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 Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  States is very different from the need for it in the abusive contexts that prevailed in Argentina and Chile. Indeed, the difference is so great that one might judge there is no transfer of the power of imagination from one context to the other. Whereas the South American societies suffer torture and physical abuse, the cultural situation in the United States, satiated by consumer goods and propelled by electronic technology, is one of narcoticized insensibility to human reality. It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny a lively, communal imagination that resists a mindless humanity of despairing conformity. If Eucharist is potentially an act of resistance and alternative to torture, perhaps Eucharistic imagination can also be a potential resistance and alternative to commodity satiation. It is evident that in our American society, as in those brutal contexts, there are two types of imagination, that of “the generals and their opponents,” or that of consumer ideology and its resisters. The fact is that we in American society too easily live “inside this imagination” when prophetic imagination is capable of enabling us to live inside “God’s imagination.” Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity. What the prophetic tradition knows is that it could be different, and the difference can be enacted. At the end of this edition of the book I have listed examples of enacted prophetic imagination. Those listed there are persons, communities, and institutions that have refused to live inside an alien, numbing imagination and have embraced the very “imagination of God.” The capacity of such alternative imagination is neither strong nor wise. But clearly, God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters; not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are (1 Cor 1:25-28).

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Excluding Hope As a beginning point it may be affirmed that the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon. Israel had no doubt that since the Solomonic achievement the royal prosperity was increasingly closed to large numbers of the Israelites. That indeed is a key point in the polemics of Amos. And so, in that time as in our own, the royal arrangement surely and properly evokes despair among those who are shut out. It is equally important to perceive that those who have entry to power and prosperity are also victims of hopelessness, or in a more contemporary idiom, have a sense of powerlessness. The royal consciousness means to overcome history and therefore by design the future loses its vitality and authority. The present ordering, and by derivation the present regime, claims to be the full and final ordering. That claim means there can be no future that either calls the present into question or promises a way out of it. Thus the fulsome claim of the present arrangement is premised on hopelessness. This insidious form of realized eschatology requires persons to live without hope. The present is unending in its projection, uncompromising in its claim of loyalty, and unaccommodating in having its own way. In the words of a recent beer commercial, you can be totalitarian when “you believe in what you’re doing” and you conclude that one way is the “right way.” I believe the Solomonic regime created such a situation of despair. Inevitably it had to hold on desperately and despairingly to the present, for if the present slipped away, there would be nothing. The future had already been annulled. I do not find it farfetched to imagine the lack of promise in Ecclesiastes to be pertinent to the royal consciousness: 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. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already, in the ages before us. (Eccl 1:9-10) There is nothing new, partly because nothing seemed to be happening but also because the regime had ordered and decreed it that way. The need to annul the future must lead to a situation in which hope is also denied. In concrete terms, technological, agricultural, and other social advances are impeded in aristocratic monarchies because the taxes, tithes, tribute, tolls, rents, and confiscations drain all the peasants’ resources and rationale for creativity; only the technology of warfare advances at a more rapid pace because that contributes to the expansion and control of the king and his entourage. [3] Furthermore, the authority of the king rests on dynastic tradition; so introducing new visions opens the possibility of challenges to the tradition and therefore the king’s authority.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This time the spring within me is quite broken; my strength and my will power fail me now. I might have stopped before leaving Tunis, or at the customs, or in a railroad station on my way, or at the entrance to the college. But I stopped in the examination room. It really is the end: I shall never be a professor. ~ 8. DEPARTURE ~ It was on the interminable return trip, during the twenty-six hours in the train, that I decided to leave Tunis with Henry. As a matter of fact, I do not quite see what else I might have done, except let myself die here. Every morning, fits of coughing exasperate me and send the blood rushing to my head, like an echo of my father’s spells of asthma. I used to be so full of disgust and pity for this ritual of pain, and here am I already aping him. It is high time for me to leave or to complete my ruin. It was a very tiring night. The wooden railroad car bumped us about on the seats and against the walls. My companions had shut the door and the window of our compartment. Soon the air became stifling and my temples and neck were sticky with sweat and soot. Once, I almost fell asleep, but the suitcase that was on my knees and on which I rested my arms and head was jerked away. Outside the compartment, the cold made me cough violently, but at least I could think. Once I had thrown up the sponge in the exam, I never entered the college again. But I did not wish to leave Algiers before having set the whole matter straight; after that, I was face to face with myself. If I now remain alive, I’ll never forget this extraordinary meeting and the strange way I came up against myself. So I have progressed from crisis to crisis, each time finding a new equilibrium, though a bit more precariously; still, there was always something left that could be destroyed. This time, the accounts are balanced: at last nothing shields me from myself. I made my break with our blind alley because it was but a childish dream, then with my father and my mother when I grew ashamed of them, with values of our community because they were obsolete, with ambition and the middle-class world because they are unjust and their ideals all questionable, with the city because it still lives in Oriental medievalism and has no love for me, with the West because it lies and is selfish. Each time, a part of me has disintegrated. I thought of death, of leaving the world. But never has the idea of death been so familiar and so present, like a ripe decision.