I haven't totally grasped your meaning but I think that you're addressing the 'shame' and stigma attached with both having some form of mental illness, and the fact that the label put-onto us is: 'SOCIAL phobia'.
A bit of a catch-22, since in order to be phobic in social situations a person would already need to be ashamed of their shyness/awkwardness/nervousness etc, and thus, embarrased about their social inadequacy to begin with. The problem with labels used in psychiatry, is that they brand a person in terms of something negative, all the whilst attempting to change something negative into a positive. ...I think that some people can handle a negative label, whilst others are only brought-down by it to some degree. The ones who are not at all phased by the label 'social phobia' are, in my opinion, likely to be unphased because they already regard it as simply the negative side to their positive -in other words they may be more inclined to see through it.
...This is the danger in psychiatry: going to someone for help who in diagnosing you (and possibly even with their attitude shown through in their choice of words, etc...) runs the risk of making you feel even more hopeless and ashamed and helpless against such a be-all-and-end-all negative. IT is in fact such a perception of reality that gets a person in the position to be a social phobic to begin with: this 'winners' vs 'losers' , black-and-white view of who people are supposed to be. We are socially phobic or anxious because we look at the world in too black-and-white a way -we effectively 'label' it too much (like is the habit somewhat in psychiatry). ...We leave no room for mistakes, for weakness, because in our mind we see too drastic a difference between strength and weakness. Instead of seeing shyness/emotional impressionability and sensitivity/a great capacity for empathy etc, we see only the negative sides to all of these characteristics.
But this is the nature of having strong emotions: because it is difficult to be balanced when there is more emotional ground to cover, it is very easy to flip from extremes and see an all-or-nothing view, and much harder to instead accept our shyness/sensitivity etc, to instead continue rejecting this aspect of ourselves as being 'wrong' and 'weak' -which is exactly what exagerrates it in the first place! It becomes a 'negative' because we have become stuck seeing it as only negative. In fact, it is neither positive nor negative, but an equal aspect of both.
I think that 'acknowledgement' is to recognise a behaviour and thinking that is out of proportion with the way things really are and replace it with thinking and then behaviour that is in proportion to who we really are; whilst self-pity is seeing the way things are not and making ourselves feel as if there is something fundamentally wrong with us. To a person who sees the world clearly -the rational, well-adjusted, truly sane and capable- there is no such thing as a person with an inherent flaw; there can only exist 'bad' in the presence of 'good', 'weakness' in the presence of 'strength'.
...it is how a person judges and perceives and defines these characteristics that effects whether they are happy or unhappy. And that, whilst there is an obstacle to getting this -ie: thinking in an out-of-perspective way already- this is to be expected when 1) we are human and very few people are lacking in illusions about who they are and who others are
2) when a person has more emotions to get into balance and bring perspective to, of course the difficulty is greater, just as the tendency to think in a black-and-white way will be greater
...So it is that, we can only forgive ourselves for struggling with the challange of 'thinking in perspective' (and the emotional balance that then comes from this) -but the ability to forgive ourselves for our difficulty and struggle, is in fact a big part of having perspective (I hope you get my meaning with this) ie: if there is a big negative, it is only in the presence of an equally big positive.
