The gaze isn’t just eyes on me; it’s the moment my activity is caught in another’s look and I’m flipped from subject to object. A second ago, I was absorbed with my project, interested, even quietly joyful, in what I was doing. Then the look lands. In Sartre’s terms, I become being-for-others: visible, exposed, available to be judged, evaluated, negated, and abandoned. The look doesn’t merely observe; it rearranges my self-experience, interrupting the flow of self-constituting action and returning me to myself as seen.

In this episode, Dr Zahra and I discuss shame from an existential and phenomenological perspective. Shame is not something inherently destructive but a fundamental part of the human condition that reveals important existential truths about the self, relationships, and the world. Referring to Tomkins and Affect Theory, we'd been able to name the affective pivot inside that instant: shame ignites when interest/joy is abruptly impeded, especially under a look. The warmth of engagement cools, agency reverses, and the body registers exposure before any story forms. That’s the existential core we’re tracking: shame as the first flash of being perceived as an object. Only after this rupture do the familiar aftershocks organise scripts in which other emotions latch onto shame (withdrawal, attack self, avoidance, attack other).