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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The massive attack on Israel took everyone by surprise, and many wounded soldiers were rushed into the hospitals, which then became too crowded for women in labor. The women were moved to the hallways. I don’t remember a lot from that war, but as it usually is with childhood experiences, it was all perceived as pretty normal. For years to come, the school had a monthly “war drill.” We children practiced walking quietly into the shelters, happy that instead of studying we were playing board games in the shelter and joking about the missile that might hit or the terrorists who would come with weapons and take us hostage. We were taught that nothing should be too difficult to handle, that danger was a normal part of life, and that all we needed was to be brave and keep a sense of humor. I was never afraid at school; only at night did I worry that a terrorist might choose our house from all the other houses in the country, and then I wouldn’t be able to save my family. I thought about all the good places people used to hide during the Holocaust: the basement, the attic, behind the library, in the closet. The secret was to make sure to always keep quiet . But I wasn’t so good at being quiet. As a teenager, I started making music, wondering if all I needed was to make noise and be heard. When I stood on stages, music was the magic. It gave voice to what I could not otherwise speak out loud. It was my protest against the unspoken. Then, in 1982, the Lebanon War erupted and I was old enough to recognize that something terrible was happening. To the school’s memorial wall were added more and more names, this time of young people we knew. Parents who had lost their boys came to the school for the ceremony of Memorial Day. I was proud to be the one singing for them, looking straight into their eyes and making sure I didn’t cry because then I would ruin the song and someone else might have to take my place behind the mic. We ended the ceremony every year with “Shir La Shalom” (“A Song for Peace”), one of the most well-known Israeli songs. We sang for peace from the depth of our hearts. We wanted to have a new beginning and liberate our future. I grew up on our parents’ promise that by the time the children were eighteen and had to serve in the army, there would be no more wars. But that, to this day, has not happened. I served in the army as a musician, praying for peace, traveling from one army base to another, crossing borders, singing for the soldiers.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Jon leaves my office, and I am aware that we haven’t yet talked about his breakdown. I notice that he has left the pacifier on the armchair again and wonder if he keeps leaving it behind because he is the one who feels forgotten and dropped. Is he worried about me not remembering him when he is gone? Jon arrives at the next session thirty minutes early. He rings the bell while I’m still in a session with another patient. I buzz him in, wondering if he is confused about the time for our session. I find myself worrying about him. I picture him sitting there, in my waiting room, speculating about why I haven’t let him in. I’m afraid that he will conclude that I have forgotten about him, and I imagine him trying hard not to feel hurt or angry at me. When I finally open the door, I see Jon sitting on the edge of the chair, playing on his cell phone. “Hey.” He looks at me. “Did you expect me? I didn’t mean to surprise you.” He slowly walks into my office and sits in the armchair. “Were you worried that maybe I forgot about our session?” I ask. “No,” he answers immediately. “I just thought maybe I came at the wrong time. Maybe you were not ready for me yet. Did we say 11:15 or 11:45? I guess 11:45, right? I hope I didn’t intrude. I mean, you were with someone else.” Jon moves uncomfortably on his chair and then adds, “It’s not a big deal. I just thought maybe I should leave and come another time.” His eyes fill with tears. “Embarrassing,” he whispers. “You thought that I wasn’t expecting you. That you were rushing to come here but I totally forgot about you,” I say and think about him using the word “expect” and its relation to pregnancy. I find myself wondering if his birth was planned, if his parents wanted to have another baby. “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” he says, both to me and to himself. “You don’t have to look forward to seeing me. You are my therapist, not my mother,” he adds firmly, making sure both of us know that he remembers that. “But maybe you feel hurt because in that moment I do become like your mother, a woman who doesn’t expect you, whom you think might reject you or prefer to be with someone else.” Jon looks serious. “That’s possible,” he says. “You know, right before I had that breakdown, I used to have those kind of thoughts and it was crazy. “At night, before I went to sleep, I used to ruminate, thinking that my boss wanted to fire me and hire someone else. I told Bella that I had a bad feeling, a feeling that he didn’t want me. In retrospect that wasn’t true but for some reason I was sure that he was planning to drop me.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  When working with children I always meet first with the parents, to gather information about the child and the family and to discuss the goals and process of therapy. Although the child is the one in therapy, very often it is the parents who need the most help. Children frequently express the reality of the family and become what we call the “identified patient,” which means the one who seems like the “sick” member of the family. Those children usually carry and express the problems of the whole family as a unit. Most families have one member who is unconsciously assigned to carry the symptoms, that is, the family member on whom the family projects the pathology. That person, often one of the children, will be the one sent to therapy. When treating families as a system, we explore the role of the child as the symptom carrier for the family. Lara was the “identified patient” in her family. She was in second grade and would wake up in the mornings nauseous, holding her stomach and crying that she didn’t want to go to school. Her parents believed she suffered from social