All well and good

It's not easy being a 'good' person. What can we learn from the people who have thought about it the most?

- Moya Sarner

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.

But of course, it is not just true for everybody else. As a patient in psychoanalysis, I've now discovered all this so-called badness exists in me, too. Unconsciously, perhaps I had tried to cancel out these judged-as-bad thoughts and feelings by doing good and helping others. Now I see that as hypocrisy and avoidance. Real goodness grows from accepting that the capacity for badness we abhor in others and in our institutions also exists within ourselves. If we can tolerate and understand this, then we can see and repair the damage we inevitably do to our loved ones and others. This is how we can grow into better adults, partners, parents, neighbours, citizens, travellers, friends. I asked experts in "goodness" what it meant to them. Here's what they told me.

How to be ... a good citizen

Matthew Bolton, executive director of Citizens UK and author of How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power