Shame is one of the most painful human emotions because it attacks not merely what we have done, but who we believe we are.
Shame versus Guilt
Psychologists often distinguish between:
- Guilt: “I did something bad.”
- Shame: “I am bad.”
Guilt focuses on an action and can motivate repair. Shame focuses on the self and can lead to hiding, withdrawal, or self-condemnation.
What Shame Feels Like
People often describe shame as:
- A desire to disappear, hide, or become invisible.
- Feeling exposed or “seen” in a way that threatens one’s dignity.
- A sinking sensation in the stomach or chest.
- Heat in the face, blushing, or looking away.
- Feeling small, defective, contaminated, or unworthy.
- Fear that others will reject, ridicule, or abandon them.
Unlike fear, which says “something bad may happen,” shame says “if people truly knew me, they would reject me.”
The Social Nature of Shame
Humans evolved as social creatures. Being excluded from the group once threatened survival. Shame is therefore deeply tied to our need for belonging.
Shame often arises when:
- We fail to meet our own standards.
- We believe we have disappointed others.
- We experience public humiliation.
- We compare ourselves unfavorably to others.
- We feel we have fallen from a valued identity.
The Flies (Les Mouches) is one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most important existentialist dramas. Written during the Nazi occupation of France, it retells the ancient Greek story of Orestes but transforms it into a meditation on freedom, guilt, responsibility, and liberation from shame.
The play is set in the city of Argos. Years earlier, King Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Since then, the city has been trapped in a culture of collective guilt and remorse.
Every year, the citizens participate in a ritual called the Day of the Dead. They are constantly reminded of their sins and taught to feel guilty. The swarms of flies that plague the city symbolize this atmosphere of shame, self-condemnation, and psychological oppression.
Into this city returns Orestes, Agamemnon’s exiled son. He finds a population that has surrendered its freedom in exchange for moral certainty. His sister, Electra, dreams of liberation but remains trapped by resentment and fantasy.
Orestes eventually decides to avenge his father. He kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Yet the central drama begins after the murders rather than before them.
The god Zeus expects Orestes to be crushed by guilt. Instead, Orestes accepts full responsibility for his actions without seeking forgiveness or excuses. He refuses to repent in the way the city demands.
The Furies (represented by the flies) pursue him, trying to make him feel remorse. But Orestes discovers that human beings are free and must create their own values. Since he consciously chose his actions, he refuses to let guilt define him.
At the end, Orestes leaves Argos, taking the city’s accumulated guilt symbolically with him, while the citizens are left with the possibility of becoming free.
A “fall from grace” is often one of the most painful forms of shame because it is not just the loss of status, reputation, innocence, success, or an idealized self-image. It is the collapse of a story about who you believed yourself to be.
Sartre’s The Flies can be helpful because it distinguishes between losing an image and losing yourself.
Step 1: Identify the lost identity
Ask:
“What version of myself fell?”
Perhaps it was:
- The good person
- The successful professional
- The admired parent
- The faithful spouse
- The strong one
- The wise one
Often the suffering comes not only from what happened but from the destruction of an identity.
In The Flies, the people of Argos remain attached to an identity of “the guilty people.” Their shame becomes part of who they are.
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Step 2: Refuse to become your failure
Sartre would not ask:
“Are you still pure?”
He would ask:
“What are you going to do now?”
Orestes does not try to recover innocence.
He accepts that innocence is gone.
The crucial realization is:
I am the person who experienced this fall, but I am not identical to the fall itself.
This is often the beginning of healing.
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Step 3: Let the old self die
This sounds harsh, but many people suffer because they spend years trying to resurrect the person they were before.
A Sartrean perspective might be:
The person who existed before the fall no longer exists.
And that is true for everyone.
The goal is not restoration but creation.
The question becomes:
Who am I now?
Existentially, this can be liberating because it shifts attention from recovering the past to building the future.
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Step 4: Notice the flies
After a fall from grace, the flies often sound like:
- “Everyone remembers.”
- “You used to be better.”
- “You have no right to speak.”
- “You are a fraud.”
- “You can never recover.”
These voices often promise redemption through endless self-punishment.
But self-punishment rarely produces growth.
It usually produces paralysis.
A useful question is:
Is this thought helping me become more responsible, or merely keeping me ashamed?
If it only produces shame, it is a fly.
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Step 5: Rewrite the myth
Many myths begin with a fall.
Consider:
- Odysseus loses his way repeatedly.
- Oedipus loses his kingship and certainty.
- Job loses almost everything.
- Sisyphus loses any hope of a final victory.
What makes them memorable is not that they avoided the fall.
It is what they became afterward.
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A healing retelling—————
Suppose the original story is:
“I was respected, then I failed. My life has never been the same.”
A Sartrean retelling might be:
“I lost an identity that I had mistaken for myself. The fall revealed aspects of reality and of myself that I could not previously see. I cannot return to who I was, but I can choose who I become.”
Notice that this retelling does not deny the loss.
It grants the loss full reality.
But it refuses to make the loss the final chapter.
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Sartre asks a different question:
What if the judgment is true? What if the fall really happened? What if innocence is gone?
His answer is:
You are still free.
Not free from consequences, not free from regret, but free to decide what meaning the fall will have.
In that sense, The Flies suggests that healing after a fall from grace comes when you stop trying to prove that you never fell and begin asking:
“Given that I fell, what kind of person do I want to be now?”
That question turns shame from a prison into a turning point.
