Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 191 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Cleanness (2020)

  My voice was low now, I was speaking into his ear, You know what you are, I said, you’re a whore, this is all you’re good for, I said, this is all you deserve. Maybe they had always been there, these words, maybe once you have heard such language it infects you, that was what it felt like, like something bursting free in me, corrosive and hot, without end, I had been waiting my entire life to say those words. I lifted my head and spat on his face, twice in quick succession, saying Faggot each time, you dirty faggot, and he cried out again, his eyes clenched shut. I smeared the saliva on his face and left my hand on his head, leaning on him, forcing his face into the thin mattress, against the hard wood beneath it. Please, he said again, his voice muffled, please, I’m nothing. He repeated this, I’m nothing, I’m nothing, and I echoed him, I said That’s right, I was fucking him with my whole body, lifting up and falling back on him, you’re a faggot, I said, you’re nothing, you’re a faggot, you’re nothing. I hammered into him as I felt it rise in me, that cruelty and rage, that acid grief, and when I came I felt him come beneath me, his body shaking, I heard him give a cry of joy. I hung over him, letting him grow still, then pulled out and fell onto my back beside him. Mnogo hubavo beshe , he said, that was good, speaking Bulgarian for the first time, his face turned away. When I didn’t answer he turned toward me, then lifted himself onto his side. Hey, he said, his voice solicitous, hey. I put my hand over my face, which was wet with tears. I was embarrassed, I didn’t want him to see me, when he asked what was wrong I couldn’t answer. Stop it, he said, pulling my hand away, stop it, which made me cry harder somehow, and he kissed me, my forehead and cheeks, my lips, when I tried to pull away he grabbed my head with both his hands, holding me in place. Sladurche , he said, sweet boy, stop it now, don’t be like that, and then he licked my face, quickly, playfully, like a cat, everywhere he had kissed he licked, catching my hands in his when I tried to shield myself or push him away, until I was laughing and weeping both, I stopped struggling and let him lick my face. He laughed too, rolling on top of me, still licking me, and I realized that I had been wrong before; it did have an end, what I had felt, its end was here, he had brought me here. Finally he laid his head on my chest. Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was about joy, the story he would tell me, but it wasn’t joy I saw as he moved back and forth between my cock and my hand, or not only joy. I had the sense that he was looking for something and not finding it, making his movements sharper and faster; he was asking a question I didn’t know how to answer, that I tried to answer by jabbing my hand and twisting it with each movement he made. But he was frustrated, I thought, and finally he stopped his motion, he forced himself down on my cock, taking me as deep as he could, shaking his head a little as if to work me in deeper, like a dog worrying a toy. I used my free hand to grab his head and fucked him as hard as I could, savagely, in a way meant to hurt him. I tilted slightly on my side and wrapped my legs around his head, trapping him and moving my hips very fast, as hard and as fast as I could, an uncontrolled motion, a kind of spasm to echo his own spasm as he choked on me, though even as he choked he locked his arms around my ass, to keep me from pulling away. I made a sound then too, loud and guttural, almost a shout, and it was only when I heard it that I realized it was anger I felt, hot and eager, I didn’t know where it came from but I would make him feel it too, I thought. I held him in place even as I felt him try to pull his head back, even after he started slapping my thighs again I held him down. I wanted to frighten him, I think, I wanted it not to be a game. You want it, I said as he struggled, you want it, take it then, I said, take it, you fucking whore, and it was the shock of the words that made me let him go, the words and what I felt as I said them. I pulled my fingers from him (slowly now, gently), and he grabbed my hand and brought it to his mouth, cleaning it though it wasn’t dirty, he was immaculate, he had cleaned himself out before I arrived. As he lay on his side gasping he said again So fucking good, not smiling now, and I thought I had satisfied him. But when he stood I saw he wasn’t satisfied, his cock was still hard as he stepped across the room and bent over to pick up the coil of my belt.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The advent of tools, symbols and then a rudimentary language allowed our ancestors to communicate with each other, sharing which action patterns worked and which didn’t, thereby refining their collective behaviors. To this end, one might speculate that they embraced art, dance and storytelling—and in the process attained, cultivated and developed, over time, reflective self-awareness. Cave paintings and other archaeological evidence record the saga of the evolution of embodied human consciousness as it blossomed in self-knowledge, in abstract symbols and finally in written language. As individuals congregated in populated communities, their survival need for constant environmental vigilance waned. Their awareness of bodily sensation took on more of a social function—what is now termed social and emotional intelligence. Survival no longer depended solely on the urgency of fight, flight or freeze. Rather, as society became more and more complex, the need for greater mental capacity to navigate our position within the group increased. Nuanced body language—the reading of facial and postural cues (the unspoken language of the body)—gave way to establishing impulse control, which propelled our progenitors toward an increasingly mental framework. By the so-called age of reason, in the mid-seventeenth century, the importance of rationality ascended to new heights. Disembodiment, in the alleged service of this rationality, had become the norm. Instincts and the immediacy of