Despair

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 Heptaméron (1559)

  me to make a secret of the matter to you, but to explain it, in order that you may not suppose me capable of act- ing so cruelly without great reason. That lady whom you have seen is my wife, whom I loved more than man ever loved woman. I risked everything to marry her, and I brought her hither in spite of her relations. She, too, evinced so much love for me that I would have haz- arded a thousand lives to obtain her. We lived long in such concord and pleasure that I esteemed myself the happiest gentleman in Christendom ; but honour having obliged me to make a journe}', she forgot hers, and the love she had for me, and conceived a jDassion for a young gentle- man I had brought up in this house. I was near discov- ering the fact on my return home, but I loved her so ardently that I could not bring myself to doubt her- At last, however, experience opened my eyes, and I saw what I feared more than death. The love I had felt for her changed into fury and despair. Feigning one day to go into the country, I hid myself in the chamber which she at present occupies. Soon after my pre- tended departure, she retired to it, and sent for the young gentleman. I saw him enter the room and take liberties with her which should have been reserved for me alone. When I saw him about to enter the bed with her, I issued from my hiding-place, seized him in her arms, and slew him. But as my wife's crime seemed to me so great that it would not have been a sufficient punishment for it had I killed her as I had killed her gallant, I imposed upon her one which I believe is more insupportable than death ; which was, to shut her up in the chamber in which she used to enjoy her stolen pleas- ures. I have hung there in a press all the bones of hef gallant, as one hangs up something precious in a cabinet ; and that she may not forget them at her meals, I have Fourth (fay.] QUEEN OF NA VARRE. jOJ,

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Hence others found another explanation. For Antissiodorensis [*William of Auxerre, Archdeacon of Beauvais] (Sent. iv, Tract. 14) said that suffrages profit the damned not by diminishing or interrupting their punishment, but by fortifying the person punished: even as a man who is carrying a heavy load might bathe his face in water, for thus he would be enabled to carry it better, and yet his load would be none the lighter. But this again is impossible, because according to Gregory (Moral. ix) a man suffers more or less from the eternal fire according as his guilt deserves; and consequently some suffer more, some less, from the same fire. wherefore since the guilt of the damned remains unchanged, it cannot be that he suffers less punishment. Moreover, the aforesaid opinion is presumptuous, as being in opposition to the statements of holy men, and groundless as being based on no authority. It is also unreasonable. First, because the damned in hell are cut off from the bond of charity in virtue of which the departed are in touch with the works of the living. Secondly, because they have entirely come to the end of life, and have received the final award for their merits, even as the saints who are in heaven. For the remaining punishment or glory of the body does not make them to be wayfarers, since glory essentially and radically resides in the soul. It is the same with the unhappiness of the damned, wherefore their punishment cannot be diminished as neither can the glory of the saints be increased as to the essential reward. However, we may admit, in a certain measure, the manner in which, according to some, suffrages profit the damned, if it be said that they profit neither by diminishing nor interrupting their punishment, nor again by diminishing their sense of punishment, but by withdrawing from the damned some matter of grief, which matter they might have if they knew themselves to be so outcast as to be a care to no one; and this matter of grief is withdrawn from them when suffrages are offered for them. Yet even this is impossible according to the general law, because as Augustine says (De Cura pro Mort. xiii)—and this applies especially to the damned—“the spirits of the departed are where they see nothing of what men do or of what happens to them in this life,” and consequently they know not when suffrages are offered for them, unless this relief be granted from above to some of the damned in spite of the general law. This, however, is a matter of great uncertainty; wherefore it is safer to say simply that suffrages profit not the damned, nor does the Church intend to pray for them, as appears from the authors quoted above.