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. [1] It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes. I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises. I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state. What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community. In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. When we think “prophetic” we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be “religious,” where do we begin? What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death. In considering the Solomonic achievement, I have been speaking of the fate of the royal consciousness as “numbness” even though I have not used that word. The Solomonic establishment embodies the loss of passion, which is the inability to care or suffer. One has only to compare the grief, anguish, and joy of David (2 Sam 1:19-27; 3:33-34; 12:15-23; 18:33; 19:4; 23:13-17) with the one- dimensional narrative of Solomon to realize something decisive has happened from the father to the son. Here the discussion of numbness concerns apathy, the absence of pathos, whereas in the reflective statement of Ecclesiastes the same experience is expressed as vanity: All streams run to the sea,

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  I will carry and will save. (Isa 46:3-4; see 43:22-24) If energy is what is in short supply, it is better to find a God who is free, able, and willing to take responsibility for his godness. There is high irony in a weary, despairing exile being in the image of a god who must be carried around because of fatigue. But the adherents of this other God are energized, empowered, and capable of living a faithful life. The contrast I have discerned is not new and has often been discerned, but what I do not want to miss is the socio-political dimension of the poem that adherence to the royal consciousness and its definition of reality make people weary and hopeless. It means nothing to recite such radical poetry unless we are clear about the battle for definition of reality that always lives close to the realities of power. The contrast of the gods and the ridicule of the Babylonian gods is brought closer by a parallel ridicule of Madam Babylon. What kind of madam is Dame Babylon? A grand dame with courtly manner? A tyrannical old lady? A lady with a house like such a lady keeps? That is all over, for the new history of Israel with Yahweh means the end of this imperial history: Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans! For you shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal, put off your veil, strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers. Your nakedness shall be uncovered,

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address. ONE AFTERNOON , we stopped by his house unannounced. “He’s going to be mad,” I said. “We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said. I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house. I played the radio, classical music. I couldn’t stand to hear anything with words. I imagined my own ice-blue eyes looking at some man, telling him to go away, that I was busy. “You’re not my type,” I said coolly into the rearview mirror. A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility. “He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.” I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July. I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing. She’d kill us before we got three blocks. But she didn’t start the car. She sat there, staring through the windshield, rocking herself, holding herself around her waist. A few minutes later, a car pulled up in the driveway, a new-model sports car, the top down, a blond girl driving. She was very young and wore a short skirt. She leaned over to get her bag out of the backseat. “She’s not as pretty as you,” I said. “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered bitterly. KIT LEANED on the counter in the production room, her magenta lips a wolf’s stained smile.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I then gave up my list of friends and my attempts to save myself. If Poinsot did not want to help me, no other Frenchman would. Furthermore, it was more and more dangerous to go out. As the community was taking its time with its reply, the raids in the streets were becoming more and more frequent and efficient. The German police were being helped by the French: unpleasant mistakes had to be avoided. So we retreated into our homes and closed our shops. The ghetto became like a desert. But the police knew the Jewish homes. Through habit and a certain respect for formalities, they still knocked on the doors and cried “Police!” The Germans then followed or simply waited in the street near their big closed vans. I was still indignant enough to want to reject this new image of France. After all, were not the policemen just as French as Racine and Descartes? I was out when they raided our Passage. Our neighbor had been dragged out of his bed in the middle of a fit of malaria and had continued to rave in delirium in the stairway. When he saw the uniforms, he began to sing the “Marseillaise”; the policemen were annoyed because they thought he was being sarcastic and began to beat him up while he stood stiffly at attention. The situation was becoming disastrous. The raiders carried off all men indiscriminately, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick. A few young girls disappeared. The families of the hostages begged and prayed and wept. Something had to be done about those who were already in the camps. When they saw that no help would come from anywhere and that ostrich tactics led only to disaster, the leaders of the community got in touch with the Germans. Later, they were violently criticized for this; at the time, however, we heaved a sigh of relief. I have enough other reasons to feel strongly against our middle class and can dare to say this. The ghetto was there, easy to cut off and surround with a handful of men, and open to any attack. The Germans could kill, rape, and loot as they pleased. Those who protest today are the ones who found refuge in homes in the European quarters, but could one hope to hide the whole ghetto? The little hucksters, saddlers, tailors, bakers, and cobblers had no connections. Something had to be done. The Germans agreed to stop the raids and to allow us to organize a medical service that would exempt the sick and the aged from labor camps. In exchange, the leaders had to supply a given contingent of workers. At last we thought we would be able to leave our anguished seclusion. I must admit that, at the time, we found this arrangement preferable to the day-to-day terror of random police raids.