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 Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  How Can I Be a Parent?TWO OUT OF three adults in our long-term study of children of divorce have decided not to have children.4 National surveys are turning up similar results. Childbirth is down everywhere, but children of divorce who choose not to have children specifically cite divorce as the main reason. Of course, these people are still relatively young and may change their minds if the right person comes along. But our data are unique in that these men and women are telling us very clearly why they don’t want children. “Kids?” they say. “No way. Out of the question.” Married, divorced, or single, they say things like, “I never want to hold a baby or to raise one.” Others insist they’d be poor mothers or fathers so why undertake a role for which they have neither interest nor talent nor good experience in their own childhood to draw from. They said, “How can I be a parent? Look at the upbringing I had.” Or, “My life is too insecure to think about having a kid.” They had little confidence in their ability to bring up a happy child. Others were afraid that a child might destabilize their marriage. No one cited a demanding career as a reason not to have children. I found it fascinating that children of divorce who want children and those who don’t want children draw on the same experiences to arrive at different conclusions. People who want kids seek to rewrite their history by providing the children with what they missed. Those who don’t want kids have no interest in looking back at their history and find little to inspire them about becoming parents. They seem to doubt they could do any better than their parents and have no interest in trying. But in looking closely at their upbringing—amount of contact with fathers, levels of child support, anger between parents—I could find little that distinguished the two groups. They are similar except for the fact that those who don’t want children were more distant from their parents, either angrier or less involved. One important, though usually unconscious, motive for having a child is a sort of payback, to express appreciation for having been brought into the world and to provide your own parents with a child who is a symbolic lien on immortality. It’s natural for new mothers to present their newborns to their moms and dads with a great sense of pride and interconnectedness. I was interested that so few children of divorce seemed interested in their own parents’ desire to become grandparents. It was a theme that came up frequently among those raised in intact families. It may be natural for children who are still angry about divorce to refuse this gift as a way of keeping their distance from their parents. If this is true, it is an exceptionally sad legacy of our divorce culture.

• From Confessions

  And how Thou didst deliver me out of the bonds of desire, wherewith I was bound most straitly to carnal concupiscence, and out of the drudgery of worldly things, I will now declare, and confess unto Thy name, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer. Amid increasing anxiety, I was doing my wonted business, and daily sighing unto Thee. I attended Thy Church, whenever free from the business under the burden of which I groaned. Alypius was with me, now after the third sitting released from his law business, and awaiting to whom to sell his counsel, as I sold the skill of speaking, if indeed teaching can impart it. Nebridius had now, in consideration of our friendship, consented to teach under Verecundus, a citizen and a grammarian of Milan, and a very intimate friend of us all; who urgently desired, and by the right of friendship challenged from our company, such faithful aid as he greatly needed. Nebridius then was not drawn to this by any desire of advantage (for he might have made much more of his learning had he so willed), but as a most kind and gentle friend, he would not be wanting to a good office, and slight our request. But he acted herein very discreetly, shunning to become known to personages great according to this world, avoiding the distraction of mind thence ensuing, and desiring to have it free and at leisure, as many hours as might be, to seek, or read, or hear something concerning wisdom.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Catholics of Castile had been systematically persecuting the Jews since the fourteenth century. Many had accepted Catholicism, and the conversos, always suspect, were a powerful element in Spanish society. In Spain, the Inquisition was part of the process whereby the Castilians penetrated and unified the whole of Spanish society: it was set up in 1478 to examine the credentials of the converts. The conquest of the Moors was virtually completed in 1492 with the fall of Granada; three months later the crown ordered all remaining Jews to leave the country, the culmination of twelve years of intensive anti-Semitic legislation. In fact, up to fifty per cent, perhaps 400,000, remained as forced converts, and solving the Jewish problem merely exacerbated the problem of the conversos. Christians with Jewish blood had been, and remained, powerful in finance, administration and medicine. By the end of the fifteenth century most of the noblest and richest families in Spain, including the royal family of Aragon, were ‘tainted’. Nevertheless, racial legislation was introduced to ‘purify’ the upper regions of society. Statutes of limpieza de sangre were passed banning descendants of Moors and Jews (especially the latter) from universities and religious orders. The Inquisition effectively controlled their enforcement and progressively extended their scope. Torquemada, who set the system in motion, and his successor as head of the Inquisition, Diego Deza, both had Jewish blood. But the Inquisition could authenticate false genealogies, and the fact that virtually everyone of any importance was vulnerable merely increased its power – accurate genealogies, secretly circulated, were a form of subversive literature. It was the guardian of the Spanish race, and one of the reasons it was popular among the Castilian masses was that in general they alone had the limpieza de sangre. In a memorandum to Charles v, the historian Lorenzo Galindez de Carvajal pointed out that most of the members of his council were ‘tainted’; among the exceptions was Dr Palacios Rubios, ‘a man of pure blood because he is of labouring descent’. The effect of the Inquisition under Torquemada was to confuse the theoretically separate matters of racial and religious purity. He issued instructions at Seville in 1484 that the ‘children and grandchildren of those condemned [by the Inquisition] may not hold or possess public offices or posts or honours, or be promoted to hold orders, or be judges, majors, constables, magistrates, jurors, stewards, officials of weights and measures, merchants, notaries, public scriveners, lawyers, attorneys, secretaries, accountants, treasurers, physicians, surgeons, shopkeepers, brokers, changers, collectors, tax-farmers or holders of any other public office.’ A new

