"And when we meet againAnd introduced as friendsPlease don't let on that you knew me whenI was hungry and it was your world." Bob Dylan, "Just Like A Woman" In this verse from "Just Like A Woman", Bob Dylan describes a situation most of us have experienced at some time in our lives. We feel an intense desire for someone, wear our hearts on our sleeves and then feel humiliated when we're rejected. Though Dylan describes this situation with particular eloquence, the world of popular music is filled with songs that express all the variations on the feelings of humiliation we can feel when we put ourselves out there in personal relationships only to be ignored or actively rejected.Much less common in popular music--in fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples at the moment, though I'm sure they exist--is any description of the very similar feelings of humiliation we can experience when we passionately pursue our life purpose. What are these feelings of humiliation and why do they come up so often when we commit ourselves to taking a particular life path?An example from everyday life might help to begin to answer this question. I had a friend who would never honk her car horn under any circumstances. She certainly wouldn't do it if she felt that the car ahead of her was going too slowly or if she was feeling impatient. But she wouldn't even do it when someone walked into the crosswalk as she was turning a corner. When we would talk about it, she would always describe the same feeling. She felt that, if she honked the horn, everyone would look at her and this made her so uncomfortable that she couldn't do it.Fortunately, my friend was a very good driver and I never felt that she was endangering anyone by refusing to honk. But she herself felt that she was being "irrational" and that she should just get over her fear of having people notice her. She knew that, in fact, it was highly unlikely that anyone would actually pay attention to her because she honked her horn and, even if they did, she didn't know why it should matter to her. It wasn't as if she was doing anything wrong. Nonetheless, it was a short step from maligning herself for being irrational to telling herself she should just get over it, to not getting over it and, finally,to feeling bad about herself for not getting over it.In my work, I have seen many people struggle with similar feelings when they're looking for or trying to express their life's passion. One obvious way people can experience this is when the thing they want to do requires them to be the center of attention--being a performer, for example, or, for some people, standing up in front of a classroom or some other audience. Often people are afraid to be noticed in these situations because they're afraid of performing badly and being ridiculed.But this feeling also comes up for people whose passions don't require them to be out in front of people on a regular basis. And it often comes up more intensely when they're doing well than when they're doing badly. These are the situations where the fear of humiliation, ridicule--shame, really-- can seem most irrational and inexplicable.One of my favorite psychological thinkers is the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. One of Kohut's many important contributions to our understanding of human experience was his belief that human beings have lifelong needs for experiences of what he called "mirroring". All of us need to be seen accurately by others and to have the qualities we value in ourselves recognized by other people. Kohut thought that no one needs or can receive perfect mirroring throughout their lives. But if we receive mirroring that is good enough, if we've had a consistent enough experience of what he called "the gleam in the mother's eye", we develop confidence in ourselves and our abilities to be successful in the world. We develop ambitions for ourselves that are both sturdy and realistic.But what happens if we don't receive adequate mirroring in childhood or later in our lives? This is a more complicated story. We certainly don't develop a resilient sense of self-confidence or sustaining ambitions. But something more insidious also occurs. If we consistently experience ourselves as not being mirrored by the people who matter to us, we don't tend to fault those other people. Especially when we're children and we don't receive adequate mirroring from our parents, we don't blame our parents. It simply feels too dangerous to think that the people we depend on could be so incapable of meeting our basic emotional needs. So, instead, we blame ourselves.Once we start down this road of self-blame, we can feel very exposed any time we show that we really care about something. Unconsciously, we're expecting to be met with the same indifference or rejection that we experienced as children. And since the self-blame we experience when our needs for mirroring aren't met is so painful, we decide that it's easier to just not let things matter so much. We deny our ambitions and, with them, our life purpose.As I hope you can tell from this brief description, these issues of ambition, shame and life purpose often play themselves out without our realizing what's going on. You can end up having feelings of depression, flatness, lack of motivation, insecurity and frustration and have very little idea of how to feel better. A good therapy relationship can help you to understand that these feelings are not your fault and help to get you back on the road to realizing your ambitions and your life purpose.