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.

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

  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. But at the same time I was angry a lot, and I didn’t know where to go with it. I was too afraid of hurting people, so I kept it all inside.” “I can see why S-M was so attractive to you,” I reply. “You could make demands and not fear hurting anyone. The unambiguous codes, the negotiating beforehand, made it safe for you. Emotionally, you tend to put other people first. Sexual domination is a way for you to override the other person’s supremacy. It’s a clever answer to your more typical emotional subordination.” “Exactly,” he says. “But at the same time, you know, it’s all about their needs. I’m pleasing them—that’s the key piece. They want it. They have to be really into it, or it’s a no-go for me.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  DiscussionYou may (unless you are extremely obsessive) have found it maddeningly difficult to stay focused on a sensation (or image) without drifting off into thought. For these exercises to take hold, you will need to regularly set some time to practice (generally from five or ten minutes to an hour). You will encounter a myriad of possible resistances ranging from drifting into thought to “spacing out” entirely or having the urge to go to the refrigerator to eat. Another kind of avoidance occurs when a sensation or image somehow reminds you of a past event, as in the experience of déjà vu. In “grabbing” prematurely for a meaning or understanding, you will almost certainly abort the developing internal process. Recall Miriam’s session (in Chapter 8), where she learned to trust the spontaneous happenings in her body by suspending her inclination to interpret, judge or understand. With practice she came to deepen her experience, notice her boundaries, heal her unresolved grief from her first marriage and physically open to her suppressed sexuality. The capacity to stay focused and deepen, focally, is a magnificent skill with great rewards, but it is stepwise and frustrating. Generally, when people are able to get in touch with their bodies, they are drawn first to a painful area. This is OK; in fact, pain (not due to a medical reason) is generally blocked sensation, indicating an area of conflict.a You will gradually learn to tease out these places of discord and progressively resolve them. But first and foremost you must learn to maintain focus and differentiate various spontaneous bodily (muscular and visceral) sensations. The term spontaneous is central here. Our limited acquaintance with our body is primarily with doing—namely, how we use our bodies to do what we want. If you observe the goings-on in any gym or health club, you will note that most people are not having an intimate relationship with their bodies. Rather, they are burning calories or building what they perceive to be an attractive shape. Even athletes (with the exception of some gymnasts, dancers and graceful individuals), more often than not, have very limited body awareness. To burrow into the world of spontaneous sensations and feelings takes a radically different approach than merely feeling the form and function of our bodies.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In Steps 5, 6 and 7, the gradual restoration of active defensive and protective responses—along with the carefully calibrated termination of the immobility reaction is accomplished. This, along with the discharge of bound energy, reduces the hyperarousal. Together these steps lie at the heart of transforming trauma. In particular, the egress from immobility is associated with intense arousal-based sensations, along with the powerful emotions of rage and frantic, fearful flight. This is the reason the process of trauma release must be worked in tiny increments. I use the term titration to denote the gradual, stepwise process of trauma renegotiation. This process operates like certain chemical reactions. Consider two glass beakers, one filled with hydrochloric acid (HCl) and the other with lye (NaOH). These extremely corrosive substances (the acid and the base, respectively) would cause severe burning if you were to place your finger in either beaker; indeed, if you were to leave that finger there for a few moments, it would simply dissolve since both of these chemicals are so caustic. Naturally, you would want to make them safe by neutralizing them; and, if you knew a little chemistry, you might mix them together to get a harmless mixture of water and common table salt, two of the basic building blocks of life. This reaction is written HCl + NaOH = NaCl + H20. If you simply poured them together, you would get a massive explosion, surely blinding yourself and any other individuals in the lab. On the other hand, if you skillfully use a glass valve (a stopcock), you could add one of the chemicals to the other one single drop at a time. And with each drop there would be a small “Alka-Seltzer fizzle,” but soon all would be calm. With each drop the same minimal reaction would repeat (see Figure 5.3). Finally, after a certain number of drops, both water and crystals of salt would begin to form. With several titrations, you would inevitably get the same neutralizing chemical reaction, but without the explosion. This is the effect that we want to achieve in resolving trauma: when dealing with potentially corrosive forces, therapists must somehow neutralize those sensations of intense “energy” and the primal emotional states of rage and non-directed flight without unleashing an explosive abreaction. Titration [image file=image_rsrc2NA.jpg] Figure 5.3 Titration in the chemistry lab is a way of combining two corrosive and potentially explosive substances in a controlled mixing that transforms the reactants gradually. Step 5. Restoring active responsesDuring my accident, as I was propelled into the windshield of the car, my arm stiffened to ward off the impact to my head. The amount of energy that goes into such a protective response is vast; muscles stiffen to maximal exertion to fend off a lethal blow. Also, at the moment my shoulder smashed into the glass and I was propelled into the air and onto the road, my body went limp.