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Double Exposure” is a “what if” story. Years ago, I regularly audiotaped the sessions of a patient who had a two-hour commute to my office and handed her the cassette to listen to on the drive to the following session. (I routinely do this with patients who come to see me from great distances. It makes good use of the commute time by priming the patient for the next hour. Therapy is always more effective if the sessions are continuous rather than episodic—I much prefer sessions that explore ongoing themes at ever deeper levels to sessions that are focused outward, upon the external events of the preceding week). Well, one week I forgot to give my patient the tape. She realized this fifteen minutes later and promptly returned to my office to retrieve the tape. The next week on her commute she listened to the tape of the session and was startled to hear my dictation of the hour, which I would hand to my secretary to transcribe. (I had been unaware the tape recorder had been left running.) Whenever I have told professional colleagues of this incident, they’ve gasped—it is a potential scenario for disaster. As things turned out in real life, however, it was a benign experience—my dictation contained nothing unset-ding and therapy continued unaffected. But what if? What if there had been something deeply disturbing in the dictation? Or, worse, what if there had been the most disturbing content imaginable—what if the therapist had been presenting her to a professional conference focusing on countertransference—that is, all the deeply personal, irrational, dark, rageful, lustful, nonprofessional feelings toward the patient? This “what if” is the fictional scaffolding upon which the events and dreams of this tale are draped. “Double Exposure” explores several themes including countertransference and the role of causality in the structure of psychotherapy theory. The concept of causality, the idea that an event following another chronologically is perceived as being caused by the prior event, is inherent in the neural apparatus through which we experience the world. Though such causal attributions vastly influence our explanations of behavior they are highly errorful. Double exposure explores the havoc caused to theory by the presence of intervening, invisible events in the causal chain. But these are minor themes: “Double Exposure” is primarily meant as a rhapsody on therapist transparency—a variation on the theme previously explored in my novel Lying on the Couch. In it I explore many questions which set therapists’ teeth on edge. If we hold that the ideal therapeutic relationship is one of genuineness and authenticity, then shouldn’t the therapist be a real person in the therapy process? As real in the therapy hour as outside of it? Should it be only the patient who self-discloses? What might happen if therapists were to reveal themselves more extensively? Or, an even more mischievous question, what might happen if that disclosure occurred in a particularly ill-starred situation?

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC, AND APOSTOLIC? 74 Evidently, then, the church was already one in some sense, but in another sense it needed to work and pray in order to become one. In a work of 1410, called The Ways of Uniting and Reforming the Church in a Universal Council, Dietrich of Nieheim asked: "Why is it necessary to work for the union of the universal church if that church is and always has been undi- vided, unified, and untouched by schism?" Two other works from about the same time dealt with that ques- tion by arguing that while the true church could not be destroyed by any schism, it was essential "to work for the union of the church" even by avoiding both parties in the schism for the sake of restoring unity, and to go on working toward union even after the scandal of "triple schism [triscisma]" had been re- moved. Therefore the Council of Basel, two decades or so later, could appeal to the Hussites: "Let us work as hard as we can to become one!" For it was not only the schism between the two popes at Rome and Avignon that was dividing the supposedly one and indivisible church during the fif- teenth century, but there were at least two other schisms that joined it in making a "mockery" of the church and of its pretensions to unity: the Hussite revolt and the separation between East and West. The chairman at the Council of Basel, in turn, accused the Hussites of showing partiality toward the Greeks, and other critics also found affinities between them. When the Hussites demanded that the council invite rep- resentatives of the East, the council fathers responded that they had already intended to do so, but the Greeks in Constantinople objected to a guilt by association that linked their name with that of the Czechs. But in the minds of various Western churchmen, the schism within their own church and the schisms with the Czechs and the Greeks were closely connected. The Hussites, they believed, were finding a pretext in the East-West schism for persisting in their own separa- tion from the Holy See; and, speaking to the Byzan- tine emperor, the ambassadors of the Western church declared: "With what yearning, with what fervor, our church has sought and still seeks peace and the union of the churches! . . . By our agreement in one place, we can restore peace to all of Christendom and to