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The beast’s words are frozen in my mind. “I am old, you murdering bitch,” he hissed, “and I have already lived eight of my lives. I have a single life left, and I swear here and now to dedicate it to revenge. I will dwell in the dream dimension, and I will haunt you and your female descendants forever. You separated me forever from Cica, the bewitching Cica, the great passion of my life, and now I will make certain that you will forever be separated from any man who ever shows an interest in you. I’ll visit them when they are with you”—here he hissed most terribly—”and drive them from you in such terror that they will never return—they will forget your very existence.” At first I felt exultant. Stupid cat! Cats are, after all, simpleminded, pinheaded animals. Merges had no real understanding of me. His brilliant revenge—that I would no longer be able to be with a man twice! Not revenge but a blessing, a blessing exceeded only by my being forbidden to be with a man even once. Never again to touch or even see a man—that would be paradise. But I soon found that Merges was not simpleminded—far from it. He could read thoughts; I am sure of it. He sat on his haunches, stroking his whiskers, staring at me with his enormous red eyes for a very long time. Then he proclaimed, this time in a strangely human voice, sounding like a judge or a prophet, “What you feel toward men will be changed forever. Now you shall know desire. You shall be like a cat, and when your heat comes each month, your desire will be irresistible. But it will never be fulfilled. You will please men but never be pleased, and each man you please will leave you, never to return or even to remember you. You shall bear a child, and she and her child and her child’s child shall know what I and Kovacs feel. This shall be for all time.” “For all time?” I asked. “Such a long sentence?” “For all time,” he replied. “What greater offense than separating me forever from the love of my life?” Suddenly overcome, I began to tremble and beg for you, my unborn daughter. “Please punish me, Merges. I deserve it for what I did to you. I deserve a loveless life. But for my children and my children’s children, I beg you.” And I bowed low before him and pressed my forehead to the ground. “There is only one exit for your children. None for you.” “What is the exit?” I asked. “Redress the wrong,” said Merges, now licking—with a tongue larger than my hand—his monstrous paws and cleaning his hideous face. “Redress the wrong? How? What should they do?” I moved toward him, pleading. But Merges hissed and brandished his unsheathed claws. As I stepped back, he faded away. The last thing I saw of him were those terrible claws.

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

  Virginia is a thirteen-year-old adopted white girl. She was taken away from her biological mother because of the mother’s drug abuse; after her first adoptive mother fell ill and died, she moved from foster home to foster home before being adopted again. Virginia was seductive with any male who crossed her path, and she reported sexual and physical abuse by various babysitters and temporary caregivers. She came to our residential treatment program after thirteen crisis hospitalizations for suicide attempts. The staff described her as isolated, controlling, explosive, sexualized, intrusive, vindictive, and narcissistic. She described herself as disgusting and said she wished she were dead. The diagnoses in her chart were bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, reactive attachment disorder, attention deficit disorder (ADD) hyperactive subtype, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and substance use disorder. But who, really, is Virginia? How can we help her have a life?[1] We can hope to solve the problems of these children only if we correctly define what is going on with them and do more than developing new drugs to control them or trying to find “the” gene that is responsible for their “disease.” The challenge is to find ways to help them lead productive lives and, in so doing, save hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. That process starts with facing the facts. Bad Genes?With such pervasive problems and such dysfunctional parents we would be tempted to ascribe their problems simply to bad genes. Technology always produces new directions for research, and when it became possible to do genetic testing, psychiatry became committed to finding the genetic causes of mental illness. Finding a genetic link seemed particularly relevant for schizophrenia, a fairly common (affecting about 1 percent of the population), severe, and perplexing form of mental illness and one that clearly runs in families. And yet after thirty years and millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of research, we have failed to find consistent genetic patterns for schizophrenia—or for any other psychiatric illness, for that matter.[2] Some of my colleagues have also worked hard to discover genetic factors that predispose people to develop traumatic stress.[3] That quest continues, but so far it has failed to yield any solid answers.[4] Recent research has swept away the simple idea that “having” a particular gene produces a particular result. It turns out that many genes work together to influence a single outcome. Even more important, genes are not fixed; life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off by attaching methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, to the outside of the gene (a process called methylation), making it more or less sensitive to messages from the body. While life events can change the behavior of the gene, they do not alter its fundamental structure. Methylation patterns, however, can be passed on to offspring—a phenomenon known as epigenetics. Once again, the body keeps the score, at the deepest levels of the organism.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  announcements of Jesus are the decisive dismissal of every self-serving form of power upon which the royal consciousness is based. Just that formula, Son of man must suffer —Son of man/suffer!