Ruth handed me a booklet entitled Free Yourself from Toxic Guilt published by an organisation called The Living Life Group. ‘Read it,’ she ordered. ‘It’s all very well poo-poohing these kinds of things but in your situation I think you’d be wise to be open-minded.’
Ruth and I had been seeing more of each other lately. She said it was because we had ‘cleared the air’. I assumed she was referring to the time she’d told me what a lousy stepsister I’d been for the past twenty years. I had laid in a store of peppermint tea for her and she was drinking some now, looking at me over the mug, as she told me she was now pretty sure that Robert was after all having an affair. She had no proof but all the signs were there, she said. Lottie didn’t want to hear a word against her father and Ruth didn’t trust her friends not to gossip so I was the only one she could confide in. I told myself that I should be grateful to be needed. I was alive and I was needed and if I wasn’t careful I might end up with the house of my dreams, too. Any more to be grateful for and I might have to call my old friend Dr Herbert at the clinic.
‘It’s like living with a stranger,’ Ruth said. ‘He comes through the door at night and he doesn’t look at me, he looks through me. Did Gabriel do that?’
I shook my head. ‘But he left really soon after he’d started seeing Suki. In a way it was a relief. I couldn’t have coped with any more of his torment.’
‘His torment?’
‘Not many people appreciate how hard it is for a good man to do bad things. He didn’t sleep, tossing and turning and waking up soaked in sweat. He lost weight, he drank too much. It was awful.’
‘I wore a red dress and red feathers in my hair the other night and I might as well have been wearing my jeans and a T-shirt.’
‘Did you? Did you really. Good for you. You suit red.’
‘Every time he’s . . . well, you know . . . strayed, he’s done the same thing, just removed himself from our life bit by bit.’
‘Leave him.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? You need to ask me why not? Well, I’ll tell you why not.’ She paused. Then she took another breath. ‘Oh yes, I’ll tell you all right.’
‘You tell me,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t do that to Lottie.’
‘Lottie will cope better than you think. She’s got her own life now. She’s twenty, after all. Of course it will be upsetting for her but she’ll cope. Anyway, she wouldn’t want to see you be unhappy.’
‘That’s what people say when they want an excuse to do the wrong thing. “It’s better for the children to have happy divorced parents than unhappy married ones.” But it’s not true, you know. They’ve found that out.’
‘But Lottie’s not a child any more, that’s the point.’
Ruth frowned at me. ‘And where would we live?’ She gesticulated round the kitchen in my little flat. ‘Somewhere like this?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘I’m sorry but I couldn’t do that to Lottie. No, I’ll have to soldier on. There’s nothing else for it.’ She was looking almost excited. ‘I must say that Daddy and Olivia have been extremely supportive. They call all the time. Daddy even sent me flowers the other day. The last time I had this much attention was when I was expecting Lottie. You weren’t there, of course, but it was wonderful. Like being a princess. Anyway,’ she shook herself, ‘I want you to really take a look at this.’ She pushed the brochure from the Living Life Group towards me on the table.
‘Each course lasts six weeks. The next one begins in a couple of days so it would work perfectly. Go on. It can’t hurt.’
‘No, no, I don’t suppose it can.’
‘So, how are things going with your godfather?’
I wondered if it would be mean to bring the subject back to her cheating husband. I expected it would be. So I just said, ‘It’s going fine. We get on very well.’
‘And?’ Ruth looked at me, her head to one side.
‘And nothing else really.’
‘That’s not what Olivia tells me.’
‘Isn’t it? So what has my mother told you?’
‘The house. He wants to buy you your own lovely home. I mean, how wonderful is that. Robert and I worked sixty-hour weeks for ten years before we were able to own our first home.’
‘I can see that doesn’t seem fair,’ I said. ‘When all I had to do was kill someone.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘Really, Eliza, now you’re being silly.’
‘Yes. Yes, I am. I’m sorry.’
