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)

  The men, too, sought calm and kindness rather than passion in their wives. They valued the woman’s ability to create a comfortable home. They said that they wanted a woman on whom they could depend. Being older, they were much more aware of how to assess a woman’s moods and how to repair the relationship when necessary. Several spoke of their wives in romantic terms, describing their beauty and caring qualities. But they also mentioned their long work days and concern that their wives might be lonely. They worried they might lose their love and fidelity. While this ongoing, subsurface tension was more a residue of their parents’ divorce than a current reality, it made the men eager to be good husbands. They tried hard to please their wives and felt blessed by unusual good fortune when they felt loved. Waiting for the Other ShoeEVEN IN MARRIAGES as loving as Karen’s, there are residues from the divorce. We discussed her problem with handling conflict but now she described another: “Whenever Gavin’s late, when he has a faculty meeting, when he has to be out of town for a consulting job, my first thought—and I hate myself for this—is that he’s going to leave me. He doesn’t really love me.” “Is that what you mean by waiting for the other shoe to drop?” She smiled wryly. “If you’re asking me whether I’m still afraid, the answer is yes, even though I’m married to a man who truly loves me. I’ve finally come to accept that my fears won’t go away. It’s like they’re imprinted in my head. They’re not as strong as they used to be and Gavin tries to teach me to laugh them away.” Her serious expression had not faded. “It works some of the time.” Karen’s story is fascinating because it illustrates how even a happy marriage carries a residue of the past that can ricochet into the present at any time. Such triggers can be an unexpected absence, a moderate disagreement, or a flash of anger. The child of divorce thinks, “This is the other shoe dropping. Here it comes. I always knew it couldn’t last. The man is gone. The marriage is over. I am alone and abandoned, just like I always knew I would be.” Karen’s logic is impeccable: if you’re afraid of loss, you’re safe only if you have nothing to lose. But if you have a happy marriage, a loving man, a beautiful child, then you’re in danger. One young woman stated it plainly: “No matter how much I love someone, no matter how much I trust him, no matter how good and trustworthy he is, there is a tiny corner of me that does not believe he will stay. I will never believe it.”

• From Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)

  This question plagues contemporary men and women, and many seek therapy because they feel their lives to be senseless and aimless. We are meaning-seeking creatures. Biologically, our nervous systems are organized in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations. Meaning also provides a sense of mastery: feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them. Even more important, meaning gives birth to values and, hence, to a code of behavior: thus the answer to why questions (Why do I live?) supplies an answer to how questions (How do I live?). There are, in these ten tales of psychotherapy, few explicit discussions of meaning in life. The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts—not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter. This existential dilemma—a being who searches for meaning and certainty in a universe that has neither—has tremendous relevance for the profession of psychotherapist. In their everyday work, therapists, if they are to relate to their patients in an authentic fashion, experience considerable uncertainty. Not only does a patient’s confrontation with unanswerable questions expose a therapist to these same questions, but also the therapist must recognize, as I had to in “Two Smiles,” that the experience of the other is, in the end, unyieldingly private and unknowable. Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession. Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  As urbanization developed in India, the sages were disturbed by a new level of aggression. By the sixth century BCE, infant states were developing; these brought a degree of stability to the region, but the kings could impose order on their subjects only by means of their armies, which they also used to conquer more territory for themselves. The new market-based economy was fueled by greed, and bankers and merchants, locked in ceaseless competition, preyed ruthlessly on one another. To some, life seemed more violent than when cattle rustling had been the backbone of the economy. The old religion no longer spoke to the changing times. Increasingly people felt uneasy about the cruelty of animal sacrifice, which seemed at odds with the ideal of ahimsa, and looked instead to the “renouncers” (samnyasins), who had turned their back on society to craft an entirely different kind of humanity. The mind-changing discipline of yoga had become central to Indian spirituality.16 Classical yoga was not an aerobic exercise but a systematic assault on the ego. The word yoga (“yoking”) is itself significant. It was originally used by the Aryans to describe the tethering of draft animals to the war chariot before a raid, but the new men of yoga were engaged in the conquest of inner space and in a raid on the unconscious drives that held human beings captive to their me-first instincts. In order to achieve an ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm, a yogi did the opposite of what came naturally. Instead of succumbing to the ceaseless motion that characterizes all sentient beings, he would sit as still as a plant or a statue. He controlled his respiration, the most fundamental and automatic of our physical functions, his aim being to stop breathing for as long as possible between exhalation and inhalation. He learned to master the ceaseless flux of thoughts, sensations, and fantasies that coursed through his mind in order to concentrate “on one point” (ekagrata). As a result, he found that he saw other objects and people differently; because he had repressed the aura of memory and personal association surrounding each one of them, he no longer saw them through the filter of his own desires and needs. The “I” was disappearing from his thinking.