anxiety. After meeting with Lara, I understood her anxiety a little differently, realizing that she was worried about her mother, and therefore it was hard for her to separate from her. It wasn’t that Lara didn’t want to go to school, but rather that she wanted to stay home with Hanna, whom she experienced as distressed and felt she needed to protect. During that first session, Hanna and Jed told me an unusual and frightening story. They explained that when Lara was only five years old, her grandmother, Hanna’s mother, Masha, filed a complaint against Ethan, Jed’s son from his first marriage, for molesting Lara. Ethan was fourteen years old then, and social services were called to the house to investigate. But no signs of sexual abuse were found and the file was closed. Since then, Masha had filed eight more complaints against Ethan. Each time there was an investigation but no evidence was found and no charges were filed. “Our family is torn. We don’t know what to do and whom to believe,” Hanna told me during that first session. “I haven’t slept well since it happened.” Jed looked at Hanna and told me that Hanna was the one who had raised Ethan. Jed’s first wife had died when Ethan was only seven years old, and when Hanna had married Jed, she had become a mother to his son. Hanna loved Ethan. “Since her mother accused Ethan of molesting Lara, everything in our family has changed,” Jed said. “We all became suspicious of one another, not sure who lies and whom to believe, whom we need to protect and whom to blame.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben says. “It’s that word that you used in our first session: omnipotent. I asked you then what it meant, and you said, ‘It means someone who thinks they can do anything, who thinks they have endless power like a superhero, with no limitations. God is omnipotent.’ You then said, ‘God can’t die. People can only play omnipotent and then they pay a price for it.’ I remember looking at you and thinking, ‘Wow, where did that come from? What is she really telling me about myself?’” “Yes,” I say, “and I remember you then told me about a guy in your unit who, during your first months of training, was reading Catch-22, and one day he looked at everyone and said, ‘We are crazy. I’m out of here,’ and left the unit. And you said that even back then you knew that he understood something that none of you did.” “Yes, he was the sane one even as he seemed so completely insane.” “It was insane to be so sane.” We look at each other and stay silent for a long while. Then Ben glances at his watch, quickly stands up, and starts walking toward the door. “I’m getting there, Doctor,” he whispers. “I’m getting there.” Ben is ten minutes late to his next session. He has never been late before and I am a little worried, checking my emails to see if he has written to let me know that he is running late. I wonder if it was the “getting there” from our last session that didn’t allow him to get here on time today. Is he anxious about what he is going to uncover or discover? Is he trying to slow down, to communicate with me that we are moving into dangerous territory? It is not unusual that as people get closer to sensitive emotional material, or even to the issues they came to therapy to resolve, they unconsciously have more resistance to treatment and “accidentally” forget to show up, find themselves late, or sabotage treatment in other ways. What is it that causes Ben to be late? Is he safe? There is a knock on the door, and Ben, trying to catch his breath, apologizes, takes his jacket off, and throws himself on the couch. “You won’t believe it, but somehow I found myself involved in a physical fight between two people that I didn’t even know,” he says. “It was bizarre. Things like that haven’t happened to me for years and I don’t know what to think.” Ben looks at me and from his expression I realize that I must seem confused or even suspicious. He smiles and points his finger. “I know that look of yours; you squeeze your eyes, I know, it’s like you have a question mark on your forehead.” “A big question mark,” I say, amused. “I’m glad that you didn’t miss it.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  How does he know that? I start getting anxious and annoyed. Who is this guy? Why is he here? People usually start therapy curious to learn more about themselves than about their therapists—at least initially. Having said that, most of my patients do come to their first session already knowing at least a little about me. They google me and can easily find a picture, my age, my birthplace, and my professional affiliations. Some dig deeper and discover something about my personal life, my musical background, or the obituary of Lew, my life partner. In our digital age, the classical psychoanalytic idea of neutrality is challenged. Whereas in the past our goal as therapists was to stay objective and make sure our patients couldn’t know anything about us—not even from our office decoration—nowadays we work with the information people inevitably have about us, and we search for the unique meaning this has for each patient. The preliminary information patients have on their therapists contributes to a fantasy about who their therapists are and what therapy is going to be like. Most patients, however, limit their search so they don’t learn more than they want to know or can handle. I assume that those who have a negative reaction to my online profile wouldn’t contact me, and I’m sure some patients might know more about my personal life than they tell me, or even more than I let myself realize. Most patients, though, do not disclose their online research, especially not in the first session, and they come with a wish, as well as a dread, of being known by me. Guy introduces a different dynamic. I’m aware that he needs me to feel that he has invaded my private life. “Are you worried?” he asks. “I’m not sure, but you don’t seem happy that I did this research about you.” “Did you think I would be happy?” I ask. He shrugs. “I am not a stalker or something, I hope you know,” he says. “I just needed to find out. These days, who knows, strange people are everywhere. I wanted to make sure you are not some lunatic. And I kind of like that your father was born in Iran. It’s pretty interesting.” I look at him and wonder: Why would he want to make me so uncomfortable? My professional self should know the answer, but I feel paralyzed, unable to think clearly. I remind myself that Guy surely wants and needs me to feel the way I feel: unsafe, even frightened. He needs to make me feel at least as intimidated as he feels when he walks into my office, perhaps as alarmed as he has been every day of his life. I’m not sure what Guy is afraid of. But I am aware that I don’t yet have his permission to explore that question, that I’m not invited into his world, and instead that he has invited himself into mine.