It’s not easy being a ‘good’ person – what can we learn from the people who have thought about it the most?
I used to think I was a good person. I was caring to my friends, my partner, my family; I gave to charity and I volunteered; I wasn’t racist, homophobic or sexist. Boxes: ticked. But when I started training to become a therapist in the NHS, I began to understand that however much we might like to think of ourselves as good people, we don’t actually know ourselves very well. We don’t know what’s really going on under the surface; why we do the things we do.
I learned about how we might, without consciously realising it, deny the feelings and motivations we consider to be bad, pushing them down into our unconscious and projecting them out on to others, so they become the bad people. I learned that deep in the human psyche, alongside love and kindness, run currents of rage, need, greed, envy, destructiveness, superiority – whether we want to acknowledge them or not. Goodness me, I thought. How terrible – for everybody else.