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  When we’re stuck in social anxiety, we often see ourselves in our mind’s eye. But it’s not the reflection we see in our bedroom mirror. Instead, we see our image as if in the funhouse mirror of the House of Social Anxiety. And this awkward image is what we think others see. For example, in high school I was asked to emcee a small talent show at the last minute. To be nice, I agreed, but without time to (over)rehearse, I was frozen onstage, a Cheshire cat–like smile plastered on my face as I “ummmed” my way through the show and tried to appease a bored and disappointed audience. Or at least that’s how it felt. When I truly think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that bad. But when I bring the memory to mind more than twenty years later, I picture myself onstage, as seen from the audience, which, interestingly, is a view I never actually saw. I’m “seeing” myself looking lost and scared, as if this is how things actually played out. But the pictures in my head are all my imagination. On what information am I basing my memory? Remember the felt sense from chapter 11? I’m basing it on how I felt the show went. I felt scared and awkward, so I assume I looked scared and awkward. Since I can’t travel back in time, I’ll never know. But even though it’s totally made up, that’s how I remember the situation in my mind’s eye. And now the view I never even saw has worked its way into my memory. This tendency to remember our anxious moments in our mind’s eye, even if we never saw that perspective, is common. But it’s also the key to busting the how I feel is how I look myth. So how to do this? Look no further than the phone in your pocket. A tried-and-true method to replace your imaginary mind’s eye movie is to make an actual movie. Have someone you trust make a video of you having a conversation, giving a presentation, or doing whatever it is that sends you into social anxiety. I know, I know: “But I hate watching myself! I hate it even more than listening to my own voice on voicemail!” You may hate this, but the payoff is huge. You can finally see yourself as others see you. Once you make the video, before you watch, ask yourself what exactly you think you’ll see. Close your eyes and form a vivid, internal movie of how you think you will look. Will you spout random, incoherent words? Tremble like a Shake Weight? If we ask Mei, she might say, I’ll look stupid, which means I’ll pause a lot, jump from topic to topic, say “um” every few words, and have an expression on my face straight out of Dumb and Dumber.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The idea that sexual practice has the power to destabilize gender emerged from my reading of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and sought to establish that normative sexuality fortifies normative gender. Briefly, one is a woman, according to this framework, to the extent that one functions as one within the dominant heterosexual frame and to call the frame into question is perhaps to lose something of one’s sense of place in gender. I take it that this is the first formulation of “gender trouble” in this text. I sought to understand some of the terror and anxiety that some people suffer in “becoming gay,” the fear of losing one’s place in gender or of not knowing who one will be if one sleeps with someone of the ostensibly “same” gender. This constitutes a certain crisis in ontology experienced at the level of both sexuality and language. This issue has become more acute as we consider various new forms of gendering that have emerged in light of transgenderism and transsexuality, lesbian and gay parenting, new butch and femme identities. When and why, for instance, do some butch lesbians who become parents become “dads” and others become “moms”? What about the notion, suggested by Kate Bornstein, that a transsexual cannot be described by the noun of “woman” or “man,” but must be approached through active verbs that attest to the constant transformation which “is” the new identity or, indeed, the “in-betweenness” that puts the being of gendered identity into question? Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.2 But what is the link between gender and sexuality that I sought to underscore? Certainly, I do not mean to claim that forms of sexual practice produce certain genders, but only that under conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality. Catharine MacKinnon offers a formulation of this problem that resonates with my own at the same time that there are, I believe, crucial and important differences between us. She writes: Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women.3

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  *These three “arts of governing” were often likened to one another, as arts that demanded a knowledge and prudence attuned to circumstances; they were also comparable because they were knowledges that were associated with an ability to command. They were frequently referred to where it was a question of an individual’s search for the principles or the authority that would help him to “conduct himself.”PART THREE [image file=image_rsrc2B8.jpg] Economics1 [image file=image_rsrc2B8.jpg] The Wisdom of MarriageHow, in what form, and why were sexual relations between husband and wife “problematical” in Greek thought? What reason was there to be worried about them? And above all, what reason was there to question the husband’s behavior, to reflect on the moderation it necessitated, and—in a society so strongly marked by the rule of “free men”—to make it a theme of moral preoccupation? It looks as if there were none, or in any case very little. At the end of the legal argument Against Neaera, attributed to Demosthenes, the author delivers a sort of aphorism that has remained famous: “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.”1 With a formula like this one, which seems to speak of a strict distribution of roles, we could not be further from the arts of conjugal pleasure such as one finds, according to Van Gulik, in ancient China. There, prescriptions concerning the woman’s obedience, her respect, and her devotion were closely linked with advice on the correct erotic behavior to manifest in order to increase the partners’ pleasure, or at least that of the man, and with opinions on the right conditions for obtaining the best possible progeny.2 This was because, in that polygamous society, the wife found herself in a competitive situation where her status was tied directly to her ability to give pleasure; questions concerning sexual behavior and the forms of its possible improvement formed part of the society’s reflection about existence; the skillful practice of pleasures and the equilibrium of married life belonged to the same set of concerns.