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It was important, we learned, never to forget. But as hard as we tried, inevitably as the siren began one of the kids would start giggling, and we would cover our faces, trying not to burst into laughter. Nervous laughter during the Holocaust Day siren is a familiar childhood memory of people who grew up in Israel, where horror stories shape part of the national identity and a special form of dark humor characterizes the younger generations. Years later, in New York City, far from my homeland, I am surprised by how many of my patients are second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. These high-functioning, successful, and productive people all have something in common: the ghosts of persecution who show themselves in unpredictable ways and at unexpected times. Under the surface they carry the trauma and guilt of the survivors. I learn that from childhood, images and daydreams of the Holocaust have been frequent visitors in their minds, even and especially for those whose parents never talked about what happened to their families during the war. The memories of the Holocaust live inside them even as they are unknown to them, and those invasive thoughts and images are often trivialized. Sometimes I learn about them only years into the therapy. When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has shaped their present lives. We identify the ways in which the past continues to play itself out in the present and how they live and relive their families’ untold stories. Rachel’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. She mentions this briefly during our first session when I ask about her family history, but she doesn’t feel it is relevant to her current life. It certainly isn’t the reason she came to therapy. “So many things have happened in my family since. So many good things. There is nothing else to say.” Rachel smiles and apologizes. “Every family carries some trauma. This is our story, and it happened so long ago. How many years since the Second World War?” She looks at me and immediately answers, “More than seventy, I think. A long time. My grandparents have already passed away,” she says. Rachel’s grandfather was born in Budapest and he survived Auschwitz. When the Second World War ended, he immigrated to America, where he met Rachel’s grandmother, who came from a Jewish family that had escaped Europe when the war started. They fell in love, and a year later Rachel’s mother, their only child, was born. Her grandfather never talked about what happened during the war, and her mother described her childhood as a normal suburban American one. On the surface their family trauma ended when her grandfather left Europe and left the past behind. Rachel came to therapy to talk about other issues, to discuss her ambivalence about having children, a topic that was a source of tension with her husband, Marc.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Decades later, Noah comes to see me with what he calls his “obsession with dead people.” He wants to know everything about these people in the obituaries, and I want to know everything about him. With each obituary that Noah brings into the consulting room, we piece together our respective puzzles, hunting for what is missing. “I got it,” Noah reports after hours of painstaking research at home, googling, filling in dates and details of the latest obituary. “I think I know everything. Now I can let it go.” Unlike Noah, I don’t get it. Missing many parts of Noah’s personal history, I try to wait patiently for them to enter the room. I know from experience that sooner or later the missing pieces will appear. I just have to silently listen and invite them in. Noah becomes irritated when he is missing something in his puzzle. He holds the newspaper and reads aloud to me from the obituary of a woman named Marie, then rolls his eyes. “Listen to how annoying this is,” he says. “How come they write that ‘Ronald’ was her second husband? If you google him, you find this same Ronald was also the translator of a book she co-authored many years earlier with her first husband—who was also named Ronald.” I am confused and jokingly think, Maybe she only liked people named Ronald. My reaction is a result of the fact that I have trouble following the details, which makes me anxious. I don’t yet fully understand Noah’s interest in these facts about the dead. “Both of her husbands were called Ronald—is that possible?” Noah wonders. He counts the Ronalds again, as if he needs to make it clear that there is something behind those names. He holds in his mind those who have died, and he refuses to let them go. He embraces their stories as if they belong to him, and in that sense those people are neither alive nor dead but rather exist as ghosts between two worlds, never fully seen but present in his life, and now in mine as well. As I join Noah on his search, I become aware that ghosts—the ghosts of the dead, the ghosts of his history—haunt us both. We always know less than we want to. “How old was your mother when you were born?” I ask him one day, trying to imagine his family. Noah answers: “Forty-four, I think. Old, right?” He is almost forty-four and doesn’t have children of his own. “Are you old?” I ask. “I guess so,” he says. “Growing up as an only child to parents in their mid-forties wasn’t easy, and for some reason, I always imagined I had a twin brother who died at birth. My mother used to get annoyed when I joked about it. She thought it was another of my crazy ideas about death. I secretly imagined we were both Noah.