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

  At first, his rain checks didn’t faze me. But as they began to pile up, I realized that “not right now” was Dad’s way of saying he’d had enough. In reality, Mom was over capacity with his round-the-clock needs, too. Plus, she was experiencing her own fear, anxiety, and caregiver fatigue. But instead of pausing and honoring where they were at, my anxiety drove me to keep searching, trying, pushing. I’ll never forget the look on their faces when we met the nutritionist assigned to us at the local hospital where Dad got his follow-up treatments. “Wait, are you Kris Carr? Who wrote all those books about cancer? Wow, OK, just do whatever she says, you’re in great hands!” This was the last thing either of my parents wanted to hear. It reminded me of my first Thanksgiving after going vegan as part of my cancer-fighting regimen. I couldn’t stop yammering about the benefits of a plant-based diet. As always, my parents were troupers. They even made a bunch of vegan dishes to share. All was well until an actual cooked turkey came out. Suddenly, the newbie vegan activist in me decided it was the perfect time to preach a sermon on the intersection of health, ethics, and the environment. Why my lecture fell flat was a mystery to me. “Love,” Dad said, “I know you’re passionate about this stuff, and we’re on board and even willing to try it ourselves—I mean, not all the way, but a lot. But if you want your message to resonate with people, you can’t pound them over the head. Ease up. You have to meet them where they are.” Translation: don’t be a dick and ruin Thanksgiving. He was right. Nobody wants to be told how to live—and they definitely don’t want to be forced to change. In fact, the only time you can change someone is when they’re in diapers. Yet there I was, wagging my finger about how superior my compassionate choices were, while failing to extend that same compassion to my family. And now here I was, years later, trying to fix Dad’s food and control his lifestyle in an effort to calm my anxiety and make cancer leave him alone. I wasn’t interested in what he wanted or what his body could tolerate, because my fear of losing him was superseding my ability to put his needs first. While his rupture caused another rupture in my life, it didn’t give me carte blanche to override his preferences. Cleary, my worries needed a similar heart-to-heart. Don’t be a dick and ruin the time you have left with your dad. To meet him where he was, I’d have to accept his needs while learning how to manage my own fear and anxiety.

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

  What safety behavior did Jia use? How is he trying to keep the guard from thinking he’s a total nut job? In this case, it’s speed. Jia moves in quickly, chatters his words, and gets out, as he put it, “like some sort of small animal running away from a predator.” As for the rest of us, we might avoid eye contact, speak in a low, mumbling voice, or hover a few steps away. This all makes sense—we’re trying to keep ourselves safe. But later, when Jia was editing the video of the encounter, he saw what he had missed. The security guard wasn’t hostile in the slightest; he was just perplexed. Jia also realized the guard’s “Why?” was an offer to extend the conversation. Jia could have been honest and said, “I’m trying to overcome my fear of rejection, so I am forcing myself to make absurd requests.” Or he could have offered to leave his driver’s license as collateral and promised to repay him. But Jia let his safety behaviors get the best of him and skedaddled. Jia vowed to do better the next day. On Day Two, he went to a burger joint for lunch. As he was filling his cup with soda at the dispenser, he saw a sign that said: “Free Refills.” Jia’s eyes lit up. After finishing his bacon cheeseburger, Jia approached the counter. In his phone video, a young guy with glasses, a red apron, and an armload of tattoos strides up to help him. “What can I do for you?” he asks. This time, Jia looks the guy in the eye, smiles broadly, and stands up a little straighter. “Yeah, your burger is really good. Can I get a burger refill?” “A what?” says the cashier. “A burger refill.” “A burger refill,” the cashier repeats, trying to wrap his head around the question. “What do you mean?” He’s not unfriendly. Like the security guard, he is merely perplexed and curious. “Like a free refill. Do you have free refills for burgers?” The cashier gets it. “Uh, no free refills for burgers,” he says. “How come you have it for drinks but not for burgers?” asks Jia. He asks this with a steady confidence, as if his request were totally reasonable. The cashier chuckles. “That’s the way it is, man,” he says with a shrug. Jia smiles, thanks him, says he’d like the place even more if they offered burger refills, and saunters off.