• 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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  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. For all of us, and particularly for the traumatized individual, the capacity to transform the “negative” emotions of fear and rage is the difference between heaven and hell.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And I told you that I would be engaged with you, and that much of our task here would be to study that engagement? And you said you welcomed that?” “This is not making sense. You think I’m deliberately opposing you. Tell me, why would I come week after week, on a long drive and blowing one- fifty an hour? One hundred fifty dollars—maybe small change for you but not for me.” “On one level it doesn’t make sense, Myrna, yet on another it does. Here’s the way I see it. You’re unhappy with your life, you’re lonely, you feel unloved and unlovable. You come to me for help—at great effort—it is a long drive. And expensive too—I do hear you, Myrna. But something strange happens here—I think it’s fear. I think getting close makes you uncomfortable, and then you back off, close down, find fault with me, ridicule what we’re doing. I’m not saying you do it deliberately.” “If you understand me so well, why the T-shirt comment? You still haven’t answered that question.” “I was addressing that when I mentioned that I felt impatient.” “That doesn’t really feel like an answer.” Ernest took another long look at his patient and thought, Do I really know her? Whence this blast of directness? But it’s a welcome, bracing wind—and anything’s better than what we’ve been doing. I’ll try to sail with it as far as possible. “Your point is well taken, Myrna. The T-shirt crack doesn’t fit in anywhere. A stupid comment. And a hurtful one. I’m sorry about it. Not sure where it came from. I wish I could recapture what prompted it.” “I remember from the tape—” “I thought you didn’t listen to the tape.” “I didn’t say that. I said I forgot to bring the tape, but I listened to it at home. The T-shirt comment came right after I said you could introduce me to one of your rich single patients.” “Right, right, I remember. I’m impressed, Myrna. Somehow I had the feeling that our sessions didn’t mean enough for you to remember them so well. Let me go back into my feelings in that last hour. One thing I remember for sure—that very comment about introducing you to one of my rich patients really bugged me. Just prior to that, I think I had asked what I could offer you, and that was your answer. I felt put down: your comment hurt me. I should be above that, but I’ve got my sore spots—and my blind spots too.” “Hurt? Aren’t we being a bit touchy? Just a joke.” “Maybe. But maybe more than a joke. Maybe you were giving voice to your sense that I have little of value to offer you—at best, an introduction to another man. So I felt invisible. Devalued. And I guess that’s why I lashed out at you.” “Poor thing!” Myrna muttered. “What?” “Nothing, nothing—another joke.” “I’m not going to let you drive me away with that kind of comment.