She got up. Nodding at the booklet, she said, ‘So you’ll go? For me.’
I picked it up once she had left and started reading. I learnt that ‘most of the misery faced by affluent Western people these days was self-inflicted and therefore avoidable, caused by neuroses and illogical concerns and obsessions and that this was a kind of obesity of the mind’. And like obesity, the solution to the problem almost always lay ‘in the hands of the individual concerned’. I also learnt that the Thirteen Steps embraced by the LLG were thirteen because it was a number feared by many and overcoming illogical fears was an important part in ‘taking control’. Among other things, attendance at the ‘workshops’ would teach me to ‘reverse ingrained assumptions and turn a negative into a positive’. That last one, I thought, they had just gone and pinched from Pollyanna.
The booklet went on to say that ‘Everybody suffers from anxiety; anxiety is a normal and necessary part of being human. For some, however, it can affect us more intensely, occur more easily and more often, thereby giving rise to problems such as toxic guilt, persistent apprehension, obsessive thoughts, panic and depression.’
It finished by saying that ‘Before we can truly cure these problems, before we can say goodbye to them for ever . . . we need to know what happened to us and why. We NEED to know. To want to know is a basic human urge and we’ll search for ever for the answers.’
Of course humankind is defined by its hunger for knowledge. That’s how all the trouble started in the first place, allegedly. But knowing didn’t always help. For example I knew exactly what had happened to Rose. If I hadn’t known, if I thought that Rose was alive and well, living in New Zealand, there would be no problem. But Uncle Ian wanted me to be happy. And if that was what he wanted, however strange it was that he should, well, then I owed it to him at least to try. It would please Ruth too if I took her advice. Bossing me around probably gave her some light relief now she was going through a bad time.
The meeting was held in the basement of a large red-brick house not far from Dr Freud’s house. This fact, also mentioned in the booklet, lent the whole enterprise a certain credibility, I thought, as I walked along Maresfield Gardens.
The large room was furnished like a mix between an opium den and a school assembly hall. A tall man seated on a floor cushion unfurled himself and greeted me.
‘You must be Eliza.’
I was intrigued. ‘How did you guess?’
‘Everyone else’s already here. Being late,’ he paused, glancing at a large clock on the wall opposite, ‘often indicates a reluctance to attend. I’m Marcus, by the way.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Does it really?’
‘Why don’t you have a seat over there, next to Sam.’ He pointed at a floor cushion with room for two.
Sam, a round-faced blonde woman in her thirties who looked as if the only thing she might have to feel guilty over was having second helpings, gave me a welcoming smile and patted a space next to her, so I smiled back and sat down. Looking around me, I noticed more smiles in my direction so I kept mine in place. If that’s what guilt did to you, I thought, then death row must be one smiley place.
Marcus sat back down on his cushion. It too was a cushion made for two but he was there alone. I suppose no one wanted to be seen as therapist’s pet.
‘So what then is Toxic Guilt?’ he began. I was happy to see him do those little quotation marks in the air thing when he spoke. I’d always wanted to see that done in real life.
‘Toxic Guilt is inappropriate guilt – guilt that comes from self-judgement. Judgements that say you have done something wrong when there is no actual wrongdoing.’ He paused and looked around him. There was a lot of nodding back at him.
‘Do you feel responsible for everyone around you?’ His voice was carrying and intimate both at once, like a trendy teacher saying; ‘I’m one of you, just in charge, that’s all.’
‘Do you value the feeling of others more than your own? Do you have unrealistic expectations of yourself: then you may be trapped by Toxic Guilt.
‘Trying to win the approval of others – parents, spouse, co-workers, friends, children can strain your relationships, drain your energy and dominate your life. The five easy-to-follow steps in escaping Toxic Guilt can liberate you from self-defeating patterns and put you on the path to living life fully, joyfully and on your own terms.’
I put my hand up. Marcus nodded at me. ‘Eliza, yes?’