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

  Once we feel threatened, we lock in and see threat everywhere. It makes sense—the rabbit keeps an eye out for the fox at all times. But it costs us. To illustrate, look around you and scan for things that are blue. The blue sky, your blue jeans, perhaps a bluebird outside or a blue book on your shelf. Done? Okay, now try to recall what you saw that was red. Exactly. When our attention is directed elsewhere, we miss out. There are probably plenty of red things around you, but since you weren’t attending to them, you didn’t see them. So it is with threat. When we selectively zoom in on turned backs and grumpy scowls, we miss the nodding heads and smiling faces surrounding them. Ah, faces. We particularly find threat in faces. Pictures of angry and disgusted faces have been used in innumerable social anxiety studies to send participants’ threat-o-meters spinning. Even smiling faces get interpreted as a threat to a socially anxious brain. And while it might make sense to avoid angry faces, avoiding smiling faces doesn’t seem useful to anyone. But a research group in the Netherlands led by Dr. Mike Rinck of Radboud University Nijmegen created an ingenious method of training a socially anxious brain to feel comfortable with smiling faces. In the study, Rinck and his colleagues showed participants pictures of faces on a computer screen and equipped them with a joystick. Pulling on the joystick zoomed in on the face, making it grow until it abstracted and disappeared, while pushing on the joystick zoomed out on the face, shrinking it until it vanished. Enlarging the face mimicked approach, while pushing away mimicked avoidant retreat. Over hundreds of trials, half the participants were instructed to pull a crowd’s worth of smiling pictures toward them, while the other half pushed the pictures away, shrinking them until they disappeared into blackness on the screen. Joystick pull by joystick pull, the participants who pulled the smiles toward them, the researchers hoped, would rewire their brains to see smiling faces as just that—friendly faces safe to approach. To test whether the training spilled over into real life, the team asked each participant to give a one-minute speech on camera, plus they were told their video would be evaluated on attractiveness, friendliness, competence, and more. In the face (pun intended) of impending judgment, the group who had practiced approaching smiling faces was less anxious (not to mention happier) after the speech than the group who pushed smiling faces away. In short, it worked. Of course, we don’t travel the world armed with a joystick that allows us to push unwanted sights away and pull others close (though someone should totally invent that). So how to adapt the findings of the lab to the real world?

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

  Method 4: Provide Frequent ValidationWhat else can a manager do to facilitate feelings of connection and avoid exclusion in their teams? We turn to a commencement address given at Harvard University by Oprah Winfrey: “I have to say that the single most important lesson I learned in twenty-five years talking every single day to people was that there’s a common denominator in our human experience: We want to be validated. We want to be understood. I’ve done over thirty-five thousand interviews in my career. And as soon as that camera shuts off, everyone turns to me and inevitably, in their own way, asks this question: ‘Was that okay?’ I heard it from President Bush. I heard it from President Obama. I’ve heard it from heroes and from housewives. I’ve heard it from victims and perpetrators of crimes. I even heard it from Beyoncé in all of her Beyoncéness. . . . [We] all want to know, ‘Did you hear me? Do you see me? Did what I say mean anything to you?’” What Winfrey speaks about is a leader noticing and appreciating a person’s inherent value. That’s part of gratitude, which we’ll dive into more in Chapter 9 . The point of gratitude isn’t just about thanking others for their accomplishments, it’s about helping people see their worth as a colleague and a human being. And it pays off for managers, too. In one Glassdoor survey, more than half of employees said feeling more appreciation from their boss would help them stay longer at their company. Method 5: Include RemotesA last suggestion in the process of fighting exclusion is to carefully include those who work remotely all or part of the time, which can certainly be anxiety-inducing in and of itself. One of the growing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that more organizations have embraced the concept of working from home. Before the virus, most of our clients had a small percent of people who worked away from the office. Some were allowing their people to work a day a week remotely. Then the virus came and overnight everyone had to learn to work off-site. Some companies have realized this can have distinctive advantages. Commute time disappears, meetings grow shorter and can be more focused, they can access talent from anywhere in the world, and many have been able to downsize physical facilities. One of those companies is a telecom firm we share office space with. Leaders decided to permanently shutter an office and have their people work from home. We bumped into some of the IT professionals and they acted as if they’d been given a second Christmas. I don’t have to deal with people interrupting me anymore! In contrast, some of the bubbly client services folks acted as if the world was about to end considering that they would not be together in person day-to-day.

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

  Oh, and in all of this, nothing ever gives managers permission to “out” people who aren’t ready. I Don’t See Color (and Other Dumb Things to Say) Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, said at a town-hall event that he doesn’t see color when it comes to race. Schultz said, “As somebody who grew up in a very diverse background as a young boy in the projects, I didn’t see color as a young boy and I honestly don’t see color now.” Says activist Franchesca Ramsey, “People who say this usually mean well—they want you to know they’re sooo not racist that they can’t even conceive of a reality in which racism exists. But what they’re actually saying is that racial identity is bad, not that racial oppression is bad. It suggests people’s experiences aren’t valid—or flat-out aren’t real. If you wear glasses and I say, ‘I don’t even see your glasses,’ that doesn’t mean you suddenly have 20/20 vision; it just means I’m in denial. Or maybe I need glasses myself.” Statements denying there’s a problem are problematic to diversity and inclusion efforts, says Janice Gassam, PhD, author of Dirty Diversity . “Anyone who is able to see can discern and recognize one skin color from the next. How can you possibly fix something that you don’t believe you actually see? It’s important to understand that the goal is not to be color-blind. The goal is actually to see and recognize skin color but to control and regulate your innate impulse to make decisions based on such characteristics,” she added. Gassam is of course correct. We all see color. We see height and weight. We remember when someone tells us they are part of the LGBTQ+ community or a minority religious group. We must recognize that each of us has preconceived notions and expectations about different groups of people. Pretending we can’t see differences shows a lack of empathy and ignores when certain groups or individuals are being alienated. Implicit bias is something that we shouldn’t be afraid to recognize in ourselves, and we should actually seek it out so we can unlearn expectations. Two of the leading scholars in implicit bias, social psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, talk about this in their aptly titled book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People . They say implicit bias can affect people who say, quite honestly, that they are horrified by these types of attitudes. They refer to a study by the Pew Research Center.

