ABSTRACT
The man who wrote this was ending a CAT therapy. He was sixty-eight at the time and had found the therapy both challenging and transforming. He had experienced much doubt as to whether he deserved the therapy and the commitment of a younger person (myself) in an endeavour that he feared was too little too late. He questioned whether he was being selfindulgent and self-pitying in his old age; struggling to find some meaning in the ‘long and painful’ journey he had travelled seemed to raise doubts that such a catharsis was both unnatural and undignified. Yet, from ‘nohope’ he had found self-reflection and the kernel of his self-esteem, but this gift, he felt, needed to be repaid rather than accepted. He could not relinquish the despair that seemed the inevitable conclusion to (his) life. To do so would be to deny the existence of death and, somehow, deprive the young of their chance.