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

  The Amen Corner____ Chuck got drunk almost every night. Some nights he was jolly. Other nights he went into silent rages in which his face would redden and swell, and his lips move to the words he was shouting inside his head. At the peak of his fury he threw himself against unyielding objects. He would ram his shoulder into a wall, then back up and do it again. Sometimes he just stood there, saying nothing, and pummeled the wall with his fists. In the morning he would ask me what he’d done the night before. I didn’t really believe that he had forgotten, but I played along and told him how wiped out he’d been, how totally out of control. He shook his head at the behavior of this strange other person. I could not keep up with him and I stopped trying. He never said anything, but I knew he was disappointed in me. Chuck’s father had run a dairy before he became a storekeeper and preacher. The family still owned the farm, though now they leased the pastures and barn to a neighbor. Mr. and Mrs. Bolger and their two young daughters lived in the main house. Chuck and I were off by ourselves in a converted storage shed a couple of hundred feet away. Mr. Bolger had the idea that a good dose of trust would rouse us to some adult conception of ourselves. It should have. It didn’t. The Bolgers went to bed at nine-thirty sharp. Around ten, if Chuck wasn’t already in the bag, we pushed his car down the drive a ways, then cranked it up and drove over to Veronica’s house. Arch and Psycho were usually there, sometimes Huff. They drank and played poker. I had no money, so I sat on the floor and watched the late show with Veronica. Veronica ruined the movies by telling me all about the stars. She had the inside track on Hollywood. She knew which actor, supposedly dead, was actually a drooling vegetable, and which actress could not be satisfied except by entire football teams. She was especially hard on the men. According to Veronica they were all a bunch of homos, and she proved it by pointing out the little signals and gestures by which they advertised their persuasion. The lighting of a cigarette, the position of a handkerchief in a breast pocket, the way an actor glanced at his watch or angled his hat— everything was evidence to Veronica. Even when she wasn’t talking I could feel

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  A good way, he said, to use the commute time from Los Altos to San Francisco. She wasn’t so sure. The hours had been frustrating in the first place, and going through them a second time was only more frustrating. The truck, having gained on her, flashed his lights to pass. Pulling over a lane, she cursed the trucker as he gave her the finger. Suppose she had an accident because she was distracted by listening to the tape? Could she sue her shrink? Take his ass into court? That notion brought a smile to her lips. Leaning over, Myrna pressed “rewind” for a few seconds, then the “play” button. “Stay here in the room with me, Myrna. What’s it been like being here today?” “What do you mean?” “Same thing I always mean. Try to talk about what’s going on here, between us.” “Frustrating! Another hundred-fifty-dollar pop, and I don’t feel better.” “So I failed again today. Took your money and didn’t help. Tell me something, Myrna; see if you can go back over our hour together and answer this question: What could I have done today?” “How should I know? That’s what you get paid for, isn’t it? And paid well too.” “I know you don’t know, Myrna, but I want you to dip into your fantasy. How could I have helped you today?” “You could have introduced me to one of your rich single patients.” “You see ‘Dating Bureau’ on my T-shirt?” “You bastard,” she muttered, punching the “stop” button. “I pay you one-fifty an hour for this smart-ass shit?” She pressed “rewind” and replayed the exchange. “. . . could I have helped you today?” “You could have introduced me to one of your rich single patients.” “You see ‘Dating Bureau’ on my T-shirt?” “Not funny, Doctor.” “No, you’re right. Sorry. What I should have said is that you stay so far away from me—from saying anything about how you feel about me.” “You, you, you. Why always my feelings toward you? You’re not the issue, Dr. Lash. I’m not going to be dating you—though maybe I’d get more out of that than from what we’re doing.” “Let’s go over it again, Myrna. You originally came in to see me saying you wanted to do something about your relationships with men. In our very first session, I said I could best help you examine your relationships with others by focusing on our relationship right here in this office. This space here in my office is, or should be, a safe place, where I hope you can talk more freely than elsewhere.