physical drives (such as sex) had become an embarrassment or worse. The subjugating power of the church reinforced this deepening split between mind and body. Finally, the supremacy of rationality congealed in Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am,” an iconic statement for modernity. The rest is history, for better and for worse. However, while apparently disengaged, our compelling instincts remain coiled, waiting to ignite and reunite body and mind into effective coordinated action. If, for example, we become stranded in the wilderness, our instincts for predation, protection and shelter will click into sharp focus. If not we will surely die. Additionally, the full power of our intellects will be enrolled to service these bodily instincts. The snapping twig, a novel scent or a fleeting shadow will arouse us to a heightened alert readiness. Sticks, leaves and mud will present themselves as precious building material and protection from the elements. When death looms, rumination is worthless, while body engagement in the here and now is invaluable. Mostly, though, our gripping survival instincts seem largely useless; in fact, in day-to-day life they are frequently detrimental. We expend an enormous amount of energy suppressing our instinctual eruptions. For example, when our boss passes over us and promotes a less experienced rival, we (perceiving actual threat) momentarily explode, then stuff our murderous rage back into our bodies from whence it came—almost before we can feel it.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Let’s take the example of anger. The feeling of anger is derived from the (postural) attitude of wanting to strike out and hit. However, if one begins to attack—hitting, kicking, tearing, biting—the feeling of anger then shifts rapidly to that of hitting, kicking, and so on. In other words, and contrary to common belief, as you execute the preparation for action, the underlying feelings are diminished if not lost.155 When we cry, for example, our sadness often “magically disappears.” However, this may be more like the teakettle just letting off steam, without changing the underlying sadness. Some of the fundamental “expressive” therapies may fall into the trap of trying to drain the emotional swamp through undue emphasis on habitual venting. Yet, what may be visible when the very deepest wells of sadness are touched is a single, trickling tear. As for anger, recall a time when you shook your fist in anger at another person or were the recipient of such behavior. Was this a time when you really needed to defend yourself, or was it rather a way to let off steam and to bully the other person? This kind of intimidation is commonly seen in domestic violence. What was the effect of your action on their behaviors and theirs on yours? In any case, when we allow ourselves to be swept away into uncontained emotional expression, we may actually split off from what we are feeling. We are held hostage by these habitual emotions, unaware that they can only be transformed if we consciously restrain and resist being triggered into the expressive phase. The samurai lost his false self and found salvation by such a momentary interruption. Containment promotes choice between a number of possible responses where previously there were only those of fear, rage, defensiveness and helplessness. In primitive life we needed to rapidly assess whether an individual we met in the forest was friend or foe, safe or dangerous. Would he attack? Should we attack first to protect ourselves, or would it be better to move quietly away? However, in modern times we are more apt to need our social skills to differentiate: do we like this person or dislike them, and what do they mean to us? Rather than coming to fisticuffs, we might first try to socially engage by conversing with the person; we might try to “disarm” him with an authentic smile. We are not acting out of emotion but rather are guided by sensate feelings—like or dislike? And most importantly we need to do this before we actually act—before we strike out with angry words. This way we enhance the capacity to prioritize possible motoric (and moment-to-moment) actions; we are able to choose which would be the most appropriate action.156

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Stop, he said. He was still looking at the window, not at his own reflection but at something in the far distance, though there wasn’t a far distance, there was just the garden wall invisible in the dark. Just stop, he said, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and when he turned his gaze to mine I could see he was angry. You’re talking to me like a child, he said, I’m not a child, you can’t talk to me like that. I’m sorry, I said quickly, meaning it, I didn’t want you to feel that, really, I’m sorry. He was silent then, he turned back to the window, as though there were something to see there, and I thought I could see him let go of his anger, all at once, his shoulders slumped a little as it went. The wind continued its assault, its constant charge against the glass, but R. wasn’t flinching from it anymore, he seemed almost to be leaning toward the window as he gazed through it, or maybe he was just leaning away from me.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  They’re fucking liars, S. said, pulling away from K. to sit upright, though she kept one arm around him. He lowered the bag from his eye, but in the dark I couldn’t see how bad it was, whether he was really hurt. Obedineni sme, he said, quoting one of their slogans, but we’re not united, they don’t want to be united with us. It’s all the same, he said, all this work and it’s always the same. No, K. said in her calm voice, no, that’s not true, you know that’s not true, but he snapped at her, he pulled away and said angrily It is true, it is true. He had been sitting with his legs stretched out but now he pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. I’m so stupid, he said, I thought it would be different here, I thought these were the good people, the better people, they say they hate the Nazis from Ataka but they’re all the same, to us they’re all the same, they hate us, he said, speaking more loudly now, they hate us, I don’t understand it but they’ll always hate us. I hate them too, he said, they’ll never change, I hate this fucking country. Mrazya vi, he said then, louder still, I hate you. He was speaking to the protesters now, the last of them passing by on the boulevard, mrazya vi, mrazya vi, each time saying it more loudly and angrily, so that people began to look our way; it made me nervous, and the others too, everyone moved just slightly toward one another. But none of the marchers stopped, they looked at us a moment and then looked away. K. kept putting her hand on S.’s back and he kept shaking it off, he didn’t want to be comforted. Mrazya vi, he said a final time, almost shouting it, and then his voice caught, he lowered his forehead against his knees. He let K. put her arm around him then, and after a moment he leaned back into her and returned the ice to his eye.