Anxiety

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 The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The “mission” of the church, then, becomes a matter of explaining to more and more people that he died for them too and urging them to believe this, so that they too can go to heaven. I have taken part in many events that have had that as their aim, some of which were explicitly called “missions.” True, in recent years several thinkers have made a distinction between “mission” (the broadest view of the church’s task in the world) and “evangelism” (the more specific task of telling people about Jesus’s death and resurrection and what it means for them); but the word “mission” is still used in the narrower sense as well, often referring to specific events such as a weeklong “evangelistic rally.” Part of my aim in this book has been to widen the scope of the “mission” based on what Jesus did on the cross without losing its central and personal focus. I hope it is clear, in fact, that this task of telling people about Jesus remains vital. But I have also been arguing that the early Christian message is not well summarized by saying that Jesus died so that we can go to heaven. That way of looking at the gospel and mission both shrinks and distorts what the Bible actually teaches. It ignores Jesus’s claim to be launching God’s kingdom “on earth as in heaven” and to be bringing that work to its climax precisely on the cross. It ignores the New Testament’s emphasis on the true human vocation, to be “image-bearers,” reflecting God’s glory into the world and the praises of creation back to God. Fortunately, a great many Christians live up to all this in practice even though they may only believe the shrunken theory. But that’s not a good place to be. The practice is far more likely to be sustained over time if those engaged in it and the leaders and teachers in their churches understand the biblical and theological basis for what they are doing. Many other Christians, convinced of the “going to heaven” theory, have come to regard any talk of working for God’s kingdom in the present world as a dangerous distraction. We ought (so they think) to see ourselves as “citizens of heaven” and therefore have nothing much to do with “earth.” Sometimes this view is backed up by the belief that God will actually destroy the present world. Why, then, would we bother with it?

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  She asked me to see if I could move my breath any lower in my body. I could not. I couldn’t put my breath anywhere, aside from sucking it in and barfing it out. I could feel my stomach rise and fall, and the whoosh through my nostrils, but I could not, as requested, send breath to my yoni. Throughout the session, sex was rarely mentioned. We played a game called “Yes, No, Maybe.” Weissfeld asked if she could do certain activities to and with me—give me a massage, go for a hike, borrow $500—and the “container of safety” was that none of these things would happen. For the first round, I had to say yes to everything. The second round, I had to say no to everything. The third round, I had to give my real answer. Before we began, she asked me to gently cup my hand on my vulva, and to place the other hand on my throat or heart. Before and after each question, I was to pause and tap into how my body felt. If I had to say “yes” to something that I wanted to say “no” to (“a hug”), I had to notice what that felt like in my body. If I had to say “no” to something I wanted to say “yes” to (“free money”), I had to notice what that felt like in my body. The idea was to practice interpreting messages from the body, not the head, and notice what it feels like in your body when you say what you want—and how uncomfortable it feels when you don’t. My homework was to enjoy something for fifteen minutes every day. It could be a hot shower or a walk around the block; I just had to notice the sensations with all five senses. I was grateful she backed off self-touch for the time being; that felt too advanced. “That skill of tuning in to the sensation of the body is known as ‘interoception,’” she said. “What has happened to many of us very early in life is that we might say something to a caregiver that reflects a sensation that we feel, like, ‘Oh, I feel a tightness in my tummy. I don’t want to go to school today.’ Right? And somebody along the way says, ‘Oh, you’re fine, honey. You’re just nervous.’ When that happens often enough, we learn to translate the sensations that we’re feeling in our body to emotions and beliefs and feelings. And we never really reverse-translate. We never go back to, ‘What does it feel like in my body when I feel happy? What does it feel like in my body when I feel anxious?’”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In what direction? In our complete ignorance of the situation, we did not know whether each step might not be leading us headlong to death, and this worried me as though I had suddenly been struck blind. I tried to master my brain that was so weary that it ached behind my painful forehead. So we were in the center of a semicircle and there was fighting on both flanks. But how far from the center were we? With daylight, aircraft would sweep over the interior of the arc. The firing grew louder, accompanied by the intermittent choking of machine guns. Suddenly, from behind the hills, two British fighter planes came flying low over the fields to attack a farm which, to us, looked like a doll’s house. A German antiaircraft gun, hidden in the hills, reacted violently and dryly like a piece of cloth being ripped. Swift and elegant, the steel-gray pursuit plane rose and then, as if unaware of the antiaircraft barrage, swooped down on the road. We threw ourselves into the ditches just as a terrifying din burst out. I lay with my face to the ground, beneath the weight of my haversack, and was only aware of the mauve thistle that was scratching my face. I supposed that, seen from above, the red, green, and blue Bedouin blankets in which our kits were rolled on our backs must form a colorful ribbon. Automatically, I