Confusion

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 Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  been thinking during the week. Then they’ll spend ten minutes summarizing the sermon I just preached and sharing their favorite parts. Except nothing they say will be what I said during the message. Nothing. At all. It’s like they’re preaching their own sermon to an audience of one—yours truly. Maybe it’s cosmic payback for the times I’ve been that guy preaching too long. I’m so glad they are engaged and excited, but they clearly weren’t listening. Here’s the thing, though. I wonder how often I’ve done that to God? I show up in prayer with an agenda, a prayer list, and a plan. I tell God what He’s thinking. I tell Him what He should do. I impose my ideas on Him. Then I walk away, happy to have expressed my point of view. And God is like, “Bro, you haven’t heard a thing I’ve been saying.” Prayer is not just a time for us to talk to God. It’s also a time to listen to Him. To know Him better. To understand His ways. To gain His perspective. If you look back over the benefits of prayer that we covered in the first section, you’ll realize that the majority of prayer is not about us telling God stuff, but about us receiving something from Him. God wants to communicate with us. He wants us to hear His voice and His heart. The Bible records over two thousand instances in the Old Testament alone when God spoke to people. In the New Testament, not only did God continue speaking, but He also promised to send the Holy Spirit to teach us and to remind us of what Jesus had said (John 14:26). God wants to speak to us. In fact, He probably is doing so already, whether we realize it or not. When I discuss this topic with people, I hear one sentence (or some variation of it) over and over: “I don’t know how to hear God’s voice.” The emotions packed into that sentence range from frustration to confusion to shame. Most people assume that it ought to be easy (just like they assume prayer ought to be easy). And when it’s not, they don’t know what to do.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  In Korea I encountered such a different culture, and the UC there was like a different movement. The levels of corruption were quite pronounced. It was like going from a nunnery to a brothel, mainly because the western or British members were naive in their beliefs and took the doctrine seriously. As a young child, this was all so confusing that at times it made me ill, for lack of any better way to put it. The church there was not prepared at first to deal with us, so two other children and I were sent from home to home. As time passed, we adjusted, but I was never truly all right after this break with everything I had ever known. I became ill due to a supposed lack of faith. I missed seeing my parents. I was constantly confused by what I had been taught to believe and the reality of Moon, his family, and others. When your group wants you to set the standard and be a "true believer," but doubt creeps inside you, the mental pressure is enormous. You feel torn in two and gasping. You want to go back to your innocence and faith, but instead, if you use analytical thought, you end up getting a daily dose of fact versus fiction. You therefore become a "problem" to others and to yourself. For years I prayed God would relieve me of these questions and doubts; yet, it seemed He only sent me more. When I finally left Korea at age fifteen, I was nearly certain that this church was evil at the core. But then again, I thought, "What if I'm wrong?" If I were wrong, I might lose God, my parents, my friends, and everything and everyone I had ever known. It would be like leaving one's country of origin and never returning or speaking of it again. It took me until I was twenty-two before I fully left, never to return. I lived a double life for years; at times I was devout, at others I rebelled. I didn't have the strength to renounce everything, and at the same time I seemed incapable of going along with an organization I knew to be harmful to my own sense of integrity. I wanted to leave the world of lies. So there it was, the final leap. How do you walk through that doorway? The doorway to the outside world. There were areas in my cognitive development and basic studies that had been neglected during my time in Korea. However, I had excessive knowledge and understanding of current events, history, Divine Principle (the UCtheology), political movements, charity, and global thinking (for lack of a better term). As a result, my mental processes and reasoning powers were well beyond my years, but I didn't always have the emotional development to match. The trouble with a sacrificial life inside a cult is that you are taught to meet the needs of others while neglecting your own needs.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Of course I wouldn’t carve into that table and neither would you,” Leif said after a while, turning to me. “You know why?” he asked. I shook my head, though I knew the answer. “Because we were raised by Mom.” I hiked away from my camp in the clear-cut at first light and saw no one all morning. By noon I didn’t even see the PCT. I’d lost it amid the blow-downs and temporary roads that crisscrossed and eventually obliterated the trail. I wasn’t terribly alarmed at first, believing that the road I was following would snake its way back to another place where it intersected the trail, but it didn’t. I pulled out my map and compass and got my bearings. Or what I believed were my bearings—my orienteering skills were still rather unreliable. I followed another road, but it only led to another and another until I couldn’t clearly recall which one I’d been on before. I stopped to eat lunch in the midafternoon heat, my monumental hunger slightly deadened