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

  One note: bring your focus back to your task, not just any random thing. Putting your attention on something other than the task at hand (“Maybe if I focus on my breathing I’ll feel better” or “Must. Check. Twitter.”) is distraction and not what we’re aiming for. Instead, redirect your focus to what you’re supposed to be doing. To further drive home the power of turning your attention inside out, try an experiment suggested by Dr. David Clark of Oxford. Have two separate conversations, he suggests, with store clerks, co-workers, whomever. The first time, focus your attention inward on your performance, your body, your anxiety. Monitor what you’re saying and work hard to manage their impression of you. Focus on you, you, you. Then, in the second conversation, turn your attention outward. Look at your conversation partner’s face. Listen closely to what they’re saying. Focus on them, them, them. This is a fundamental shift. Which conversation is more productive? Which is more pleasant? Where do you get the best response? I’ll bet you a rockin’ rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” it’s the second. Says Dr. Clark, “It helps people discover through experience that what they’ve been doing to manage their social anxiety is not helping; it’s actually part of the problem. Try this courageous and challenging thing—changing your behavior—so you can learn something new.” Diego did exactly this. He practiced shifting his attention away from monitoring and weighing his words. With all the freed-up bandwidth, he focused on his tasks: taking vitals, listening to his patients’ questions, and yes, performing Pap smears and testicular exams. As he practiced, he felt a palpable difference. He realized so much of his attention had been focused inward, which he thought had been helpful but had left little for his job. Now he doesn’t let himself get sucked into a whirlpool of self-absorbed prophecies. By turning his attention inside out, far from coming across as stupid, he’s made room for the attentive, responsive doctor who is anything but. * * * Sometimes when we’re feeling socially anxious, we do focus outward, but we tend to focus on what might be going wrong. Our conversation partner looks away and we think he is scanning desperately for an escape route. Our colleague shifts in her seat and we decide she thinks we’re a weirdo. We fear judgment but then, oddly, twist ourselves into a pretzel to find it. This is called attention to threat.

• From Open (2009)