• From Three Women (2019)

  I have to tell you something important, he says. It’s about Murphy. Aaron tells her that Shawn Krinke saw Aaron leave TGI Friday’s that night. Aaron doesn’t know what he actually saw, but he saw something. Then Mr. Krinke told Mr. Murphy, who already had suspicions, because Maggie would sign out of Newspaper and say she was going to Art, or to the washroom, but really she was going to Aaron’s classroom. Maggie thinks back to the night when she picked him up. It was dark out but she couldn’t guarantee that Krinke wouldn’t have been able to see it was her from inside the restaurant. She feels that it’s her fault, that she needs to handle it. So both Murphy and Krinke think we’re together? Maggie asks. Well, we’re not— That we were? I don’t know, maybe. Well fuck them. Maggie feels glad, suddenly, to have an outlet for her pain that is closer to anger than grief. She tells Aaron she wants to confront Murphy. That’s not a good idea, Aaron says. He sounds nervous, and frustrated by her immaturity. Sometimes he looks pained, the hero staying in a shitty marriage because he loves his kids too much. At other times, he looks the way he does now. Maggie looks at the clock. She is going to be late for her next class so she tells him she’ll come back to hear the whole story, to make a plan. It’s somewhat comforting that they have this one last mission to complete together. Later, Maggie gets up to leave in the middle of Mr. Murphy’s newspaper class and heads back to Aaron’s room. Mr. Murphy’s class was very different from any other because for the first fifteen minutes there were progress updates but then the students were set loose to get their stories finished. They could sign out to get interviews or go to the library. But Maggie had stopped signing out. She just left. Aaron is at his desk, grading papers. He looks beautiful and so far away. Hey, she says. Just then, she hears someone behind her. It’s Jeremy Murphy. Oh good! Maggie says brashly. I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk about why you think something is going on between me and Knodel. Murphy starts to speak, stumbling over his words. I just wish you had said something to me first, Maggie says, if you had these concerns. At this point, Aaron’s voice rises behind Maggie. I understand, Aaron says, his speech suddenly and bizarrely formal, that Mr. Murphy probably just felt uncomfortable by the nature of—of our friendship, and perhaps— Yes, Murphy says, precisely as Mr. Knodel was saying— Maggie feels winded. They never in the past referred to each other as mister. It was always their last names, collegial. Okay, well, I’ve had enough, Maggie says. I gotta get back to work. She and Murphy walk back to his classroom together. It’s extremely awkward and they are completely silent.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  special encyclical to the United States, Longinqua oceani, (1895), tried hard to straddle the horns of the dilemma:’. . . it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the hope of the most desirable status of the church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for state and church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced... [the church] would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favour of the laws and the patronage of public authority.’ He added that ‘unless forced by necessity to do otherwise, Catholics ought to prefer to associate with Catholics.’ This effusion struck anti-republicans in Europe as feeble and compromising, but it infuriated Americans and made the position of the Catholic hierarchy there very difficult. They had always emphasized that the republic and the Church were virtually soul-mates. As the most influential of them, John Ireland, Archbishop of St Paul, put it: ‘There is no conflict between the Catholic church and America. I could not utter one syllable that would belie, however remotely, either the church or the republic, and when I assert, as I now solemnly do, that the principles of the church are in thorough harmony with the interests of the republic, I know in the depths of my soul that I speak the truth.’ But many Americans did not accept this assurance. How could they, when there was so manifest a gulf between Protestant triumphalism, and the triumphalism of the Vatican? The feeling was established, and it persisted for more than half a century, that no Catholic must be allowed to become President of the Republic. What was, perhaps, more important, was the effect on American Catholics. At times they feared that the papacy would simply condemn ‘Americanism’ as a modern ‘error’, and thus quarantine the Catholics within American society. The American bishops were constantly obliged to head off the Vatican from this direction, and though they were successful, the concession was bought at the price of servile conformity on virtually everything else. Thus American Catholics did not play the progressive role within the Church which their membership of the millennial society made natural. A Vatican assault on American ideology came very near when the ninety-three- year-old Leo XIII was succeeded by Guiseppe Sarto, as Pius X, in 1903. Pius X was remarkable in a number of ways. He came from a very poor family: his father had belonged to the lowest and most despised grade of the municipal civil service, a process-server and debt-collector. There had been popes from poor backgrounds in the Middle Ages, but none in recent centuries, virtually all coming from aristocratic families. Pius was also the first pope for many generations to have had pastoral