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Yes. And then I thought that when we finish our session, you’ll take your loss up your little garden path to your wife, who’ll be there waiting with the rest of your tidy, cozy life. That’s when it turns red.” My office, only a couple hundred feet from my house, is a comfortable red-tile-roofed cottage enveloped in the lush greens and violets of lupine, wisteria, frangipani, and Spanish lavender. Though Irene loved the serenity of my office, she often made sarcastic comments about my picture-book life. “It’s not just you I feel angry at,” she continued. “It’s everyone whose life is intact. You’ve told me about widows who hate being without a role, who hate being the fifth wheel at dinner parties. But it’s not the role or being the fifth wheel that matters: it’s hating everyone else for having a life; it’s envy; it’s being filled with bitterness. Do you think I like feeling this way?” “A little while ago when you were preparing to walk out of here, you said you weren’t fit to be with anyone.” “Well, am I? Do you want to be with someone who hates you because your wife is alive? Does anyone want that kind of person around? The black ooze—remember? No one wants to be tarred, do they?” “I stopped you from leaving, didn’t I?” No answer. “I’m thinking of how dizzy you must feel to be so angry at me and yet so close, so grateful.” She nodded. “A little louder, Irene. Can’t quite hear you.” “Well, I got dizzy thinking about why you told me about your brother-in-law today.” “You seem suspicious.” “Very.” “You have a hunch?” “More than a hunch. I think you were trying to manipulate me. See how I would react. Giving me a test.” “No wonder you exploded. Maybe it’ll help if I tell you exactly what was going on inside of me today after I got the news of Morton’s death.” I told her how I canceled the rest of my schedule but decided to see her, and why. “I couldn’t cancel it—not after your courage in always coming here no matter what. But,” I continued, “I still had to face the question of how to be with you and deal with my loss at the same time. “So what options did I have today, Irene? To shut down and withdraw from you? That would have been worse than canceling. To try to stay close and honest with you and not tell you about it? Impossible—a recipe for disaster: I learned long ago that when two people have something big between them and don’t talk about it, they don’t talk of anything else of importance either. This area here”—I gestured toward the air space between us—“we need to keep it clean and free, and that’s my job as well as yours. So that’s why I told you what was happening to me straight. Straight as I could—no manipulation, no test, no ulterior motive.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  My office, only a couple hundred feet from my house, is a comfortable red-tile-roofed cottage enveloped in the lush greens and violets of lupine, wisteria, frangipani, and Spanish lavender. Though Irene loved the serenity of my office, she often made sarcastic comments about my picture-book life. “It’s not just you I feel angry at,” she continued. “It’s everyone whose life is intact. You’ve told me about widows who hate being without a role, who hate being the fifth wheel at dinner parties. But it’s not the role or being the fifth wheel that matters: it’s hating everyone else for having a life; it’s envy; it’s being filled with bitterness. Do you think I like feeling this way?” “A little while ago when you were preparing to walk out of here, you said you weren’t fit to be with anyone.” “Well, am I? Do you want to be with someone who hates you because your wife is alive? Does anyone want that kind of person around? The black ooze—remember? No one wants to be tarred, do they?” “I stopped you from leaving, didn’t I?” No answer. “I’m thinking of how dizzy you must feel to be so angry at me and yet so close, so grateful.” She nodded. “A little louder, Irene. Can’t quite hear you.” “Well, I got dizzy thinking about why you told me about your brother-in-law today.” “You seem suspicious.” “Very.” “You have a hunch?” “More than a hunch. I think you were trying to manipulate me. See how I would react. Giving me a test.” “No wonder you exploded. Maybe it’ll help if I tell you exactly what was going on inside of me today after I got the news of Morton’s death.” I told her how I canceled the rest of my schedule but decided to see her, and why. “I couldn’t cancel it—not after your courage in always coming here no matter what. But,” I continued, “I still had to face the question of how to be with you and deal with my loss at the same time. “So what options did I have today, Irene? To shut down and withdraw from you? That would have been worse than canceling. To try to stay close and honest with you and not tell you about it? Impossible—a recipe for disaster: I learned long ago that when two people have something big between them and don’t talk about it, they don’t talk of anything else of importance either. This area here”—I gestured toward the air space between us—“we need to keep it clean and free, and that’s my job as well as yours. So that’s why I told you what was happening to me straight.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Five years. For five years I led a daily therapy group on a psychiatric ward. At ten every morning I left my cozy book-lined office in the Stanford University Medical School, bicycled over to the hospital, entered the ward, winced at my first breath of sticky, Lysol-laced air, and poured my coffee from the staff caffeinated urn (no caffeine for the patients, nor tobacco, alcohol, or sex—all part of an effort, I suppose, to discourage them from settling too comfortably and for too long into the hospital). Then I arranged the chairs into a circle in the multipurpose room, unpocketed my baton, and for eighty minutes conducted a group therapy meeting. Though the ward had twenty beds, my meetings were small, sometimes only four or five patients. I was picky about my clientele and opened my