by the queasy realization that I didn’t know where I was. I silently lambasted myself for having been so careless, for pushing on in my annoyance rather than pausing to consider a course, but there was nothing I could do now. I took off my Bob Marley T-shirt and draped it over a branch to dry, pulled another T-shirt from my pack and put it on. Ever since Paco had given me the Bob Marley shirt, I’d carried two, switching them out during the day the same way I did my socks, though I knew such a practice was a luxury that only added more weight to my pack. I studied my map and walked on, down one rough logging road and then another, feeling a flutter of hope each time that I’d found my way back on track. But by early evening the road I was on ended in a bulldozed heap of dirt, roots, and branches as high as a house. I scaled it for a better view and spotted another road across an old clear-cut swath. I made my way across it until one of my sandals fell off, both the duct tape and the strap that held it across the top of my foot having detached from the rest of the shoe. “AHHHH!” I yelled, and looked around, feeling the strange hush of the trees in the distance. They were like a presence, like a people, protectors who would get me out of this mess, though they did nothing other than silently look on.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  All that would come up was the group's policy on leaving. It was hard enough beingconfused about what I really believed, but not having the words to explain myself in plain English was worse. The words at my disposal all had cult meanings attached to them and that would start my inner conflict all over again. When I get excited or tired, I still have trouble with vocabulary. I'll starttalking orthinking in cultese, and it can be a shock, and frustrating. Sometimes my thoughts would be circular to the point of making me confused. It helped to just write them down. Then I didn't have to think about them or resolve anything-they were written down and could be resolved later. I'd write until I had nothing more to say. Sometimes I would study my journals and see that I wasn't having as much trouble as before. That helped. I forced myself to read books and visited the library frequently. At first I really didn't understand much of what I read, but I'd read each book as much as I was able. Especially helpful was Orwell's 1984. 1 compared the characters' lives to my own. Another person who had been in a similar group for twenty years had extreme difficulty speaking so-called normal English, even though it was his native language: "I spent time every day for the first few weeks out of the group relearning English, until I had every cult word replaced with a known English word." Television, magazines, crossword puzzles, and books of all kinds can reacquaint you with language and help rebuild vocabulary. Reading the newspaper and listening to the news are also highly recommended for retraining your mind, gaining vocabulary, and keeping up with world events. Another useful technique is to list all specific words and phrases connected to the cult, and then look them up in a dictionary. Seeing the accepted definitions and usages can help reorient your thinking and reestablish your capacity for self-expression. Another typical aftereffect of cult involvement is difficulty concentrating. Many former members report that immediately after leaving their group, they were unable to read more than a page or two of a book in one sitting, incapable of reading a newspaper straight through, or forgot things a minute after reading or hearing them. This is due in part to the loss of critical thinking abilities caused by the cult's thought-reform program and controlled environment, and in part to the loss of familiarity with their native language. Although it can be overwhelming at times, this inability to concentrate is generally temporary. Floating and Other Altered StatesAnother common postcult difficulty is learning how to deal with the disconcerting phenomenon of "floating," also referred to as trancing out, spacing out, or dissociation. Sometimes people float back and forth between their precult and cult personalities.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I suppose it was that night, while she was dressing for dinner that Nessim came into her room and addressed her reflection in the spade-shaped mirror. ‘Justine’ he said firmly, ‘I must ask you not to think that I am going mad or anything like that but — has Balthazar ever been more than a friend to you?’ Justine was placing a cigale made of gold on the lobe of her left ear; she looked up at him for a long second before answering in the same level, equable tone: ‘No, my dear.’ ‘Thank you.’ Nessim stared at his own reflection for a long time, boldly, comprehensively. Then he sighed once and took from the waistcoat pocket of his dress-clothes a little gold key, in the form of an ankh. ‘I simply cannot think how this came into my possession’ he said, blushing deeply and holding it up for her to see. It was the little watch-key whose loss had caused Balthazar so much concern. Justine stared at it and then at her husband with a somewhat startled air. ‘Where was it?’ she said. ‘In my stud-box.’ Justine went on with her toilette at a slower pace, looking curiously at her husband who for his part went on studying his own features with the same deliberate rational scrutiny. ‘I must find a way of returning it to him. Perhaps he dropped it at a meeting. But the strange thing is.… ‘He sighed again. ‘I don’t remember.’ It was clear to them both that he had stolen it. Nessim turned on his heel and said: ‘I shall wait for you downstairs.’ As the door closed softly behind him Justine examined the little key with curiosity. * * * * * At this time he had already begun to experience that great cycle of historical dreams which now replaced the dreams of his childhood in his mind, and into which the City now threw itself — as if at last it had found a responsive subject through which to express the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture. He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place. These disturbed him for they were not at all the dreams of the night-hours. They overlapped reality and interrupted his waking mind as if the membrane of his consciousness had been suddenly torn in places to admit them.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Lara travels to meet with her grandmother Masha. She wants to learn about Masha’s childhood and hopes to find her own answers there. Masha grew up in a chaotic household with very few resources. Her parents went to work early in the morning and came back late at night. Her oldest sister, who was thirteen, became her main caretaker. Masha told Lara that she always felt her mother didn’t want her, that deep inside, her mother regretted having so many children. Masha was a shy girl and a good student. Excelling at school was her way to feel special and worthy. One night, when Masha was ten years old, she had a bad dream. She often had bad dreams but knew she couldn’t wake her parents up or they would be upset with her. She sneaked into her fifteen-year-old brother’s bed. Her brother was the smartest; he was funny and brave and the one she admired the most. He kissed her . From then on her brother came into her bed every few nights. She would make believe she was asleep and wouldn’t make any noise. He would touch her gently and never hurt her. In the morning they behaved as if nothing had happened. It was when Masha was about thirteen and got her period for the first time that her mother told her in a very matter-of-fact way that she shouldn’t let her brother in her bed anymore. “Do you mean her mother knew?” I can’t stop myself as I interrupt Lara, who is still shaken by what she learned. Lara nods. “Yes, but they never talked about it. She never told anyone.” Unprocessed experiences always find ways to come back to life, to reenact themselves again and again. Masha’s repressed memory came to life in the typical way repressed memories do. It snuck into the mind unexpectedly, triggered by later events. For Masha, Ethan and Lara were a reminder of her and her older brother. That close relationship between a brother and a sister awakened her own repressed memory, and she felt the urge to give Lara the protection she never had, to be the parent she herself had always wanted. Her request that Lara’s hair be cut short was an attempt to protect Lara, in the same way that Masha believed she protected her daughter, Hanna, when she became a woman. Through Lara, Masha relived her own sexual abuse, which she could never fully process. Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing traumatic experiences that we know. The intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse is unique in the way that each generation overwhelms the next and inflicts on it the drama of their sexual trauma. The next generation’s world is often sexualized in the same way that the victim was sexualized as a child. They feel flooded by the parent’s unintegrated sexuality and perplexing boundaries.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  During that first session, Hanna and Jed told me an unusual and frightening story. They explained that when Lara was only five years old, her grandmother, Hanna’s mother, Masha, filed a complaint against Ethan, Jed’s son from his first marriage, for molesting Lara. Ethan was fourteen years old then, and social services were called to the house to investigate. But no signs of sexual abuse were found and the file was closed. Since then, Masha had filed eight more complaints against Ethan. Each time there was an investigation but no evidence was found and no charges were filed. “Our family is torn. We don’t know what to do and whom to believe,” Hanna told me during that first session. “I haven’t slept well since it happened.” Jed looked at Hanna and told me that Hanna was the one who had raised Ethan. Jed’s first wife had died when Ethan was only seven years old, and when Hanna had married Jed, she had become a mother to his son. Hanna loved Ethan. “Since her mother accused Ethan of molesting Lara, everything in our family has changed,” Jed said. “We all became suspicious of one another, not sure who lies and whom to believe, whom we need to protect and whom to blame.” Hanna started to cry. “I don’t believe he did it,” she said. “I really don’t believe it. I know him so well and I know my mother; when it comes to these things she can be a little crazy.” “What are ‘these things’?” I asked. Jed reached out and held Hanna’s hand. She didn’t answer. “This situation has created a lot of tension between us,” he said. “Hanna became depressed. She blames herself.” “What are you blaming yourself for?” I asked. “I’m her mother,” Hanna said, sobbing. “I’m the one who should know what the truth is.” She grabbed a tissue from the box and looked at me. “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and my mother is right and something terrible happened right in front of my eyes. I don’t know how to protect my daughter.” There was a long silence and then Hanna said, “I realize that maybe it’s my mother that I should protect my daughter from. My own mother, whom I love. But why would she blame him? Why would she do that?” Hanna and Jed hoped that someone would tell them what had really happened. They yearned for the truth. “What does Lara know about this situation? Is she aware of anything?” I asked before we ended the session. Jed looked at Hanna and they were both silent for a long minute. “About a year ago, my mother came to visit and told Lara that Ethan had sexually abused her.