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Nehemiah’s great preoccupation on his first visit to Jerusalem was the rebuilding of the city walls. He did not announce publicly his intention of rebuilding. He inspected the walls by night and tried to present his adversaries with a fait accompli. The opposition was led by “Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab” (2:19). Sanballat is known from the Elephantine papyri as governor of Samaria. The name Tobiah is associated with the powerful family of the Tobiads, who lived in Transjordan (modern Jordan) and who were still a powerful force in Judean politics in the second century B.C.E. The name Sanballat honors the Babylonian moon-god, Sin, but this is not necessarily significant, as some Yahwistic Jews also had Babylonian names (e.g., Zerubbabel). The name Tobiah, in contrast, means “Yahweh is good,” and suggests that its bearer worshiped the God of the Jews. Sanballat, Tobiah, and their friends express concern that Nehemiah was rebelling against the king (2:19). Later they claimed that Nehemiah wanted to make himself king (6:6-7). Significantly, however, they are not said to complain to the Persian court. They appear to have accepted Nehemiah’s royal authorization. Instead, the opponents only ridiculed the endeavor (4:1-3) and allegedly set a trap for Nehemiah, which he was smart enough to resist (6:1-9). These people were clearly involved in a power struggle with Nehemiah. His actions can be understood as an attempt to make Jerusalem independent of Samaria and Ammon, the home turf of Sanballat and Tobiah. He was not attempting to achieve independence from Persia. On the contrary, the distant Persian monarch was the source of his authority, by which he hoped to free Judah from the influence of its immediate neighbors. In addition to political problems, Nehemiah also had to deal with a severe economic crisis because of a famine. According to Nehemiah 5, there was a great outcry because people had to pledge their fields and houses to get grain. Some were forced to sell sons and daughters as slaves, and some daughters were ravished. The root of the problem (apart from drought, which probably precipitated the crisis) was “the king’s tax” (5:4). We do not have much specific information about Persian taxation in Judah, but it was evidently oppressive. Nehemiah was not about to challenge the king’s tax, since his own authority

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  DOCTRINAL PLURALISM 68 coincidence of opposites." In this sense it did not matter what names one used for God, so long as one used "negative theology" or "learned ignorance" to protect any such name from distortion. The effort of these theologians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to accommodate the language of Dionysian mysticism about "deification" and "neg- ative knowledge" to the common faith of the church was an especially poignant example of the doctrinal pluralism of the period. Everyone went on speaking about the one true faith as in some sense still "one," despite the variety of opinions about one article of faith after another. Yet doctrinal pluralism there had always been, and far more of it than the official po- sition of bishops and theologians was willing to ac- knowledge. What had managed to hold the pluralism within bounds was Augustine's elevation of the cath- olic unity of the church as the context not only for moral reform but for theological difference: Augus- tine diverged from Cyprian in basic teaching, but shared with him the commitment to the unity of the catholic church, within which their divergence was tolerable. But doctrinal pluralism came to grief in the fifteenth century—and to tragedy in the sixteenth cen- tury—when this presupposition of catholic unity itself lost its credibility. 2 One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic? In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII opened his most famous bull, Unam Sanctam, with the words: "By the re- quirement of the faith we are obliged to believe and hold one, holy, catholic, and indeed apostolic church"; in 1413 John Hus, the Czech Reformer, opened his most famous treatise, The Church, with the words: "Every pilgrim ought faithfully to believe the holy, catholic church." But Boniface was referring to the church whose visible head was "the Roman pontiff, [to whom] every human creature must be subject to be saved," as his closing words declared, while Hus was referring to "the totality of all who have been predestined," as he went on to explain a few para- graphs later. And Hus's nemesis at the Council of Constance, Gerson, while certainly no partisan of Pope Boniface, quoted the formula of the Nicene Creed, from which both Boniface and Hus were also quoting, as proof against Hus and Wycliffe that a church coun- cil had the right to condemn not only doctrinal ab- errations, but also such errors as pertained to the moral implications of the faith. In a sermon delivered at Constance a few months before the execution of Hus, Gerson gave a brief definition of each of the attributes of the church enumerated in the Nicene Creed (which he called the Apostles' Creed, whereas one of his contemporaries attributed the phrase to the Athana- sian Creed). He quoted the article of the creed again in another sermon at Constance as well as elsewhere, with the teachings of Hus in mind as a deviation from the true faith concerning the church. 69

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  THE BIBLE AND HISTORY The Bible is a product of history. It took shape over time, and its content and even its wording changed in the process. In this it is no different from any other book, except that the Bible is really a collection of books, and its composition and transmission is spread over an exceptionally long period of time. The Bible, however, is also immersed in history in another way that has implications for how we should study it. Much of it tells the story of a people, proceeding in chronological order, and so it has at least the appearance of a historical narrative. (One of the most influential biblical scholars of the twentieth century, Gerhard von Rad, once said that the Old Testament is “a history book.”) Not all books of the Bible have this history-like appearance. Books like Proverbs and Job have virtually no reference to dates or places that would enable us to locate them in history. But these books are exceptional in the corpus. If we read through the Pentateuch, we follow a story about humanity from the dawn of history, and then the emergence of a particular people, Israel. The