slipped my blanket beneath me. In the general noise, a hurrah came from the men. I looked to the side: a little cart, madly drawn by a galloping donkey, tore down the road. I joined in the shouting too when, with my shortsighted eyes, I made out Picchonero, oblivious to the bombing, gesticulating on the seat by the driver. “I’ll send you help from Tunis! I’ll send...” So he disappeared. Across the road, from the depths of their ditches on either side, the men lay flat on the ground and made joyous signs to each other. If Picchonero was not killed on the way, we could hope for a truck in a few hours. Silence followed the uproar. We were all alive, not quite knowing whether we had been aimed at, but our new hope reviving all our last and most selfish energies. We took to the road again in small and scattered groups, linked only loosely by our ebbing strength. The first group disappeared far ahead, and the last straggled to the rear. Each one wanted to exploit to the full his last chance, and the redhead no longer tried to regroup us. Nor did I have any more suggestions to make. Maybe he was right, and it was better to save a few than lose the lot.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A minute later, he went back through the little door, apparently in order to fetch something from the storeroom. I hoped my benefactor would be too busy and would now ask me to come back another day. Wearily, however, the pharmacist returned to tell me that my benefactor was going to see me, that he even wanted to see me and had important matters to discuss with me. This was an untimely development; it had been a foolish idea of mine to come on this visit just before the scheduled ceremony. But I would never have dared disturb the pharmacist and my benefactor a third time; so, to overcome my impatience, I began to think of the ceremony and of how, in a short while, I would answer the principal of our high school and perhaps even our Director of Public Education. They would both congratulate me in public, that was certain. But was I expected to reply to them and to express my thanks? Yes, I would have to do it, I would utter a few words before the assembled crowd of parents and representatives of the press. I supposed there would be journalists present, so I made up a nice emphatic-sounding statement that would be impressive and subtle, full of various meanings, promising that this prize, a landmark in my life, would also mark the end of the first stage in my pursuit along the road that leads to wisdom. The whole crowded hall would then applaud while I went up to collect my prize on the platform, where all the official personalities sat. The principal and the Director of Public Education would shake my hand, but I would be in no hurry, no longer paralyzed by my own timidity, since all of this was really owed me. So I tried to formulate my brief reply and to give it the proper rhythm, but my anxiety, as time went by and the customers of the store constantly came and went, prevented me from remaining among the rosy-colored clouds of my imagined triumph. Finally I came to a heroic decision and approached the pharmacist as he was gluing a label onto a bottle; I asked him to express my apologies to Monsieur Bismuth because I had to leave at once, but that I would be able to come back later in the evening, around six o’clock, or the following morning at eleven. He stared at me, obviously surprised by my nervousness and annoyed at having been disturbed so frequently as well as by my apparently independent attitude toward his boss. I mumbled that I had very important business, was in a great hurry to be present for the awarding of prizes, for the honor prize; I absolutely had to be there and it was now already five minutes past five. He hadn’t answered me yet when we heard Monsieur Bismuth’s clubfoot at the end of the long passage that led to his den. The pharmacist then opened the little door ahead of me and I saw the druggist coming slowly toward us, his hip swerving out of joint at each step. He saw me too, waved to me to come along, and went back to his chair.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I have no idea whether or not this was an accurate assessment, since I neither wrote nor read music. All I know now is that I no longer write this way. All I know now is that writing, or whatever it was I was doing when I could proceed on no more than “xxx” and “xxxx,” whatever it was I was doing when I imagined myself hearing the music, no longer comes easily to me. For a while I laid this to a certain weariness with my own style, an impatience, a wish to be more direct. I encouraged the very difficulty I was having laying words on the page. I saw it as evidence of a new directness. I see it differently now. I see it now as frailty. I see it now as the very frailty Quintana feared. We are moving into another summer. I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty. I fear falling on the street, I imagine bicycle messengers knocking me to the ground. The approach of a child on a motorized scooter causes me to freeze mid-intersection, play dead. I no longer go for breakfast to Three Guys on Madison Avenue: what if I were to fall on the way? I feel unsteady, unbalanced, as if my nerves are misfiring, which may or may not be an exact description of what my nerves are in fact doing. I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasingly distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer. As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint. I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response. What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine. Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. I push-pin the index card to the corkboard on which I collect notes. “Struck by a train nine days before our wedding,” one note on the corkboard reads. “Left the house that morning and was killed that afternoon in the crash of a small plane,” another reads. “It was the second of January, 1931,” a third reads. “I ran a little coup. My brother became president. He was more mature. I went to Europe.”

