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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I think I would more gladly have allowed my eyes to be torn out. Fortunately, he was carried away by his own ardor and spared me this martyrdom. His grimy fingers grasped the box as though he were holding some slimy beast, and he hurled the whole mess out of the window, while I felt as though he were tearing open a wound in me. When he went on to my neighbor who was already speechless with fear, I tiptoed out of the dormitory, but my candy had already vanished when I reached the yard. I soon had to admit to myself that I regretted this trip. My loneliness, the lack of any affection, perhaps also the silence of the forest and the howling of the jackals, the unaccustomed food too — all these weighed on my mind. I hesitated to write to my family and remembered with bitterness how much I had insisted on leaving home. I tried to maintain my dignity by writing reasonable letters to my parents, but my unhappiness must have been quite obvious because, without much skill, they tried, in their replies, to encourage me to be more patient. When I understood that they had seen through my defenses, I lost all self-control and wrote to them about my despair at the mere thought of so many more days of camp ahead of me. Although I could easily imagine my life beyond this intervening barrier of dead time, and although I knew that there was something after it, a period in which time would regain its accustomed rhythm and flavor, this yet remained one of my first childish panics. Deprived of the protection of my parents and of their physical presence, I found myself, for the first time, cast alone on the world. Still, I remained sure of one thing: if I begged him without any pretense, my all-powerful father would come and help me. This last possibility set a limit to my despair and gave me enough assurance for me to refrain, for the time being, from falling back on it. After attending to the morning’s minor chores, after lunching and then resting for our siesta, we always went out to a big clearing in the heart of the wood. The place itself was very beautiful, if I can judge from details that occur to me even today. The forest guarded it jealously, drawn tight all around it with wonderful ancient oak trees that rose to mingle their branches in a vault above us.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Again I was forced to choose, and my weariness made the least effort exhausting. But this time the choice would not be personal; it required an urgent, definite, and public solution. When war had been declared, a spontaneous movement had caused all native-born Jews to sign up. At the Liberation, not one of them volunteered. The instinct of human groups is usually sound. The war had taught us our real place in the mind of the West. Each time we had needed the West it had ignored us. The news that now reached us from the rest of the world confirmed this selfishness of the West: the desperate appeals of the Warsaw ghetto, the silence of the West’s religious authorities, and its abandonment of most of the Jewish minorities to the Germans. As soon as the Germans left Tunis, our ghetto decided for itself that the war was over. For me, it could not be so simple. Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. How much would I have to uproot in myself now? What would be left me? It was in this dreadful moment that I finally caught a glimpse of my ruin. If I rejected what I was becoming would I be able to return to what I had been? I hung around the deserted recruiting offices without being able to make up my mind. One of my motives was to end this constant brooding and to do anything so as to be done with it. But a new phenomenon appeared in my life: I developed insomnia. Until then, no noise or irritation had been able to provoke this, and I could have been carried around, fast asleep, without being awakened. I now started to have nightmares and it took me so long to fall asleep that, the next day, my features were drawn and my head empty. One night I had such a terrible dream that I awoke in anguish and leaped out of bed. I no longer remember the details, which I was anxious to chase out of my mind, but I still have with me the curious and horrible impression that it left. It was about a replica of myself, dead and stretched out on the floor, while my mother inhumanly forced me, with a cruel hand, to stare in its face. Alive, I still felt that I was dead and that I had to live and accept and put up with my own death. I jumped out of bed and ran to open the window to let some fresh air into the room. My hand trembled on the window latch and I had to walk up and down to calm myself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  I have spoken of the most obvious places where idols are worshipped in our time and where forgiveness and freedom from slavery must be announced and implemented by the followers of Jesus. But precisely because our vocation as Jesus followers is to be renewed humans, the “royal priesthood” who worship the true God and work for his kingdom in the world, our own lives must be subject to the same critique, the same vocation. There is no place for people who want to go charging off to implement some social, cultural, or political agenda but who think that this absolves them from the challenge to personal holiness. There is always a danger of using large public issues to stop our ears against the nagging problems within—just as there is an opposite danger, of being so obsessed with our own struggles for sanctity that we fail to notice the plight of the poor. Holiness is multidimensional. And holiness will always be shaped by the cross. Paul speaks of “putting to death” the impulses and deeds that bubble up from within us and distort our genuine human vocation. His letters are full of sharp practical counsel of this sort. Financial corruption, sexual immorality, evil and malicious speaking—all must be killed off (see, for instance, Col. 3:1–11). Easier said than done, of course, but once more the victory of the cross is central. And note carefully: this is not a matter of saying, “Now that you’re a Christian, you must follow the rules.” Rules matter, but they matter because they are one of the guardrails within the much larger vocation, to worship the true God and work for his kingdom. Every time you are tempted to sin, you are being asked to hand over to some alien force a little bit of your own God-given power, which is supposed to be exercised over yourself, your life, and the parts of the world you touch. You are being drawn into the sphere in which some “power” is at work, under the control of the satan. At that moment you are also being called (did you but know it) to exercise your true power as a genuine human being, to practice your vocation as part of the royal priesthood. Sin is a distraction from our true tasks, a distortion (at best) of our true vocation. It keeps the powers in power. Resisting it—especially when we have allowed habit to take us effortlessly in that direction—will be difficult, sometimes painful, sometimes profoundly depressing. That is part of taking up the cross.