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

  Self-harmDuring my training I was called from my bed at around 3:00 a.m. three nights in a row to stitch up a woman who had slashed her neck with whatever sharp object she could lay her hands on. She told me, somewhat triumphantly, that cutting herself made her feel much better. Ever since then I’d asked myself why. Why do some people deal with being upset by playing three sets of tennis or drinking a stiff martini, while others carve their arms with razor blades? Our study showed that having a history of childhood sexual and physical abuse was a strong predictor of repeated suicide attempts and self-cutting.[8] I wondered if their suicidal ruminations had started when they were very young and whether they had found comfort in plotting their escape by hoping to die or doing damage to themselves. Does inflicting harm on oneself begin as a desperate attempt to gain some sense of control? Chris Perry’s database had follow-up information on all the patients who were treated in the hospital’s outpatient clinics, including reports on suicidality and self-destructive behavior. After three years of therapy approximately two-thirds of the patients had markedly improved. Now the question was, which members of the group had benefited from therapy and which had continued to feel suicidal and self-destructive? Comparing the patients’ ongoing behavior with our TAQ interviews provided some answers. The patients who remained self-destructive had told us that they did not remember feeling safe with anybody as a child; they had reported being abandoned, shuttled from place to place, and generally left to their own devices. I concluded that, if you carry a memory of having felt safe with somebody long ago, the traces of that earlier affection can be reactivated in attuned relationships when you are an adult, whether these occur in daily life or in good therapy. However, if you lack a deep memory of feeling loved and safe, the receptors in the brain that respond to human kindness may simply fail to develop.[9] If that is the case, how can people learn to calm themselves down and feel grounded in their bodies? Again, this has important implications for therapy, and I’ll return to this question throughout part 5, on treatment.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement The ministry of Jeremiah as we have considered it as a model was concerned with radical criticism. And the most radical criticism of the prophet is in grief over death . The alternative community embodied in Jeremiah saw how surely fatal everything that the kings called life was. There are, to be sure, other important aspects of Jeremiah’s ministry. For example, Thomas Raitt has recently argued persuasively that Jeremiah is the boldest and most inventive of all the prophets of hope. [1] In such a view, different critical questions do arise; but Raitt, after the manner of John Bright, [2] ascribes to Jeremiah substantial parts of the hope poetry. I call attention to this in order not to misrepresent the richness of the Jeremiah tradition. In any case, my governing hypothesis is that the alternative prophetic community is concerned both with criticizing and energizing. On the one hand, it is to show that the dominant consciousness (which I have termed “royal”) will indeed end and that it has no final claim upon us. On the other hand, it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality. Having considered the first of these tasks in the tradition of Jeremiah, I now turn to the second function of prophecy, to energize. I propose this hypothesis: The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God . Numb people do not discern or fear death. Conversely, despairing people do not anticipate or receive newness.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  With that he went away, and she returned to her chamber more dead than alive. "Get up, my friends," she cried to her women ; "get up. You have slept too long for me. I thought to trick you, and I have been tricked myself," and. saying this, she fainted away. Her women, thus suddenly roused from their sleep, were astonished at her words, and still more when they saw her lying like a corpse, and they ran hurriedly to and fro in search of means to revive her. When she had recovered her speech, she said to them, " You see before you, my friends, the most wretched creature in the world." Then she related to them her adventure, en- treating them to stand by her, for she looked upon her- self already as a dead woman. While her women were endeavouring to comfort her, a valet-de-chambre arrived with a message from her husband, ordering her to come to him instantly. Thereupon she embraced two of her women, and began to cry and shriek, beseeching them not to let her go, for she was sure she should never re- Second day.\ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 1 49 turn. The valet-clc-chambre, however, bade her not be afraid, for he would answer for it with his life that no harm should happen to her. Seeing, then, that resist- ance was useless, she threw herself in the valet's arms, saying, "Since it must be so, my friend, carry this wretched body to death ; " and in fact he carried, rather than led her away, for she was almost in a swoon. The moment she entered her husband's room, she fell on her knees, and said, " Have pity on me, monsieur, I beseech you ; and I swear to you before God that I will tell you the whole truth." " That I am determined you shall," replied the hus- band in a furious tone, and ordered every one to quit the room. As his wife had always seemed to him very devout, he thought she would not perjure herself if he made her swear on the cross. He therefore sent for a very handsome one he had, and when they were alone he made her swear on that cross that she would speak the truth as to such questions as he should put to her. By this time she had been able to rally her spirits, and having partly recovered from her first terror, she re- solved to conceal nothing, but at the same time not to say anything which could compromise her lover. Her husband then put the questions he deemed necessary, and this was how she replied to them :

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

  I have always wondered how parents come to abuse their kids. After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning. What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children? Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: Watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers. At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions. Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping. Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with their mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/intrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most powerful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise. Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults. Dissociation: Knowing and Not KnowingLyons-Ruth was particularly interested in the phenomenon of dissociation, which is manifested in feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world and in seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down. She found a “striking and unexpected” relationship between maternal disengagement and misattunement during the first two years of life and dissociative symptoms in early adulthood. Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to know and to see.”[36] Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves—their interests, preferences, and goals. Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal. But if your caregivers ignore your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing.[37]

