Start Here: Dignity from Definition to Reclamation

This episode is for you if you want a comprehensive overview of dignity, exploring its definition, elements, and the impact of power dynamics on dignity violations. It’s for you if you’re a leader. It’s for you if you’ve been hurt, and who hasn’t? We discuss the vulnerability of dignity, how trauma and shame relate to dignity violations, and offer insights on reclaiming dignity after harm. We expand dignity to encompass “next level dignity,” broader implications of dignity for future generations and the earth.

Takeaways

• Dignity is inherent and does not need to be earned.
• Dignity can be violated by anyone in our lives.
• Power dynamics significantly affect how dignity is experienced and violated.
• As leaders, we need to be aware of the impact of our actions on others.
• Trauma stems from repeated dignity violations, and shame is a common response to those dignity violations.
• Reclaiming dignity involves recognizing our inherent worth.
• Setting boundaries is crucial for restoring dignity.
• Self-compassion helps in the process of reclaiming dignity.
• We can shift from a victim mindset to one of agency by making commitments to ourselves.
• Next level dignity extends to future generations and the earth.

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

For more information on the podcast, please visit www.thedignitylab.com.
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For additional free resources, including the periodic table of dignity elements, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/resources/.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Dignity Lab. Even though we're completing our fourth season, we're calling this episode Start Here because this episode provides a broad overview of dignity, incorporating many of the concepts from our conversations in previous episodes, and it's a great place to jump into the world of dignity. I'll first define dignity and then contrast dignity with what I call its lookalikes. Then I'll talk about ways in which our dignity can be harmed and about the role that power plays in dignity violations. I'll describe some ways we respond when our dignity is violated, specifically touching on the experience of shame evoked by trauma. I'm then going to move into ways we can reclaim our dignity after harm, and I'll close by expanding the ways I think we're called to think about dignity across time and space. I'm going to start with answering the question.

I'm going to start with answering the question, what is dignity? The modern concept of dignity is deeply embedded in human rights discourse. This is exemplified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948, which established that all humans which established that all humans are born equal in dignity and rights. Dignity is our inherent worth or value. Inherent means that your dignity is baked into your very being. From the day you're born, you have worth and value. Just like a brand new baby doesn't have to earn their worth, you don't have to earn your dignity. One of the key ideas behind dignity is that no one has more or less than another person. The bottom line, dignity is your birthright and everyone else's. 

It's important to differentiate between dignity and respect and pride and honor because all of these can be violated and violations from any one of these. It's important to differentiate between dignity and respect and pride and honor because each of these can be violated. I think of dignity as congenital and respect as acquired. Respect is earned through our accomplishments or it's given to us by another person. Pride similarly comes from our attributes and our achievements and it's dependent in many ways like respect on how we're perceived by others.

Honor stems from adherence to moral and social codes. For men, honor often shows up as strength, as defending what belongs to us, even with violence. For women, honor is embedded in purity and chastity, different indeed from dignity.

So what does it mean to live a life of dignity and to treat other people with dignity? I've adapted what follows from the work of Dr. Donna Hicks, who, along with her graduate student, identified 10 elements of dignity by conducting interviews all around the world. 

The first three elements are acceptance of identity, inclusion, and safety. Acceptance of identity means that we are not seen as superior or inferior on the basis of our age, our race or ethnicity, the language we speak, our status in the world, our ability, our body size, our sex or gender, our possessions, where we're born or our station in life. The next element is inclusion. Inclusion means that you are treated as if you're part of your family, your school, your workplace, your community, country, and world. It means you are not subjected to stigma or being treated as the other. It also means you have a meaningful voice in decisions and discussions and are able to contribute fully while having your perspective valued. The third element is physical and psychological safety. These first three elements, again, are acceptance of identity, inclusion and physical and psychological safety. I group these three under the umbrella of belonging. 

The next three elements of dignity are understanding, validation and recognition. Understanding means having a chance to have your story heard without interruption or being plowed over conversationally or otherwise. Validation means that your experiences and thoughts and feelings are considered as important, whether somebody agrees with you or not. We all know what it feels like to have our feelings or experiences invalidated. Recognition means that your achievements and your striving are seen, whether you succeed or not, that when you try something, you are seen as making a contribution. For if we're only recognized for what we do right, we'll never try something new. We won't have a culture of growth. These three elements, understanding, recognition, and validation, I group under the umbrella of being seen and heard. 