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Suicide can become a family myth, usually filled with unanswered questions. I wonder out loud, “What is the story behind your grandfather’s suicide? Why did he do it?” “I often ask myself that question,” Leonardo answers. “I’ll tell you the craziest theory I have,” he says, but then he pauses and falls into a long silence. “It feels like you are holding a secret,” I say. Leonardo smiles. “I wouldn’t call it a secret. It’s something I used to joke about with Milo, a wild thought that I always had, that Grandfather was actually gay and that his suicide was not the real secret my family kept, but his sexuality.” Leonardo leaves and I am left with the feeling that there are layers of truths unrevealed, unspoken facts from his family history as well as a hidden identification he has with his grandfather and with what he believes led to his death. That underlying identification sent Leonardo on an unconscious mission, which I locate in his dream—to liberate the family from shame and from a destiny of self-destruction. In the following sessions, Leonardo and I dive into his family history, trying to explore his secret identification with his grandfather: the feeling that his dead grandfather lives in him and that Leonardo needs to live out something for him and for the whole family. There are many unanswered questions, but I realize that the more we talk about his grandfather’s sexuality, the less space Milo takes up in his mind. As time passes and his symptoms of depression slowly subside, Leonardo becomes certain that he has figured out his family secret, and he decides it’s time to find out the truth. “I didn’t want to feel that I was crazy and that I made up all these theories about my family,” he tells me one morning, describing how, at his cousin’s wedding the previous night, he decided to ask his aunt. “My whole family was there, my two aunts, my father’s younger sisters, and their children. I really like my family and I was happy to see them, and you know, I love weddings.” He smiles. “The pathos of forever and ever until death do us part, isn’t that romantic?” Leonardo is playful and I recognize his fantasy about romance and death. “My aunts were very close to my grandmother, and I figured this was my chance to learn something about the years before my grandfather died and know what’s only in my head and what is real. Let me tell you, the good news is that I’m not crazy. The bad news is that it’s worse than I imagined. “After the ceremony, one of my aunts came to me in tears and said how sad she was that my father hadn’t lived to celebrate that day with us. She told me she was thinking about him the entire evening.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Every day, I walked to the candy store on the corner and waited, exactly as they’d told me to do. Moses, the owner of the store, was a kindly old man with a white mustache and a big smile. I liked him. I believed that he liked me too, and I especially liked that he gave me candy. As a little girl, there was nothing I loved more than candy. My mother, in an attempt to feed us healthy food, did not allow it in the house. She used to serve us plates with sliced apples and dried fruit. “Candy made by nature,” she called it. When Moses offered me candy for the first time, I was thrilled and ate it as fast as I could. He looked at me and smiled. “I see that you really love it.” The following day he offered me ice cream that he kept in a freezer in the back of the store. “What kind do you like?” He had a cone in each hand. “Vanilla or chocolate?” I pointed to the vanilla one. “Why did I know you would choose that one?” he teased, and then asked if I wanted to come pick out something from the back of the store. “I will let you choose whatever you like,” he said. Moses always smiled, and his kisses were ticklish and wet. Once in a while his wife would come to the store and he would put a little chair for me in the front and ignore me until she left. When my dad arrived to pick me up, Moses would tell him what a good girl I was and wave goodbye. “See you tomorrow.” I liked waiting for my parents there, but as time passed I started feeling nauseous. “Moses gives you too much candy,” my mother would say. “That’s why your stomach hurts.” But that wasn’t the reason. I wasn’t sure why; I just knew that I didn’t like it when he hugged me so tight. I still liked him even when I didn’t. In third grade I stopped liking Moses. We moved to our new home and I tried to avoid walking near his store. Only years later was I able to put it all together and understand what had really happened in the first few months of second grade. I never told anyone, and I wasn’t always sure if it had actually happened or if I’d imagined it. Freud viewed memory as a fluid entity that was constantly changing and being reworked over time. He referred to this dynamic as nachträglichkeit, translated into English as “afterwardness,” which means that early traumatic events are layered with new meanings throughout life. Freud was especially focused on sexual abuse as an event that would be reworked retrospectively as the child got older and reached certain developmental phases. Sexual abuse in childhood isn’t always registered by the child as traumatic. The child is overwhelmed with something they cannot process or even make sense of.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  For him, the most fascinating thing is my father’s choice of creating another family behind my mother’s back instead of leaving my mother when he wasn’t happy. My dad left only when my mother found out and he had no other choice. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You’d have to be a real asshole to do something so immoral, but Art was fascinated by that choice. He said that for someone who was not a psychopath it must have been so much more difficult to lie like that and live a double life than to leave. And trust me, it was very hard for Art to leave his family, so it’s not like he was saying any of that is easy. “I see things differently now. I see how my father was unable to leave her because he couldn’t handle hurting her. Does that make sense? I’m sure he couldn’t even tell her how unhappy he was in the marriage because she would feel so awful. I’m not blaming her, but I’m sure he knew he would lose me if he left her, and he was right. He was a coward, and she controlled him with her sadness, I guess the same way she controlled all of us.” I recognize that Alice needs to be able to find a way to accept both her mother and her father, with all their imperfections and faults, so she can accept herself with her human limitations. She needs to become her own person, free to choose, as opposed to a daughter who is trapped in her parents’ world. I hesitate at times, questioning whether understanding her father is in fact obedience to a normative structure, not a form of freedom. Is there a real freedom in the acceptance of both her parents, in the forgiveness of her father? Or is it only a way to conform to the patriarchal order in which men systemically have more power, and thus fathers are not judged as harshly as mothers? I sit with the questions that fill me, as I see Alice struggle to break that binary of identification where she has to be like her mother or like her father and is only allowed to be loyal to one of them. I know what a burden it is on her and how it keeps her as a little girl with no real power to choose or to grow up. Alice grabs the water bottle and puts it back in her bag. “Therapy is tiring, you know?” She smiles. “I never knew that I had so much to talk about.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “Last night I had a conversation with Jake, my oldest brother,” he says. “I told him about my therapy. I told him that a lot of things from my childhood are coming up now, especially from the time I was a baby. It was surprising, I have to tell you. I never thought I would be able to talk to him about these things, and I was shocked when he told me that he has been in therapy for years now. ‘We had a lot to deal with, as kids,’ Jake said, ‘especially you.’ “‘Why me?’ I was kind of confused. ‘You guys knew Jane, I didn’t.’” Jon pauses and looks at me. “My brother Jake said that in his therapy he realized that there are two kinds of people: those who have lost and those who never had anything to begin with. ‘I struggle with that idea,’ he said, ‘and I always tell my therapist that you, Jon, unlike the rest of us, who had lost, you never had. I tell her, “This is why he is the most wounded one of us all.”’ “You can imagine how confused that made me,” Jon says. “I told him, ‘Jake, I’m not sure what you are saying.’ And then he basically told me that he was eight years old when my parents found out Mom was pregnant with me, and that she was very upset and angry. She didn’t want another baby, and she blamed my dad for that pregnancy and wanted to get an abortion. There were a lot of fights and they didn’t talk for a while. “‘Then you were born and a few months later Jane died,’ Jake said, and I felt a kick in my stomach. Everything you and I talked about suddenly made sense. They didn’t want me to begin with.” He looks straight into my eyes. “My parents never wanted a fifth child. Four was enough for them. They ended up with four after all. But not with the four they wanted.” We are both silent. I’m stunned but not surprised. It is often easy to recognize those people who were not fully invited into this world. They seem like visitors, outsiders who might leave at any minute. Like Jon, many such patients don’t have a coherent existence, and therefore in therapy it is harder for them to create a clear narrative of their early life.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  When my dad arrived to pick me up, Moses would tell him what a good girl I was and wave goodbye. “See you tomorrow.” I liked waiting for my parents there, but as time passed I started feeling nauseous. “Moses gives you too much candy,” my mother would say. “That’s why your stomach hurts.” But that wasn’t the reason. I wasn’t sure why; I just knew that I didn’t like it when he hugged me so tight. I still liked him even when I didn’t. In third grade I stopped liking Moses. We moved to our new home and I tried to avoid walking near his store. Only years later was I able to put it all together and understand what had really happened in the first few months of second grade. I never told anyone, and I wasn’t always sure if it had actually happened or if I’d imagined it. Freud viewed memory as a fluid entity that was constantly changing and being reworked over time. He referred to this dynamic as nachträglichkeit, translated into English as “afterwardness,” which means that early traumatic events are layered with new meanings throughout life. Freud was especially focused on sexual abuse as an event that would be reworked retrospectively as the child got older and reached certain developmental phases. Sexual abuse in childhood isn’t always registered by the child as traumatic. The child is overwhelmed with something they cannot process or even make sense of. As time passes, the traumatic experience is reprocessed. In every developmental phase the child will revisit the abuse from a different angle and with different understanding. When that abused child becomes a teenager and then an adult, when they have sex for the first time or have children, when their child reaches the age they were when the abuse happened—in each moment the abuse will be reprocessed from a slightly different perspective. The