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  And as if he knew how Dwight would describe the sight later on, Arthur, who despised him, smirked at Dwight, and wriggled and pranced every step of the way. When I got home from Concrete one night there was a big dog sleeping on the floor of the utility room. It was an ugly dog. Its short yellow coat was bare in patches, and one ear hung in pennant-like shreds. It had a pink, almost hairless tail. As I began to walk past, the dog came awake. Its eyes were yellow. At first it just looked at me, but when I moved again it gave a low growl. I yelled for someone to come. Dwight stuck his head through the doorway and the dog got up and started licking his hands. Dwight asked what the problem was and I told him the dog had growled at me. Dwight said, “Good, he’s supposed to. He doesn’t know you yet. Champion,” he said, “this is Jack. Let him smell your hands,” he told me. “Go on, he won’t bite.” I held my hand out and Champion sniffed it. “Jack,” Dwight said to him. “Jack.” I asked Dwight whose dog it was. He told me it was mine. “Mine?” “You said you wanted a dog.” “Not this one.” “Well, he’s yours. You paid for him,” he added. I asked what he meant, I paid for him, but Dwight wouldn’t tell me. I found out a few minutes later. Something was wrong in my room. Then I saw that my Winchester was gone. I stared at the pine rack I had made for it in shop. I stared at the rack as if I’d overlooked the rifle the first time, and only needed to look more carefully to see it. I sat on my bed for a while, then I stood up and walked out to the living room, where Dwight was watching television. I said, “My Winchester is gone.” “That dog is purebred weimaraner,” Dwight said, keeping his eyes on the TV. “I don’t want it. I want my Winchester.” “Then you’re shit out of luck, because your Winchester is on its way to Seattle.” “But that was my rifle!” “And Champ’s your dog! Jesus! I trade some old piece of crap for a valuable hunting dog and what do you do? Piss and moan, piss and moan.” “I’m not pissing and moaning.” “The hell you aren’t. You can just make your own deals from now on.” My mother was at a political conference. She had done some local organizing for the Democratic party in the last state election, and now they were trying to get her to work for Adlai Stevenson. When she got home the next day I met her outside and told her about the rifle. She nodded as if she’d already heard the story. “I knew he’d do something,” she said. They had it out after I went to bed.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Power and power imbalances are inescapable. Ethel Spector Person, in Feeling Strong, writes that we first learn about power differentials in the power grid of our families. “All power relationships, all desires either to dominate or submit, have their psychological roots in the fact that we were all once little children with big parents, and their existential roots in our feelings of being small people in an out-of-control big world that we need to be able to tame.” Childhood is our basic training for power tactics. We have our will; our parents have theirs. We demand; they object. We bargain for what we want; they tell us what we can have. We learn to resist, and we learn to surrender. At best we learn to balance, to mediate, to understand. All these permutations of power stumble into our adult intimacies, and gender does matter. Boys and girls undergo a radically different initiation in wielding power. Men become adept at direct expressions of power, women at indirect expressions; and these differences are discernible in our sexual scripts. As adults, we seek control in part as a defense against the vulnerability inherent in love. When we put our hopes on one person, our dependence soars. So do our frustrations and disappointments. The greater our helplessness, the more dangerous the threat of humiliation. The more we need, the angrier we are when we don’t get. Kids know this; lovers do, too. No one can bring us to the boiling point as quickly as our partner (except maybe our parents, the original locus of dependent rage). Love is always accompanied by hate. While we fear the depth of our dependence, many of us are even more frightened by the depth of our rage. We resort to intricate relational contortions in order to keep all this combustion in check. Yet the couples who most successfully implement this model of placidity are rarely passionate lovers. When we confuse assertion with aggression, neutralize otherness, adjust our longings, and reason away our hostility, we assemble a calmness that is reassuring but not very exciting. Stephen Mitchell makes the point that the capacity to contain aggression is a precondition for the capacity to love. We must integrate our aggression rather than eradicate it. He explains, “The degradation of romance, the waning of desire, is due not to the contamination of love by aggression, but to the inability to sustain the necessary tension between them.” Jed and Coral Jed is unassuming. He is a clean-shaven, mild-mannered architect, brilliant and well-spoken. He is kind, never the sort of person to get in your face about anything. But sexually, he’s another man. Jed discovered S-M (sadomasochism) as a teenager, and for years he has used eroticism as a venue for aggression. He loves leather, hard surfaces, chains, handcuffs. “I used to be shy, and it was hard for me to assert myself.