The last four elements are being given the benefit of the doubt, fairness, autonomy, and accountability. Benefit of the doubt means that we're seen as having integrity. Fairness means that we're treated equally according to mutually agreed upon rules without discrimination. Autonomy means we have a choice in what happens to us and what we're asked to do. I think autonomy is violated at the beginning of life, it's violated at the end of life, and it's violated if we have a disability. Accountability is one of the most important elements to me and means that people take responsibility when they've messed up and that they seek to make amends. I group these four under the umbrella of justice. 

Additional elements of dignity identified by ari weinzweig include helping everyone achieve their version of greatness and  and living with authenticity. 

When these elements of dignity are honored, we feel that we belong, we are seen and heard, and we are treated justly. We have trust. We show up as who we truly are and are able to reach our potential. When any one of these elements are not lived out or experienced by us, our dignity is violated and we can violate the dignity of another.

As essential as dignity is, it's also incredibly fragile. It's like a part of the body, like our heart or any other organ, both essential and vulnerable. Dignity is vulnerable to harm from the moment we're born through the end of our lives. Your dignity can be violated or bruised at the very least by your parents, your siblings, your partners, your friends, your teachers, by physicians, by systems. Your dignity can be violated, or bruised at the very least, by everyone in your life, by your parents, your siblings, your partner, your teachers, by physicians, team coaches, scout leaders, people in places of worship, really in any setting. Groups of people can have their dignity violated by another group, even people on the other side of the world.

One of the things that's become increasingly clear to me throughout the episodes of our podcast and in my thinking about dignity is that power plays a tremendous role in understanding violations of dignity. When there's a power imbalance, the very same behavior that would have been benign or even amusing when exhibited by someone who has equal power to us, this very same behavior can be toxic when exhibited by somebody with more power. Let's take for example, teasing. From a sibling, teasing can be a form of connection and play. When done by a parent, teacher, coach, physician, anybody with more power, it's of an entirely different flavor. Harmful gossip by a coworker hurts, but when a leader or teacher engages in harmful gossip, it's poisonous. A hateful statement from a leader of a country can lead to violence against an entire group of people. And when we have more power than another person or group, it's easy to violate the dignity of others, often without even realizing it.

I also want to talk about the power of systems or institutions to violate dignity. It's often the case that the lack of accountability and repair from a system perpetuates harm. There's rarely a reckoning and there's no one to step up and say, I made a mistake or we violated your dignity and this is how we're going to fix it. The system in fact is nameless and faceless, and often so self-reinforcing that change or repair seems impossible. It thus follows that if we're part of a system and benefit from it, part of a system that hurts other people, we are at risk of being complicit in violating the dignity of others. And people who speak up against a system.are labeled as troublemakers and may suffer exile, as we often see with whistleblowers.

How do we react? How do other people react in response to a dignity violation? People are fine-tuned to notice dignity violations even if they've never used or heard the word dignity. When one or more of these elements is violated, and it usually is more than one at a time, we are first likely to react in our body. We can freeze, shutting down entirely. We may feel small or might prepare to flee, to run. We can feel tension in our body that could spring forth and roar at the person who hurt us or hurt someone we love. Our entire nervous system can get hijacked. Even without words, we sense the violation of our dignity or of another person or being that we love.

We may also have emotional responses that result from our responses in our body. This can include anger, fear, grief, and disgust. If we aren't accustomed to naming or parsing out our emotions, we may feel merely “bad.”

There are also ways we can act when our dignity is violated that align with the fight, flight, or freeze reaction. Automatic responses such as physically or verbally lashing out at people, avoiding conflict, giving people the silent treatment, withdrawing, staying in an unsafe situation, whether at home or at work, gossiping to find what turns out to be false intimacy. We might speak or act with righteous indignation. This is one of my go-tos. We may repel feedback, avoiding taking responsibility for our mistakes. We may thrive in our victim or martyr identity, telling our story over and over to anyone who is unfortunate enough to be nearby to the point that we don't know who we are without the victim narrative. Finally, we can outsource our dignity, asking others to repair our dignity through external, sometimes incessant, unending validation. 