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

  I missed my plane that day because I had to talk with Steve Maier. His workshop offered clues not only about the underlying problems of my patients but also potential keys to their resolution. For example, he and Seligman had found that the only way to teach the traumatized dogs to get off the electric grids when the doors were open was to repeatedly drag them out of their cages so they could physically experience how they could get away. I wondered if we also could help my patients with their fundamental orientation that there was nothing they could do to defend themselves? Did my patients also need to have physical experiences to restore a visceral sense of control? What if they could be taught to physically move to escape a potentially threatening situation that was similar to the trauma in which they had been trapped and immobilized? As I will discuss in the treatment part 5 of this book, that was one of the conclusions I eventually reached. Further animal studies involving mice, rats, cats, monkeys, and elephants brought more intriguing data.[10] For example, when researchers played a loud, intrusive sound, mice that had been raised in a warm nest with plenty of food scurried home immediately. But another group, raised in a noisy nest with scarce food supplies, also ran for home, even after spending time in more pleasant surroundings.[11] Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening. I thought about my patients with abusive families who kept going back to be hurt again. Are traumatized people condemned to seek refuge in what is familiar? If so, why, and is it possible to help them become attached to places and activities that are safe and pleasurable?[12] Addicted to Trauma: The Pain of Pleasure and the Pleasure of PainOne of the things that struck my colleague Mark Greenberg and me when we ran therapy groups for Vietnam combat veterans was how, despite their feelings of horror and grief, many of them seemed to come to life when they talked about their helicopter crashes and their dying comrades. (Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, who covered a number of brutal conflicts, entitled his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.[13]) Many traumatized people seem to seek out experiences that would repel most of us,[14] and patients often complain about a vague sense of emptiness and boredom when they are not angry, under duress, or involved in some dangerous activity.

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

  The questions continued: “Who made the rules at home and enforced the discipline?” “How were kids kept in line—by talking, scolding, spanking, hitting, locking you up?” “How did your parents solve their disagreements?” By then the floodgates had usually opened, and many patients were volunteering detailed information about their childhoods. One woman had witnessed her little sister being raped; another told us she’d had her first sexual experience at age eight—with her grandfather. Men and women reported lying awake at night listening to furniture crashing and parents screaming; a young man had come down to the kitchen and found his mother lying in a pool of blood. Others talked about not being picked up at elementary school or coming home to find an empty house and spending the night alone. One woman who made her living as a cook had learned to prepare meals for her family after her mother was jailed on a drug conviction. Another had been nine when she grabbed and steadied the car’s steering wheel because her drunken mother was swerving down a four-lane highway during rush hour. Our patients did not have the option to run away or escape; they had nobody to turn to and no place to hide. Yet they somehow had to manage their terror and despair. They probably went to school the next morning and tried to pretend that everything was fine. Judy and I realized that the BPD group’s problems—dissociation, desperate clinging to whoever might be enlisted to help—had probably started off as ways of dealing with overwhelming emotions and inescapable brutality. After our interviews Judy and I met to code our patients’ answers—that is, to translate them into numbers for computer analysis, and Chris Perry then collated them with the extensive information on these patients he had stored on Harvard’s mainframe computer. One Saturday morning in April he left us a message asking us to come to his office. There we found a huge stack of printouts, on top of which Chris had placed a Gary Larson cartoon of a group of scientists studying dolphins and being puzzled by “those strange ‘aw blah es span yol’ sounds.” The data had convinced him that unless you understand the language of trauma and abuse, you cannot really understand BPD.

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

  This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs. Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system, the subject of the treatment section of this book. Nonetheless, learning to recognize irrational thoughts and behavior can be a useful first step. People like Marilyn often discover that their assumptions are not the same as those of their friends. If they are lucky, their friends and colleagues will tell them in words, rather than in actions, that their distrust and self-hatred make collaboration difficult. But that rarely happens, and Marilyn’s experience was typical: After she assaulted Michael, he had absolutely no interest in working things out, and she lost both his friendship and her favorite tennis partner. It is at this point that smart and courageous people like Marilyn, who maintain their curiosity and determination in the face of repeated defeats, start looking for help. Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when the cop warns you that there’s an accident ahead.) But the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions. Change begins when we learn to “own” our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable. Learning to RememberAbout a year into Marilyn’s group, another member, Mary, asked permission to talk about what had happened to her when she was thirteen years old. Mary worked as a prison guard, and she was involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with another woman. She wanted the group to know her background in the hope that they would become more tolerant of her extreme reactions, such as her tendency to shut down or blow up in response to the slightest provocation.