  Now Ivanisevic’s serving at 4–5. He double-faults. Twice. He’s down love–30. He’s cracking under the strain. I haven’t broken this guy in the last hour and a half and now he’s breaking himself. He misses another first serve. He’s coming apart. I know it. I see it. No one knows better than I what coming apart looks like. I also know how it feels. I know precisely what’s happening inside Ivanisevic’s body. His throat is closing. His legs are quivering. But then he quiets his body and hits a second serve to the back of the box, a beam of yellow light that barely nicks the line. A puff of chalk shoots up as if he hit the line with an assault rifle. Then he hits another unreturnable serve. Suddenly it’s 30–all. He misses another first serve, makes the second. I crush a return, he hits a half volley, I run in and pass him and start the long walk back to the baseline. I tell myself, You can win this thing with one swing. One swing. You’ve never been this close. You may never be again. And that’s the problem. What if I get this close and don’t win? The ridicule. The condemnation. I pause, try to shift my focus back to Ivanisevic. I need to guess which way he’s coming with his serve. OK, a typical lefty, serving to the ad court in a pressure point, hits a bending slider, out wide, that sweeps his opponent off the court. But Ivanisevic isn’t typical. His serve in a pressure point is generally a flat bomb up the middle. Why he prefers that serve, God knows. Maybe he shouldn’t. But he does. I know this about him. I know he’s coming up the middle. Sure enough, here he comes, but he nets the serve. Good thing, because that thing was a comet, right on the line. Even though I guessed right, moved right, I couldn’t have put my racket on it. Now the crowd rises. I call time, to have a talk with myself, aloud, saying: Win this point or I’ll never let you hear the end of it, Andre. Don’t hope he double-faults, don’t hope he misses. You control what you can control. Return this serve with all your strength, and if you return it hard but miss, you can live with that. You can survive that. One return, no regrets. Hit harder. He tosses the ball, serves to my backhand. I jump in the air, swing with all my strength, but I’m so tight that the ball to his backhand side has mediocre pace. Somehow he misses the easy volley. His ball smacks the net and just like that, after twenty-two years and twenty-two million swings of a tennis racket, I’m the 1992 Wimbledon champion.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  On the forest trail to the put in I remember Hannah being annoyed with me, because it took me too long to put my life jacket on and too long to secure my paddle into my kayak and too long to pick my kayak up and trudge down the forest trail to the put in as I stopped and turned to look at things and got the kayak tip caught in bushes and wow look at my own magnificent red converse sneakers a step at a time in front of me making a rhythm and cottonwood blowing around like summer snow and look at the intriguing hats in the branches no wait those are BIRDS and stopping and laughing until she came back for me going WHAT ARE YOU DOING, EXACTLY? My kayak in the dirt. Eye to eye, she saw it. Christ Lidia, you are high. What the fuck? You have to go in the water. To my huhuhuhuhuhuh. So she slapped me hot and hard right on the cheek. Time stopped. I’m pretty sure my pupils pinned. I saw stars. I liked it. For a split second I felt alive. I wanted her to do it again. Harder. But I didn’t say anything. Hannah turned and picked up her kayak and left the trail in the trees, making for the rocks near the river’s edge. We could see the rest of our class up ahead - some on the rocks, some in the water. Still stunned into focus, at the point where the rocks met the water I saw a dead steelhead, half in water, half out. Even dead, she was something. The silver and black and blue sheen of her body, the white of her underbelly. She smelled like ocean. “She” because of her split open belly, and the dried up jelly of sunburned eggs on the rocks. I had a hard time not looking. LIDIA. Hannah calling. No one seemed to notice we were a little late, they just dipped in and paddled around like spinning ducks in a big pool of slow water, their shiny bright colored helmets looking like Easter eggs to me. Big red’s hair briefly mesmerized me, as usual, and I reached my hand out to touch it, but Hannah pinched my arm where fat grows and I got clear again. In we went, Hannah ahead of me, me getting a little too interested in the black lines on the ends of my paddle. Huhuhuhuhuhuh. I had my bright blue tard helmet on backwards but no one noticed.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I told Carla and she held me and gave me lots of kisses and told me it would all be over tomorrow and that we could make love several times then. I couldn’t sit still. My stomach was roiling with nervousness, so I decided to type. I called Mom this morning to wish her a Happy New Year and found out she and her husband, Arney, are driving over to see the match. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I hate to have them come all that way just to watch me wrestle. I always get nervous before a match, but this is the worst ever. XXIIIIt’s finally stopped snowing and the morning is beautiful. Before I finally hit the sack last night I taped a note to the coffeepot reminding Dad please not to shovel the walk. Sometimes he gets up early and shovels before work. I slept late. It’s almost ten. Carla left a note telling me not to be nervous. I usually feel logy when I sleep so late, but I feel okay this morning. Aside from being nervous. Whenever I tell Dad I’m nervous he always tells me to have confidence. I have all the confidence in the fucking world. I’m just nervous is all. I shovel slowly and with deliberation. The snow is so deep I can’t push it as usual. I dig down to concrete, then take it shovelful by shovelful. Mr. Sears yells from across the street do I want to use his snow blower. I shout back no thanks. He waves through the white mist thrown up by his machine and yells me good luck tonight. When I finish, the snowbanks are so high the sidewalk seems like a tunnel. They’re higher than my head. It’s three thirty. I’m just getting more and more nervous hanging around home. I can’t take a nap, I don’t feel like reading, and there’s nothing but shit on TV, so I guess I’ll take a slow walk up to school. I call Dad to let him know I’m leaving early and that he won’t need to call and wake me up. “Good luck, Son. Do your best.” “Thanks, Dad. I will.” It’s all we ever say. I guess it’s all there is to say. But just once I wish he’d tell me, “Go out there and make ’em remember us, Louden! Bulge and snap! Crack, zing, whip, dance, and fly! Write the name of Swain in shivers up everybody’s spine!” Dad would never tell me that. But maybe he’s thinking it. If he were just thinking it, I’d be happy. * * * Leeland Wain is in the gym, shooting at one of the side baskets with his two little girls. The mats have already been taped down in the middle of the floor. Carts and carts of folding chairs jam the doorway by the ticket booth. Sharon and Rosalie see me and run across the floor in that funny way little girls run.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Another reason you might not talk about what turns you on is that you don’t really know yourself. Your body is as much a mystery to you as it is to your spouse. If you don’t know what gives you pleasure, what makes you feel aroused, what triggers an orgasm, it’s time to go back to school. You have to study your body. You need to know what feels good and what leaves you feeling cold. You can’t teach your spouse what works for you if you are clueless. You’ve got to spend some time exploring your body, getting to know yourself intimately. Although some people feel uncomfortable with the idea of self-stimulation, it’s important that you push yourself through your discomfort for the purpose of educating yourself. Once you have more information about what it takes for your body to feel excitement and pleasure, you can begin to have more productive conversations about sex with your spouse. But there are a few things you should keep in mind before you decide to sit down and discuss matters. Much of the advice that I gave in the previous chapter about constructive conversations applies here. Pick a time when you both feel ready to talk. Don’t do it when either of you is tired, in a bad mood, or angry at each other or when there are distractions. Make sure you have enough privacy so you don’t feel squeamish or nervous about being interrupted or overheard. A safe, comfortable environment is very important. Before you begin your conversation, you should have a pretty good idea about what you’re hoping to accomplish. As you read some of the reasons couples talk about sex, determine what you’re hoping to accomplish and review whether what you’re planning to discuss will accomplish that end: To let their partners know what feels good To talk about areas they’d like to improve To negotiate differences in sexual interests and preferences To talk about aspects of their sexual relationship that aren’t comfortable or pleasurable To share fantasies To correct faulty perceptions To share their vulnerabilities To request sexual gifts To express interest and attraction To heighten sexual pleasure To be playful Now, let’s review the tips I gave you in the last chapter and see how they apply here. • Start off on a good note. Since sex is such a sensitive subject, if you and your spouse haven’t talked about sex all that much during your marriage, it will help to ease your partner’s mind by beginning with the parts of your sexual relationship that you like. For instance, say, “I appreciate that when I suggest that we try new things, you’re often willing to experiment. I like that.” Or, “When we take lots of time for foreplay, it feels really good to me. I like that you enjoy taking things slowly sometimes too.” • Talk about what you want rather than criticize.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Instead of saying, “Take more initiative,” tell your spouse, “It’s great when you are the one to ask me to go upstairs to our bedroom or to tell me you’re horny. I feel I’m the one to get things going most of the time. And it would also be wonderful if, when we’re making love, you took the lead in suggesting new positions or that we try something new like, using oils or giving each other massages.” Instead of saying, “I wish you wouldn’t put so much pressure on me to be sexual all the time,” say, “It feels as if you’re always talking about our sexual relationship. It would really help me if you just gave me some time to get charged up myself. Please don’t bring up talk about our sexual relationship for a week or two. Give it a rest. I know sex is important to you and it is to me too, but the more you talk about it, the less I want it. So give me a week or two now and then without letting me know you’re ready.” • Use I-messages. As with any other topic in your marriage, it helps if you talk about how you feel rather than comment on your spouse’s sexual abilities or techniques. Keep in mind that things that aren’t exciting or stimulating for you might be very exciting to someone else. So, talk about you. Here are two examples: Instead of saying, “You’re so goal oriented and impatient. You don’t take enough time to help me feel aroused and you expect me to have an orgasm,” say, “When we’re being sexual and you slow the pace, I really like it. For instance, I seem to need more time for foreplay in order to feel excited. Also, sometimes I just enjoy making out, and I’m satisfied with that. You don’t have to worry if I don’t have an orgasm. It’s fine with me if I don’t from time to time. I wish it would be fine with you.” Instead of saying, “Your sexual desire is nonexistent. I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re not into it anymore,” try, “Lately, I’ve been feeling as if you aren’t particularly interested in having sex with me. It makes me wonder if you’re feeling okay or if something’s wrong. I miss feeling close to you.” • If things get heated, take a time-out.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  By now, you should know what happens when statements or questions such as these are asked. Instead of discussing the issues at hand, couples become defensive and debate how frequently those problem areas actually do occur. But that’s not the point, is it? It’s much more helpful to avoid generalizing and exaggerating if you don’t want to push your spouse’s buttons. Instead of saying, “I’m always the one pursuing you,” try saying, “It seems to me that I pursue you more often than you pursue me. I would really like it if you would put out more effort and tell me that you want to make love once in a while.” A bit different, isn’t it? And speaking of exaggeration, people often do it without thinking. One of the most puzzling and even humorous things that happens in my office when I talk about sex with couples is how incredibly different their perspectives are about what actually happens in their bedrooms. For example, if I ask, “How frequently do you make love?” I often wonder if the two spouses answering my question are actually in the same marriage because I hear two very different accounts. One spouse will say, “One or two times a week,” and the other will, with a look of disbelief, reply, “Excuse me, it’s more like one or two times a month!” It’s not that people are intentionally under- or overestimating the level of their sexual activity; it’s just that their disparate starting points—one person wants very little sex and one person wants lots—color their perceptions. Everything in life, including sex, is relative. • Don’t get discouraged if your partner doesn’t follow your lead right away. If talking about sex is new to both of you and you’re taking the lead, congratulations. I know this has been challenging. But you’re doing it for a very good reason. You want a better sexual relationship, and talking frankly about sex is an important step in getting there. Since this is very new to both of you, your spouse may not be as at ease with talking as you are. When you reveal your thoughts and feelings, your spouse might not be as open as you would like him or her to be. Perhaps, out of embarrassment, s/he starts joking around or evading the conversation. Or maybe s/he has a very difficult time being specific. Whatever the roadblocks to clear communication might be, it’s important that you don’t get frustrated and clam up. Just take a deep breath, and keep going. With a little practice, you’ll both get better at it, and if you don’t, you can always get some help from a trained sex therapist. * * *