I'm wondering if any of these sound familiar to you. I'm also wondering if it's helpful to see these types of responses in other people and to become curious or more aware about what violations they have experienced.

Next, I'd like to talk briefly about trauma and shame. Trauma is the result of massive or repeated violations of dignity. Trauma can take the form of neglect or abuse or pervasive dysfunction. It's also the case that what happens in the here and now can echo what happened there and then earlier in your life. Have you ever had a physical or emotional reaction to something someone did that seemed perhaps out of proportion to what they actually did? It's possible that what's happening in the moment replicates a dignity violation from earlier in your life. It's also possible when people respond to you, that they are feeling in the here and now something that happened there and then. 

When we experience trauma, violation of our dignity, we can experience shame. Until I learned about dignity and thought through these elements and our responses, I found this puzzling. Why should I feel shame when someone else did the harm? This is how I put it together.

If dignity is our worth and value, shame is the opposite, an experience of feeling worth-less. Shame is the experience or feeling that we and not our actions are a mistake. Shame therefore essentially argues that we do not have dignity. So a violation of dignity through trauma or even a smaller violation can lead to shame. Many of these responses are ingrained in us at an early age, not merely by our first family, but also out in the world as children. If we're excluded, not accepted, not safe, not seen and heard, not treated with justice, we can experience shame. And it's important to recognize multi-generational trauma, multi-generational shame.

So I've talked about what dignity is, what it isn't, what it looks like and what might happen and how we might act when our dignity is violated. I've also talked briefly about power. I've also talked about power and trauma and shame. 

How do we go about reclaiming our dignity after harm? Are we destined to sit in the shattered pieces of our broken dignity, swimming in an ocean of shame? What are our options for reclaiming our dignity? Here's something I found important and helpful. The word reclaim comes from the old French word to call back your hawk. The way I think about it is this, your dignity is always yours. It may be distant, bruised or broken, but it is still yours. It may be past the mountains, over the ocean, distant from you. It can leave you, but it's always yours. Just like if you call back your hawk to yourself, you can reclaim your dignity calling it back from far away.

So what are some ways we can actually go about reclaiming our dignity? The first thing we can do is remind ourselves that our dignity is our inherent worth. It can be all too easy to forget that we have worth because the way the world works and the way power works and trauma and shame, we can forget that we have worth and value, not by virtue of the family into which we were born or how much we have or how much we have accomplished or our station in life or how much we do for other people, but just because we are a child of the universe. This reminder is probably the most important step. 

I do find it also helpful to identify the element of dignity, or more commonly the elements of dignity, that were violated in a particular circumstance. There's something powerful in naming exactly what was wrong in what happened or in the elements of dignity that we have violated. One of the things I've noticed is that people often invalidate their experiences. They have a hard time seeing that what happened was actually a violation of dignity. They're essentially gaslighting themselves. 

Setting boundaries is another way to reclaim our dignity. We decide what's acceptable and what's not. And we can very compassionately set boundaries with others. And compassion, don't forget, includes fierce compassion, where we set a line that can't be crossed. Compassion and self-compassion are important levers in reclaiming our dignity and restoring that of others. Compassion requires that we notice suffering both in ourselves and in others, and then act to tend to, if we are able to, that suffering. In the case of self-compassion, we name that this is a moment of suffering and that suffering is part of the human condition. We are not alone. Self-compassion also means we don't over-identify with our stories and our emotions, but we also don't avoid them. 

After our dignity has been violated, we don't have to stay victims. I believe that we were not created or did not evolve to be victims. I don't think we thrive when we're victims. And I don't think we can achieve our purpose if we sit in a state of victimhood or martyrdom.