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  They found that the total number of months in combat over a three-year period was associated with progressive decreases in alpha power at the back of the brain. This area, which monitors the state of the body and regulates such elementary processes as sleep and hunger, ordinarily has the highest level of alpha waves of any region in the brain, particularly when people close their eyes. As we have seen, alpha is associated with relaxation. The decrease in alpha power in these soldiers reflects a state of persistent agitation. At the same time the brain waves at the front of the brain, which normally have high levels of beta, show a progressive slowing with each deployment. The soldiers gradually develop frontal-lobe activity that resembles that of children with ADHD, which interferes with their executive functioning and capacity for focused attention. The net effect is that arousal, which is supposed to provide us with the energy needed to engage in day-to-day tasks, no longer helps these soldiers to focus on ordinary tasks. It simply makes them agitated and restless. At this stage of McFarlane’s study, it is too early to know if any of these soldiers will develop PTSD, and only time will tell to what degree these brains will readjust to the pace of civilian life. Neurofeedback and Learning DisabilitiesChronic abuse and neglect in childhood interfere with the proper wiring of sensory-integration systems. In some cases this results in learning disabilities, which include faulty connections between the auditory and word-processing systems, and poor hand-eye coordination. As long as they are frozen or explosive, it is difficult to see how much trouble the adolescents in our residential treatment programs have processing day-to-day information, but once their behavioral problems have been successfully treated, their learning disabilities often become manifest. Even if these traumatized kids could sit still and pay attention, many of them would still be handicapped by their poor learning skills.[22] Lisa described how trauma had interfered with the proper wiring of basic processing functions. She told me she “always got lost” going places, and she recalled having a marked auditory delay that kept her from being able to follow the instructions from her teachers. “Imagine being in a classroom,” she said, “and the teacher comes in and says, ‘Good morning. Turn to page two-seventy-two. Do problems one to five.’ If you’re even a fraction of a second off, it’s just a jumble. It was impossible to concentrate.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When I had taken it once I took it again, with the excuse that I had to check it because I had been too impatient or had taken it too soon. In spite of my refusal to take myself seriously, I was in fact far more worried than I admitted, and the rhythm of my daily life was determined by the thermometer. I tried to work in spite of the doctor’s advice, but within a few minutes, my eyes would burn, my head grew heavy, and I would feel exhausted. I had always worked too much, but I now knew that it would be unbearable if I were not able to. I could no longer think of anything but myself and the balance-sheet of my life that I was now forced to examine. In the past, some urgent task had fortunately always required attention, and I had only stopped once in a while to ponder the meaning of my life. But I was now locked up with myself by war and sickness, with no possible diversion. The worst part of being sick, I found, was this concentration on one’s self and the tyranny of the self. Perhaps others who live more extrovertedly find this profitable. But for those who tend to be introspective, sickness is stark solitude, the worst of all possible conditions. For several weeks I had not been able to make entries in my diary. I now returned to my scrupulous and methodical habits, but my point of view had changed. Before, it had been metaphysical and impersonal, scrutinizing the world passionately to understand it. Now I became the only center of my own preoccupations. Who was I? What were the results of my long struggle ever since my childhood? In the confusion of my buzzing ears and burning cheeks and feverish brain, I was certain only of the need to come to a conclusion. Would I have the courage to go on living in so unstable an equilibrium? But once more my balance-sheet was almost forgotten. The collapse of the Germans was as sudden as the arrival of their Junker transports full of troops had been, at least to me. One afternoon, probably at about five, I had just taken my temperature when shots rang out in the streets. As we always expected the worst, we started to put up barricades, before we caught sight of the first American tanks. For several days we gave ourselves up to delirious joy. Miraculously, our anxiety was gone, and here again were freedom and abundance. The German planes soon disappeared and our nights ceased to be nightmares, we devoured endless cans of meat, and spoke loudly in the streets to relieve ourselves. It was more than peace: it was a party. Then we had to start everyday life again. I realized that the historical change in our situation required a new kind of behavior.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos We have considered as a paradigm for prophetic imagination the formation of a consciousness that is a genuine alternative to the royal consciousness. Now a question must be faced (and it is surely a contemporary question): What would such an alternative consciousness be like? Here I take only the modest step of considering some ways in which the prophets of Israel addressed that task, but behind that explicit consideration we necessarily wonder what we might do given our own situation. We also are children of the royal consciousness. All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask, as Israel’s prophets ever asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable . We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought. When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I suspect that our own self-concept as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim. But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation .

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Even an Uncle Ray would upset the wonderful balance. At about six, his car pulled up in the driveway, a small silver Alfa Romeo. He got out, slung a hanging bag over his shoulder, removed a duffel and an aluminum briefcase, the gray of his hair catching the late sun. I stood uneasily on the porch as she ran to him. They kissed, and I had to look away. Didn’t she know how easily this could go bad, wasn’t she afraid? WE ATE PAELLA outside on the patio under a string of lights shaped like chili peppers, Emmylou singing in the background, the sweetheart of the rodeo. Mosquitoes whined. Claire lit citronella candles, and Ron told us about the assignment he’d gone to Halifax to film, a story about a haunted bar. He was a segment producer on a show about the weird and occult. Evidently the ghost nearly smothered a customer to death last year in the men’s room. “It took us three hours to get him back in there. Even with the film crew, he almost chickened out. He knew it was going to try to finish him off.” “What would you have done if it had?” Claire asked. Ron stretched his legs out on the bench in front of him, hands clasped behind his head. “I’d have sicced the Tidy Bowl man on it.” “Very funny.” Her face was the shape of a perfect candy-box heart, but there was a haze of mistrust over her features. “I could try Vanish.” As they joked, I tried to see what Claire found so great about him. He was attractive but not stunning—medium height, trim, small features, closely shaven. He brushed his steel-gray hair back without a part. He wore rimless glasses and his cheeks were rosy for a man’s. Hazel eyes, hands smooth with trimmed nails, smooth wedding band. Everything about Ron was smooth, calm, underplayed. He told a story, but it didn’t matter if we liked it or not, not like Barry, looking for applause. He didn’t overwhelm you. He didn’t seem to need anything. She took his plate, scraped the scraps onto hers, stacked it underneath, reaching for mine. “If you don’t watch out, you could be the one to vanish.” She said it lightly, but the timing was off. “The La Brea Vortex,” he said. The phone rang and Ron went through the open French doors to answer it. We saw him lie down on the white quilt, pick at his toenails as he talked. Claire stopped clearing the table, and her face blurred, resolved, blurred. She stood at the picnic table fiddling with the plates, with the scraps and silverware, trying to hear what he was saying. He hung up and came back to the table. Her shadows swept back by his sun. “Work?” Claire asked, as if it made no difference. “Jeffrey wanted to come over and talk about a script. I said no.” He reached out and took her hand.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Three months later Marilyn told the group that she had stumbled and fallen a few times on the sidewalk between the subway and my office. She worried that her eyesight was beginning to fail: She’d also been missing a lot of tennis balls recently. I thought again about her drawing and the wild child with the huge, terrified eyes. Was this some sort of “conversion reaction,” in which patients express their conflicts by losing function in some part of their body? Many soldiers in both world wars had suffered paralysis that couldn’t be traced to physical injuries, and I had seen cases of “hysterical blindness” in Mexico and India. Still, as a physician, I wasn’t about to conclude without further assessment that this was “all in her head.” I referred her to colleagues at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and asked them to do a very thorough workup. Several weeks later the tests came back. Marilyn had lupus erythematosus of her retina, an autoimmune disease that was eroding her vision, and she would need immediate treatment. I was appalled: Marilyn was the third person that year whom I’d suspected of having an incest history and who was then diagnosed with an autoimmune disease—a disease in which the body starts attacking itself. After making sure that Marilyn was getting the proper medical care, I consulted with two of my colleagues at Massachusetts General, psychiatrist Scott Wilson and Richard Kradin, who ran the immunology laboratory there. I told them Marilyn’s story, showed them the picture she’d drawn, and asked them to collaborate on a study. They generously volunteered their time and the considerable expense of a full immunology workup. We recruited twelve women with incest histories who were not taking any medications, plus twelve women who had never been traumatized and who also did not take meds—a surprisingly difficult control group to find. (Marilyn was not in the study; we generally do not ask our clinical patients to be part of our research efforts.) When the study was completed and the data analyzed, Rich reported that the group of incest survivors had abnormalities in their CD45 RA-to-RO ratio, compared with their nontraumatized peers. CD45 cells are the “memory cells” of the immune system. Some of them, called RA cells, have been activated by past exposure to toxins; they quickly respond to environmental threats they have encountered before. The RO cells, in contrast, are kept in reserve for new challenges; they are turned on to deal with threats the body has not met previously. The RA-to-RO ratio is the balance between cells that recognize known toxins and cells that wait for new information to activate. In patients with histories of incest, the proportion of RA cells that are ready to pounce is larger than normal. This makes the immune system oversensitive to threat, so that it is prone to mount a defense when none is needed, even when this means attacking the body’s own cells.