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  When you make the decision to get divorced, you also can’t know how that decision will work out. That’s true whether you are deciding about choosing a major or changing it, or starting a job or quitting it, or starting a project or abandoning it. When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can’t know for sure whether you can succeed at what you’re doing because that’s probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer. The desire for certainty is the siren song calling us to persevere, because perseverance is the only path to knowing for sure how things will turn out if you stay the course. If you choose to quit, you will always be left to wonder, “What if?” Just as the Sirens of mythology lured sailors toward their song, we are lured to persevering because we want to know . It’s the only way to avoid those “what ifs.” The problem, of course, is that sometimes, the siren song lures you toward a rocky shoal that breaks your ship apart. Or it leads you to your death at the top of Everest. In fact, the only time you can be sure you should quit is when it’s no longer a decision, when you’re at the edge of the abyss or you’ve already stumbled into it. Then you have no choice but to abandon course. I challenge you to put yourself in the position of climbers near the top of the mountain. Imagine having spent all that time and effort and money. Imagine the sacrifices that you and your family have made for you to get to the top of Everest. You are within a few hundred feet—just a few hours—from the summit. Could you turn around without knowing for sure whether you could have made it, after everything you put yourself through and all you’ve asked of others? How much of a burden would it be having to live with “What if I hadn’t quit?” for the rest of your life? Most people in that situation could not do it. Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke did, but a much larger number—those who died that day and many others who barely escaped death—were unable to resist the call to persevere. The Super Bowl Is a Corporate GraveyardJust as you have to exercise skill in choosing which hills to climb, you also need skill in choosing when to climb down. As the world changes, we should be quitting stuff that isn’t working or is no longer what people want or what we want. We should be surveying the landscape, both to understand when that may happen as well as to find something better we can turn our attention to. It turns out that just because you’re on a big mountain, you aren’t necessarily on particularly solid ground, even if you’re near the top.