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

  My patient Julia was brutally raped at gunpoint in a hotel room at age sixteen. Shortly thereafter she got involved with a violent pimp who prostituted her. He regularly beat her up. She was repeatedly jailed for prostitution, but she always went back to her pimp. Finally her grandparents intervened and paid for an intense rehab program. After she successfully completed inpatient treatment, she started working as a receptionist and taking courses at a local college. In her sociology class she wrote a term paper about the liberating possibilities of prostitution, for which she read the memoirs of several famous prostitutes. She gradually dropped all her other courses. A brief relationship with a classmate quickly went sour—he bored her to tears, she said, and she was repelled by his boxer shorts. She then picked up an addict on the subway who first beat her up and then started to stalk her. She finally became motivated to return to treatment when she was once again severely beaten. Freud had a term for such traumatic reenactments: “the compulsion to repeat.” He and many of his followers believed that reenactments were an unconscious attempt to get control over a painful situation and that they eventually could lead to mastery and resolution. There is no evidence for that theory—repetition leads only to further pain and self-hatred. In fact, even reliving the trauma repeatedly in therapy may reinforce preoccupation and fixation. Mark Greenberg and I decided to learn more about attractors—the things that draw us, motivate us, and make us feel alive. Normally attractors are meant to make us feel better. So, why are so many people attracted to dangerous or painful situations? We eventually found a study that explained how activities that cause fear or pain can later become thrilling experiences.[15] In the 1970s Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that the body learns to adjust to all sorts of stimuli. We may get hooked on recreational drugs because they right away make us feel so good, but activities like sauna bathing, marathon running, or parachute jumping, which initially cause discomfort and even terror, can ultimately become very enjoyable. This gradual adjustment signals that a new chemical balance has been established within the body, so that marathon runners, say, get a sense of well-being and exhilaration from pushing their bodies to the limit. At this point, just as with drug addiction, we start to crave the activity and experience withdrawal when it’s not available. In the long run people become more preoccupied with the pain of withdrawal than the activity itself. This theory could explain why some people hire someone to beat them, or burn themselves with cigarettes. or why they are only attracted to people who hurt them. Fear and aversion, in some perverse way, can be transformed into pleasure.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " It is true," said Simontault, " that there is no one on whom penance has been imposed who has not done the reverse of that which afforded him pleasure : witness a lady I once saw in a distinguished house, who, to com- pensate for the pleasure she had taken in kissing a man she loved, was found at four o'clock in the morning kiss- ing the dead body of a man who had been killed the pre- ceding day, and for whom she had never had any especial love more than for another. Every one was then aware that she was doing penance for her past pleasures." '•That is just the way," said Oisille, "in which men poison all the good acts done by women. My opinion is that we ought to kiss neither the living nor the dead, except after the manner which God commands." "For my part," said Hircan, "I care so little for kissing any other woman than my wife, that I willingly subscribe to any terms that may be made on the subject ; but I pity the young folk whom you would deprive of such a small gratification, annulling the precept of Saint Paul, who ordained that people should kiss /;/ oscnlo sane to." " If Saint Paul had been a man like you," said Nomer- fide, "we should have demanded palpable evidence of the spirit of God which spoke in him." " To the last you will rather doubt Holy Writ than give up a hair's breadth of one of your petty ceremonies," said Geburon. " God forbid," replied Oisille, " that we should doubt 462 THE IIEPTAMERON OF THE ^Movel 58. Holy Writ, though we put Httle faith in your lies. There is no woman but knows that her proper creed consists in never doubting the word of God, and always distrust- ing that of men." "I believe," said Simontault, "that there are more men deceived by women than women deceived by men. Their want of love for us hinders them from believing- the truth ; whilst we, on the contrary, love them to such excess, that we readily believe their falsehoods, and find ourselves their dupes before we have imagined the pos- sibiUty of their duping us." " I suppose," said Parlamente, "you have heard some fool complain of having been duped by some light woman. In fact, what you state carries so little weight with it, that it has need of being supported by some example. So, if you have one to adduce, let us hear it. I do not mean to say that we are bound to believe you ; but it will not pain our ears to hear you malign us, for we know the truth of the matter." "Well, that being so," said Simontault, "you shall be satisfied." NOVEL LVIII. How a lady of the court pleasantly revenged herself on her faith- less lover.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In all of those intensive care units there were the same blue-and-white printed curtains. In all of those intensive care units there were the same sounds, the same gurgling through plastic tubing, the same dripping from the IV line, the same rales, the same alarms. In all of those intensive care units there were the same requirements to guard against further infections, the donning of the double gowns, the paper slippers, the surgical cap, the mask, the gloves that pulled on only with difficulty and left a rash that reddened and bled. In all of those intensive care units there was the same racing through the unit when a code was called, the feet hitting the floor, the rattle of the crash cart. This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking—outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption—in the third of those intensive care units. By the time she reached the fourth I was no longer invoking this special exemption. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I just said that, but what does it mean? All right, of course I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent? Time passes. Yes, agreed, a banality, of course time passes. Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once? Have I been saying it the same way I say I have lived most of my life in California? Have I been saying it without hearing what I say? Could it be that I heard it more this way: Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even: Time passes, but not for me? Could it be that I did not figure in either the general nature or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? The way in which you live most of your life in California, and then you don’t? The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life? Time passes. Could it be that I never believed it? Did I believe the blue nights could last forever? 3Last spring, 2009, I had some warnings, flags on the track, definite notices of darkening even before the blue nights came. L’heure bleue. The gloaming. Not even yet evident when that year’s darkening gave its first notices.

