You had to feel ashamed.

Every person knows shame: it is a normal feeling. While you would prefer to disappear, you actually become intensely aware of yourself, you suffer from an excess of stimuli, from blushing and sweating, to ill-defined anger. In short, you feel overwhelmed by sensations. Shame is an emotion you want to get rid of as soon as possible, the feeling hurts. To do so, you use classic defence mechanisms like denying, rejecting, repressing, shifting, and rationalising shame, talking it up. Shame is social pain. What is left of you feels powerless, like an object of contempt, paralysed, passively afflicted by painful autonomous reactions. When you feel ashamed, against your better judgment, you heave emotionally with the enemy who thinks you are worthless. There is no more room for understanding yourself.

It is the other person's eyes that shame you. The gaze of the other begins with the mother, father, caregiver, grandfathers, grandmothers, the community: through their looks and words, you learn how to behave and to belong. What you can say and what to be silent about. Shame acts as oil in a society. It keeps people in their place. But there may be reversals in who has the power to shame whom. #Metoo is an example of how power and shame relationships can change. Shamelessness can be a defence through which someone does not feel the shame that would otherwise be unbearable, but evokes it in bystanders, "the vicarious shame."

High time to delve into Shame.

More detailed information on each event and guest speakers will follow in due course.