story of this people continues in the “Former Prophets” and in Chronicles and Ezra- Nehemiah (and also in the books of Maccabees if we include the Apocrypha). The books of the prophets repeatedly refer to events in that history and are virtually unintelligible without reference to it. Only in the Writings, in some of the Psalms and in the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, Qoheleth), does the history of Israel recede from view, and even then it reappears in the later wisdom books in the Apocrypha (Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon). For most of Jewish and Christian history, there has been an uncritical assumption that the biblical story is historically true. In fact, for much of this time the Bible was virtually the only source of information about the events in question. In the last two hundred years, however, copious information about the ancient world has come to light through archaeological exploration and through the recovery of ancient literature. This information is often at variance with the account given in the Bible. Consequently, there is now something of a crisis in the interpretation of the Bible. This is a crisis of credibility: in brief, if the Bible

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

  But in the days before Dad was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for his Whipple surgery, my fear and anxiety roared back with a vengeance. I was down the street at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute getting my two-year checkup while Dad was getting ready to go back under the knife. Though I’d had plenty of experience with scans, too many to even count, my nerves were extra raw. Maybe it was because I was nervous for Dad. Maybe I was rattled by the small lump I’d recently found on my arm. Had my disease finally woken up and spread further? Whatever the reason, moments like these are when the rubber meets the road. All the mindset tools I’d cultivated stood ready for deployment. My heart was practically beating out of my chest as Brian and I checked in to get my scan results—my cue to find a private bathroom and glue myself together before things got worse. First, I focused on my breath. Next, I took a mental inventory of all the things that were right with my body. Sure, I had dozens of tumors in my lungs and liver, a strange lump on my arm, and a very vivid imagination, but there were sooo many parts of me that were working exceptionally well—including the parts that were struggling. In fact, there were way more things right with me than wrong. Finally, I reached for the strongest medicine in my toolkit: self-love. I looked in the bathroom mirror, and with all the compassion I could muster, I said: “I love you, Kris. I am here for you. Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out together.” When I first started telling myself stuff like this, I felt like a big cheeseball. Thank God no one can see me. But I could soon see how words of self-love really worked. So I repeated them over and over until I was relaxed enough to get my ass back to the waiting area in time to be escorted to the room I knew by heart. Three chairs, a privacy curtain, and an exam table with a disposable paper sheet (presumably in case you shit yourself). I took my usual seat, fixed my eyes on the doorknob, and silently repeated my bathroom mantras. As soon as Dr. D., my good-natured oncologist, entered, I felt a spike of adrenaline. This was the moment. Good news or bad, my body was jacked. One of the things I appreciate about Dr. D. is his bedside manner. He always bounces into the room with a smile on his face and gets right to it. No excruciating small talk. “Hey! Good to see you. So, everything looks really great,” he said.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  Greek medicine and philosophy concerned themselves with the aphrodisia and the use that ought to be made of them if one wished to care properly for one’s body. This problematization did not lead to a drawing of distinctions among those acts, their possible forms and varieties, in order to decide which ones were admissible and which were harmful or “abnormal.” By considering them in the aggregate, as the manifestation of a generic activity, it sought to determine the principles that would enable individuals to engage in them at the appropriate intensity and to distribute them in the right way, according to circumstances. Yet the clearly restrictive tendencies of such an economy attest to an anxiety about this sexual activity. An anxiety that related to the possible consequences of abuses; an anxiety that also related—especially so—to the act itself, which was always perceived in terms of a male, ejaculatory, “paroxystic” schema that appeared to adequately define all sexual activity. We see, then, that the importance that was accorded to the sexual act and to the forms of its rarefaction was owing not only to its negative effects on the body, but to what it was in itself and by nature: a violence that confounded the will, an expenditure that wasted the body’s resources, a procreation that was linked to the future death of the individual. The sexual act did not occasion anxiety because it was associated with evil but because it disturbed and threatened the individual’s relationship with himself and his integrity as an ethical subject in the making; if it was not properly measured and distributed, it carried the threat of a breaking forth of involuntary forces, a lessening of energy, and death without honorable descendants.