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

  Experiencing Bill’s flashback firsthand in my office helped me realize the agony that regularly visited the veterans I was trying to treat and helped me appreciate again how critical it was to find a solution. The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop. It took me years to learn how to effectively treat flashbacks, and in this process Bill turned out to be one of my most important mentors. When we gave the Rorschach test to twenty-one additional veterans, the response was consistent: Sixteen of them, on seeing the second card, reacted as if they were experiencing a wartime trauma. The second Rorschach card is the first card that contains color and often elicits so-called color shock in response. The veterans interpreted this card with descriptions like “These are the bowels of my friend Jim after a mortar shell ripped him open” and “This is the neck of my friend Danny after his head was blown off by a shell while we were eating lunch.” None of them mentioned dancing monks, fluttering butterflies, men on motorcycles, or any of the other ordinary, sometimes whimsical images that most people see. While the majority of the veterans were greatly upset by what they saw, the reactions of the remaining five were even more alarming: They simply went blank. “This is nothing,” one observed, “just a bunch of ink.” They were right, of course, but the normal human response to ambiguous stimuli is to use our imagination to read something into them. We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination. The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is then seen in some of the classic “suffering” psalms, like Psalm 22, which begins with the experience of desolation, shame, and suffering: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. . . . But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads. . . . For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. . . . (22:1–2, 6–7, 16–18) And then, in a dramatic change, the mood suddenly gives way to a shout of triumph: I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you; You who fear YHWH, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! . . . All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to YHWH; And all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion [malkuth, “kingdom”] belongs to YHWH, And he rules over the nations. (22:22–23, 27–28) This theme receives full, detailed, and highly personal expression in the Servant Songs in Isaiah: The sovereign YHWH has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward. I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. (50:5–6) He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. . . . He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. (53:3–4, 7–9)