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  An important question comes to the surface. Is it better for the next generation of trauma survivors—the inheritors—to know, or not to know? Does it even matter, assuming our ancestors’ trauma finds its way into our minds anyway? This dilemma preoccupies many parents, who worry about the impact of their suffering on their children and try to minimize the damage. Parents want to protect their children from carrying their pain, and children try to protect their parents from having to reveal and relive their traumas. The unconscious collusion between parent and child is one that aims to avoid pain, and it contributes to the repression of those experiences, which become unspoken secrets. Descriptions of traumatic events are overwhelming and might create a “secondary trauma,” an emotional distress that happens when we are exposed to another person’s trauma. Disturbing reports or images inflict cruelty: they reenact the traumatic event and traumatize those who didn’t directly experience it. In Israel after World War II, survivors didn’t talk about the Holocaust. Being a survivor was a source of shame, and it was only years later that talking about the Holocaust became normalized and an inherent part of the culture. However, being exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust from such a young age doesn’t only educate but often also traumatizes Israeli kids. Without fully knowing it, they live and relive the history of the Holocaust. Remembering and reenacting suffering is part of the Jewish tradition, and it is threaded through many rituals, such as the Passover seder, where the “memory” of slavery and liberation is relived through our senses and our actions. The reenactment of trauma links the past and the future, our history and our destiny. It turns passive victims into active agents, victims into victors. The identity of the Israeli state, founded only three years after the Holocaust, is based on the ongoing Jewish trauma of persecution and on the dream of creating a safe home for the Jews. It is that dynamic of turning passive into active, which I discuss at length in Chapter 7, that aims to liberate victims from defeat and helplessness while denying their own aggression. The dilemma of memorializing of trauma on the one hand holds the need to honor the victims, to cherish an identity and a legacy, and to try to prevent crimes from happening again. On the other hand it binds together past, present, and future as one. The next generation is called to identify with the previous one, and it will be entangled with the trauma and losses of those who came before. When it comes to talking about trauma, we always walk the delicate line between too much and not enough, between what is too explicit and what is secretive, what is traumatizing and what is repressed and thus remains in its raw, wordless form. We are usually caught in that binary between the two extremes because when it comes to trauma, regulation is always a challenge.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  It’s time get in the game. 4. SEARCH MY HEART. Another prayer that may lead you places you wouldn’t have expected is this one: “Search my heart.” This is an invitation for God to probe your innermost being: your thoughts, your motives, the deepest secrets of your heart. The things you don’t want anyone to know about. The fears you haven’t admitted to yourself. The hopes buried deep in your heart. The dreams you don’t think could ever come to pass. God doesn’t need your permission, of course. He sees it all anyway. That’s why David wrote, “You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar” (Psalm 139:1–2). But the same David wrote, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23–24 We don’t pray to give God permission to speak, but rather to acknowledge that we are listening. We need to verbalize the desire for God to know us deeply, authentically, completely. We need to hear ourselves say it. It helps us be ready to respond when He speaks. Because while God won’t be surprised at what He finds in our hearts, we might be.

• From Wild (2012)

  I’d never set foot on the AT, but I’d heard much about it from the guys at Kennedy Meadows. It was the PCT’s closest kin and yet also its opposite in many ways. About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer, and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year. Hikers on the AT spent most nights camping in or near group shelters that existed along the trail. On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing but a post office and a bar or tiny store. I imagined the Australian honeymooners on the AT now, eating cheeseburgers and guzzling beer in a pub a couple of miles from the trail, sleeping by night under a wooden roof. They’d probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming people too. Half the time that Greg, Matt, and Albert had talked about Brent they’d referred to him as the Kid, though he was only a few years younger than me. Greg had been occasionally called the Statistician because he knew so many facts and figures about the trail and he worked as an accountant. Matt and Albert were the Eagle Scouts, and Doug and Tom the Preppies. I didn’t think I’d been dubbed anything, but I got the sinking feeling that if I had, I didn’t want to know what it was. Trina, Stacy, Brent, and I ate dinner in the bar that adjoined the Belden store that evening. After paying for a shower, laundry, the Snapple, and a few snacks and incidentals, I had about fourteen bucks left. I ordered a green salad and a plate of fries, the two items on the menu that both were cheap and satisfied my deepest cravings, which veered in opposite directions: fresh and deep-fried. Together they cost me five dollars, so now I had nine left to get me all the way to my next box. It was 134 miles away at McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, which had a concessionaire’s store that allowed PCT hikers to use it as a resupply stop. I drank my ice water miserably while the others sipped their beers. As we ate, we discussed the section ahead. By all reports, long stretches of it were socked in. The handsome bartender overheard our conversation and approached to tell us that rumor had it that Lassen Volcanic National Park was still buried under seventeen feet of snow. They were dynamiting the roads so they could open it for even a short tourist season this year. “You want a drink?” he said to me, catching my eye. “On the house,” he added when he saw my hesitation.