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Okay, your turn. So let’s add to that Challenge List again. Now that you’ve done some smaller-scale stuff with your brave pants on, nudge yourself along to some things that scare you a little more, and this time get rid of the very things you think are keeping you safe. If you’re worried that your hands shake, your life preserver might be to drink only from a bottle, not a cup that might shake and spill. If you’re worried about blushing, you may wear one of your many turtlenecks. If you’re worried about running out of things to say, you may only go to parties with your partner. So drop the life preserver, pour your beer in a glass, and leave the bottle behind. Put on a V-neck shirt, blushing be damned. Go stag to a party. Or all three. Whatever your life preserver, leave it at home and see what happens. Try it out. Or as a wise, short-statured social anxiety therapist once said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Below, fill in some new challenges, along with the safety behaviors you’d like to drop. Then, as Dr. Richard Heimberg, the aforementioned father of social anxiety research, said to me when I asked the secret to overcoming social anxiety, “Go forth and do.” 5. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ 6. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ 7. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ * * * Nice work. As Dr. Seuss might say, you’re off to great places; you’re off and away! We’re almost up to the hardest stuff on your list. As you cruise into the home stretch, you may wish to psych yourself up with a pep talk—perhaps some self-affirmations. But affirmations often get a bad rap, evoking cheesy, overly earnest sessions with the bathroom mirror. The interweb makes fun of affirmations: “I become better each day in every way. Unless there is a Golden Girls marathon on, and then I’m not leaving the house.” Or, “I honor and express all facets of my being, regardless of state and local laws.” We make fun of affirmations because they feel tacky and dumb. But worse, they feel like a lie. If we try, in desperation, to psych ourselves up for our Challenge List with affirmations—I got this! I’m gonna be awesome! Yeah!—we are left feeling deflated. Why? Because we don’t believe them.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But it’s not just the physical signs of anxiety that trip us up; it’s how closely we pay attention to them. You probably know someone who’s the exact opposite of the princess in The Princess and the Pea—someone who can’t tell if she’s hungry or has no idea how he got that bruise. On the flip side, you probably also know someone with a remarkably clear sense of their own internal workings. This person may even be you. This awareness of one’s own body (or lack thereof) is called interoceptive awareness.1 Interoceptive awareness, unsurprisingly, is more sensitive in individuals with any kind of anxiety. Indeed, when those of us attuned to our bodies feel ourselves blush, sweat, tremble, stammer, or tear up that’s when things start to get all meta and we get anxious about our anxiety. Indeed, if our bodies spark the myth of how I feel is how I look, our brains fan the flames. This happens due to a quirk of thought called the illusion of transparency, which is exactly what it sounds like: We think our internal state is visible and will give us away. In normal, non-anxious life, we generally assume that others share our experience. Indeed, most of the time people can see what we see, hear what we hear. But in moments of high anxiety, we seem to forget that what goes on inside our bodies and brains is actually private. We feel our heart pounding, our panic rising, our thoughts racing, and think everyone can see through us like a jellyfish. But when reminded, we remember we are not jellyfish. One study even found that simply telling participants that, hey, guys, there’s this thing called the illusion of transparency, allowed them to strengthen their un-jellyfish-like spines and give a better speech performance. What’s more, when the participants’ speeches were viewed, raters agreed, meaning the reminder didn’t just lead to feeling better—it led to performing better. * * * Okay, now it’s time for a pop quiz! Is your refrigerator handle on the right or the left? What color was your childhood home? Did Einstein have a mustache? Got your answers? Nice work. To answer these questions, you probably conjured up a picture in your head. You “saw” your fridge, the home you grew up in, and Einstein’s mustachioed face. You created and held these images in your mind’s eye. Our brains do the same thing when we get anxious, which perpetuates “how I feel is how I look.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  After twenty years of helping define and refine corporate culture, we can offer up one warning: Most businesses took their corporate cultures for granted when all employees worked in the same building. When considering the world of remote work, we are entering the Wild West. Helping people—perhaps spread out over various time zones—feel like a part of a collective whole is an entirely different matter. To build culture in a remote world, and reduce anxiety in the process, managers must communicate more, not less, to help their people feel included and not be afraid to try to break out of the status quo. Kraft Heinz Company has done just that. Shirley Weinstein, head of Global Rewards, shared that her executive team has participated in live cooking showdowns in their home kitchens for employees to watch—incorporating their products from Philadelphia Cream Cheese to Oscar Mayer to Classico Pasta Sauce. The half-hour shows pit two executives against each other, cooking in their kitchens in front of their families. “Our global head of communications, Michael Mullen, is the engaging moderator, with a member of our culinary team to judge the creativity and use of our products,” she said. “The taste testers are their families, which is a great way to bring their children, their spouses, and even their dogs into the show.” She added that busy employees working remotely at first thought, “‘I don’t have time for this,’ but they joined in and appreciated the diversity that it brought to their workday. It was a time to reflect, to learn, to laugh, and to appreciate their leaders on a personal level.” As Kraft Heinz is attempting, building culture in a remote world also means clearly defining your mission and values and celebrating those who embody these grand ideals in interactions with customers or fellow team members. It also means using technology platforms and social media to provide ways that employees can connect and get to know each other, replicating the old water-cooler talk or sticking your head over the cubicle wall. Managers with remote teams also should spread leadership around to enhance ownership and engagement—asking certain folks on the team to run meetings about a subject they are passionate about or conduct training sessions on an area of their expertise. Bosses can also bring some fun into the mix by encouraging home workspace decorating contests or background competitions. Even little things can help build connection. For instance, if leaders bring in lunch for people who are in the office, they can make sure to send food to remote people as well. That’s a nice touch.