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  You must stick it out till the end of your holiday.” He didn’t add a word, not even one of encouragement. I was too downhearted or perhaps I felt some pity for him and allowed him to leave without witnessing my tears and protestations. My despair adopted, from then on, a different tone. I was cornered, without any escape, and began to think of death for the first time in my life. Without being at all strange or foreign, this idea of suicide was born within me quite spontaneously and gently, like the world coming to life at dawn. At once, suicide seemed familiar to me, like a release, and I was surprised how convenient and tempting so serious an action could seem. The ultimate solution to my problems was within my own power. In my solitary afternoon retreats, I had discovered a huge depression in the ground that constituted a barrier to my further escape. This ditch that was several meters deep now fascinated me. Full of self-pity and weeping salt tears that dripped into my open mouth, I closed my inflamed eyes and walked ahead, a step at a time, my chest thrust forward, trying hard to abolish all my will power, as when one learns to float on one’s back. Often, in a kind of sleepwalking mood, I imagined that I no longer had the solid ground beneath my feet. But no matter how much I kept my eyes closed and tried to forget my own conscience, the reflexes of my body that I allowed to guide me never drove me into the ditch. I fell into a kind of stupor, lost all appetite, and gave up even my blindman’s excursions on the brink of my abyss. Some time after all this, one morning when I woke up, I could no longer get out of bed. In a kind of awakened dream, I heard the voices of my comrades murmuring around me. The sergeant who was on duty was very worried and had me transported on a stretcher to the little mountain dispensary that was far from our camp. My sleepy refusal to live lasted several days, then I developed a fever. As the doctor failed to understand the meaning of it but said he was sure it must be a tropical disease, I was forgotten up there in my infirmary. That was when I discovered that I had not yet reached the lowest depths of solitude. I was all alone, the only patient in a huge square ward. On the other beds, there weren’t even any sheets. Nor was there anything in the room, except the iron bedsteads and the mattresses, to furnish all this bare space. As soon as I was strong enough, I went, on my shaky legs, on a tour of inspection of the infirmary.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  No New Beginnings More specifically, the termination of the present in the fall of 587 B.C.E., just as Jeremiah had anticipated, created a situation in which the royal consciousness found itself without resource. The very kings who could not cope with the thought that an end might come could also not imagine a new beginning. Those who had worked so hard to deny the future and banish hope could not all of a sudden permit hope to happen. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience a really new beginning that is underived or unextrapolated from what went before. Kings were accustomed to new arrangements and new configurations of the same pieces, but the yearning to manage and control means that new intrusions are not regarded as desirable. Neither are they regarded as possible or discerned when they happen. And thus the same royal consciousness that could not imagine endings and so settled for numb denial is the one that could not imagine beginnings and so settled for hopeless despair and a grim endurance of the way things now are. Beginnings are no more thinkable or acceptable to kings than endings are, for both announce an inscrutable sovereignty that kings cannot entertain. The despair is perhaps reflected in Psalm 137. So I contend that the despair of the early exile is not a new thing in the Babylonian exile; rather, it is the payoff for the hopeless, futureless existence of Israel for a long period. To be sure, the imprecations of Ps 137:7-9 may indicate some quite modest hopefulness; but obviously the poet envisions no bold hope for restoration. At best it is a grim holding, a resolve to remember forever, and a venting of hostility. No word of a beginning that would transform history is articulated here. In the poetry of Lamentations, as Norman Gottwald has observed, hints of hope do poke through; [4] but we should not miss the extreme reservation of the conclusion of the last poem: Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old! Or have you utterly rejected us?