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  And so I took his head in my hands and started fucking his face, pulling him toward me and lifting my hips, taking all his art from him, all or nearly all. When you’re being used like that you become an object, which is the pleasure of it, your only role is to be the best object you can be, to keep your lips wrapped around your teeth, to curl your tongue to make the right aperture, now tighter and now more ample; you have to become a hole, which was what he had said he wanted. I went easy at first, since most men say they want it but they don’t really, they gag or choke and they’ve had enough; it’s another fantasy of themselves, what they think they want they don’t actually want. But he was different, he took it without complaint, and so I fucked him harder, I gripped him more tightly and bent his neck this way and that, trying different angles. Finally he did gag, for the first time, not just in his throat but deep in his abdomen, and I let him go. But he didn’t want to be let go, he grabbed my knees with both of his hands and locked them around his head, not letting me pull away. Something came over me again, that intensity or aggression I had felt earlier, a kind of cruelty, and I said Take it then, almost spitting the words, gripping the back of his head and fucking it hard, in short savage thrusts as he gagged, take it, and then I held it in place, pulling him against me as his body jerked, and I took pleasure in his suffering, in his willingness to suffer. It was the pleasure of being a man, I think, I’m not sure I had ever felt it before. I luxuriated in it, I didn’t want to let him go, I held him even after he motioned for me to stop, I let go only when he started slapping at my thighs. He took great gulps of air, hanging his head above my cock, threads of saliva still connecting us, viscous and heavy, until he used one hand to wipe his face. So good, he said then, his voice thick, so fucking good, and he smiled at me before he started sucking me again. I dropped my head back on the pillow, letting him work.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  As he drove he listed the advantages of life in Chinook. The air. The water. No crime, no juvenile delinquency. For scenery all you had to do was step out your front door, which you never had to lock. Hunting. Fishing. In fact the Skagit was one of the best trout streams in the world. Ted Williams—-who, not many people realized, was a world-class angler as well as a baseball great, not to mention a war hero—-had been fishing here for years. Pearl sat up front between Dwight and my mother. She had her head on my mother’s shoulder and was almost in her lap. I sat in the backseat between Skipper and Norma. They were quiet. At one point my mother turned and asked, “How about you guys? How do you like it here?” They looked at each other. Skipper said, “Fine.” “Fine,” Norma said. “It’s just a little isolated, is all.” “Not that isolated,” Dwight said. “Well,” Norma said, “maybe not that isolated. Pretty isolated, though.” “There’s plenty to do here if you kids would just take a little initiative,” Dwight said. “When I was growing up we didn’t have all the things you kids have, we didn’t have record players, we didn’t have TVs, all of that, but we were never bored. We were never bored. We used our imaginations. We read the classics. We played musical instruments. There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t. You show me a bored kid and I’ll show you a lazy kid.” My mother glanced at Dwight, then turned back to Norma and Skipper. “You’ll be graduating this year, right?” she said to Skipper. He nodded. “And you have another year,” she said to Norma. “One more year,” Norma said. “One more year and watch my dust.” “How’s the school here?” “They don’t have one. Just a grade school. We go to Concrete.” “Concrete?” “Concrete High,” Norma said. “That’s the name of a town?” “We passed it on the way up,” Dwight said. “Concrete.” “Concrete,” my mother repeated. “It’s a few miles downriver,” Dwight said. “Forty miles,” Norma said. “Come off it,” Dwight said. “It’s not that far.” “Thirty-nine miles,” Skipper said. “Exactly. I measured it on the odometer.” “What’s the difference!” Dwight said. “You’d bellyache just as much if the goddamned school was next door. If all you can do is complain, I would thank you to just stow it. Just kindly stow it.” Dwight kept looking back as he talked. His lower lip was curled out, and his bottom teeth showed. The car wandered the road. “I’m in fifth grade,” Pearl said. Nobody answered her. We drove on for a while. Then my mother asked Dwight to pull over. She wanted to take some pictures. She had Dwight and Norma and Skipper and Pearl stand together on the side of the road with snowy peaks sticking up behind them. Then Norma grabbed the camera and started ordering everyone around.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. Once again I had played the balloon-headed Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy invariably pulls away at the last second. By the time our next session rolled around, my anger matched Irene’s. That session was less like therapy than a wrestling match. It was the most serious fight we had had. The accusations gushed out of her: “You’ve given up on me! You want me to compromise by killing vital parts of myself!” I made no pretense of empathizing or understanding her position, “I’m sick and tired,” I told her, “of your minefields. I’m sick and tired of your setting tests for me that more often than not I fail. And of all the tests, this is the dirtiest, most treacherous one. “We have too much work to do, Irene,” I finished, taking a line from her dead husband. “We don’t have time for this bullshit.” It was one of our best hours. At its end (after, of course, another skirmish about ending on time and her accusing me of throwing her out of the office) our therapeutic alliance was stronger than ever. Neither in my textbooks nor in my supervision or classroom teaching would I ever dream of advising a student to tangle angrily with a patient; yet