• From Wild (2012)

  As I hiked, I tried to force myself not to think about the things that hurt—my shoulders and upper back, my feet and hips—but I succeeded for only short bursts of time. As I traversed the eastern flank of Mount Jenkins, I paused several times to take in vast views of the desert that spread east below me to the vanishing point. By afternoon I had come to a rockslide and stopped. I looked up the mountain and followed the slide with my eyes all the way down. There was a great river of angular fist-sized metamorphic rocks—in place of the once-flat two-foot-wide trail that any human could walk through. And I wasn’t even a normal human. I was a human with a god-awful load on my back and without even a trekking pole to balance myself. Why I had neglected to bring a trekking pole, while not failing to bring a foldable saw, I did not know. Finding a stick was impossible—the sparse low and scraggly trees around me were of no use. There was nothing to do but to push on. My legs trembled as I stepped onto the rockslide in a half squat, fearful that my usual hunching in a remotely upright position would upset the rocks and cause them to slide en masse farther down the mountain, carrying me with them. I fell once, landing hard on my knee, and then I rose to pick my way even more tediously across, the water in the giant dromedary bag on my back sloshing with each step. When I reached the other side of the slide, I was so relieved it didn’t matter that my knee was pulsing in pain and bleeding. That’s behind me, I thought with gratitude, but I was mistaken. I had to cross three more rockslides that afternoon. I camped that night on a high saddle between Mount Jenkins and Mount Owens, my body traumatized by what it had taken to get there, though I’d covered only 8.5 miles. I had silently lambasted myself for not hiking more quickly, but now, as I sat in my camp chair catatonically spooning my dinner into my mouth from the hot pot that sat in the dirt between my feet, I was only thankful that I’d made it this far. I was at an elevation of 7,000 feet, the sky everywhere around me. To the west I could see the sun fading over the undulating land in a display of ten shades of orange and pink; to the east the seemingly endless desert valley stretched out of sight.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  If we reduce prayer to a shopping list, we miss the point. Prayer is not meant to be about getting quick answers and going on our way, but about relationship and connection with God. Maybe that’s why the first line of the Lord’s Prayer is about asking for God’s will to be done. Jesus modeled this in the garden of Gethsemane, when He asked for “this cup,” which referred to the suffering He knew was ahead, to be taken away from Him, but then added, “yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). That’s how we should pray. “God, I’d love this house or that job, I really would, and I’m praying for it and believing for it. But more than my desires, I want your will to be done.” The most effective prayers are the ones that are according to God’s Word and His will. The least effective prayers are the ones that are according to our desires and will. Prayer keeps us connected to God’s will and to the needs of people around us. It grounds us. It keeps us from getting isolated. 6. BOOMERANG PRAYERS Boomerang prayers are the kind of prayers you toss up to God but then catch again. In other words, you “give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you” (1 Peter 5:7 NLT ), but you don’t leave your worries and cares there with Him; you pick them back up. You carry them around with you. You sleep with them at night, wake up with them in the morning, and take them to school or work during the day. Prayer will only reduce your stress and worry if you are able to leave the things you’re anxious about with God. You have to learn to trust Him, to rely on Him, to wait on Him. It might be overstating it to call these prayers a waste of time because God is gracious and kind and good, and He helps us even when we think we are carrying the load ourselves. But when we pray boomerang prayers, we are missing out on some of the most important benefits of prayer, particularly the peace and perspective that prayer should bring. There are times to think about and work toward solving problems, and there are times to recognize that only God can take those things from here. I’m sure you’ve read the Serenity Prayer, a short prayer that has been widely used in recovery programs (and printed on bookmarks and refrigerator magnets) for decades. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. (Side note: The prayer is usually attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, although for years a heated and very public debate raged between Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, and a Yale Law School researcher named Fred Shapiro regarding who actually wrote it.5 I think that’s ironic considering the prayer is about serenity.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice takes a deep breath. “Now you know why I’m here.” She finishes the sentence in a childish voice. We are left with the clear link between the past and the future, the previous generation and the next one, and with Alice, in the middle, trying to bridge the two, to heal her mother as a way to liberate herself, to make sense of her past and to create a better future. The baby will be born in two months and Alice feels unprepared. “Maybe I started this process too late,” she says. “I have so many things to tell you and to talk about before she arrives.” I wonder out loud about her urgency to resolve everything before the baby is born . Alice is frustrated. “You have no idea,” she says. “It is urgent. There are so many decisions I have to make. And I suddenly have many feelings and so many bizarre dreams at night. I’m worried about the money and how we are going to cover that loan. “They say that money isn’t important,” Alice continues, sounding upset again, “but have you noticed that the people who say this are usually the ones with money? Money is in fact very important