doors only to higher-functioning patients. The ticket of admission? Orientation times three: time, place, and person. My group members had only to know when it was and who and where they were. While I didn’t object to members being psychotic (as long as they were quiet about it and did not interfere with the work of others), I did insist that each member be able to talk, pay attention for eighty minutes, and acknowledge the need for help. Every prestigious club has entrance criteria. Perhaps my requirements for membership made my therapy group—the “agenda group,” as it was called for reasons I shall explain later—more desirable. Those without the ticket of admission—the more disturbed, regressed patients—off with them to “communication group,” the other group on the ward, which held shorter, more structured, less demanding meetings. And, of course, there were always those in social exile, those who were too intellectually impaired, distracted, belligerent, or manic to be accommodated in any group at all. Often some agitated patients in social exile would be permitted to attend the communication group after medication had settled them down, perhaps in a day or two. “Permitted to attend”: that phrase would crack a smile in the face of even the most withdrawn patient. No! Let me be honest. Never in hospital history has there been a sighting of disturbed patients pounding on the doors of the group therapy room, demanding admission. A far more familiar scene is the pregroup roundup, the posse of attendants and white-cloaked nurses galloping through the ward, rousting members out of their hiding places in closets, johns, and showers, and herding them into the group room. The agenda group had a distinct reputation: it was tough and challenging and, worst of all, had no corners—no place to hide.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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. We have learned that the world wants us to recover quickly and that it becomes impatient with those who cling too long to losses.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  They most definitely did not want to dodge broadsides about their therapeutic technique, especially when the critique was based on a traditional analytic approach inappropriate to their current clinical setting. Finally Ernest himself suggested that the discussion was no longer productive and urged the group to return to the topic of his countertransference. A few members then spoke of similar patients who had drained and bored them, but Barbara’s comment most piqued Ernest’s interest. “This is not like any other resistant patient,” she said. “You say she gets to you like no one else and that you’ve never been so disrespectful to a patient before.” “It’s true, and I’m not sure why,” Ernest responded. “Several things about her tick me off. I get infuriated at her persistent reminders of the money she’s paying me. She is constantly turning this process into a commercial transaction.” “It’s not a commercial transaction?” interposed Dr. Werner. “Since when? You give her a service, and in return she gives you a check. Looks like commerce to me.” “Well, parishioners tithe, but that doesn’t make a church service an act of commerce,” said Ernest. “Oh, yes, it does!” insisted Dr. Werner. “The circumstances are just more refined and concealed. Read the genteel fine print at the end of a prayer book: no tithing, eventually no service.” “Typical analytic reductionism, everything reduced to its basest level,” said Ernest. “I’m not buying it. Therapy is not commerce, nor am I a merchant. That’s not why I’m in the field. If money were uppermost, I’d have gone into something else—law, investment banking, even one of the rich medical specialties like ophthalmology or radiology. I see therapy as something else—call it an act of caritas. I signed up for a life of service. For which I also, incidentally, happen to get paid. But this patient keeps slapping me in the face with the money.” “You give and give,” Dr. Werner purred in his most professional sonorous voice, appearing to relent. “But she gives nothing back.” Ernest nodded. “Right! She gives nothing back.” “You give and give,” repeated Dr. Werner. “You give her your best stuff and she keeps saying, ‘Give me something worthwhile.’” “That’s exactly the way it feels,” said Ernest more softly. This exchange happened so smoothly that none of the seminar members, perhaps not even Dr. Werner himself, was conscious of his switch into his seductive professional voice—or, it seemed, of Ernest’s eagerness to snuggle into the warmth of the therapeutic comforter. “You said there’s something of your mother in it,” remarked Barbara. “I never got much good stuff from her either.” “Does her ghost influence your feelings toward Myrna?” “It was different with my mother. I was the one who kept pulling away.