such a session invariably moved Irene forward. It was the metaphor of the black ooze that guided these efforts. By making contact, emotional contact, by wrestling with her (I speak figuratively, though there were times when I felt we were on the brink of a physical struggle), I was proving again and again that the black ooze was a fiction that neither tarred, nor repelled, nor endangered me. Irene clung so strongly to the metaphor that she was convinced each time I approached her rage that I would either abandon her or die. Finally, in an effort to demonstrate once and for all that her anger would neither destroy me nor drive me away, I laid down a new therapy ground rule: “Whenever you really explode at me, we will automatically schedule an extra appointment that week.” This act proved highly effective; in retrospect, I consider it inspired. The black-ooze metaphor was particularly powerful because it was overdetermined: it was a single image that satisfied and expressed several different unconscious dynamics. Grief rage was one important meaning.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was there to join them, but something held me back. I stood scanning the crowd until I saw, among all the Bulgarian red and green and white, a little rainbow flag, then another, a whole group of five or six people waving them alongside their posterboard signs. I knew them, or most of them, they were activists I had met over the years, and I cut through the crowd toward them. S. greeted me first, tucking his posterboard under his arm to shake my hand. He was in his midtwenties, tall, with longish brown hair he frequently tossed out of his eyes, the gesture of an eighties pop star. He had come in from Varna, where he ran one of the only activist organizations I had heard of outside of Sofia. It had been in the news lately, they had tried to organize what he called an LGBT film festival, though it was really just a few chairs and a DVD player in a café. But even that was too much; on the second day a group of men barged in, they destroyed the television, they threatened anyone who came back. I mentioned this to him, saying it was terrible, outrageous, but he waved the words away. Those assholes, he said, it was just bullshit theater, the police were there the next day but they didn’t come back. He was more upset about the Pride parade in Sofia, which had been canceled; when the city had expressed concern about security during the protests, the organizers had put out a statement that they were postponing the event as an act of solidarity, that it was a time for Sofians to stand together. Obedineni sme, they said, we’re united as Bulgarians, which is total bullshit, S. said, what kind of message is that, it says we have to choose between being gay and being Bulgarian, fuck that, it’s so fucking homophobic. He winced as an air horn blew nearby. And fuck the city, he said, they can’t just decide not to protect us. If they want to be part of the EU they have to make it safe for us to march, it’s bullshit to give them permission not to try. He gestured to the rest of the group. So we’re doing Pride anyway, he said, they should know we’re here, they shouldn’t be able to ignore us. Even so, their posterboard signs were mostly discreet, one with the words NIE SME S VAS, we’re with you, with rainbows in the corner, another with TOLERANTNOST in thick black letters against the white. Only two of them carried signs that were more demonstrative: S., whose sign read NIE PROTESTIRAME BEZ HOMOFOBIYA, we’re protesting without homophobia, and K., a woman my age from Dobrich, a small city where she worked translating technical English but spent most of her time on message boards and chat rooms, often enough on the phone, counseling gay teenagers—she called them her children—sometimes talking to them through the night. This accounted for the harried look she always wore when I saw her, the dark circles under her eyes, the heaviness with which she moved. She was admirable, everything about her spoke of sacrifice, and something in me shied away from her, I didn’t doubt the good she did but I avoided her whenever I could. S. had been one of her children, years before, and he remained devoted to her; I had heard him say that she had saved his life, that she inspired the work he did. She nodded when I walked up, but didn’t offer to shake my hand. Hers was the largest sign, with the letters LGBT and beneath them I NIE SME BULGARI, we’re Bulgarians too.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  He quietly reflected. Placing his sword back into its sheath, he bowed to the teacher in reverence. “And this,” the master replied again with equal calm, “is heaven.” Here the samurai, his sword held high at the peak of feeling full of rage (and at the moment before executing the prepared-for action), learned to hold back and restrain his rage instead of mindlessly expressing it. In refraining (with the master’s quick guidance) from making his habitual emotional expression of attack, he transformed his “hell” of rage to a “heaven” of peace. One could also speculate on what unconscious thoughts (and images) were stirred when the master provoked the swordsman’s ire. Perhaps the samurai was startled and at first even agreed with the characterization that he was ugly and untalented. This strong reaction to this insult (we might hypothesize) derived from his parents, teachers and others who humiliated him as a child. Perhaps he had a mental picture of being shamed in front of his school classmates. And then the other micro-fleeting “counter thought”—that no one would dare to call him that again and make him feel small and worthless. This thought and associated (internal) picture, coupled with a momentary physical sensation of startle , triggered the rage that led him down the compulsive, driven road to perdition. That was, at least, until his “Zen therapist,” precisely at the peak of rage, kept him from habitually expressing this “protective” emotion (really a defense against his feelings of smallness and helplessness) and forced him to the ownership of his real power and peaceful surrender. In the examples of Pouncer and the Zen master, choice occurred at the critical