Brothers, Guilt, and Love

We can be happier by letting go of—or at least managing—emotional baggage. But until we figure out how, and summon the will to follow through, we remain stuck.

I’m thinking of my patient Jeremy. Jeremy is 25, and moved to New York to get away from scenes that still haunt him. He grew up in a California beach town, surfing with a group of bravos who defied “No Surfing After Dark” signs. But when he came to my office a few months ago, he was depressed over a younger brother who had died from a heroin overdose. He blamed himself for what had happened.

Jeremy and his brother Mark had had a fraught relationship. Mark was three years younger and liked to tag along when Jeremy was out with his pals. He annoyed Jeremy. Once when Mark slowed Jeremy down, Jeremy hit him and broke his nose. When they got home, Mark protected Jeremy and said that he’d been hit on the nose when his surfboard overturned. He thought he was protecting Jeremy, but the lie backfired— his parents forbid them both to go surfing for six months, even though Mark hadn’t been surfing at all when Jeremy hit him. The tension between them increased. Without his brother to hang with, Mark got in with a bad crowd and started doing drugs. One night he came home high and collapsed. Jeremy woke up, put a blanket on him, and went back to bed. Mark never woke up.

Jeremy describes the years of guilt that followed. He dropped out of school for a while and quit surfing. “I felt no good as a person, and nothing could change that.”

When brothers fall out, and one harms another, the perpetrator may turn on himself. In part, it’s because he feels as though a certain sacred bond has been broken. Brothers are supposed to protect each other—instinctively —the way Mark tried to protect Jeremy from their parents. Jeremy felt that when it was his turn to protect Mark, he failed. “I’m an unnatural person,” he said. It was this sense that he could never get past what he saw as a sin that really worried me. If he was ever to find peace, he’d have to get past what seemed like interminable guilt.

If I were to help him, I’d have to know more about why, when Mark took up drugs of his own volition, Jeremy still blamed himself.

Jeremy felt that if he had tolerated his brother, or at least included him occasionally, Mark would not have died. He made a direct connection between rejecting Mark and Mark’s falling in with the wrong crowd. He thought anyone else would have acknowledged what Mark was doing and then called him out. “I’d see him sometimes at night and he’d look unfocused. What else could it have been but drugs?” Apparently, their parents, who hadn’t a clue about drugs, suspected nothing. “I could have warned them, but I didn’t. Why?”

Guilt is always riddled with self-questioning. Often, the questions have no answers. They’re just rhetorical, more like self-accusations which no one can answer and that hang in the air like perpetual rebukes. That was Jeremy. He’d beat up on himself with endless what-ifs. As I listened to him, it was like he wanted to martyr himself to all the possibilities that might have saved Mark but, through his own indifference, never did. How could I penetrate all his hypotheticals? There’s no denying maybes.

As we spoke, I realized that guilt is hard to expunge because there are always plausible alternative histories, endless variants on the theme of “If only I had. . .” Jeremy had entered a self-fulfilling spiral of suggestion and affirmation, where each new possibility made his guilt seem even more inarguable.

He felt that his interminable guilt was Mark’s revenge. Finally, he said, Mark had the upper hand and was making him suffer the way he had made Mark suffer. That sounded eerie. Besides, I didn’t see it that way. “You feel guilty,” I said, “because you’re inflicting it on yourself. It’s punishment.” Yet can anything make sense to someone so deeply scarred, who keeps opening the wound? Jeremy’s explanation of Mark’s death—“Just blame me. I did it.”—had just enough plausibility to sound convincing to someone who wants to convince himself of its plausibility.

For a while, we kept going in circles. I tried to ease into the subject by saying that Jeremy was not only to blame, since there were so many factors involved. But Jeremy said that even if he bore only some blame for his brother’s death, that was still horrific.

Jeremy recalled how he would never have threatened his life. So, we started discussing love, and how he wouldn’t feel so awful if he hadn’t loved his brother. The point was to refocus Jeremy’s thoughts away from guilt to why that guilt mattered to him. If he could understand that his love for his brother was real, and that it had always been there, then he could—in time —understand that while his actions had been inadequate, he was not so culpable that he should blame himself forever. His motivations were time-limited and in no way denied the love for his brother that had always been there.

We will keep talking.

But still. I keep wondering: What can I do when someone won’t allow a wound to heal? Obviously, Jeremy wanted help. But he was also convinced that he would—that he should—suffer forever. He was conflicted, with guilt maintaining the upper hand. I suggested that as a start, he cast back over the events that tormented him and see them in a different light, one that would allow his wounds to finally close. That’s why I reminded him that he loved Mark. He had never acted with animus, but only with the kind of disregard that, in time, should be allowed to loosen its moral grip on the ensuing events.

In effect, I offered Jeremy a way to think about his guilt that he hadn’t tried before. He is now trying. He is beginning to understand that, at least within families, guilt is often closely aligned with love. It must, therefore, at least be separated from the type of malice that may seem to render us irredeemably guilty. At least, this is a new start.