GUILT

As a student at Cambridge in the UK, Chris Moore was involved in a drunk-driving incident that killed a cyclist. Years later, as a psychologist, he would become expert in the healing powers of guilt

- By Emine Saner

FUELLED BY THE RELIEF of having finished end-of-year exams, the pleasure of a warm late spring evening and quite a lot of alcohol, the house party was one of those that should have been remembered for all the right reasons. At some point, later in the night, Chris Moore and three friends were ready to leave. The party was some way out of town - Cambridge - and too far to walk, and anyway there was a car, temptingly, in the driveway, its keys in the ignition.

Somebody - Moore can't remember who - suggested they drive back, and with the recklessness of youth and too much beer, they all got in. "I ended up in the front passenger seat and fell asleep," he says. He came to, being taken out of the car by para- medics then sitting by the side of the road, his face streaming with blood, surrounded by the lights of the emergency services. They had been in an accident, and Moore had hit the windscreen, asleep, and had deep lacerations on his forehead. He was the only one of the four who had been injured. What he didn't know until the next day, in hospital after surgery, was that they had driven into a cyclist and killed him.

"I felt this incredible shock, that mass combination of emotions, obviously the horror of what had happened," he says. "The massive regret of what we'd done." He was also fearful of what it meant for him and the people he loved - what would his parents think? "There isn't a simple story in terms of what the emotions were. It was just a roiling mass of different negative emotions. That's why I think of guilt as being complex, because all of these other emotions were tied into it."