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them — the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out — all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I have perhaps already lost it. Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: “How’s it going?” Bounin’s eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. He is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I’ll not be working later. For the first time in my life I’m about to waste the time allotted for an exam. Within a few hours, I’ll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I’ve been acting. No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. Now, if I don’t write, I’ll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I’ve allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I’ve counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. No, I’m not a novice and I don’t want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly. This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account. How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there’s a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I’m a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself a bankrupt.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “Ingrid, guess who I saw last night at the Virgins,” she said, her high voice breathless with malice. “Our old friend Barry Kolker.” She stage-sighed. “With some cheap little blond half his age. Men have such short memories, don’t they?” Her nostrils twitched as she stifled a laugh. At lunchtime, my mother told me to take everything I wanted, art supplies, stationery. We were leaving and we weren’t coming back. 3 [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] “I SHOULD SHAVE my head,” she said. “Paint my face with ashes.” Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. “How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?” She didn’t go back to work. She wouldn’t leave the darkened apartment except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours watching the reflections in the shimmering blue, or swam silently underwater like a fish in an aquarium. It was time for me to go back to school. But I couldn’t leave her alone, not when she was like this. She might not be there when I returned. So we stayed in, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then we were eating rice and oatmeal. “What do I do?” I asked Michael as he fed me cheese and sardines at his battered coffee table. The TV news showed fires burning on the Angeles Crest. Michael shook his head, at me, at the line of firemen straddling the hillside. “Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You’re looking at a natural disaster.” I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Barry died a slow lingering death for what he was doing to my mother. A RED MOON rose over downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was the season of fire, and we were trapped in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind. “This ragged heart,” she said, pulling at her kimono. “I should rip it out and bury it for compost.” I wished I could touch her, but she was inside her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn’t hear me through the glass. She doubled over, pressing her forearms against her chest, pressing the air out of herself. “I press it within my body,” she said. “As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric dung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him.” She whispered this last, but ferociously. “A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it’s not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me.” The next morning she got up. She took a shower, went to the market.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was the last time that I ever went along the tunnel with its walls lined with boxes and bottles from floor to ceiling. With a gesture of his hand Monsieur Bismuth invited me to be seated. It was also the only occasion, I think, when he did not put on a show for me and continue, for a while, to write. As usual, he was the first to speak and, as long as he still spoke, I said nothing; still, he spoke simply and clearly. If his attitude was at all calculated, then it was rather one of indifference. In a carefree manner that seemed to me to be affected, he announced that I was no longer to expect any help from him. It had become impossible for him to continue to bear the expenses of my studies, especially those for higher education. As for me, I was stunned by this decision that allowed no appeal, contradicting as it did all my dreams and everything that had ever seemed certain to me. It was as if I felt a chill, while he continued to speak with poise, in studied tones. Business, he said, was bad, much worse than it had been, and he was the father of two little girls and had to think of their future too. Behind him, hanging on the wall, there was his portrait, the same one I had seen seven years earlier, when I had come for the first time to see him and had left him with the feeling that the whole world lay open ahead of me and that I only needed to deserve it. How ridiculously self-complacent one can be! Fancy hanging one’s own picture on one’s wall! As soon as one looks at all older, everyone notices it. In the past seven years, Monsieur Bismuth had indeed aged a lot. He now spoke, still giving me advice, as I recall, directives for the future. He seemed to forget that our only link was that of financial assistance and that, once he ceased to give me any, we automatically became strangers again. Out of sheer habit, he continued to give me instructions: “You will study pharmacy all the same. You can do some tutoring and live in one of the dormitories of the Cité Universitaire in Paris. Come back and see me before you leave town and I’ll give you a letter of introduction to the director of the Spanish House there. He’s a good friend of mine.” But my future was no longer any of Monsieur Bismuth’s business, and this alone was a good enough reason for me to dare at last to express to him an objection. “I was planning to study philosophy,” I said. His gesture expressed only contempt. “To become a teacher? A civil servant? You’ll never earn a living that way.” He had overridden my argument, just as he had before when he decided that I must study pharmacy instead of medicine.