when you need it and don’t have it.” I think about the open way Alice talks about money. Sex and money are two topics that people usually try to avoid, not only in their lives, but in therapy too. Those subjects are filled with hypocrisy and dishonesty, and therefore they’re a good place to hide other feelings and needs that people are uncomfortable expressing. Any unwelcome feeling can be expressed through sex or money: aggression, hostility, the need for domination and power, as well as fragility, narcissism, and trauma. Sex, for example, can be seen as lovemaking even in cases where it is a way to express hostility. Like money, sex can be used to control others, to compensate for emotional insecurities, and to express or hide pain. Avoiding talking about money and sex allows us to disguise any negative feelings. In therapy, for example, negative feelings toward the therapist could be expressed in delayed payments. When we are too embarrassed to talk about money, we might miss the opportunity to reveal and process feelings that the patient wants to hide. Alice talks about the cost of the reproductive process and explores her feelings about everything she might not be able to afford, financially but also emotionally. The enormous economic burden is part of a broader weight of self-doubt and shame that she carries. When reproduction involves such transactional or medicalized aspects—when it happens away from the couple’s bed—it often breaks the romantic fantasy of a baby born “out of love.” Difficulty getting pregnant can bring to life, in different ways, intense shame, and evoke the darkest fears and feelings about being damaged, cursed, rotten, broken, or bad. It is a profound injury that touches an essential insecurity about one’s body and existence.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Rachel Yehuda, director of traumatic stress studies, and her team reveals that the offspring of Holocaust survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body bounce back after trauma. It was found that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress-hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Research indicates that healthy offspring of Holocaust survivors as well as of enslaved people, of war veterans, and of parents who experienced major trauma are more likely to present symptoms of PTSD after traumatic events or after witnessing a violent incident. From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of those kinds of epigenetic changes might be to biologically prepare children for an environment similar to that of their parents and help them survive, but in fact they often leave them more vulnerable to carrying symptoms of trauma that they didn’t experience firsthand. This research is not surprising for those of us who study the human mind. In our clinical work we see how traumatic experience invades the psyche of the next generation and shows itself in uncanny and often surprising ways. The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, we know what was not explicitly conveyed to us, and these things shape our lives in ways that we don’t always understand. We inherit family traumas, even those that we haven’t been told about. Working in Paris with Holocaust survivors and their children, the Hungarian- born psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham used the word “phantom” to describe the many ways in which the second generation felt their parents’ devastation and losses, even when the parents never talked about them. Their inherited feelings of the parents’ unprocessed trauma were the phantoms that lived inside them, the ghosts of the unsaid and the unspeakable. It is those “ghostly” experiences, not quite alive but also not dead, that we inherit. They invade our reality in visible and actual ways; they loom in, leaving traces. We know and feel things and we don’t always recognize their source. Emotional Inheritance interweaves my patients’ narratives and my own personal stories of love and loss, personal and national trauma, with a psychoanalytic lens and the most recent psychological research. It describes the many ways in which we can locate the ghosts of the past that hold us back and interfere with our lives. Everything we do not consciously know is relived.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I can’t afford to hurt her feelings,” she says. “Maybe she can have sessions with you too. Maybe she can work on her trauma, because if I try to talk to her, she immediately tears up and says, ‘I did my best to be a good person and a good mother.’ And you know what? I believe her. She is a good person and I love her. I know she did her best.” Alice’s mother needs to feel she is the victim and not the cause of the traumatic events that happened to her. To be a good person means not feeling angry. Alice, on the other hand, feels better when she is not a victim. She would rather be angry than sad. That disparity in their defenses is Alice’s attempt to be different from her mother, to be an active agent and control her life. “I’m trying so hard to be different but I am too similar to my mother. That’s exactly the problem,” she says. “The breast milk I drank was hers and it shaped my body and my mind. I didn’t belong to anyone but her. I didn’t have a father. My stepfather was an outsider and it was only my mother and me in the inner circle. Yes, I hate to be a victim but I, too, had a really sad childhood. I, too, got divorced. My luck is so bad that I can’t even get pregnant from having sex, like everyone else. I need to go through hell. And I want everyone to leave me alone, just as my mother wanted. She wanted to leave us and go on her retreats. I want to protect my baby from the same future. She will have Art’s genes; he is amazing.” Alice takes a deep breath. “Now you know why I’m here.” She finishes the sentence in a childish voice. We are left with the clear link between the past and the future, the previous generation and the next one, and with Alice, in the middle, trying to bridge the two, to heal her mother as a way to liberate herself, to make sense of her past and to create a better future. The baby will be born in two months and Alice feels unprepared. “Maybe I started this process too late,” she says. “I have so many things to tell you and to talk about before she arrives.” I wonder out loud about her urgency to resolve everything before the baby is born. Alice is frustrated. “You have no idea,” she says. “It is urgent. There are so many decisions I have to make. And I suddenly have many feelings and so many bizarre dreams at night. I’m worried about the money and how we are going to cover that loan.