process of mourning keeps changing and accrues new layers of meaning. Time will not necessarily make the memory fade; instead, the memory will appear and reappear in different forms and will be experienced simultaneously as real and unreal. Nineteen years after I first met Lara, it is a gloomy day in mid-September and I’m about to meet her again. It is also my birthday. In the intervening years, I’ve had three children. I have stopped working with children and am now only seeing adults. My office is in the same neighborhood as it was nineteen years ago, in downtown Manhattan. I open my door and look at the tall young woman who stands there. I do not recognize her. “I grew up quite a bit.” She smiles as if reading my mind. “Thank you for answering my email so quickly, and for agreeing to see me.” She sits on the couch and looks around. “I like your new office.” I recognize her smile and these first words.

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow. I’d generally been covering two miles an hour as I hiked most days, but everything was different in the snow: slower, less certain. I thought it would take me six days to reach Belden Town, but when I’d packed my food bag with six days’ worth of food, I didn’t have any idea what I’d encounter. Six days in these conditions were out of the question, and not only for the physical challenge of moving through the snow. Each step was also a calculated effort to stay approximately on what I hoped was the PCT. With my map and compass in hand, I tried to remember all I could from Staying Found, which I’d burned long ago. Many of the techniques—triangulating and cross bearing and bracketing—had perplexed me even when I’d been holding the book in my hand. Now they were impossible to do with any confidence. I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. So mostly I relied on the narrative descriptions in my guidebook, reading them over and over, matching them up with my maps, attempting to divine the intent and nuance of every word and phrase. It was like being inside a giant standardized test question: If Cheryl climbs north along a ridge for an hour at a rate of 1.5 miles per hour, then west to a saddle from which she can see two oblong lakes to the east, is she standing on the south flank of Peak 7503?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  As Lara describes, innocent, trivial things, such as the underwear she wore when she went to sleep, were filled with sexual meanings. The adult—in this case Lara’s grandmother—who tries to make sense of her own feelings often communicates to the child the confusion about what is safe and what isn’t. The original confusion between innocence and perversion is played out through the next generation, with seduction, promiscuity, and prohibition all intermingled. The next generation usually describes growing up with a constant, vague feeling of violation that only later in therapy is understood to be related to the original break of boundaries in their family’s history of sexual abuse. In her article “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge: On Rape and History,” Dr. Judith Alpert describes how sexual abuse can present itself in the mind of the next generation. Using her own childhood experience, she discusses the way traumatic thoughts and “memories” can be transmitted from parents and grandparents and present themselves in the child’s mind as their own. That phenomenon leaves everyone, the child and her caretakers, with the confusion that is at the core of sexual abuse. As in Lara’s case, our challenge is to hold all generations in mind—grandmother, mother, and child—as victims of either sexual abuse or the intergenerational inheritance of sexual abuse. Masha, who was reliving her own unprocessed trauma, devastated her family with the idea that Lara’s brother sexually abused her. Lara became more and more overwhelmed. It was as if she were reliving her grandmother’s repressed feelings. Through the family’s ongoing rumination and the premature introduction of sex, Lara felt the intrusion into her body and thus the scene of sexual abuse was reenacted. “When I was sitting with my grandmother last week and she told me about her childhood, I cried. She didn’t,” Lara says, and tears drop down her cheeks. “I tried to listen to her the way you listen to me, and to help her understand that she could tell me anything and I wouldn’t judge her, that I really wanted to know her . “At some point she stopped and said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But she kept talking and I didn’t say a word. She started blaming herself, saying it was she who went into his bed first.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Later, walking about in the strident native quarter with its jabbing lights and flesh-wearing smells, I wondered as I had always wondered, where time was leading us. And as if to test the validity of the very emotions upon which so much love and anxiety could base themselves I turned into a lighted booth decorated by a strip of cinema poster — the huge half-face of a screen-lover, meaningless as the belly of a whale turned upwards in death — and sat down upon the customer’s stool, as one might in a barber’s shop, to wait my turn. A dirty curtain was drawn across the inner door and from behind it came faint sounds, as of the congress of creatures unknown to science, not specially revolting — indeed interesting as the natural sciences are for those who have abandoned any claims of cultivating a sensibility. I was of course drunk by this time and exhausted — drunk as much on Justine as upon the thin-paper-bodied Pol Roget. There was a tarbush lying upon the chair beside me and absently I put it on my head. It was faintly warm and sticky inside and the thick leather lining clung to my forehead. ‘I want to