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

  There could be only one explanation for such results: In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive. The disappearance of medial prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatized people lose their sense of purpose and direction. I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it. Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired. How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn’t define what they wanted or, to be more precise, what the sensations in their bodies, the basis of all emotions, were trying to tell them? The lack of self-awareness in victims of chronic childhood trauma is sometimes so profound that they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror. Brain scans show that this is not the result of mere inattention: The structures in charge of self-recognition may be knocked out along with the structures related to self-experience. When Ruth Lanius showed me her study, a phrase from my classical high school education came back to me. The mathematician Archimedes, teaching about the lever, is supposed to have said: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Or, as the great twentieth-century body therapist Moshe Feldenkrais put it: “You can’t do what you want till you know what you’re doing.” The implications are clear: to feel present you have to know where you are and be aware of what is going on with you. If the self-sensing system breaks down we need to find ways to reactivate it. The Self-Sensing SystemIt was fascinating to see how much Sherry benefited from her massage therapy. She felt more relaxed and adventurous in her day-to-day life and she was also more relaxed and open with me. She became truly involved in her therapy and was genuinely curious about her behavior, thoughts, and feelings. She stopped picking at her skin, and when summer came she started to spend evenings sitting outside on her stoop, chatting with her neighbors. She even joined a church choir, a wonderful experience of group synchrony.

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

  And yet, after attending another wake for a teenager who was killed in a drive-by shooting in the Blue Hill Avenue section of Boston or after reading about the latest school budget cuts in impoverished cities and towns, I find myself close to despair. In many ways we seem to be regressing, with measures like the callous congressional elimination of food stamps for kids whose parents are unemployed or in jail; with the stubborn opposition to universal health care in some quarters; with psychiatry’s obtuse refusal to make connection between psychic suffering and social conditions; with the refusal to prohibit the sale or possession of weapons whose only purpose is to kill large numbers of human beings; and with our tolerance for incarcerating a huge segment of our population, wasting their lives as well as our resources. Discussions of PTSD still tend to focus on recently returned soldiers, victims of terrorist bombings, or survivors of terrible accidents. But trauma remains a much larger public health issue, arguably the greatest threat to our national well-being. Since 2001 far more Americans have died at the hands of their partners or other family members than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American women are twice as likely to suffer domestic violence as breast cancer. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that firearms kill twice as many children as cancer does. All around Boston I see signs advertising the Jimmy Fund, which fights children’s cancer, and for marches to fund research on breast cancer and leukemia, but we seem too embarrassed or discouraged to mount a massive effort to help children and adults learn to deal with the fear, rage, and collapse, the predictable consequences of having been traumatized. When I give presentations on trauma and trauma treatment, participants sometimes ask me to leave out the politics and confine myself to talking about neuroscience and therapy. I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people. My most profound experience with healing from collective trauma was witnessing the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was based on the central guiding principle of Ubuntu, a Xhosa word that denotes sharing what you have, as in “My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.” Ubuntu recognizes that true healing is impossible without recognition of our common humanity and our common destiny.