• From Wild (2012)

  The men got into the truck again and I rode in the back for a couple of miles by myself, until we reached the spot where Walter had parked his truck. He and Carlos drove off in it and left me alone with Frank, who had another hour of work to do. I sat in the cab of the yellow truck watching Frank go back and forth on a tractor, grading the road. Each time he passed, he waved to me, and as he rode away I surreptitiously explored the contents of his truck. In the glove compartment there was a silver flask of whiskey. I took a shallow swig, and quickly put it back, my lips on fire. I reached under the seat and pulled out a slim black case and opened it up and saw a gun as silver as the whiskey flask and shut it again and shoved it beneath the seat. The keys to the truck dangled from the ignition, and I thought idly about what would happen if I started it up and drove away. I took off my boots and massaged my feet. The little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland was still there, but faded to a faint morose yellow now. I ran my finger over it, over the bump of the tiny track mark still detectable at its core, amazed at my own ludicrousness, and then put my socks back on so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. “What kind of woman are you?” Frank asked when he was done with his work and he’d climbed into the truck beside me. “What kind?” I asked. Our eyes locked and something in his unveiled itself, and I looked away. “Are you like Jane? Like the kind of woman Tarzan would like?” “I guess so,” I said, and laughed, though I felt a creeping anxiety, wishing that Frank would start the truck and drive. He was a big man, rangy and chiseled and tan. A miner who looked to me like a cowboy. His hands reminded me of all the hands of the men I’d known growing up, men who worked their bodies for a living, men whose hands would never get clean no matter how hard they scrubbed. As I sat there with him, I felt the way I always do when alone in certain circumstances with certain men—that anything could happen. That he could go about his business, mannerly and kind, or he could grab me and change the course of things entirely in an instant. With Frank in his truck, I watched his hands, his every move, each cell in my body on high alert, though I appeared as relaxed as if I’d just woken from a nap.

• From Wild (2012)

