GUILT – THE USELESS EMOTION

Faithful readers will know that some years ago, my beloved wife fell ill. Gravely, life-threateningly ill. It was the darkest time of my life. I fell apart in so many ways.

I was entirely unequipped to deal with what was happening. My son had just started high school, and his mother was in hospital with so many tubes running out of her she looked like a de-salination plant.

So, I crumbled. I was as broken as broken gets, I guess. I was actively considering and planning an end to it all. But me being me, there was no way I was leaving without taking all of my many enemies with me. Yes, indeed. All those fuckers who’d done me wrong were going to pay. It was, I felt, my way of slightly improving the wretched world I was soon going to leave.

I was then and remain now, a writer. It’s the only thing I can really do, because I’m pretty crap at everything else. So I am cursed/blessed with an active imagination. And in this instance, this imagination was on fire. It blazed with wondrously imagined possibilities and outcomes.

In my mind, I buried my wife many times. I visualised the funeral. I visualised my traumatised son at the coffin of his mother, whom his worthless father had failed to preserve. I could smell the fucken flowers people had brought.

I was entirely bereft of any emotion save two – stark terror and white-hot anger. I still worked, though how running a multi-million dollar magazine was a thing I could do in-between twice-daily hospital visits, getting my boy off to school and picking him up afterwards, plus a bit of freelancing, remains a mystery to this day.

But it’s quite amazing what one can do when one has no choice, right? The close friends I thought I’d had had all largely deserted me. It seemed my wife’s illness was just too much for them to bear. One later told me he was having trouble coping with it. But not-so-close friends filled that void. Their endless little kindnesses to me and my son is not something I will ever forget, though I shall never be able to repay them.

This taught me a valuable lesson about the people in my life. It’s like a meme had come to live with me. You will know who your true friends are when the shit hits the fan and starts to spray around the room. So now I knew things I did not know before. Was I hurt? Yes. Deeply. Did I show anyone this wound? Fuck, no.

But what else I knew in those long months of despair – and I knew this deep in the back of my screaming brain – was that I could not continue in this way. I could not be any kind of father or husband in the state I was in. On the outside I looked and acted pretty much how I had always looked and acted, although it would be fair to say I looked very stressed out. People could understand me looking like that. How could I not be stressed out?

But inside was a different thing. How could people understand that? Inside, I was a maelstrom of chaos. Why else would I be actively contemplating suicide and murder? No rational person does that. And of course, I was not rational, was I? I needed help. I certainly knew that.

So, I went to my doctor. He was the very same GP who had diagnosed my wife’s illness…well, had enough concern for her symptoms to send her for the tests that confirmed his suspicions. His name was John Miller. He is the twin brother of George Miller. You’d know George from Mad Max. Small world, huh?

Anyway, Doctor Miller remains the most amazing doctor I have ever had the privilege of knowing. His care and concern for both me and my wife was, quite simply, unbelievable.

Doctor Miller and I had a conversation about me, and he said I should go and speak to a psychologist. I told him to get fucked. He insisted I go. I insisted he get fucked.  Could he just prescribe some drugs that would make me less insane? He explained those drugs only and temporarily mask the problem. They solve nothing. Therapy might solve nothing too, but we needed to try it. I told him I could not afford a psychologist. I am the working poor, for fuck’s sake. To this day, I scrabble out an existence that depends entirely on the goodwill of my readers.

Doctor Miller said Medicare would cover the first ten visits, after which we would see what my other options were, but it was imperative, he insisted, that I go and get some help before I became a news item.

There seemed to be enough humanity left in me to do as the good doctor had said. The next day I was in a bland, featureless consulting room for my very first session.

Luck had once again smiled upon me. I had no animosity or suspicion towards my therapist.  And for therapy to work, the patient must trust the therapist. I mean, how else are you expected to spill your deepest and darkest bile? The therapist is a stranger. I don’t tell my dearest friends of the screaming inside me, and now I’m expected to bare all to someone I do not know?