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  My calf muscles tensed—I believe I was preparing myself to tackle her if she bolted for the door. “Oh, no, you’re not. Not after that. You’re staying right here and talking this out.” “I can’t. Can’t work, can’t stay here with you. Not fit to be with anyone.” “There’s only one rule here in this office: that you say exactly what’s on your mind. You’re doing your job. You’ve never done it better.” Dropping her purse on the floor, Irene slumped back in her chair. “I told you that after my brother died I always ended my relationships with men the same way.” “How? Tell me again.” “They’d have some mishap, some problem, maybe get sick, and I’d get nasty and cut them out of my life. A quick surgical incision! I cut clean. And I cut sharp. ” “Because you’d compare their problem to the immensity of losing Allen? That would make you bitter?” She nodded her appreciation. “That was most of it, I’m pretty sure. Also that I just didn’t want them to matter to me. I didn’t want to hear about their puny problems.” “And with me today?” “Color it red! Rage! I wanted to throw something at you!” “Because it felt like I was comparing my loss with yours?” “Yes. And then I thought that when we finish our session, you’ll take your loss up your little garden path to your wife, who’ll be there waiting with the rest of your tidy, cozy life. That’s when it turns red.” My office, only a couple hundred feet from my house, is a comfortable red-tile-roofed cottage enveloped in the lush greens and violets of lupine, wisteria, frangipani, and Spanish lavender. Though Irene loved the serenity of my office, she often made sarcastic comments about my picture-book life. “It’s not just you I feel angry at,” she continued. “It’s everyone whose life is intact. You’ve told me about widows who hate being without a role, who hate being the fifth wheel at dinner parties. But it’s not the role or being the fifth wheel that matters: it’s hating everyone else for having a life; it’s envy; it’s being filled with bitterness. Do you think I like feeling this way?” “A little while ago when you were preparing to walk out of here, you said you weren’t fit to be with anyone.” “Well, am I? Do you want to be with someone who hates you because your wife is alive? Does anyone want that kind of person around? The black ooze—remember? No one wants to be tarred, do they?” “I stopped you from leaving, didn’t I?” No answer. “I’m thinking of how dizzy you must feel to be so angry at me and yet so close, so grateful.” She nodded. “A little louder, Irene. Can’t quite hear you.” “Well, I got dizzy thinking about why you told me about your brother-in-law today.” “You seem suspicious.” “Very.” “You have a hunch?” “More than a hunch.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “This is Dr. Lash dictating notes for countertransference seminar. Notes on Myrna, Thursday, 28 March. Typical, predictable, frustrating hour. She spent most of the session whining as usual about the lack of single available men. I get more and more impatient . . . irritable—lost it for a moment and made an inappropriate remark: ‘Do you see “Dating Bureau” on my T-shirt?’ Really hostile thing for me to do—very unlike me—can’t remember last time I’ve been so disrespectful to a patient. Am I trying to drive her away? I never say anything supportive or positive to her. I try, but she makes it hard. She gets to me . . . so boring, rasping, crass, narrow. All she ever thinks about is making her two million in stock options and finding a man. Nothing else . . . narrow, narrow, narrow . . . no dreams, no fantasies, no imagination. No depth. Has she ever read a good novel? Ever said something beautiful? Or interesting . . . just one interesting thought? God, I’d love to see her write a poem—or try to write a poem. Now, that would be therapeutic change. She drains me. I feel like a big tit. Over and over the same material. Over and over hitting me over the head about my fee. Week after week I end up doing the same thing—I bore myself. “Today, as usual, I urged her to examine her role in her predicament, how she contributes to her own isolation. It’s not such a difficult concept, but I might as well be speaking Aramaic. She just can’t get it. Instead she accuses me of not believing that the singles scene is bad for women. And then, as she often does, she threw in a crack about wishing she could date me. But when I try to focus on that, on how she feels toward me or how she makes herself lonely right here in this room with me, things get even worse. She refuses to get it; she will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. She can’t be stupid. Wellesley graduate—high-level graphics work—huge salary, hell of a lot bigger than mine—half the software companies in Silicon Valley competing for her—but I feel I’m talking to a dumb person. How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? And all those cracks about not getting her money’s worth—I feel demeaned. She is a vulgar lady. Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. Presses so many—” A passing car’s honk roused her to the fact that her car was weaving. Myrna’s heart pounded. This was dangerous. She switched off the Walkman and drove the few minutes to her turnoff. She pulled into a side street, parked, rewound, and listened:

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And spiritual depth?” Deliberately, without speaking, Dr. Lee looked over at her, all the while tossing the chalk into the air and catching it a couple of times. Finally he turned and wrote Paula’s suggestions on the board. Although I thought them not unreasonable, I knew—and knew that everyone else knew—that as Dr. Lee watched the tumbling chalk, he was thinking, Somebody, anybody, please get that old lady out of here! Later, at lunch, he referred to Paula contemptuously as an evangelist. Although Dr. Lee was an eminent oncologist whose support and referrals were essential to the project, I risked antagonizing him and defended her staunchly by emphasizing her critical importance in the formation and functioning of the groups. Though I failed to alter his impression of her, I felt proud of myself for standing by her. That evening Paula phoned me. She was furious. “All of the medical professionals at the workshop are automatons, inhumane automatons. We patients who struggle with cancer twenty-four hours a day—what are we to them? I’ll tell you: we are nothing more than ‘maladaptive coping strategies.’” I spoke with her for a long time and did all I could to mollify her. I tried to suggest gently that she not stereotype the doctors and urged her to be patient. Affirming my loyalty to the principles with which we had started the group, I concluded, “Remember, Paula, none of this makes any difference because I have my own research plan. I’m not going to be controlled by their mechanistic perspective. Trust me!” But Paula was not to be mollified, nor, as it turned out, would she trust me. The workshop festered in her mind. For weeks she ruminated about it and finally directly accused me of selling out to the bureaucracy. She submitted a minority report of one to the National Cancer Institute, and it did not lack vigor or rancor. Finally, one day Paula came into my office and announced that she had decided to leave the group. “Why? ” “Well, I’m just tired of it.” “Paula, there’s more to it than that. What’s the real reason?” “I told you, I’m tired of it.” No matter how I probed, she continued to insist on that excuse, though we both knew that the real reason was that I had disappointed her. I used all my cunning (and after all my years of practice, I knew a few ways to get around people), but to no avail. Each of my attempts, including some ill-advised bantering and appeals to our long friendship, was greeted by an icy glare. I had no more rapport with her and had to endure the sorrow of a deceptive discussion. “I’m just working too hard. It’s too much for me,” she said. “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying for months, Paula? Cut down all your visits and phone calls to the dozens of patients on your roll. Simply come to the group. The group needs you.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Pouncer, a dingo mix, was imbued with a strong instinctual urge to chase deer and other swift creatures of the upland forests. Try as I might, it was not possible to neutralize this “habit” by reprimanding him. If I tried to call him back or foolishly admonished his behavior when he returned, breathless and panting from the chase, it was of no avail. However, if when we encountered deer up ahead, at the very moment his posture changed (just hinting at his readiness to leap forward), I would firmly but gently say, “No, Pouncer. Heel.” He would then calmly continue on our walk, striding enthusiastically by my side. Then there is the following story of a brash young samurai sword fighter and a venerated Zen master. Two Horns of the DilemmaThe vital balancing act between expression and restraint requires that when we experience a strong emotional feeling, we need not necessarily act upon it, as this teaching story demonstrates. A young, brash samurai swordsman confronted a venerated Zen master with the following demand: “I want you to tell me the truth about the existence of heaven and hell.” The master replied gently and with delicate curiosity, “How is it that such an ugly and untalented man as you can become a samurai?” Immediately, the wrathful young samurai pulled out his sword and raised it above his head, ready to strike the old man and cut him in half. Without fear, and in complete calm, the Zen master gazed upward and spoke softly: “This is hell.” The samurai paused, sword held above his head. His arms fell like leaves to his side, while his face softened from its angry glare. 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.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very nearly. How time went by! Ten years dead, and she was only twenty-seven. That healthy boy with his fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had then been so scornful of! Where would she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-second spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and freshens the whole being. Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous, round stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand the Arabs say, soft and downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping. But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent. But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might somehow bear. Was she fit, anyhow? She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against Clifford, and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded a woman even of her own body. Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very soul. But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things, for he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her, but she had wanted to do what she could. So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day or two; when Mrs. Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as was inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted. It was natural he should. And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, began to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Werner. “I’d like to make a process comment. Ernest does exactly what we’re supposed to do in this seminar—report on his innermost feelings about his patient—and then gets blasted for it. How come?” “Right, right!” said Dr. Werner. The gleam in his blue-gray eyes showed that he relished the uprising, the spectacle of grown siblings suspending their rivalry and uniting in a joint patricidal campaign. In fact, he loved it. By God, he was thinking, just imagine! Freud’s primal horde alive and rampaging right here on Sacramento Street! For a moment he considered offering this interpretation to the group but thought better of it. The children weren’t ready for it yet. Maybe later. Instead he responded, “But keep in mind, I was not critical of Dr. Lash’s feelings about Ms. Myrna. What therapist who has ever lived has not had such thoughts about an irritating patient? No, I do not criticize his thought. I criticize only his incontinence, his inability to keep his feelings to himself.” That triggered another round of protests. Some defended Ernest’s decision to express his feelings openly. Others criticized Dr. Werner for not building a trusting environment in the seminar. They wanted to feel safe there. They most definitely did not want to dodge broadsides about their therapeutic technique, especially when the critique was based on a traditional analytic approach inappropriate to their current clinical setting. Finally Ernest himself suggested that the discussion was no longer productive and urged the group to return to the topic of his countertransference. A few members then spoke of similar patients who had drained and bored them, but Barbara’s comment most piqued Ernest’s interest. “This is not like any other resistant patient,” she said. “You say she gets to you like no one else and that you’ve never been so disrespectful to a patient before.” “It’s true, and I’m not sure why,” Ernest responded. “Several things about her tick me off. I get infuriated at her persistent reminders of the money she’s paying me. She is constantly turning this process into a commercial transaction.” “It’s not a commercial transaction?” interposed Dr. Werner. “Since when? You give her a service, and in return she gives you a check. Looks like commerce to me.” “Well, parishioners tithe, but that doesn’t make a church service an act of commerce,” said Ernest. “Oh, yes, it does!” insisted Dr. Werner. “The circumstances are just more refined and concealed. Read the genteel fine print at the end of a prayer book: no tithing, eventually no service.” “Typical analytic reductionism, everything reduced to its basest level,” said Ernest. “I’m not buying it. Therapy is not commerce, nor am I a merchant. That’s not why I’m in the field. If money were uppermost, I’d have gone into something else—law, investment banking, even one of the rich medical specialties like ophthalmology or radiology. I see therapy as something else—call it an act of caritas.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  She just can’t get it. Instead she accuses me of not believing that the singles scene is bad for women. And then, as she often does, she threw in a crack about wishing she could date me. But when I try to focus on that, on how she feels toward me or how she makes herself lonely right here in this room with me, things get even worse. She refuses to get it; she will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. She can’t be stupid. Wellesley graduate—high-level graphics work—huge salary, hell of a lot bigger than mine—half the software companies in Silicon Valley competing for her—but I feel I’m talking to a dumb person. How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? And all those cracks about not getting her money’s worth—I feel demeaned. She is a vulgar lady. Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. Presses so many—” A passing car’s honk roused her to the fact that her car was weaving. Myrna’s heart pounded. This was dangerous. She switched off the Walkman and drove the few minutes to her turnoff. She pulled into a side street, parked, rewound, and listened: “. . . I feel demeaned. She is a vulgar lady. Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. Presses so many of my buttons that there’s got to be something of my mother in this. Every time I ask her about our therapy relationship, she gives me that wary look as though I’m coming on to her. Am I? Not a whisper of it when I check into my feelings. Would I if she weren’t my patient? Not a bad-looking woman—I like her hair, gleaming—carries herself well—great-looking chest, popping those buttons—that’s definitely a plus. I worry about staring at those breasts but don’t think I do—thanks to Alice! In high school once, I was talking to a girl named Alice and hadn’t any idea that I was staring at her tits until she put her hand under my chin and tilted my face up and said, ‘Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, I’m up here!’ I never forgot. That Alice did me a big favor. “Myrna’s hands are too big; that’s a turnoff. But I do like that great slick, sexy swish of her stockings as she crosses her legs. Yeah, I guess there are some sexual feelings there. If I had run into her when I was still single, would I have hit on her? Probably yes, I’d be attracted to her physically, until she opened her mouth and started whining or demanding. Then I’d want to get away fast.