‘I thought it was thirteen steps?’ Actually, what I had wanted to ask was where the bit about how to deal with having caused, for example, a death, came in but I couldn’t bring myself to do it – not yet. Maybe later, when we’d warmed up.
‘Really? Why did you think that?’
‘It said so in the booklet.’
‘Maybe that referred to another of our programs. Either way, we use five, if that’s OK with you?’ The smile was not quite so friendly this time.
I told him that of course it was fine with me and that I was sorry for interrupting. Marcus told me I was not to apologise.
‘In fact,’ he turned to the rest of the room, ‘over-eagerness to apologise is a typical response of someone suffering from Toxic Guilt.’
He went on to list the five steps. They were:
1) Recognize the difference between good guilt and Toxic Guilt;
2) Build boundaries around your time and emotions;
3) Weather the storm of people’s disapproval;
4) Find freedom through forgiveness and relinquishing control;
5) Protect your sense of self while still caring for others.
Then it was everyone’s turn to stand up, form a circle and share, one after the other, the focus of their guilt. Marcus nodded towards the woman opposite him. ‘Daisy, why don’t you start.’
Daisy looked around her and the others all smiled their encouragement. She stepped into the circle.
‘Hello, everyone. I’m Daisy and . . . well, I just can’t stop feeling guilty about the fact that I was sent to private school and my older sister wasn’t. She’s never forgiven me, or our parents. Everyone else tells me I have nothing to feel bad about, but I can’t help it. I feel as if everything good that’s happened to me since, my successful career, my marriage and lovely home, all stem from that lucky break. It makes it worse that my sister is struggling on a low income.’
Everyone clapped, and Daisy who was lithe and blonde and quite possibly drove a Porsche, appeared to be relieved of a burden as she seated herself back down in one smooth movement.
Alan was in his late forties and wearing clothes that looked as if he’d got them from the ‘preppy’ section of a catalogue. He had a buzz cut and a wide mouth that dipped at the corners.
‘Hi, I’m Alan. I can’t stop thinking about how I didn’t visit my dying grandmother in hospital. We never had a chance to say goodbye. I was her favourite grandchild and she practically brought me up yet when she needed me I wasn’t there for her.’
Again, everyone clapped. I wondered if I might suggest we drop the clapping. It took up a lot of time and the session only lasted two hours. It was the same in yoga class. I found the relaxation part difficult. I couldn’t help thinking of all the things I should be doing, none of which involved lying on a mat imagining being a white feather floating to the ground.
Next it was the turn of a woman in late middle age with an elongated body and dry dull hair drooping around her thin face like branches of a weeping willow. She looked so distressed that for a moment I thought she might have done something truly bad.
‘Hi, I’m Joan. When my dog died we found out that she was dehydrated because I rationed her water so she wouldn’t keep peeing on the carpet. I didn’t realise she suffered from diabetes. The vet said lack of water wasn’t the cause of death but I can’t stop blaming myself and thinking of how she must have suffered from thirst in those last few days of her life.’ Joan started to cry and everyone clustered round and patted her on the back and shoulders and told her she was ‘doing good work’.
I wanted to cluster and pat too. Instead I stood there, my arms hanging stiff at my sides, watching. I could feel Marcus’s disapproving gaze. But I really didn’t think the others would want me once they had heard what I had to say, any more than a gang of petty thieves would want an axe murderer to chummy up to them to say he knew exactly how they felt because, when it came to it, weren’t they all in it together.
Joan appeared to have cheered up, and following her was Clare, who felt guilty the whole time but didn’t know over what and Janet, who had the same problem. Then it was Zoe.
‘Hi, I’m Zoe and I’m a working mother.’
There was an expectant silence from the group but the thin woman in her late thirties, whose stooping posture suggested that her guilt was perched right there on her shoulders, appeared to have said her piece and stepped back into the circle.
It was my turn. Marcus nodded at me. ‘Eliza?’