moment before executing attack. With the Zen master’s critical intervention, the samurai held back and felt the preparation to strike with his sword. In this highly charged state he paused and was able to restrain and transmute his violent rage into intense energy and a state of clarity, gratefulness, presence and grace. It is the ability to hold back, restrain and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy. Containment (a somatic rooting of Freud’s “sublimation”) buys us time and, with self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations. And this fraction of a second of restraint, as we just saw, is the difference between heaven and hell. When we can maintain this “creative neutrality,” we begin to dissolve the emotional compulsion to react as though our life depends on responses that are largely inappropriate. The uncoupling of sensation from image and thought is what diffuses the highly charged emotions and allows them to transform fluidly into sensation-based gradations of feelings . This is not at all the same as suppressing or repressing them.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why my father is ten times the human being you are: you _gentleman_!" He reached and rang the bell for Mrs. Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills. She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: "Him and buying people! Well, he doesn't buy me, and therefore there's no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They've got about as much feeling as celluloid has." She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn't want to hate him. She didn't want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and india rubbery where other people were concerned. She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinnertime. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer. He was reading a French book. "Have you ever read Proust?" he asked her. "I've tried, but he bores me." "He's really very extraordinary." "Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentalities." "Would you prefer self-important animalities?" "Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self-important." "Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well-bred anarchy." "It makes you very dead, really." "There speaks my evangelical little wife." They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn't help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly _will_ against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He too was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him. She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half-past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs. Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Right! What right ha' yo' ter start harnessin' other folks i' your Continuity? Leave folks to their own continuities." "My dear man, do you think I am concerned with you?" said Hilda softly. "Ay," he said. "Yo' are. For it's a force-put. Yo' more or less my sister-in-law." "Still far from it, I assure you." "Not a' that far, I assure _you_. I've got my own sort o' continuity, back your life! Good as yours, any day. An' if your sister there comes ter me for a bit o' cunt an' tenderness, she knows what she's after. She's been in my bed afore: which you 'aven't, thank the Lord, with your continuity." There was a dead pause, before he added: "--Eh, I don't wear me breeches arse-forrards. An' if I get a windfall, I thank my stars. A man gets a lot of enjoyment out o' that lass theer, which is more than anybody gets out o' th' likes o' you. Which is a pity, for you might 'appen a' bin a good apple, 'stead of a handsome crab. Women like you needs proper graftin'." He was looking at her with an odd, flickering smile, faintly sensual and appreciative. "And men like you," she said, "ought to be segregated: justifying their own vulgarity and selfish lust." "Ay, ma'am! It's a mercy there's a few men left like me. But you deserve what you get: to be left severely alone." Hilda had risen and gone to the door. He rose and took his coat from the peg. "I can find my way quite well alone," she said. "I doubt you can't," he replied easily. They tramped in ridiculous file down the lane again, in silence. An owl still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it. The car stood untouched, a little dewy. Hilda got in and started the engine. The other two waited. "All I mean," she said from her entrenchment, "is that I doubt if you'll find it's been worth it, either of you!" "One man's meat is another man's poison," he said, out of the darkness. "But it's meat an' drink to me." The lights flared out. "Don't make me wait in the morning, Connie." "No, I won't. Good night!" The car rose slowly on to the highroad, then slid swiftly away, leaving the night silent. Connie timidly took his arm, and they went down the lane. He did not speak. At length she drew him to a standstill. "Kiss me!" she murmured. "Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down," he said. That amused her. She still kept hold of his arm, and they went quickly down the lane, in silence. She was so glad to be with him, just now. She shivered, knowing that Hilda might have snatched her away. He was inscrutably silent. When they were in the cottage again, she almost jumped with pleasure, that she should be free of her sister. "But you were horrid to Hilda," she said to him.