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was only the next day, when my mother returned from her marketing, that I was punished. Oh, it all happened without any insults, without any blows. How much would I have preferred a good thrashing! A spanking delivered with the hard and horny hand of my father, or even a whipping, with his belt, on the soles of my feet. I would then have howled, swallowed my tears for a good quarter of an hour, and been able to publicize my suffering; after which my conscience would have been appeased and I would have played out of doors until I had forgotten my crime. Instead, a vague anxiety already began to pervade me when my mother refused me the privilege, granted to me twice a week, of awaiting her return from the market at the opening of Tarfoune Street. As soon as we saw her, we always rushed toward her from there and seized her heavy basket that my sister and I would then drag as far as our kitchen. Seated side by side on the brick-red tiled floor that was never cold, we played a wonderful game of fishing in it, punctuating our fun with loud cries of joy. Mother always left us in peace, our excuse being that we put the vegetables away in the kitchen closet and the fruit in the room. We always put all the yellow lemons together, so vividly bright and rich in aroma that I never wearied of breathing their scent deep in my lungs, as if I wanted to absorb their contents through my sense of smell, and then the eggplants, dark purple with mysterious lighter spots that turned to red, the tender green artichokes that seemed to paraffin the whole mouth and to coat the palate with rubber, lastly the heavy watermelon that was so heavy we had to roll it along the floor to the room. Each time we discovered a little surprise, some peanut butter, a piece of halva, a sesame cake. But we always tasted everything: a fresh mouthful of fennel, a lick of sugar, a bite into a carrot. Mother knew our joy and didn’t constrain it with useless nagging. To prevent any damage was her only concern: “Be careful with the eggs! Don’t get all dirty from the fish!” On this particular morning that I remember so bitterly, she wouldn’t let us take hold of her basket. I knew the meaning of her tight lips. Her fine Berber face was drawn taut over the jaws and the hard peaks of her cheekbones. A painful anxiety began to pervade me, all the more disturbing because its cause was unknown. Desperately I searched my conscience and discovered several grave sins, but I was still afraid that some terrible and odious crime might rise to the surface of my memory. It did indeed come to the surface, and I felt no sense of relief at all when she said to me: “I’ve just seen little Fraji’s mother...”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I emerged from my silence. “And what about the war, Henry?” He was in the middle of his dream and could not free himself so easily from it. He thought I was alluding to the dangers of the sea voyage. “The Germans are finished in the Mediterranean.” “That’s not what I mean. Can we really stay out of this war?” He exploded. “So you think we haven’t paid a high enough price already? The truth is that you are speaking for yourself and that you are terrified of being accused of fright. Besides, damn it, first of all they should want to have us. They don’t want our help because they don’t want to grant us our rights. Our dignity now requires that we all volunteer together; if they want us, they must take the lot of us.” Unfortunately, it was too late for anything but individual solutions. The French were now sure of victory and refused to make any postwar promises, so the traumatized Jewish masses withdrew to themselves again. But I could not hope for any peace without having first tried everything. Why has nothing ever been simple for me? I envied any young Frenchman who had just received his orders to join the army. If he delayed answering the call, the military police came and fetched him. My ex-comrades in the camps had a freer conscience. They felt that they paid their tribute to a war in which they did not believe and which would change nothing for them. I alone had no idea what to do because I was too free, with the too perfect freedom of a seed which seeks a place to settle. Freedom is one aspect of solitude, and my solitude was too painful for me to enjoy the full weight of my freedom. The rumor got around, however, that the Free French Forces were more liberal than the regular army which accepted only conscripts. When the Gaullists opened their first recruiting office in a tailor’s shop, I went there with Henry, who was sarcastic but always willing to follow me. A Free French lieutenant with a blue cap and red lapels awaited his clients behind a huge counter. He rose exuberantly: “So you want to fight?” “Yes,” I said. He pointed to an open register which was the only object on the counter and, indeed, in the shop. “Here, fill in your name, address, age...” It was still the first page, almost blank: I counted three names. The lieutenant followed my eyes. “It’s true, your compatriots don’t seem very enthusiastic,” he said cheerfully. Henry and I looked at each other. It would take too long and be too difficult to explain, and it might hurt his feelings. Why should they be enthusiastic? What had they to defend or to hope for? I did not answer. Jumping from column to column, I carefully wrote down my name, address, age, nationality, and profession.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My hand trembled on the window latch and I had to walk up and down to calm myself. That was what I was suffering from, far more than my lungs. I stood before myself as before a deforming mirror; something strange had slipped into the core of my life. Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep. During all this period, Henry was an admirable example of calm, of smiling serenity. He had no ties that he felt he needed to break, and he saw and acted directly, without suffering. Although I was too agitated to listen to him properly, he reduced my scruples by teasing me. Do others have scruples about us? He had turned a part of his room into a workshop where he manufactured toys. He invented new toys and he carved and painted wood with great skill and taste; it was the only useful thing he had learned in his Italian school, he said. The merchants of the city had long been short of goods and they paid him whatever he asked. This source of income allowed him to break with his father for longer periods and his independence made him happy. I used to stretch out on his couch and watch him at work. As his paintbrush moved over a panel of plywood, he would talk away about his latest daydream, with great precision and carefully collected details. In his generosity, he included me in his plans. This time, he had found he had an uncle who was a planter in Argentina, a new country full of possibilities. Europe was ruined and would need everything. We would go to Argentina and carry on his uncle’s flourishing business, even extend it and plant more and more to supply Europe. Soon we would be powerful and perhaps famous in Argentina, where cultured and educated men must be relatively scarce. Henry was a practical dreamer and quoted figures as well as the promises of his uncle who had answered his questions through his daughter. He even showed me some letters! I did not take him seriously, any more than when he had planned a fishing business on the desert coasts of the South. Did the uncle really exist? But I liked Henry’s daydreams. They were a relief for me from the insoluble problems that entangled me. With a single stroke of his brush, an eye appeared; another, and there was the bear’s snout too. Henry would then stop and judge the whole. “How d’you like it?” he would ask.