  “It’s twelve dollars for the night,” the man added in a gasping voice. “The thing is,” I said, “I don’t happen to have any cash on me. I’m on this big trip. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—the PCT?—and there’s all this snow up in the mountains—it’s a record year—and anyway, I got off the trail and I didn’t plan to be here because these women who gave me a ride accidentally dropped me off in the wrong place and it was—” “None of that changes the fact you have to pay, young lady,” the man bellowed with surprising power, his voice silencing me like a great horn from the fog. “If you can’t pay, you’ve got to pack up and leave,” said the woman. She wore a sweatshirt that had a pair of baby raccoons peeping coyly from a burrow in a tree on her chest. “There’s no one even here! It’s the middle of the night! What harm would it do if I simply—” “Them are the rules,” heaved the man. He turned away and got back into the truck, done with me. “We’re sorry, miss, but we’re the camp hosts and keeping everyone to the rules is what we’re here to do,” said the woman. Her face softened for a moment in apology before she pursed her lips and added, “We’d hate to have to call the police.” I lowered my eyes and addressed her raccoons. “I just—I can’t believe that I’m doing any harm. I mean, no one would even be using this site if I weren’t here,” I said quietly, trying to make one last appeal, woman to woman. “We’re not saying you have to leave,” she shouted, as if she were scolding a dog to hush up. “We’re saying you’ve got to pay.” “Well, I can’t.” “There’s a trail to the PCT that starts up just past the bathrooms,” the woman said, gesturing behind her. “Or you can walk on the side of the road, about a mile or so up. I think the road’s more direct than the trail. We’ll keep the lights on while you pack,” she said, and got back into the truck beside her husband, their faces now invisible to me behind the headlights. I turned to my tent, stunned. I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands, and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by now, the half moon in the sky. The only thing scarier than the thought of hiking along an unknown trail in the dark was walking along an unknown road in the dark. I put on Monster and waved to the couple in the truck, unable to see whether they waved back.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evidence of a Jesus-cult which did not have the sanction of Pope Martin V but of the anti-Pope Calixtus. We are not surprised to learn that one of the judges who originally condemned her, Jean le Fèvre, was also a judge at her rehabilitation; or that Thomas de Courcelles, who advised that she be tortured during her interrogation, was promoted to be Dean of Notre Dame the year she was cleared and lived to preach the funeral panygyric on her hero-Dauphin, Charles VII. Because the Christian society was total it had to be compulsory; and because it was compulsory it had no alternative but to declare war on its dissentients. Thus in the later Middle Ages it was weighed down by the multiplicity of its enemies. If Joachim was an ‘acceptable’ prophet, he was soon saddled with a mass of interpretations and commentaries which became the small-change of rustic millenarians and village charismatics. It was a feature of medieval prophecy that ‘sleeping’ kings or emperors would awake, and either restore harmony or rampage, depending on whether you believed the Pope was the vicar of Christ or Antichrist himself. Men claiming to be Arthur or Charlemagne or the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, or the Emperor Frederick II, appeared, raised a following, were hunted down, then hanged or burned. Disproof by events seems to have done nothing to shake men’s belief in prophecy; crucial years came and went – 1260, 1290, 1305, 1335, 1350, 1360, 1400, 1415, 1500, 1535; nothing happened as foretold, but still men believed. Many of these pretenders produced elaborate social manifestos, with an egalitarian or distributive object. Most began, or ended, in anti-clericalism. Religious hysteria expressed itself in almost every imaginable form of outrageous behaviour. Self-flagellation, for instance, had been a feature of certain sophisticated pagan sects absorbed into Christianity in the fourth century. We hear of it breaking out in eleventh-century Italy, then, on a huge scale, in the second half of the thirteenth century, after which it spread all over Europe and became endemic. The flagellants marched in procession, led by priests, with banners and candles, and moved from town to town, parading before the parish church, and lashing themselves for hours on end. The German flagellants, with their rituals, hymns and uniforms, were particularly ferocious: they used leather scourges with iron spikes; if a woman or a priest appeared, the ritual was spoiled and had to be started again; it culminated in the reading of a ‘heavenly letter’, after which spectators dipped pieces of cloth in the blood and treasured them as relics. The Church was ambivalent towards flagellants. In 1384 Clement VI had encouraged public flagellation in Avignon: hundreds of

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

  If I could only figure out why cancer was in my body, maybe I could stop it—a reasonable desire but one that wasn’t serving my mental health long-term. Head-tripping 24-7 over an unanswerable question was definitely not productive. In the decades since my diagnosis, I’ve learned that “What?” is a better question to ask than “Why?” For example: What is going on in my body when I have these anxious thoughts? What part of my body feels the most scared or anxious? What can I do to support myself now? What helps me de-escalate my worry in healthy ways? Truth is, we may never know why we or someone we love gets sick. Why our partner decides to leave us for a younger lover. Why we get laid off from a dream job or booted from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Why a BFF suddenly becomes distant. Why a seemingly good financial investment goes south. And on and on. And while assigning blame may make us feel like we have some degree of control, ultimately it’s the last thing that deserves to be taking up valuable space in our minds. Survival demands that we don’t get stuck looking back or spinning our wheels with worry about the future or beating ourselves to a pulp with a bunch of “should-haves.” When it comes to navigating uncertain moments, a far more productive focus is on how we care for our mental and physical health, right here and right now. When we let go of the “why” and zero in on the “what”—as in, What do I most need right now to feel supported?—we not only calm our systems, but we become more present, more adaptable, more creative, and, most importantly, more at ease with life’s natural currents. HOLD FASTOnly 1 in 10 pancreatic cancer patients survives five years past their diagnosis. If the cancer is found early and the tumor can be removed, the chances for survival are slightly higher. But one of the problems with pancreatic cancer is that it’s hard to detect because the symptoms often go overlooked. Dad’s disease was already aggressive when the doctors found it. If he didn’t do chemo and radiation right away, his prognosis of survival was less than two months. To make matters worse, his tumor was wrapped around a major artery. The only way he’d even be eligible for surgery was if the mass shrank enough to clear the artery. Dad muscled through six months of a powerful cocktail of chemotherapy and radiation, along with all their debilitating side effects. To help him find the inner strength to dig deep, my mother made a beautiful altar with photos of our ancestors, cherished mementos that reminded him that life was so worth fighting for. She also framed a photo of his personal mantra: Hold fast—a nautical term that to him meant “rough seas ahead, tie the lines, batten down the hatches.”