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  What do you make of it?” asked Barbara . “Some dark primitive vagina dentate fantasy in me, no doubt,” replied Ernest. “But still there’s something in this patient that particularly ignites that fear.” Just before drifting off to sleep, Ernest wondered again whether he should stop seeing Myrna. Maybe she needs a female therapist, he thought. Maybe my negative feelings are too deep, too entrenched. But when he had raised that question in the seminar group, everyone, including Dr. Werner, said, “No, stay the course.” Myrna’s major problems, they felt, were with men and could best be addressed with a male therapist. Too bad, Ernest thought: he really wanted out. Yet, he wondered, what about that strange session today? Although as obnoxious as ever in most ways, including her reference to his fee, Myrna had at least acknowledged his presence in the room. She had challenged him, asked him whether he liked her, taken him to task about the sarcastic T-shirt comment. Exhausting—but at least something different, something real, was happening. On her drive to the next session, Myrna listened again to Dr. Lash’s hateful dictation and then to the tape of the last session. Not bad, she thought—she liked the way she had held her own in the last session. She enjoyed making the sucker work for his money. How delicious that he was unsettled by her barbs about his fee: I’ll make sure, she resolved, to zap him with a money-jab each session. The long drive zipped by. “Yesterday at work,” Myrna began the hour, “I was sitting in the lavatory and overheard some girls at the sink talking about me.” “Oh? What did you hear?” Ernest was always intrigued by the drama of overhearing oneself being discussed. “Things I didn’t like. That I’m obsessed with earning money. That I talk about nothing else, have no other interests. That I’m boring and hard to be with.” “Oh, terrible! How painful that must have been. ” “Yeah, I felt betrayed by someone I thought cared for me. Kicked in the stomach.” “Betrayed? What sort of relationship had you had with them?” “Well, they’d pretended to like me, to care about me, be my friends.” “How about others in your office? How do they feel about you?” “If you don’t mind, Dr. Lash, I’ve been thinking about what you’ve been saying about staying here in this office. You know, focusing on our relationship. I’d like to try that.” “Absolutely.” A look of astonishment crossed Ernest’s face. He couldn’t believe his ears. “So let me ask you,” said Myrna, crossing her legs with a loud swish of her stockings, “do you feel that way about me?” “What way?” stalled Ernest. “What I just said. Do you find me narrow? Boring? Hard to be with?” “I never feel just one way about you, or anyone. It varies.” “Well, let’s say in general ,” said Myrna, who was clearly not about to be deterred.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  She had an uncanny knack of locating and zeroing in on my major irritants. “Oh, no, you don’t!” she shot back. “I was captain of the varsity debating team at Radcliffe and I know that strategy—reductio ad absurdum! But it’s not going to work. Admit it; you know there’s truth in what I say.” “No; I disagree. You’re totally overlooking the training of therapists! That’s what training in my field is all about—to acquire sensitivity, empathy—to be able to enter the world of another, to experience what the patient experiences.” I was irritated all right. And I had learned not to hold back. We worked much better together when I just cut loose with my feelings. Irene could come into my office so depressed she could hardly speak. But once we tangled about something, she inevitably became enlivened. I knew I was assuming Jack’s role here. He was the only one ever to stand up to her. Her icy demeanor was daunting to others (her surgery residents referred to her as “the Queen”), but Jack never deferred to her. She told me he took no pains to conceal his feelings, often walking out of the room muttering, “I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Not only was I irritated at her insistence that only bereaved therapists can treat bereaved patients but I was also angry at Eric for reinforcing her view that bereavement is never-ending. That idea was part of an ongoing debate between me and Irene. I was taking a well-established, sound position, namely, that the work of mourning consists of gradually detaching oneself from the one who died and redirecting one’s energy toward others. Freud first elaborated this understanding of grief in 1915 in Mourning and Melancholia, and since then this approach has been supported by much clinical observation and empirical research. In my own research, completed just before I took on Irene’s case, every single widow and widower I studied gradually detached from the dead spouse and then reinvested in something or someone else. And that was true for even those who had had the most loving of marriages. In fact, we found strong evidence that many of the widows who had had the best marriages went through the bereavement and detachment process more easily than those who had had a deeply conflicted one. (The explanation for this paradox lay, it seemed to me, in “regret”: for those who had spent their lives married to the wrong person, bereavement was more complicated because they also had to grieve for themselves, for their many squandered years.) Since Irene’s marriage appeared to me to have been exceptionally loving and supportive, I had initially predicted a relatively uncomplicated bereavement. But Irene was highly critical of most traditional attitudes about bereavement. She hated my comments about detachment and dismissed my research out of hand: “We bereaved have learned to give the answers investigators want.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As individuals congregated in populated communities, their survival need for constant environmental vigilance waned. Their awareness of bodily sensation took on more of a social function—what is now termed social and emotional intelligence. Survival no longer depended solely on the urgency of fight, flight or freeze. Rather, as society became more and more complex, the need for greater mental capacity to navigate our position within the group increased. Nuanced body language—the reading of facial and postural cues (the unspoken language of the body)—gave way to establishing impulse control, which propelled our progenitors toward an increasingly mental framework. By the so-called age of reason, in the mid-seventeenth century, the importance of rationality ascended to new heights. Disembodiment, in the alleged service of this rationality, had become the norm. Instincts and the immediacy of physical drives (such as sex) had become an embarrassment or worse. The subjugating power of the church reinforced this deepening split between mind and body. Finally, the supremacy of rationality congealed in Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am,” an iconic statement for