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Information from this sense lets us know our position with respect both to gravity and to any change in velocity (i.e., acceleration and deceleration). The Visceral Receptors The fourth subsystem, which provides the deepest level of interoception, derives from our viscera and blood vessels. In Chapter 6 I described the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to most of our internal organs. This massive nerve is second only to the spinal cord in total number of neurons. Over 90% of these nerve fibers are afferent: that is, the vagus nerve’s main function is to relay information from our guts upward to our brains . Thus, the colloquialisms “gut instinct,” “gut feelings” and even “gut wisdom” have a robust anatomical and physiological basis. Visceral sensations also originate from receptors in the blood vessels—as sufferers from migraines know all too well, the abrupt dilation of blood vessels (after strong constriction) causing their excruciating pain. However, we are also receiving all sorts of other ambient information from our blood vessels. We feel relaxed and open when our blood vessels and viscera gently pulse like jellyfish, causing sensations of warmth and goodness to surge through our bodies. When the vessels and viscera are constricted, we feel cold and anxious. The Image Channel While image commonly refers to visual representation, I use it more generally to refer to all types of external sense impressions, which originally come from stimuli that arise from outside the body and that we have also incorporated into the brain as sense memory. These external (“special”) senses include sight, taste, smell, hearing and the tactile sense. ‡ Counter to common parlance, I use the same word—Image—to categorize all of these external senses. Indeed, the I in the SIBAM model could refer, equally, to any of the externally generated Impressions (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, etc.). For example, if a person is physically touched by another person, he or she will experience both the external impression of being touched as well as the internal (interoceptive) sensation of his or her response to that touch. So if we have been touched inappropriately, it will be necessary to separate the actual tactile impression from our internal response to this stimulus in each new situation in order to free ourselves from reflexively reacting from past experience. The visual impression, or Image, is the primary way modern humans access and store external sense information, unless they are visually impaired. The largest portion of our sensory brain is dedicated to vision. There are, however, other therapeutically oriented reasons for my including all of the external senses in the Image channel. At the moment a trauma takes place, all of a person’s senses automatically focus on the most salient aspect of the threat. This is usually a visual image, though it could also be sound, touch, taste or smell.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Lights can be flashed, objects moved or even writing displayed, and these patients will insist, unequivocally, that they see absolutely nothing. Yet detailed experiments show that while denying all visual experience , they can nevertheless point to the location of a flashed light, or discriminate between upward and downward movement, between vertical or horizontal stripes and between various different objects. Oliver Sacks, from his many moving and wise vignettes about the tragic, yet compelling, consequences of neurological disorders, describes the case of Virgil. 152 Virgil’s entire visual cortex was knocked out by oxygen deprivation, rendering him completely blind, yet Sacks describes Virgil’s wife’s inexplicable observations: “Virgil had told her that he was completely blind, yet she observed that he would reach for objects, avoid obstacles and behave as though he were seeing.” Such is the enigma of this type of “implicit” information processing. The explanation that is generally accepted for this phenomenon is that destruction of the visual cortex still leaves several other (primitive, subcortical) visual pathways intact. Sensory information to these somehow registers basic information that normally has the function of directing eye movements to garner more data. These data, however, also render a flimsy sketch of which we are largely unconscious. It is this unconscious information that evokes the readiness for movement (i.e., premovement). It is also this primitive circuitry that makes possible the reasonably accurate “guesses” that are observed in people with blindsight disorder. Hence, we are once again appreciative of the prompting to respond to events before we become overtly aware of them. Consider your response to the fleeting shadow, the subtle gesture of another person or a distant sound. Each of these events can evoke in us survival-bound responses without our ever being aware that something in our environment has triggered them. Notably, when we have been traumatized, we are particularly sensitized to (and hyperaroused by) these fleeting stimuli. Our senses of seeing, hearing and smell provide countless stimuli that cause us to overreact, even though we may be unaware of the presence of those subliminal stimuli and our premotor responses to them. As a result we may, and often do, attribute our actions to irrelevant or manufactured causes. This attribution of causation is like the subjects in Wegner’s experiments who falsely believed that they had willed the movement of the experimenter’s arms. It is specifically because we are unaware of our environmentally triggered premovement that we falsely believe we are consciously initiating and constructing the movement. Furthermore, when the (unacknowledged) premovement drive is strong, we may feel compelled to fully enact the entire movement sequence. Two confusions of causality occur for traumatized individuals.