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

  Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past. This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like the veterans in chapter 1, come up with what many of them call their “cover story” that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account—a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even a seasoned reporter like the famed CBS correspondent Ed Murrow struggled to convey the atrocities he saw when the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was liberated in 1945: “I pray you believe what I have said. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.” When words fail, haunting images capture the experience and return as nightmares and flashbacks. In contrast to the deactivation of Broca’s area, another region, Brodmann’s area 19, lit up in our participants. This is a region in the visual cortex that registers images when they first enter the brain. We were surprised to see brain activation in this area so long after the original experience of the trauma. Under ordinary conditions raw images registered in area 19 are rapidly diffused to other brain areas that interpret the meaning of what has been seen. Once again, we were witnessing a brain region rekindled as if the trauma were actually occurring. As we will see in chapter 12, which discusses memory, other unprocessed sense fragments of trauma, like sounds and smells and physical sensations, are also registered separately from the story itself. Similar sensations often trigger a flashback that brings them back into consciousness, apparently unmodified by the passage of time. Shifting to One Side of the BrainThe scans also revealed that during flashbacks, our subjects’ brains lit up only on the right side. Today there’s a huge body of scientific and popular literature about the difference between the right and left brains. Back in the early nineties I had heard that some people had begun to divide the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn’t paid much attention to this idea. However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Bissor sat down beside me in very bad spirits because his newspaper route had been reduced by one third since he began his round too late; except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he could not begin his deliveries before four o’clock. I tried, in spite of the noise, to hear what he was saying. Suddenly, as he spoke, a lighted cigarette butt streaked through the blue air and landed on Bissor’s head. I smelled the burning hair and, since he didn’t seem quite aware of what was happening, I began to grope for the butt. Then, understanding, he rose with clenched teeth and began looking around for the villain who was easily identified: a Sicilian worker who, with his friends, was shrieking with delight at having hit the jack pot. The Sicilian, ready for battle, shouted: “Cosa vole?” (What do you want?) Without reply or warning, Bissor lifted his arm and rammed his fist at the man’s nose. Blood began to flow over his lips and chin, and there was a moment of stupefaction before the loud and indignant response. No one dared to touch Bissor, but the Sicilians all yelled, surrounded their beaten friend, pushed his head back to stop the blood and, forgetting their pride, argued all at once. Watching them, one might have concluded that we had all been playing a harmless game together and that our side had taken it badly. The rest of the audience was curious, couldn’t figure out what had happened, and reacted, as always, by screaming as if a fire had broken out. The uproar increased and someone went for the policeman who came in at once and saw the injured man, head thrown back, clothes covered with blood. The avenging Sicilians pointed Bissor out to him and the whole audience had risen to its feet and was screaming. The cop felt that no explanation was necessary and moved toward Bissor, who was now returning to his own seat. My heart pounded with fear, as I was terrified of all cops. What was going to happen to Bissor, and perhaps to myself? Grabbing the boy’s arm, the officer pushed him toward the exit; I followed them to the door and joined Bissor outside. “Let’s go to the harbor,” he said. That was one of our favorite walks, and although Bissor tried to be bold I knew he was heavyhearted, just as I was. Not only had we lost our money, but we had been cruelly disappointed. “You see how they hate us?” said Bissor, hopelessly convinced. They: the young Sicilians, the Arab policeman, the French newspaper owner, our classmates at the lycée, the whole city in fact.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, then they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:7-9) [2] In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience . [3] Clearly, the regime is interested not in what people experience but in their behavior, which can be managed. More specifically, the royal consciousness is committed to numbness about death. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience the end of his favorite historical arrangements, for they have become fully identified with his own person. Indeed, they are his person, as much as he is or has a person. And therefore his historical arrangements must be invested with a quality of durability if not eternity. Kings need to assign the notion of “forever” to every historical accident over which they preside. Thus it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienations. So we must practice the royal game with our marriages and all serious relations, with our bodies, our age and our health, our nerve, and our commitments.

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

  To the questions “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever have you touch their body in a sexual way?” and “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever attempt oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?” 28 percent of women and 16 percent of men responded affirmatively. One in eight people responded positively to the questions: “As a child, did you witness your mother sometimes, often, or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her?” “As a child, did you witness your mother sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard?”[15] Each yes answer was scored as one point, leading to a possible ACE score ranging from zero to ten. For example, a person who experienced frequent verbal abuse, who had an alcoholic mother, and whose parents divorced would have an ACE score of three. Of the two-thirds of respondents who reported an adverse experience, 87 percent scored two or more. One in six of all respondents had an ACE score of four or higher. In short, Felitti and his team had found that adverse experiences are interrelated, even though they’re usually studied separately. People typically don’t grow up in a household where one brother is in prison but everything else is fine. They don’t live in families where their mother is regularly beaten but life is otherwise hunky-dory. Incidents of abuse are never stand-alone events. And for each additional adverse experience reported, the toll in later damage increases. Felitti and his team found that the effects of childhood trauma first become evident in school. More than half of those with ACE scores of four or higher reported having learning or behavioral problems, compared with 3 percent of those with a score of zero. As the children matured, they didn’t “outgrow” the effects of their early experiences. As Felitti notes, “Traumatic experiences are often lost in time and concealed by shame, secrecy, and social taboo,” but the study revealed that the impact of trauma pervaded these patients’ adult lives. For example, high ACE scores turned out to correlate with higher workplace absenteeism, financial problems, and lower lifetime income. When it came to personal suffering, the results were devastating. As the ACE score rises, chronic depression in adulthood also rises dramatically. For those with an ACE score of four or more, its prevalence is 66 percent in women and 35 percent in men, compared with an overall rate of 12 percent in those with an ACE score of zero. The likelihood of being on antidepressant medication or prescription painkillers also rose proportionally. As Felitti has pointed out, we may be treating today experiences that happened fifty years ago—at ever-increasing cost. Antidepressant drugs and painkillers constitute a significant portion of our rapidly rising national health-care expenditures.[16] (Ironically, research has shown that depressed patients without prior histories of abuse or neglect tend to respond much better to antidepressants than patients with those backgrounds.[17])