One of the most important things we can do to reclaim our dignity is tell a different story. What do I mean by that? When dignity has been violated, we can see things as having been done to us. Philosopher and psychologist William James, cited in the work of Donna Hicks, proposed that we move from, ”This was done to me. I am a victim. I react. I lash out, I run away, I isolate myself, I make myself small” to “I choose, I respond, I commit, I pledge.” This is a powerful shift in how we move forward in our lives and in the world. Yes, what happened wasn't right, but you don't have to sit in this position of “done” to me.

You don't have to sit in a state of victimhood or self-pity or people looking at you as if you're broken. You can choose to inhabit your body to its full, to be your full height, to make decisions and choices about what's next. You can look into your future, making a commitment, a promise or pledge to yourself moving forward. This takes time. I've been there. Be really kind to yourself. 

Perhaps as you're listening to this, you're thinking words like “me” and “I” is uncomfortable. Some cultures avoid focusing on me or I, instead focusing on others, on the community. I'm wondering if this is you. The bottom line is that we can only control, manage or change ourselves.

(As an aside, a lot of suffering comes about in life because we believe we can change or control others. As uncomfortable as you might feel thinking about moving from me to I, it really is the truth that we only have control over our own behaviors and emotions and the stories we tell ourselves.)

In service of moving beyond the self, however, I'm going to talk now about the concept of “I and Thou” written about by philosopher Martin Buber in 1923. While I-it relationships treat others as objects to be used or experienced or othered, I-thou encounters involve genuine relationships where people meet each other in their wholeness without objectification.  As we heal from violations of our dignity, we may begin to see the dignity within others, including the people that have hurt us. In a remarkable way, this shift continues our own healing. It's not possible to rush this, but it can happen, and it can change how you feel in your heart towards people, whether they have names or not in your life, whether you still see them or not. Please note that I do not believe we should or can expand dignity to broken, exploitative systems. 

As I wrap up today, I want to talk about what I call next level dignity. Next level dignity is how I refer to the dignity of subsequent generations and communities with which we have no direct contact. I expand dignity to include the world. I've also come to believe that we have to stop thinking of dignity as something that only human beings have. This transactional approach we have to the earth, this I-it relationship, and the way we violate the dignity of the earth has led to great destruction and to the trouble that we're in now.

I'm curious how you're feeling and what you're thinking after hearing this today. I'm wondering what dignity means to you right now. How have you seen dignity show up in your life? What elements of dignity are your favorites or are they all equally important parts of the dignity package? Is there one step you can take to reclaim your dignity, to call back your hawk? What can you shift in your life to more often honor the dignity of others, of work, of the earth, of seven generations to come? 

We love to hear from you. You can reach us at our website, thedignitylab.com, or by emailing me at jennifer at jennifergriggs.com. On our website, you'll also find downloadable resources, including a table of the elements of dignity, a downloadable resource on dignity look-alikes, well as many other things, meditations to help you call back your hawk, and a link to sign up for our newsletter, which we publish just once a month. 

If you're interested in learning more about ways to heal after dignity violations, or how to live and lead with dignity, consider joining the Dignity Lab, a small group leadership roundtable that allows you to explore and put into practice the principles of dignity. The conversations we have in the lab are transformative in healing yourself and then repairing harm at work, at home, and in your community. Your leadership skills will be up-leveled. You'll learn how to delegate with dignity. You'll understand how to gossip with dignity, how to inspire your team, and how to lead through disruption and workplace trauma. You'll also be part of a community, a small group, where you feel safe and experience true belonging. 

If you're interested in learning more about the Dignity Lab Mastermind Group, I'll be hosting an online Dignity Lab demo on Tuesday, February 25th at 6 p.m. Eastern Time and a second one on Saturday, March 22nd at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. I'm also hosting an online session on authentic listening, also with two dates, the first on Sunday, March 2nd at 2 p.m. Eastern Time

and the second one on Tuesday, April 1st at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. We'll be practicing radical listening and you'll learn a new way to be authentic even if you don't feel safe at work. You can sign up for any and all of these on our website, thedignitylab.com or on my website, jennifergriggs.com. Space is limited so that we can have more connection and more time for discussion.

If this episode was helpful, would you consider sharing it with one or two other people in your life? And please rate, review, and subscribe. All of those things will help expand our audience. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.