“An obligatory aspect of shame is the role discovery plays,” writes Leon Wurmser, a University of Maryland psychiatrist, in The Mask of Shame. “It is usually a more or less sudden exposure, and exposure that abruptly brings to light the discrepancy between expectation and failure.” The feeling is that of sudden, sharp, inescapable humiliation—of a yawning gap between who you say you are and who your failures reveal you to be, of an ugly stain upon your public face.
