“This therapist is no good at all,” he complained to me. “She says my problem is, I’m too selfish. If I did something to benefit other people, my health would improve dramatically. That’s a complete contradiction of what I was taught before!”

“How can I do both ” he exclaimed despairingly. “Benefit others whilst remaining true to myself  It’s impossible!”

As I said, he is a troubled soul.

I can recall being eaten with envy. It made me feel quite ill. The object was a girl in my school: blonde, dynamic, with glittering green eyes. Beyond being beautiful, she was wonderfully self-possessed. What else could a teenager wish for 

Her smugness irritated me no end. She was so radiant, so full of fun, so damned pleased with life. Everyone adored her, except me and a few others equally afflicted.

I nearly fainted the day she came to me requesting, would I be her friend  Seemingly sincere, she claimed to be in awe of my prowess in the classroom, where she herself had to struggle.

Resentment gave way to devotion. I became her faithful servant sunning myself in her glory; she my loyal supporter boosting my fragile self. It was a friendship made in heaven, forged for life.

Sadly, like many flares burning brightly, hers was not made to last. Shortly after her nineteenth birthday, without warning, she died.

It struck me then as absurd that, of the two of us, she should be the one who perished, while I was the one who was spared. I had always regarded her as the one who was privileged; myself as the one deprived.

I thought of my former envy and realised that, since we don’t know what’s in store for any of us, envy is never justified.

A friend of mine had been tyrannised by a formidable mother since the day she was born. She lived under an emotional terror-reign, where guilt was the main offensive weapon. It seemed she couldn’t blink an eye without causing her mother to be hurt, upset, annoyed, distressed or worse.

“I can’t take any more,” she told me in despair. “My whole life is spent apologising to my mother.”

“It has to stop,” I agreed. “You are an adult independent woman. It’s time you told her once and for all that her emotions are her own responsibility. No one has a right to blame others for what they feel.”

She heeded my advice. The message, apparently, was received with ice-cold equanimity.

Some time later, my friend gave a recital ? she is a very talented musician. Her mother, as usual, attended, and afterwards, with relish, pulled her daughter’s performance to pieces, adding, for good measure, quotes from the audience: scathing, humiliating remarks that she purported to have overheard in the ladies’ room.

Her sweet, gentle daughter burst into tears. “Mummy, don’t say any more,” she pleaded. “Surely you realise how much it hurts.”

Her mother turned a beady eye on her: “Don’t blame me, dear, for your emotions. You said it yourself: they are your responsibility.”

“No,” said my friend, reached by a sudden insight ? perhaps the most important one she’d had. “That rule does not apply when someone hurts you intentionally.”

I was every bully’s dream. They were drawn to me like bees to honey. Such easy game: I must have been irresistible.

The minute someone wilfully attacked me, verbally or physically, I broke right down, burst into tears: submission, humiliation complete. Bully’s mission accomplished.

How I hated myself for being so weak! For not being able to stand up for myself. It left me with a deep sense of shame.

I was too innocent to know that it isn’t weakness to feel aggrieved as you discover brutality where you expected friendship, duplicity where you had placed your trust, malice where you had felt devotion.

At a later stage I learnt that this particular despair was not on behalf of my own person. I felt ? still feel ? that same lump in my throat whenever faced with human iniquity: tales of tortured kittens, gratuitous violence; documentaries on the Holocaust; reports of current war atrocities.

However, my lament is not for the victims, whose souls no wanton cruelty can touch; but for those misguided wretches, who deliberately have taken their leave of the only thing worth living for: the only thing that gives life value.

Rejecting and negating human kindness, they’ve placed themselves beyond its reach. For them there is no hope, no redemption.

Now, as my tears fall for them, I am no longer ashamed.