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The traces of the past are everywhere. Repressed secrets become nameless dread. They live in our psyche, like radiation, with no form, color, or smell. The mind cannot prevent the psychological invasion of destructive aspects of the past, and in Rachel’s case, her family trauma plays itself out over and over again. “I don’t know anything about what happened then,” Rachel says. We look at each other and she adds, “My grandfather mentioned once that they arrived at Auschwitz on a beautiful spring day. The place looked green and peaceful but one thing bothered him: a strange, overwhelming smell, kind of sweet and unfamiliar. In retrospect, the scent of death.” We are both silent. “My grandfather was a young man when the war started. He lost all his relatives. He was the only survivor.” “Who did he lose?” I ask. “I have no idea.” Rachel sounds frustrated. “He talked about the weather at Auschwitz. He talked about his best friend, who survived with him. But he never told us about the family he lost. “I want to know who Ruth was,” she adds, and there is a new spark in her eyes. “I understand that my nightmares are being triggered by this trip, but I think I should not cancel it. I should look for my grandfather’s friend’s family and find out. I owe this to myself and to all of us.” Rachel had planned the trip for mid-April, without realizing she was going to be there for Holocaust Remembrance Day. She was going to look for traces of her family history and try to put a narrative to the disturbing images she has carried inside her since she was a child. Names are a significant part of one’s identity. In first sessions, I usually ask people about the meaning of their names, inquire who chose the names for them and why, and wonder if there are specific meanings or stories associated with their names. Names are connected to emotions, the hopes parents have for their child, who they think the child will become or want the child to become. A name reflects the parents’ feelings about having that child. It contains remembrances from the past as well as a vision of the future.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “You will see.” She smiles as if hiding something. “You will see what I mean soon. The grandmother has a lot of secrets.” But we don’t find out what the grandmother’s secrets are, nor do we ever get to her house. Instead Lara instructs me, as Red Riding Hood, to sit under a tree and wait for her to come pick me up. “I will be back soon,” she says firmly. She turns her back to me and starts playing on her own. I am left to sit there for a long while, knowing that I have been assigned to be the girl that Lara has been, lost alone in the woods, overwhelmed by the secrets of others. Sitting there in silence, waiting for Lara to come back, I feel like the little girl I used to be, when I was left to wait for my parents to come pick me up from the candy store. My “me-search” enters the room and I realize what I am looking for. I suddenly remember what I always knew. I was seven years old, younger than Lara. I had started second grade in a new school far from our home. During the first week of school my parents had told me that we were planning to move to a new apartment, closer to the new school, but until then I should wait at the candy store after school and they would pick me up from there. Every day, I walked to the candy store on the corner and waited, exactly as they’d told me to do. Moses, the owner of the store, was a kindly old man with a white mustache and a big smile. I liked him. I believed that he liked me too, and I especially liked that he gave me candy. As a little girl, there was nothing I loved more than candy. My mother, in an attempt to feed us healthy food, did not allow it in the house. She used to serve us plates with sliced apples and dried fruit. “Candy made by nature,” she called it. When Moses offered me candy for the first time, I was thrilled and ate it as fast as I could. He looked at me and smiled. “I see that you really love it.” The following day he offered me ice cream that he kept in a freezer in the back of the store. “What kind do you like?” He had a cone in each hand. “Vanilla or chocolate?” I pointed to the vanilla one. “Why did I know you would choose that one?” he teased, and then asked if I wanted to come pick out something from the back of the store. “I will let you choose whatever you like,” he said. Moses always smiled, and his kisses were ticklish and wet. Once in a while his wife would come to the store and he would put a little chair for me in the front and ignore me until she left.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The guy who wrote the show and plays the lead role was a fighter in our unit,” he says, “and so much of it is based on real things that happened. I started watching it and found myself thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is insane.’” “And what is it that you watch and think is insane?” I ask. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben says. “It’s that word that you used in our first session: omnipotent. I asked you then what it meant, and you said, ‘It means someone who thinks they can do anything, who thinks they have endless power like a superhero, with no limitations. God is omnipotent.’ You then said, ‘God can’t die. People can only play omnipotent and then they pay a price for it.’ I remember looking at you and thinking, ‘Wow, where did that come from? What is she really telling me about myself?’” “Yes,” I say, “and I remember you then told me about a guy in your unit who, during your first months of training, was reading Catch-22, and one day he looked at everyone and said, ‘We are crazy. I’m out of here,’ and left the unit. And you said that even back then you knew that he understood something that none of you did.” “Yes, he was the sane one even as he seemed so completely insane.” “It was insane to be so sane.” We look at each other and stay silent for a long while. Then Ben glances at his watch, quickly stands up, and starts walking toward the door. “I’m getting there, Doctor,” he whispers. “I’m getting there.” BEN IS TEN minutes late to his next session. He has never been late before and I am a little worried, checking my emails to see if he has written to let me know that he is running late. I wonder if it was the “getting there” from our last session that didn’t allow him to get here on time today. Is he anxious about what he is going to uncover or discover? Is he trying to slow down, to communicate with me that we are moving into dangerous territory? It is not unusual that as people get closer to sensitive emotional material, or even to the issues they came to therapy to resolve, they unconsciously have more resistance to treatment and “accidentally” forget to show up, find themselves late, or sabotage treatment in other ways. What is it that causes Ben to be late? Is he safe? There is a knock on the door, and Ben, trying to catch his breath, apologizes, takes his jacket off, and throws himself on the couch. “You won’t believe it, but somehow I found myself involved in a physical fight between two people that I didn’t even know,” he says. “It was bizarre. Things like that haven’t happened to me for years and I don’t know what to think.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For a year and a half I had eaten nothing but cutlets and salmis, pates and crystallised fruits; but there was a dish that Mrs Milne had used to make, consisting of mashed potato, mashed cabbage, corned beef and onions - Gracie and I had used to smack our lips at the sight of it placed before us on the table. I thought it couldn’t be very hard to make; and I set about cooking it now, for Ralph and Florence.I had set the potatoes and the cabbage on to boil, and got as far as browning the onions, when I heard a knock at the door. This made me jump, then grow a little flustered. I had made myself so comfortable that I felt, instinctively, that I should answer it; but should I, really? Was there not a point at which helpfulness, if persevered with, became impertinence? I looked down at the pan of onions, my rolled-up sleeves. Had I perhaps crossed over that point, already?’While I wondered, the knock came again; and this time I didn’t hesitate, but went straight to the door and opened it. Beyond it was a girl - a rather handsome girl, with dark hair showing beneath a velvet tam-o‘-shanter. When she saw me she said, ‘Oh! Is Florrie not at home, then?’ and looked quickly at my arms, my dress, my eye, and then my hair.I said, ‘Miss Banner isn’t here, no. I’m on my own.’ I sniffed, and thought I caught the smell of burning onions. ‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘I’m doing a bit of frying. Do you mind... ?’ I ran back to the kitchen to rescue my dish. To my surprise I heard the thud of the front door, and found that the girl had followed me. When I looked round she was unbuttoning her coat, and gazing about her in wonder.‘My God,’ she said - her voice had a bit of breeding to it, but she was not at all proud. ‘I called because I saw the step, and thought Florrie must have had some sort of fit. Now I see she’s either lost her head entirely, or had the fairies in.’I said, ‘I was me that did it all ...’She laughed, showing her teeth. ‘Then you, I suppose, must be the fairy king himself. Or is it, the fairy queen? I cannot tell if your hair is at odds with your costume, or the other way around. If that’ - she laughed again - ‘means anything.’I didn’t know what it might mean.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I’m the girl who flirted with you once eighteen months ago? I’m the girl who asked you to supper, then left you standing, without a word, on Judd Street?‘I’m a friend of Miss Derby’s,’ I said at last.Florence blinked. ‘Miss Derby?’ she said. ‘Miss Derby, from the Ponsonby Trust?’I nodded. ‘Yes. I - I met you once, a long time ago. I was passing through Bethnal Green, on a visit, and thought I might call. I brought you some watercresses ...’ We turned our heads and gazed at them. They had been placed on a table near the door and looked very sad, for I had fallen upon them when I swooned. The leaves were crushed and blackened, the stems broken, the paper damp and green.Florence said, ‘That was kind of you.’ I smiled a little nervously. For a second there was a silence - then the baby gave a kick and a yell, and she bent to pick it up and hold it against her breast, saying as she did so: ‘Shall Mama take you? There, now.’ Then the man reappeared, bearing a cup of tea and a plate of bread and butter which he set, with a smile, on the arm of my chair. Florence placed her chin upon the baby’s head. ‘Ralph,’ she said, ‘this lady is a friend of Miss Derby’s - do you remember, Miss Derby that I used to work for?’‘Good heavens,’ said the man - Ralph. He was still in his shirt-sleeves; now he picked up his jacket from the back of a chair and put it on. I busied myself with my cup and plate. The tea was very hot and sweet: the best tea, I thought, that I had ever tasted. The baby gave another cry, and Florence began to sway and jiggle, and to smooth the child’s head, distractedly, with her cheek. Soon the cry became a gurgle, and then a sigh; and hearing it, I sighed too - but turned it into a breath for cooling my tea with, in case they thought I was about to start up weeping again.There was another silence; then, ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name,’ said Florence. To Ralph she explained: ‘It seems we met once.’I cleared my throat. ‘Miss Astley,’ I said. ‘Miss Nancy Astley.’ Florence nodded; Ralph held out his hand for mine, and shook it warmly.‘I’m very glad to meet you, Miss Astley,’ he said.