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The poor prince, who was led by his wife as she pleased, went and walked alone with the gentleman, and told him that he was in still greater embarrassment than ever, being afraid that what he had told him was only an excuse to hinder him from coming at the truth, which made him more uneasy than before ; therefore he be- sought him most earnestly to tell him the name of her he loved so much. The poor gentleman implored the duke not to constrain him to break the promise he had given to a person he loved as his life, and which he had kept inviolate until that moment. It would be tanta- i;30 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE ^Niwel ^o. mount to requiring him to lose in one day what he had preserved for more than seven years, and he would rather die than do that wrong to a person who was so faithful to him. His refusal threw the duke into such a violent fit of jealousy that he exclaimed furiously, " Take your choice : either tell me the name of her you love above all others, or quit my dominions on pain of death if you are found in them after eight days." If ever faithful servant was smitten with keen anguish it was this poor gentleman, who might well say, AngnsticB swit miJii undiqne. On the one hand, if he told the truth he lost his mistress, should it come to her knowledge that he had broken his word to her ; on the cfther, if he did not tell it, he was exiled from the coun- try where she resided, and could never see her more. Thus pressed on all sides, a cold sweat broke out upon him, as if his anguish had brought him to the brink of the grave. The duke perceiving his embarrassment, imagined he loved only the duchess, and that his con- fusion arose from the fact that he could not name any- one else. In this belief he said to him sternly, " If you had told me the truth, you would have less difficulty in doing what I desire ; but I believe that it is your crime that occasions your embarrassment." The gentleman, stung by these words, an^ urged by the love he bore his master, resolved to tell him the truth, assuring himself that the duke was a man of so much honour that he would keep his secret inviolate. He fell on his knees then, and said to him, with his hands pressed together, " My liege, the obligations I am under to you, and the love I bear you, constrain me more than the fear of death. You are possessed with so false a prejudice against me that, to undeceive you, I am resolved to tell you what no torments could extort from Seventh day.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE 53 [

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  He doesn’t have much time left, and I need you to help me make sure that a jackhammer isn’t the last sound he hears.” “Uh . . .” They looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and disbelief, before a brawny dude with a gentle soul softly said, “You bet, ma’am. Sorry.” Then there was quiet. Ahhh . . . “May God bless you, fellas!” I yelled on my way out. Where that came from, I’m not sure, because I’m a part-time atheist—mostly on Sundays. Yet as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, and boy did I need God in that moment (or someone like her). The soundtrack of jackhammers may have subsided, but inside, my adrenaline was still totally jacked. I couldn’t stop thinking about what was actually going to happen as Dad came closer to the threshold, passing from this glorious and sometimes stress-inducing life to mysterious death. Where was he going? What would life even be without Dad’s beaming smile and familiar “Hi, love. What’s doin’?” And how the heck was I going to live in the world without this person who played such an important and valuable role in my life? ANTICIPATORY GRIEF With each urgent question came another surge of cortisol and anticipatory grief, which I didn’t know was a thing until I was going through entire tissue boxes in my downtime, even though Dad was still very much alive at that point. I’ve since learned that grief doesn’t just magically appear after loss, like sudden-onset diarrhea might come on after too much onion dip. Instead, it often begins long before life ends. Anticipatory grief is especially common for patients living with terminal illness, as well as for their caregivers. But because this surreal in-between stage is so foreign, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing something wrong, or like you can’t let the person who is sick see your worry, so you have to keep your feelings to yourself. Old ideas about grief, coupled with a general lack of awareness around anticipatory grief, can further muddy the waters and make us feel more alone. A friend of mine had this experience when she reached out to a therapist, asking if she could join the therapist’s grief support group, only to learn that since her near-death loved one was still technically alive, the therapist wouldn’t invite her to the group. “Call me when she dies.” Really? However anticipatory grief is handled, not to mention received, there’s a strong notion that it’s better to keep these “downer” feelings to ourselves. Of course, just the opposite is true.