modernity. The rest is history, for better and for worse. However, while apparently disengaged, our compelling instincts remain coiled, waiting to ignite and reunite body and mind into effective coordinated action. If, for example, we become stranded in the wilderness, our instincts for predation, protection and shelter will click into sharp focus. If not we will surely die. Additionally, the full power of our intellects will be enrolled to service these bodily instincts. The snapping twig, a novel scent or a fleeting shadow will arouse us to a heightened alert readiness. Sticks, leaves and mud will present themselves as precious building material and protection from the elements. When death looms, rumination is worthless, while body engagement in the here and now is invaluable. Mostly, though, our gripping survival instincts seem largely useless; in fact, in day-to-day life they are frequently detrimental. We expend an enormous amount of energy suppressing our instinctual eruptions. For example, when our boss passes over us and promotes a less experienced rival, we (perceiving actual threat) momentarily explode, then stuff our murderous rage back into our bodies from whence it came—almost before we can feel it. The cumulative consequences of suppressing such powerful impulses, however, takes its toll in the form of back pain, headaches, high blood pressure, heart disease and gastrointestinal disorders, just to mention a few.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 2: Further, the more the reason is hindered, the less does a man show his thoughts. But the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that “an angry man is not cunning but is open.” Therefore anger does not seem to hinder the use of reason, as desire does; for desire is cunning, as he also states (Ethic. vii, 6.). Objection 3: Further, the judgment of reason becomes more evident by juxtaposition of the contrary: because contraries stand out more clearly when placed beside one another. But this also increases anger: for the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 2) that “men are more angry if they receive unwonted treatment; for instance, honorable men, if they be dishonored”: and so forth. Therefore the same cause increases anger, and facilitates the judgment of reason. Therefore anger does not hinder the judgment of reason. On the contrary, Gregory says (Moral. v, 30) that anger “withdraws the light of understanding, while by agitating it troubles the mind.” I answer that, Although the mind or reason makes no use of a bodily organ in its proper act, yet, since it needs certain sensitive powers for the execution of its act, the acts of which powers are hindered when the body is disturbed, it follows of necessity that any disturbance in the body hinders even the judgment of reason; as is clear in the case of drunkenness or sleep. Now it has been stated [1436](A[2]) that anger, above all, causes a bodily disturbance in the region of the heart, so much as to effect even the outward members. Consequently, of all the passions, anger is the most manifest obstacle to the judgment of reason, according to Ps. 30:10: “My eye is troubled with wrath.” Reply to Objection 1: The beginning of anger is in the reason, as regards the appetitive movement, which is the formal element of anger. But the passion of anger forestalls the perfect judgment of reason, as though it listened but imperfectly to reason, on account of the commotion of the heat urging to instant action, which commotion is the material element of anger. In this respect it hinders the judgment of reason.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  So surrounded was she by material reminders of Jack that I worried Irene would become like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, a woman so caught up in grief (she had been deserted at the altar) that she lived for years in the cobwebs of loss, never taking off her wedding dress or clearing off the table set for her wedding feast. Hence, throughout therapy I urged Irene to turn away from the past, to rejoin life, to loosen her ties with Jack: “Take down some of your photos of him. Redecorate your home. Buy a new bed. Clean out the desk drawers; throw things away. Travel somewhere new. Do something you’ve never done before. Stop talking so much to Jack.” But what I called reason, Irene called treason. What I called rejoining life, she called betrayal of love. What I called detachment from the dead, she called abandonment of her love. I thought I was being the rationalist she needed; she thought I was polluting the purity of her grief. I thought I was leading her back into life; she thought I was forcing her to turn her back on Jack. I thought I was inspiring her to become the existential hero; she thought I was a smug spectator watching her tragedy from a safe grandstand seat. I was stunned by her obstinacy. Why can’t she get it? I wondered. Why can’t she get that Jack is really dead, that his consciousness is extinguished? That it isn’t her fault? That she is not jinxed, that she will not cause my death or the death of the next man she loves? That she is not fated to experience tragedy forever? That she is clinging to crooked beliefs because she so fears the alternative: recognizing that she lives in a universe absolutely indifferent to whether she is happy or unhappy. And she wondered at my obtuseness. Why can’t Irv get it? Why doesn’t he see that he is defacing my memory of Jack, defiling my grief by tracking in grave mud and leaving the shovel in the kitchen? Why can’t he understand that I just want to look out the window at Jack’s grave? That it infuriates me when he tries to yank me away from my heart? That there are times when, despite my need for him, I absolutely have to get away from him, squeeze by him on the stairs, breathe fresh air? That I’m drowning, I’m clinging to the wreckage of my life, and he keeps trying to pry my fingers away? Why can’t he get it that Jack died because of my poisoned love? That evening, as I reviewed the session in my mind, another patient whom I had seen decades earlier came into my mind. Throughout adolescence she had been locked in a long, bitter struggle with her nay-saying father.