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Using a computerized speed test, researchers found only 20 percent of Asian American adult test-takers and only 30 percent of White adults participating did not exhibit any subconscious racial preference between White people and Asian people. When measuring preference between White people and Black people, only 27 percent of White adults and 26 percent of Black adults showed no implicit bias. In one version of this test, researchers took famous Asian Americans such as Connie Chung, Michael Chang, and Kristi Yamaguchi and White foreigners such as Hugh Grant, Katarina Witt, and Gerard Depardieu, and timed test-takers connecting them to American symbols and foreign symbols. They learned that people found it much easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung. “That shows how deeply the category ‘American’ is White in many people’s minds,” Banaji said. Implicit biases developed from a human need to process information quickly to make split-second decisions; the brain is constantly using shortcuts to find connections between bits of data that come our way. If we are crossing the road, for instance, and we see a moving blur in the corner of our vision, our brains will very quickly connect that with an approaching car and we’ll jump. Life saved. Unfortunately, implicit biases can lead to harmful stereotypes when applied to people. As just one example, women are too often subconsciously perceived as less capable in traditionally male roles, say computer programming. A woman might pick up on her interviewer’s hesitancy and begin to feel less confident in herself, throwing the interview off course. Despite our best intentions, and without our awareness, stereotypes and assumptions can very easily creep into our minds and affect our actions, even when we are completely determined to be objective and fair. It is so prevalent that 20 percent of large US companies today provide implicit bias trainings to their employees, and half of US companies say they will offer it within the next few years. Starbucks recently closed all of its stores to have mandatory racial bias training for its employees. That’s a good start. When biases are not addressed, they can affect working relationships and trust, undercut diverse talent recruitment and inclusion efforts, and impact promotion and professional development opportunities. Derek Lundsten, president and CEO of LifeGuides, believes being different should be a good thing. “You don’t have to be a person of color or of a certain identity or a certain gender to feel on the outside.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Others don’t want to coddle their workers, especially during times of crisis when there are so many other demands on their time. A few leaders have shared the view that praising their people all the time for just doing their job will come across as condescending or fake. “Who am I,” they ask, “a praise-giving robot?” Well, first, it’s not nonstop praise that’s called for, it is gratitude expressed in the right way and at the right time. Managers need employees who are motivated to achieve. And one of the simplest and most effective ways to motivate people to achieve is by regularly expressing gratitude. Our research shows unequivocally that offering such positive reinforcement produces impressive boosts in team performance. Here’s some of that evidence: Research conducted for us by Willis Towers Watson found that when employee engagement is in the bottom quartile of national rankings, customer satisfaction is 20 percentage points lower than when employee engagement is in the top quartile. And of the people who report the highest level of engagement at work, a whopping 94 percent agree that their managers are effective at recognizing them when they go above and beyond. That shows an extremely strong link between gratitude and employee engagement, and engagement and customer satisfaction. All of this is made more startling when we add morale into the mix. Some 56 percent of employees who say they have low morale at work give their managers a failing grade on gratitude, while only 2 percent of people who have low morale say they have a boss who is great at appreciating their work. How Gratitude Affects AnxietyMore than two thousand years ago, Cicero called gratitude “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” Yet gratitude receives little attention as an area of research in the business world. That is unfortunate. Expressions of gratitude, when done regularly, can produce profound effects. In a world filled with uncertainty, when managers frequently offer up their thanks for great work—and are specific in how an achievement has helped the team—they can significantly reduce anxiety levels. Such acts are like regular deposits in the Bank of Engagement. They build up reserves for when an employee’s work does have to be corrected. Workers who have a strong degree of confidence that their manager has faith in their abilities are better able to receive criticism and realize that the coaching is specific to a particular task or aspect of their work rather than a condemnation of their overall capabilities. Another plus: Whether leaders regularly thank team members for work well done, or if they receive thanks themselves, they are better able to bounce back from adversity with greater resilience, according to Dr.