But that’s the thing. My friends would judge me. Their judgement would make things worse. The therapist? Well, he might judge me too, but I didn’t know him and so his judgement would be of no consequence. But therapists, good ones, do not judge – or if they do, you would not have an inkling of it. Mainly, they just listen.

And this one had lots to listen to. I said some shit in that room to that therapist that would cause a priest to burn. I confessed all. I told him I spent my days either trembling in monkey-brain terror, or being a breath away from red-eyed violence, which should I give in to, would be entirely catastrophic. So, fear or anger, turn and turn-about.

I went home that day feeling no different. But like the therapist said, it would take a few sessions before we could find something that could be addressed. Mental health is not like setting a broken bone.

It was around the fourth session when we began to discuss my guilt. I’m not even sure how guilt came into our discussion, but I’m thinking I said something about how much of it I felt while I was wallowing in terror or planning destruction.

“You need to understand guilt is the most useless emotion we have,” he said.

“How can any emotion be useless?” I asked.

“Guilt is useless. Anger is not. Fear is not. Anger, like fear, is a motivator. Guilt is us punishing ourselves for something that occurred in the past. And the past is something that cannot be altered. You are beating yourself up for nothing. So, what, specifically, do you feel guilty about?”

I thought about this for a while. Then it poured out of me. I felt guilty that my wife was sick instead of me. I felt guilty about how shit a father I was to my son while his mother’s illness occupied my every thought. I felt guilty for leading a life that might have contributed to her illness in some way. I felt guilty for not earning more money which might have got my wife better treatment. I felt guilty for not being able to fix any of this, heal her, and make things better. I felt guilty for all things I didn’t do and didn’t say, and now it may all be too late, and I was ever so guilty of every fucken thing I listed to him and more.

He wasn’t even looking at me as this poured out. And I wasn’t looking at him. Tears were streaming down my face, but I wasn’t actually crying. There were just tears. Fuck knows why. Anyway, I must have talked for a long time, and then I just stopped, and we sat in silence for a while.

“What’s driving your fear and anger is guilt,” he finally said quietly. He always spoke quietly. “It’s what underpins and feeds those two feelings. It’s how our brains try to heal themselves, and make sense of what we’re dealing with. Our brain understands guilt is a pointless emotion. So, it creates two non-useless and motivating emotions to address the underlying problem. In your case, those emotions are also very destructive. But the foundation upon which they are built is guilt. And feeling guilty cannot be more pointless.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Can you go back in time and make amends?”

“No.”

“Is there anything you can do to counter whatever past wrongs you imagine you need to pay for with your guilt?”

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“No.”

“So, what purpose does your guilt serve then?”

“I should stop feeling guilty?”

“If it serves no purpose, why would you do it?”

“To be a better person?”

“You do not need to chew on your guilt or let it chew on you to do that, do you? If you feel you need to be a better person, then just make the conscious decision to be a better person.”

“It’s that easy?”

“I don’t recall using that word.”

I went to a few more session after that, and the therapist offered some suggestions, or “tools” as he called them, to help me on my way. These were just ways of looking at the things that speared into my head. Different perspectives, I guess. And perspective is far better than any kind of wisdom, I think.

I felt…well, better is not the right word. I felt more like I had some control of the demons that screamed at me, rather than just screaming back at them and feeling guilty.

I was still scared of what might happen to my wife. And how I would deal with that if it did. Hell, I live with that every day, so many years later. She is my everything in every way possible. But so is my son, and he certainly doesn’t need me howling at the moon and smearing myself with the blood of my enemies, no matter how much I imagine I do.

I have made major changes in my life. The fearsome anger comes back now and again, but it’s manageable. The unbridled fear also comes back, but I manage that as best I can when it does. And that’s the key. Management, not surrender and helplessness.

I have understood that guilt is pointless and worthless. I cannot change the past. I cannot make amends. I can just choose to do better. So, that’s what I work at.

And it’s a far better outcome than the alternative.