. It often manifests as excessive politeness or people-pleasing.

Self-deprecation can be a source of fawning: it’s a way we protect other people from seeing ourselves as more talented, powerful, or worthy of attention than our self-concept permits us to feel.

In the reality-shifting book, Existential Kink, Carolyn Elliott emphasizes the concept of havingness levels. She describes them as subconscious blueprints which determine how much sensation we allow ourselves to feel before we “turn ourselves off” by getting into a sour mood, regretting the past, or getting into an accident.

Self-deprecation is a strategy we use to numb ourselves from several possible scary sensations, like the sense of feeling superior to others. Or being viewed as more resourced than another person.

These feelings can feel funky, overwhelming, and unjustified, especially since society conditions us to stay small and limited, encouraging us to shove signs of personal authority into the shadows.

What happens when you stay present with sensations, no matter how sharp or ego-crushing

If you can train yourself to see self-deprecation as a havingness level problem — an issue related to your capacity to stay present with intense sensations — you can become a much more whole, self-aware person.

This is what most people do: they experience emotional charge, and they either fight, suppress, or numb it: with caffeine, social media scrolling, alcohol, compulsive people pleasing, etc.

Or they instantly translate a negative sensation into a narrative about how corrupt society is or how terrible their past mistakes were.

But the wider you can open to the diversity of sensations reality offers us, the more you create an insurance policy against the mundane.

In my case, I’m making a practice out of noting my sensations as they arise. When I give them granular attention, I notice that most sensations feel punishing because of the stories we attach to them, rather than the sensations themselves.

When I stay present with my sensations, my narratives feel less grounded in reality and more like fictions I use to justify staying in familiar territory.

When you release the conditioning that makes you shrink from intensity, you become capable of wielding much more power than the average person.

As somatic therapist and musician Luis Mojica has brilliantly pointed out: when you relate to your sensations as SENSATIONS (rather than confirmations about how terrible you are), you’re embodying your trauma response, rather than becoming identical with it.

Staying present with sensations will give you the experiential recognition we all want from meditation. It creates a psychological distance where you no longer take your thoughts so seriously.

They just ARE. They don’t say anything about you.

When you make a habit out of staying present with your sensations, its benefits will compound. And one benefit of this shift is that you stop fawning or self-depricating when you feel intense sensations in social settings. Instead, you’re able to expand into the discomfort. You feel safe enough to feel it arise and pass away, rather than needing to take extensive measures to distance or numb yourself to it.

Soon, you’ll access a power center within yourself, transporting you into a version of reality where fulfillment, safety, and peace aren’t products of flawless circumstances, but interpretations you can generate from within.

Do you want to dissolve your degrading, repetitive patterns, and merge with your larger Self, so you can materialize your juiciest, most adventurous intentions for this lifetime?

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