know what it really means’ I told myself in a mirror whose cracks had been pasted over with the trimmings of postage stamps. I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it. The sound within had increased to a sly groaning and squeaking — a combustible human voice adding itself to the jostling of an ancient wooden-slatted bed. This was presumably the identical undifferentiated act which Justine and I shared with the common world to which we belonged. How did it differ? How far had our feelings carried us from the truth of the simple, devoid beast-like act itself? To what extent was the treacherous mind — with its interminable catalogue raisonné of the heart — responsible? I wished to answer an unanswerable question; but I was so desperate for certainty that it seemed to me that if I surprised the act in its natural state, motivated by scientific money and not love, as yet undamaged by the idea, I might surprise the truth of my own feelings and desires. Impatient to deliver myself from the question I lifted the curtain and stepped softly into the cubicle which was fitfully lighted by a buzzing staggering paraffin lamp turned down low.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them too. Unknown fronds of trees arched over him, brushing his face, while cobbles punctuated the rubber wheels of some dark ambulance full of metal and other dark bodies, whose talk was of limbo — a repulsive yelping streaked with Arabic objurgations. The pain, too, had begun to reach up at his reason and lift down fantasies. The hard white edges of the bed turned to boxes of coloured bricks, the white temperature chart to a boatman’s white face. They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red water of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity was gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature which she had kept hidden from me. Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but coolly, like a husband or a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner self, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife — and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it is the children who deliver the final coup de grâce in all these terrible transactions of the heart.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  The only way to live within this system as a parent was to refuse to think about your child or children. From the time I dropped my son off in the morning until I picked him up (anywhere from eleven at night to two in the morning), I had rather little awareness of being a parent. My son was two-and-a-half years old when our group began to fall apart. In late 1985, the inner circle surrounding the leader broke the bond of silence and began exposingto the membership the true nature of the group. This explosion from within left many shattered lives in its wake. I was thirty-six years old at the time. It had never been easy to be committed to the organization twentyfour hours a day and be a parent of a young child. But it was even more challenging to emerge from that insulated, cocoon-like world. I felt dead inside, but I had to figure out what I thought and felt, and enter a world where I needed to make decisions not only for myself,but also for my son. There I was: a parent of a toddler I had seldom seen for two years, and in a marriage that lacked any positive feeling. Even though we had joined the group together, my husband and I had gone in remarkably different directions over the years. The group frowned on couples having any life separate from the organization; we weren't even meant to talk to each other about our work. Because of his professional training, my husband had been promoted into a leadership position while I functioned as a workhorse in the lower echelons. When we emerged from the group, we were at opposite poles on every issue. We had particularly little shared experience, no ability to communicate with each other, and a huge pool of unspoken pain between us. Several years later, we got divorced. I was filled with confusion and anxiety about my identity, self-worth, and ability to function as an individual, but I knew I didn't want to fall into a pattern of daily life by default. I wanted to be able to think through what had happened to me, understand it, and not repeat it. There were a number of-things I did to regain my self-respect, to practice thinking, and to find a place for me in the world as a parent and as an individual. The first and most crucial thing was to allow myself time: time for me and time with my family, particularly my son, parents, brothers, and sisters. I would have chosen to also spend time with my husband, but his needs were different from mine. My first goal was to reestablish my relationship with my son, and make a conscious decision to become a mother. Even though my child already existed, and I was his mother, sometimes my eyes would peer at him while my brain tried to figure out where he came from.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The chandeliers in the great house whose ugliness I have come to hate, blaze over the gatherings which have been convened to say farewell to my friend. They are all there, the faces and histories I have come to know so well, Sveva in black, Clea in gold, Gaston, Claire, Gaby. Nessim’s hair I notice has during the last few weeks begun to be faintly touched with grey. Ptolemeo and Fuad are quarrelling with all the animation of old lovers. All round me the typical Alexandrian animation swells and subsides in conversations as brittle and frivolous as spun glass. The women of Alexandria in all their stylish wickedness are here to say good-bye to someone who has captivated them by allowing them to befriend him. As for Pombal himself, he has grown fatter, more assured since his elevation in rank. His profile now has a certain Neronian cast. He is professing himself worried about me in sotto voce; for some weeks we have not met properly, and he has only heard about my school-mastering project tonight. ‘You should get out’ he repeats, ‘back to Europe. This city will undermine your will. And what has Upper Egypt to offer? Blazing heat, dust, flies, a menial occupation.