Hey Inky!

I guess shame is one of the most powerful emotions we got – designed to help us to adapt to a community and thereby survive!
You went there with trust. You opened up and showed your work in the belief you would get some constructive and great feedback. Instead it was a shameful situation, where you were told by an important person of the community that your work is not good enough.
Your reaction is completely natural!
But shame only makes sense when it helps you to adapt. Therefore a good teacher or leader should be constructive. But your feeling of shame persists because there is nothing you can do to adapt to such a rude form of criticism! So every time you even think about it, the feelings comes back like a wave. You kind of “lost your face” in front of the community – at least this is what it feels like!
The reality is that she probably does not even think about it, and would greet you friendly without even knowing how she made you feel – she just feels great about herself because she could find some sort of perceived weakness and point it out! So in the end she is just a very bad teacher/leader without empathy, who is destructive towards her own community to push her ego.
When you meet her or her partner: Be nice to them, they deserve your pity!

How to face this, and just go to events anyway, and feel you are accepted and can be yourself? I wish I knew 😀
I try to remember that everyone feels like this from time to time, and that others won’t even know or notice it. If you go there anyway you can maybe “overwrite” the feeling of shame by making new and better experiences, even if it is painful in the beginning.
Sometimes you just need to let go and find new communities. I once went to a theatre group with lots of hopes, but they were arrogant jerks who made new people feel unwelcome and treated them like sh… When I moved to a different city I wanted to go to a new theatre group, and I spend an hour outside because I did not even want to go in… when I finally did I was greeted with so much warmth and I gained several great friends and my bf of five years!
However, just thinking about that first group still gives me a sense of shame, even many years later! Knowing that I don’t need them to survive, that they are not worth a single though and that they will not even know how horrible I felt with them, I try just not to think about them at all.
In short: Go there, face your fears & the reaction, if it still feels shitty you know it’s not you but them – then accept the feeling, go somewhere else and find people who make you feel good! It’s just like a relationship 😉

PS: If you find other ways to deal with this please let me know – I figured recently that I try to evade that feeling most of the time, which might be healthy sometimes, but not everytime…