I have been house sitting different places for over fifteen years. Most of the people I sit for have been great with, for example, their return dates. Occasionally in my earlier years, before I began telling people to always let me know if they are returning early, someone would return early without telling me of their change in plans. My first notice would be them walking through the front door today… instead of tomorrow or next week, as planned.

To do this, they had to dehumanize me and the situation. Not on purpose, not maliciously, just without thought, consideration. One couple thought, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. If you haven’t cleaned up yet, we can all do it quickly. If you don’t have a place to stay next, since we came home early, you can stay in the guest room’. Another: ‘But it’s our house; we shouldn’t have to give warning for every little thing, like coming home early. It’s OUR house’.

My response: What do those things matter? This house is an inanimate object, it doesn’t need any warning or notices. But I have a life. This is about caring about MY life. You’re home early, which means I could have been in the shower. Or having friends or family over for one final dinner and nice evening. I could have been in bed with a girlfriend. Or a thousand other things. What matters is that you didn’t think about how this would affect my life. All it would have taken is a twenty-second phone call or email, once you knew your change in plans.

Most people I house sit for consider that I have a life and plans and that they may actually be making me very uncomfortable and throwing my own plans off, simply by not telling me of their own change in plans. There were a few people that had to dehumanize me, make it about only their wishes, only the house.

I was the night security person at a couple hotels. I’d walk around, keeping the noisy rooms reasonable in the evenings and quite after 11pm. I can’t count how many times people have said things like ‘I paid a lot of money for this room, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want’, or ‘We’ve been coming here for years, we’re good customers, we should be able to cut loose a little when we’re here’. You get the picture. Maybe you’ve even defended yourselves that way, when someone’s asking you to ‘please keep it down’.

You know what I say? What does money have to do with this? What does being a repeat customer have to do with it? I am talking about CARING. Since when did anything give anyone a license to not care about your neighbors’ enjoyment of life, your neighbors having a good sleep? Why did you bring money or anything else into this? I’m coming from the realm of CARE. You’ve got kids around you. People tired from the day’s traveling. People who want to get up early for their own plans. People who just want to sit and enjoy the quiet evening and nice view. People who want to read, or visit with each other, without listening to arguing people or screaming drunk people or booming stereos for the evening and half the night.

People will use a hundred lines and excuses to get their way each day, and each of those lines involves some form of dehumanizing the situation. I don’t always find the right things to say, I don’t always defuse explosive situations. But when I try to think of how to defuse situations, I become guilty of dehumanizing it myself. I’m most successful when I stop defusing, and simply try to see where the humanity is, simply open to the people in front of me, open to my own humanity, open to the humanity of others who are being affected by those people in front of me.

It isn’t about me shutting them up, shutting anyone down… it’s about me nudging them to remember their own humanity. I try for a win-win situation, where no one is the enemy, no one is ‘being bad’. If they’re yelling at me, I’m still trying to see their humanity and wondering if there’s something I can do or say to bring that back into the open. Sometimes I can do it… but sometimes I’m still ‘the enemy’. I’m getting better at finding what will nudge people back to their humanity. It doesn’t just defuse the situation… they are affected, changed by it. You should see the look on peoples’ faces when they realize it. Wonderful.

People will dehumanize you, make you diminutive to objects, to their most petty plans and wishes, every day. Perhaps you don’t even notice it happening. But it is constant, every day, and you yourself do it to others. We all have occasional moments where we try to get what we want, by making it about something other than considering how it affects another person or other people involved: for example, you’re standing in line at the store and you’re in a hurry, getting angry because the person holding up the line is using dozens of coupons. Or is elderly and having a hard time with the debit machine, or finding proper coins for change. Or it’s a trainee clerk at the cash register. If you dehumanize the situation, then it’s about being in a hurry, being late, the lineup being slowed down by this darn couponer, darn old lady, darn trainee.

But if you re-humanize the situation, people become real people again. They become living beings, with feelings, problems, limitations, families, situations, just like you. When you re-humanize them, you regain your empathy, compassion. You’ve been a trainee yourself sometimes and it can be hard, stressful, embarrassing to learn a new job, especially in the public eye. You know some elderly people, maybe your grandparents, they can have a tough time with even the small tasks, and also… one day YOU will be old, and how would you like to be treated when you slow things down for others because you’re old, aching, slow? This couponer… she’s a mom, might really have to stretch her budget to make ends meet, you wonder how stressful her home life is, what dreams she’s had shatter. Etc, etc, etc.

Dehumanizing others happens at all levels large and small, from overriding others’ wishes or comfort so you can get what you want when you want it, to lessening others’ importance compared to yours, to sociopathically not caring about others’ feelings at all, to full-blown psychopathically giving in to whatever you want to do to people with no regard for their wishes, feelings, or lives whatsoever; from minor, unknowing daily events where you want to get your way, to cheating people and putting their dreams second to your wants, to out and out torture and murder… to some degree small or large, you must dehumanize them, make them less important than your wishes, even make them objects, pawns in your orchestrations.

Everybody does this to some degree. Most of the time it’s hardly noticeable and unseen and we don’t even think about it. During the more apparent events, it can cause some pain between people. At its worst, we read about some tragedy in the news, or something terrible is done to someone we know… or to us, directly.

There’s only one thing that has a chance of countering the dehumanization of any situation: you bring it back to humanity. You re-humanize your thoughts about something, you re-humanize the situation and your thoughts towards the person who is ‘doing this to you’ or to someone else. Loud partiers, selfishly greedy people, psychopathic serial killers, criticizing in-laws, impatient people in lineups, all people are human, and can be reminded of their humanity even during the most extreme times they are dehumanizing another person, another race, another culture, another anything.

You may not find the right words at the right time; you may not be able to express the right things that will nudge them to remember their and your humanity. But even a psychopath has a humanity, somewhere in there, and there are many victims who have miraculously found the right way to nudge it in their attackers, and be allowed to survive. And there are many who haven’t. It takes a lot of thought, intuition, and you’ll often fail; there is no guarantee of success when you are trying to re-humanize any situation that is being dehumanized.

But it is a wonderful practice to learn for helping everyday happenings, and it is a valuable self defense option when you have run out of other options.

Re-humanizing people and situations is a purely positive action, there can never be harm directly from this action, regardless of whether you succeed or fail with it. I hope to succeed, and I hope you succeed with it, at whatever level you use it at.

BRING IT BACK TO HUMANITY