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘It’s important that everyone shares,’ he said. ‘In fact it’s pretty bad for the morale of the group if one member withholds.’
My heart was racing and I had to take a couple of deep breaths to steady my voice. I glanced over at Marcus. ‘It’s OK, Eliza. You’re amongst friends.’
I stepped into the circle. ‘Hi, I’m Eliza and my selfish and destructive behaviour when I was younger caused a lot of problems for my family, my stepsister especially.’ I looked around me at the sympathetic faces. Marcus nodded his approval. I closed my eyes for a moment, before opening them again and giving Marcus a little nod back. ‘And I killed my best friend.’
Everyone remained still vaguely in the formation of a circle, but looking awkward, a bit like party-goers when a fellow guest has said something really embarrassing before throwing up in the ice bucket. Then Joan and Zoe started up a conversation about begonias. This struck me as imaginative until I noticed the carrier bag with a pot of begonias on the floor by the door. I wished I could join in. Begonias were reassuring things. Looking around me I realised that by now I was standing apart although I hadn’t moved.
Marcus called us to attention by telling us that our time was up; apparently the room was needed for the sex, drugs and alcohol addicts. I was collecting my jacket and bag when Marcus called me back. Could he have a word?
Once we were on our own he said, ‘I’m not sure we are the right people to help you. As I explained at the start of the session we deal with toxic or as it could also be described, imagined guilt. Guilt with no real substance . . .’ he carried on explaining as if I were not only really, really guilty but also really, really stupid ‘. . . with no basis in reality, is simply another kind of addiction and like all addictions it’s about control. Your problem seems to be that . . . well, that you really do have a reason to feel guilty. Were you ever . . . well, punished for what happened?’
I didn’t want to talk to him about it any more. I couldn’t understand what had made me tell a room full of strangers in the first place. Perhaps it was the incense, or maybe the dimmed lights that made you think you were in the cinema or a theatre where nothing was quite real; maybe it was simply the act of forming a circle, which helped, in some curious way, to release inhibitions. I felt let down by Marcus and his clinic. I had told myself that I was only going along to please Ruth but I suppose I had hoped, too, that I would find some answers.
Marcus had been raking his fingers through his mop of dark curly hair and now he rolled his head from left to right as if his neck was hurting. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally, ‘but as I said, we deal with . . .’
‘I know. You only deal in guilt that isn’t actually guilty.’ I walked to the door.
‘Wait.’
I turned round. ‘Yes?’
‘At least let me give you a refund.’
Earlier in the day I had sensed the promise of spring, but as I walked back to the flat through the dark streets the wind seemed to come straight from the north and I turned up my collar and shoved my hands deep into my pockets. I paused at the corner of the road, waiting for the bus to pass before I crossed. I was tired. I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking how easy it would be to just step into the road and be done with it. Dead and Done. Done and Dusted. They said a change was as good as a rest and there was no denying that being dead would be a change. One foot forward, one step down. I opened my eyes and jumped back on to the pavement. The bus passed.
I had done a good thing there, I thought as I walked on. Just think how late the passengers would have been had they had to stop and wait while the police came and the ambulance scraped me off the wheels. Being late home on a chilly March evening might not seem like such a big deal but it could be most inconvenient. Add to it that they could not exactly complain about it. I mean, what would it look like, coming through the door with a scowl and a sigh, saying, ‘That’s all I needed after a long day at work, some bloody woman getting herself run over by my bus.’
I had barely got through the door myself when the phone rang. It was Ruth, wanting to know how the session at the LLG had gone. I told her it had been very helpful.
‘So you’ll continue going? Excellent.’
‘Not really.’
I heard her sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘Why not, Eliza? I mean if I didn’t know any better I would think you didn’t even want my help.’
‘I do. I do. But I really wasn’t given the option to continue. Apparently mine was the wrong kind of guilt.’
Ruth seemed to think I was trying to be funny at her expense so she said goodbye in a tight little voice and hung up before I had had a chance to explain.