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

  We are fundamentally social creatures—our brains are wired to foster working and playing together. Trauma devastates the social-engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as a productive member of the clan. In this book we have seen how many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support. Yet institutions that deal with traumatized children and adults all too often bypass the emotional-engagement system that is the foundation of who we are and instead focus narrowly on correcting “faulty thinking” and on suppressing unpleasant emotions and troublesome behaviors. People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score: If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, and other forms of joyful engagement. As we’ve seen, my own profession often compounds, rather than alleviates, the problem. Many psychiatrists today work in assembly-line offices where they see patients they hardly know for fifteen minutes and then dole out pills to relieve pain, anxiety, or depression. Their message seems to be “Leave it to us to fix you; just be compliant and take these drugs and come back in three months—but be sure not to use alcohol or (illegal) drugs to relieve your problems.” Such shortcuts in treatment make it impossible to develop self-care and self-leadership. One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents. Our increasing use of drugs to treat these conditions doesn’t address the real issues: What are these patients trying to cope with? What are their internal or external resources? How do they calm themselves down? Do they have caring relationships with their bodies, and what do they do to cultivate a physical sense of power, vitality, and relaxation? Do they have dynamic interactions with other people? Who really knows them, loves them, and cares about them? Whom can they count on when they’re scared, when their babies are ill, or when they are sick themselves? Are they members of a community, and do they play vital roles in the lives of the people around them? What specific skills do they need to focus, pay attention, and make choices? Do they have a sense of purpose? What are they good at? How can we help them feel in charge of their lives?

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  against every historical agent that assigns to itself enduring, even ontological, significance. Both creation faith and messianism have the potential of making major positive contributions to the life and faith of Israel. Both could have advanced the vision and promise of Moses. Creation faith might have articulated a vision of a just cosmic and social order. Messianism could have promised a reliable, powerful advocate for the powerless. In fact, both had intrinsically reactionary tendencies that functioned to enhance the status quo and to resist the abrasive covenantal questions. Thus, not only economically and politically but also theologically, tenth-century monarchic Israel moved against the revolution for the freedom of God and the politics of justice and freedom. It may be that I have schematized matters too much, but I believe that schematization is evident in the text itself. The emergence of royal reality could have gone either way, and the tradition holds out a hope for faithful royal reality, even as late as Josiah (c. 640–609 B.C.E.). In fact, it did not turn out that way, and that indeed presents a major problem for biblical faith. Royal reality rode roughshod over Moses’ vision. The gift of freedom was taken over by the yearning for order. The human agenda of justice was utilized for security. The god of freedom and justice was co-opted for an eternal now. And in place of passion comes satiation. I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate. We do not need to review the literature of passion but only to make reference to Soelle, Moltmann, Wiesel, and especially Heschel. [17] Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. That same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for—even Solomon in all his splendor.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Some Jews (not all) believed that deliverance would come through suffering, but such suffering would not be undergone by the Messiah himself. It would be hard for a Second Temple Jew to read key passages like Psalm 2 or Psalm 110 without envisaging the Messiah as a military conqueror. This is all the more striking in that the early Christians continued to invoke just those passages, shorn of their explicit violence, in their interpretation of Jesus and what he had accomplished. It is important, then, to detach the pre-Christian Jewish notion of a coming Messiah from the notion of suffering. Albert Schweitzer, as I mentioned a moment ago, popularized the idea that the long-awaited new age would come about through a period of intense suffering, which came to be termed the “messianic woes.” The phrase “messianic woes” by itself, however, is imprecise and potentially misleading. Schweitzer was referring to a visible reality: that from quite early on in the writing of the books that became Israel’s scriptures, some prophets and psalmists seemed to come back regularly to this idea of great suffering as the prelude to the coming deliverance. This suffering would, however, only be “messianic” in the loose sense that it might immediately precede the “messianic age.” Sometimes Israel’s scriptures refer to the suffering that results from Israel’s idolatry and sin. Sometimes, however, as in many of the psalms, it is suffering inflicted on God’s people, or perhaps on an individual, despite their innocence. The night gets darker, the pain still more intense, and then the new day will dawn. All this comes to a head in passages like Daniel 12:1: “There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered.” 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.

• 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.