… After all, you are not Rimbaud.’ The faces surging round us sipping toasts prevent my answering him, and I am glad of it for I have nothing to say. I gaze at him with a portentous numbness, nodding my head. Clea catches my wrist and draws me aside to whisper: ‘A card from Justine. She is working in a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine. Shall I tell Nessim?’ ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ ‘She asks me not to.’ ‘Then don’t.’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice’s loss of her father remained unrecognized and even dismissed. Once again, grief and sadness belonged solely to her mother—her mother was the one who had lost a husband she loved, and Alice became her emotional caretaker, replacing the mother her own mother never had. It is only now, for the first time, that we start questioning how much choice Alice actually had in that family dynamic as we try to differentiate between her mother’s needs and her own. “My mother remarried but she was still unhappy. Her childhood trauma was always there and it made her fragile and sad. She never stopped mourning her mother, and she never recovered from my father’s abandonment of her.” Alice is unconsciously tied to her mother’s traumas. I recognize how confused she feels as she tries to find out the truth about herself and the people around her. Her parents were both dishonest, in different ways, and she struggles with the double messages she received from them, with her mother’s dissociated anger, with her father’s lies, and with her own aggression, which functions as a defense against her hidden vulnerability. Alice pauses and searches her pockets. She finds a hair tie and quickly puts her long dark hair up in a ponytail. Then she looks at me and smiles. “My mother is almost seventy years old now and she wears her hair in two long braids, like a little girl. Did I tell you that?” she asks. In that moment a thought crosses my mind. I wonder if her mother was envious of her for being a child with a mother. Does her mother need to keep herself looking like a young girl with the hope that one day she, too, will have a mother who will take care of her and brush her hair? It is not unusual for mothers who didn’t have mothers themselves, or those who had abusive mothers, to resent their daughters for having the mother they never had. In therapy, the mother often explores feelings about her daughter having more than she had; she envies her daughter for having her as a mother. Trying to understand Alice’s mother’s psychology, I become aware of how, in our sessions, I switch from analyzing Alice to analyzing her mother, and I assume this is my unconscious collusion with Alice’s enmeshment with her mother. I’m enacting her wish to heal her mother and to make her stronger. In these moments, I become her mother’s therapist—her mother’s mother—as Alice fantasizes about being able to leave her mother with me to take care of while she goes off to start a family and become a mother herself.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The bedroom for example with its bronze phosphorous light, the pastels burning in the green Tibetan urn diffusing a smell of roses to the whole room. By the bed the rich poignant scent of her powder hanging heavy in the bed-curtains. A dressing-table with its stoppered cream and salves. Over the bed the Universe of Ptolemy! She has had it drawn upon parchment and handsomely framed. It will hang forever over her bed, over the ikons in their leather cases, over the martial array of philosophers. Kant in his nightcap feeling his way upstairs. Jupiter Tonans. There is somehow a heavy futility in this array of great ones — among whom she has permitted Pursewarden an appearance. Four of his novels are to be seen though whether she has put them there specially for the occasion (we are all dining together) I cannot say. Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines — empty capsules, bottles and syringes. ‘Kiss her’ says Arnauti ‘and you are aware that her eyes do not close but open more widely, with an increasing doubt and madness. The mind is so awake that it makes any gift of the body partial — a panic which will respond to nothing less than a curette. At night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock.’ On the far wall there is an idol the eyes of which are lit from within by electricity, and it is to this graven mentor that Justine acts her private role. Imagine a torch thrust through the throat of a skeleton to light up the vault of the skull from which the eyeless sockets ponder. Shadows thrown on the arch of the cranium flap there in imprisonment. When the electricity is out of order a stump of candle is soldered to the bracket: Justine then, standing naked on tip-toes to push a lighted match into the eyeball of the God. Immediately the furrows of the jaw spring into relief, the shaven frontal bone, the straight rod of the nose. She has never been tranquil unless this visitant from distant mythology is watching over her nightmares. Under it lie a few small inexpensive toys, a celluloid doll, a sailor, about which I have never had the courage to question her. It is to this idol that her most marvellous dialogues are composed. It is possible, she says, to talk in her sleep and be overheard by the wise and sympathetic mask which has come to represent what she calls her Noble Self — adding sadly, with a smile of misgiving, ‘It does exist you know.’