Now some of us had parents and teachers who were always kind and supportive, and some of us had parents and teachers who were demanding, critical and punitive, some of us had a happy and secure childhood, and some of us had an insecure and unhappy childhood, but, whatever, we each drew the same conclusion about how a child and an adult must try to behave.
This conclusion which each of us drew as a child and which underlies everything we think, feel and do is:
Because I am not acceptable as I am, I must work hard to be good so I can live with myself and not have other people criticize and reject me.
These are my words. Each of us feels, expresses and acts upon it in our own individual way.
We each differ in what we mean by being good.
Some of us would not use the words ‘being good’, but instead think in terms of setting goals and achieving them. Nevertheless, failure seems like badness and weakness. Tom blamed himself when his firm let him go. George sets himself goals in studying the scripture so as to be acceptable to God. Ivan Boesky set himself the goal of gaining great wealth and, while being tried and sentenced for illegal stock exchange dealings, explained, ‘I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’17
Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of meeting our responsibilities and doing our duty. Nevertheless, failure to meet our responsibilities we see as wickedness. Pat did not think of herself as being good when she nursed her sick parents, but she did feel she was wicked to be angry with her sisters for not helping her.
Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being helpful to other people. Such helpfulness, as Ruth said, ‘feels good’.
Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being acceptable to other people. This can mean always striving to be well groomed and properly dressed or, most frequently, always going along with what other people want and never simply pleasing yourself. Lisa, who worried about her appearance constantly, always tried to please other people and considered doing anything to please herself as selfish and therefore wicked. If she did dare to do something to please herself – like eating a cream cake – she felt guilty.
So here we all are, each in our own way, striving to be good.
Most of us are extremely good at being good. We work hard, achieving goals and immediately setting new ones, we meet our responsibilities to others, we consider other people’s wishes before our own, we try to make our appearance attractive, we keep our homes clean and tidy, we strive to be unselfish, unaggressive, kind, loving, loyal, modest, generous, friendly, cheerful, understanding, patient, and punctual, and we try to teach these ways of being good to our children.
Most of us are so good at being good that we generally forget that all this striving to be good is in an effort to overcome our feeling that as ourselves we are not good enough, that we are bad, even evil, and certainly unacceptable to ourselves and to other people.
Nevertheless, if someone comments on how good we are, we must instantly disclaim it. We feel that we have to say, ‘Oh, not really’, and go on to talk about how incompetent we actually are, or how dependent we are on other people, or how we ought to achieve more, or how it is luck and not virtue or competence which enables us to do what we do. A few of us have learned to respond to a compliment with simply, ‘Thank you’, but even then the Thank you’ must be said modestly, lest we be punished by those people who see it as their duty to humble the proud. Thus, no matter how good we are at being good, we can never be good enough.
No matter how good we are at being good, whenever we fail to be good – when we do not achieve our goals, when we make a mess of things, or let people down, or fail to please people, or people criticize, reject or abandon us, or when life does not turn out the way we expect it would – even if we do not directly blame ourselves for our failure, we become aware of a sense of badness and unacceptability. Then we feel very frightened, and we have to strive hard to put things right.
Where does this sense of badness and unacceptability come from? After all, when we were small babies we were pleased with ourselves. We existed, and we did not doubt that we had a right to exist. How was it that later we drew the conclusion that we were bad and unacceptable and that we had to spend our lives working hard to be good?
Drawing the Conclusion ‘I Am Bad’
Sometimes we draw conclusions slowly, amassing evidence little by little, and gradually becoming certain that something is as it is. Sometimes something sudden and dramatic happens, and we know instantly and clearly what our conclusion is.
Sometimes someone says something to us and we realize that we are not as good as we thought we were. Anna told me how, when she was a small child, her mother contracted tuberculosis and so was in hospital for much of Anna’s childhood. She said, ‘When I was sent to boarding school I used to go to chapel and pray for my mother. This was during the Second World War and there was this other little girl and her father was in the navy. So we’d go and pray. She’d pray for her father and I’d pray that my mother would get well, and her father came home on leave. So I went to one of the nuns and I said, “Mary Jane’s father’s home but my mother’s still in the hospital”, and she said, “I guess you didn’t pray enough, dear.” How can these people say such things to children! They probably think it’s good for your character. I just had a double worry then, that my mother was sick and that I hadn’t prayed enough. I continued in that attitude, that I wasn’t good enough.’
Pat accumulated the evidence that she was bad and unacceptable slowly. She does not remember being a baby, but family photographs show her with her parents who look as though they loved her and were proud of her. Her first dear memory is of being shut out of her mother’s bedroom and later being told that she had a baby sister. Her father is not present in this memory. She cannot remember ever sitting on her father’s knee.
‘He wanted a son,’ she told me, ‘I was a great disappointment to him. In later years he was very fond of my youngest sister – she was very pretty, not like me – but I think he just felt uncomfortable in a house full of females. He spent all his time working, and when he took up golf we never saw him at weekends. Mother was affectionate to me, but she was always busy. The only way I could get any attention from her was to be useful. I’ve been doing housework for as long as I can remember.’
So Pat gradually formed the opinion that as herself she was valueless. Only what she could do for people had some value.
‘I never consciously thought, “I am valueless”,’ she said. ‘It was just something I knew, like I knew the sun would rise each morning. It was a fact of the universe. What I did think about was how I could please my mother and father. I thought that if I tried really hard to please them then they would be proud of me. I knew they loved me, but it was in a distant sort of way, like I loved my great aunt. She was a relative, so you were supposed to love her. I wanted to make them notice me and be proud of me. That’s why I wanted to be a doctor.’
‘Your father stopped you from being a doctor?’ I said.
‘Not stopped, like saying, “You can’t”. He just let me know in different ways that he didn’t think that medicine was a suitable profession for a woman. And he told all of us that he couldn’t afford to put us through university.’
‘Were you angry with him?’
‘Angry? Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of being angry with him. I was sure he was doing what he thought was best for me.’
Dan remembers very clearly the day he concluded that he was bad. It