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  On September 11, 2001, five-year-old Noam Saul witnessed the first passenger plane slam into the World Trade Center from the windows of his first-grade classroom at PS 234, less than 1,500 feet away. He and his classmates ran with their teacher down the stairs to the lobby, where most of them were reunited with parents who had dropped them off at school just moments earlier. Noam, his older brother, and their dad were three of the tens of thousands of people who ran for their lives through the rubble, ash, and smoke of lower Manhattan that morning. Ten days later I visited his family, who are friends of mine, and that evening his parents and I went for a walk in the eerie darkness through the still-smoking pit where Tower One once stood, making our way among the rescue crews who were working around the clock under the blazing klieg lights. When we returned home, Noam was still awake, and he showed me a picture that he had drawn at 9:00 a.m. on September 12. The drawing depicted what he had seen the day before: an airplane slamming into the tower, a ball of fire, firefighters, and people jumping from the tower’s windows. But at the bottom of the picture he had drawn something else: a black circle at the foot of the buildings. I had no idea what it was, so I asked him. “A trampoline,” he replied. What was a trampoline doing there? Noam explained, “So that the next time when people have to jump they will be safe.” I was stunned: This five-year-old boy, a witness to unspeakable mayhem and disaster just twenty-four hours before he made that drawing, had used his imagination to process what he had seen and begin to go on with his life. Noam was fortunate. His entire family was unharmed, he had grown up surrounded by love, and he was able to grasp that the tragedy they had witnessed had come to an end. During disasters young children usually take their cues from their parents. As long as their caregivers remain calm and responsive to their needs, they often survive terrible incidents without serious psychological scars. But Noam’s experience allows us to see in outline two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival. At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen—a lifesaving trampoline.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was delighted but a little embarrassed. Of course, I suffered from my growing awareness that I was alien in the eyes of Europeans, but it had not yet occurred to me to make a move toward the Moslems for I thought of this road as closed . “Precisely,” said Ben Smaan, “that is something new in our program: we would like to have some Jews too, so as to express the aspirations of the whole Tunisian nation.” “But are we a part of the nation?” “Of course you are! Where was your father born? And your grandfather? Have you ever had any other nationality in the last few centuries? No! There you are!” “It’s true,” I said, “that I was born here, like my father and all my ancestors, and I’ve never been out of this country since my birth. You consider that we belong to the same nation, but what about the others, Ben Smaan, what about the others? I’m afraid that, to them, we may still be foreigners.” “Maybe the times have changed. But there’s a job for those of us who know how to speak and explain and convince. We must promote unity among all the native sons of the country and make them act according to their own conscience. Why should we do without the help of the Jews who are an important part of the population and a particularly active, clever, and powerful one?” The last part of this sentence did not please me. What could he mean by “clever and powerful”? I preferred to think that his words had been tactlessly chosen. “I can only agree, but I must admit that I am a pessimist. One cannot force oneself to be accepted as a relative or even a neighbor. That is the opinion of many Jews for whom the only solution is Zionism.” He stopped me with both hands and a scornful expression on his mouth that was as small as his eyes; he curled his lips to express his indignation and disagreement. “Zionism! Leave that alone! It’s a Utopia and one that will arouse the whole Arab world. What could a handful of madmen do against the whole Arab world? No, let us put aside what would split us apart and look only to what can bring us together. ” I did not know then what to think of Zionism, but such a rapid condemnation hurt me, and the implied threat particularly shocked me. Nevertheless, I felt that Ben Smaan’s advances and generosity were sincere. His contact with the Socialist youth movement had given him a broad-minded humanism and the idea of the necessity of a social as well as a political liberation.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  THE VAN CAME at seven. Starr got up and signed the papers while the driver eyed her figure in her bathrobe. There was one other kid in the van. I took the seat in front of him, also by the window. We picked up three more on the way out. The day was overcast, June gloom, the moisture in the air beading on the windshield. You couldn’t see down the freeway as far as the next overpass. It came out of the mist and then it vanished, the world creating and erasing itself. It made me carsick. I cracked the window. We drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs. If only I knew what she would be like when I got there. I couldn’t imagine my mother in prison. She didn’t smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn’t say “bitch” or “fuck.” She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never even been inside a McDonald’s. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison? At Chino, we turned off the freeway and drove south. I tried to memorize this, so I could find it again in my dreams. We drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally we came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure. There was a big complex of buildings on the right. “Is that it?” I asked the girl next to me. “CYA,” she said. I shook my head. “Youth Authority.” All the kids eyed it grimly as we passed. We could be there, behind that razor wire. We were silent as death when we went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, we turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. I wanted to remember it all. The kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now I could see the prison—a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum-sided, like Starr’s trailer. Frontera wasn’t at all as I had imagined. I’d been picturing Birdman of Alcatraz, or I Want to Live! with my mother as Susan Hayward. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison. Except for the guard towers, the razor wire. Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. We filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched our backpacks and passed us through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts.