For some, heaven and hell are literal places, not mere metaphors for the delivery of karmic justice. As a young child in primary school, my initiation into the concept of heaven and hell was a baptism by fire. Asked by my teacher (a nun) where I was destined to go after death, I quickly replied, “Heaven, sister”. Quicker than you could say ‘Hades’, this demented woman in black rapped the back of my small, unformed hands with a wooden ruler, leaving a pulsating, red vapour trail across both hands. Stunned and humiliated, I looked up at her, my eyes stinging with tears. “And why were you punished?”, she persisted. Frozen into a shamed silence, I couldn’t think or speak. She then turned magnanimously to the rest of the class, inviting them to redress my appalling ignorance and answer the question. A chorus of timorous wee voices, unified in a rhythm of terror, responded, “Because only saints go straight to heaven and the rest of us go to purgatory until we are resurrected.”

To add insult to injury, the nun then rapped my hands again (I didn’t have the foresight to remove them after the first swipe), saying, “And that is for your sin of vanity!” From that moment on, I was in no doubt about where I was headed post-shuffling off my mortal coil. The inevitability of a gateway to hell dangled perilously below me for years.

It’s a shame that nun never got to hear the current Pope’s alleged take on hell. With the emergence of details of an interview with Pope Francis by veteran Italian journalist, Eugenio Scalfari (founder of La Repubblica newspaper), a fair bit of turbulence has been whipped up in the Holy See this week.

According to Scalfari, when he asked the Pope about “where the bad people go (after death)?”, the Holy Father allegedly replied, “they simply disappear.” It seemed the Pope had banished hell. Not so, according to the Vatican media machine. They’ve charged to the rescue of traditional Catholic doctrine to reassure us that Hell is, in fact, alive and burning. It’s there, waiting to welcome us with big, wide-open arms should we be unfortunate enough to die in a state of mortal sin. Time-wise, there’s no change: it’s still for eternity.

It would have been refreshing if the Vatican had allowed Pope Francis to explore and expand his metaphorical and philosophical version of Hell, instead of dousing it with very cold, albeit holy water. And even more surprising if they’d encouraged us to think more about how we make our own individual hells here on earth that don’t require us to wait until we pop our clogs.

As a psychotherapist and mental health practitioner, I have come to understand that many of us find ourselves in a living hell because we are unable to understand our feelings and the behaviours they drive. We mistakenly believe that in order to survive, we need to suppress, deny or cut off from our emotions, fearing that if we allow ourselves to actually feel them, we might fall apart or descend into a hell of madness. As children, we’re told in no uncertain terms that our emotions - particularly powerful ones like sadness, envy and anger - are ‘bad’ and therefore not allowed. We bury the feelings away in the hope that we’ll manage not to feel them. Sadly, this can sow the seeds for significant psychological and emotional problems in adulthood, particularly in relationships and with our self-esteem. When the denial of feelings has become our default mode for survival, we end up in an emotional abyss where life has little meaning or satisfaction and where compassion and love for others are extremely thin on the ground.

As adults, although we may find ourselves in a hell that was not of our own making, we alone are responsible for our release from it. Our personal redemption comes from the realisation that whilst we cannot change the past, we can certainly change how we feel about it. In doing so, it’s possible to build a more fulfilling future where we can resurrect and reclaim some of the wonder and innocence that was part of us when we entered the world. As for hell, God only knows.