“Let us turn directly to the inner experience of shame. To feel shame is to feel SEEN in a painfully diminished sense. The self exposed both to itself and to anyone else present. Contained in the experience of shame is the piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being. to live with shame is to experience the very essence of self as wanting…The binding effect of shame involves the whole self. Sustained eye contact with others becomes intolerable. The head is hung. And speech is silenced. Exposure itself eradicates the words, thereby causing shame to be almost incommunicable to otehrs. Feeling exposed opens the self to painful inner scrutiny. It is as though the eyes inexplicably turn inward. We are suddenly watching ourselves, scrutinizing critically the minutest detail of our being…Yet it seems to us instead the people around us who are watching and seeing into our very souls, finding us lacking, insufficient.”…Gershen Kaufman
(Anyhow this hits the nail on the head how I feel but it is not a defn of sz, but of shame I feel regarding it’s stigma.)