—is more than the world can tolerate, for the phrase of ultimate power, “Son of man,” has as its predicate the passion to death. It is true that no precise counterpart can be found in the history of Moses. Moses never speaks or acts in this way; but we may pause to discern important continuities between the two. Moses also dismantled the empire and declared it to be a no-power (remember Exod 8:18) by disregarding the claims of the imperial reality and trusting fully in the Lord of justice and freedom. In parallel fashion, the dominant power is dismantled by appeal to an uncredentialed God. That the passion sayings of Jesus constitute the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness is evident in the reaction of the faithful. First, Peter, on behalf of the church, rejects the criticism as too radical and he is roundly reprimanded (Mark 8:32-33). Second, the disciples did not understand and are afraid to ask (9:32). Third, they respond, indicating they understood nothing, by fresh dispute about their own power and authority (10:35-37). The criticism of Jesus is too radical, not only for the imperial managers but also for his own followers. None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism. Sayings on the Cross. Jesus’ sayings on the cross as preserved in the various traditions are the voice of an alternative consciousness. His initial plea for forgiveness for his enemies is an act of criticism (Luke 23:34), for it asserts the insanity of the dominant culture. On behalf of that world that has now sentenced him, he enters a plea of temporary insanity . A reference should be made here to the insightful interpretation of Paul Lehmann, who shows that the trial of Jesus before Pilate in fact has Pilate, and not Jesus, on trial. [17] The cry of Jesus from the cross, then, may be regarded as a decision (by the Judge) that the defendant (the old order) may not be punished because it is insane. Second, his cry of despair is an announcement of abandonment (Mark 15:34). The whole known network of meaning has collapsed and a new, dangerous situation of faith has emerged. [18] Thus Jesus experiences the result of the criticism; the old assurances and awarenesses of meaning are now all gone. [19]

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It may seem immodest not to mention as well the simple fear I had of the war. Not that I never thought of it. But the idea of death had so often been with me beside my bed, obscurely tempting but rejected, that the anguish of battle could not be much worse. Meanwhile, I wrote also to the Military Commander of the city and waited a long time for his answer, which said that nothing had been planned for people in my category. Finally, after much reasoning I admitted what the masses had immediately felt intuitively. I could only be a victim of this war; never would I be accepted as one of the victors. In the end this side of the question was cleared up completely. A member of the Chamber of Deputies demanded the mobilization of native Africans, but the Algerian Assembly refused. From a distance, we followed the disappointing debate. The heads of our community then proposed, of their own accord, that the Jews be conscripted. That too was refused. Such a collective measure would evidently have meant extending the rights and advantages of servicemen to their families, and that was out of the question. There was no longer any reason to doubt; for the second time, the West had rejected and betrayed us. The first time, I had been able to find an excuse for it: the Vichy government was much criticized by the Western powers. This time, however, there could no longer be any doubt. Some time later it was rumored that one could join the Second Gaullist Armored Division in Tripoli. Apparently, they did not dare send back those who had traveled so far to enlist. But I did not make any further moves. I would never be a Westerner. I rejected the West. Still, my ideas were too confused and my heart too passionately involved in all that happened, so that I could not fully realize my position or draw practical conclusions from it. I had rejected the East and had been rejected by the West. What would I ever become? What was my future? Again, I fell prey to harassing doubts, utterly overwhelmed. At least there were now few air raids, and I could rest better. So I spent most of my afternoons with Henry. For hours, I would listen to him dreaming about wealth in Argentina and the wonderful life out in the open, on horseback, in boots and sombreros. I did not argue about the war any more. He had included it in his plans, which became more complex. First, we would go to England and join the British forces which were less difficult than the French. He had found out that British R.A.F. pilots were being trained in America. We might do a little fighting, to satisfy me. Afterwards, as the war drew to a close, we could get ourselves demobilized in America. From there, we could get to Argentina.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Are you exceedingly angry with us? (Lam 5:20-21) There is the risk of a petition, but with little conviction. The last pair of rhetorical questions seems to expect the worst. The inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion is predictable given the characteristic royal capacity to manage all the pieces. It is so even in our personal lives, in which we conclude that the given dimensions we have frequently rearranged are the only dimensions that exist. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. We are able to believe no more in the graciousness of God than we are in the judgment of God. We are largely confined to reflections on the given pieces, and our modest expectations are confined by our reason, our language, and our epistemology. We have no public arenas in which serious hopefulness can be brought to articulation. What is most needed is what is most unacceptable—an articulation that redefines the situation and that makes way for new gifts about to be given. Without a public arena for the articulation of gifts that fall outside our conventional rationality, we are fated to despair. We know full well the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces. And short of genuine newness life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much. My judgment is that such a state of affairs not only is evident in the exile of Judah but is characteristic of most situations of ministry. When we try to face the holding action that defines the sickness, the aging, the marriages, and the jobs of very many people, we find that we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. Such hope is an enemy of the very royal consciousness with which most of us have secured a working arrangement. The question facing ministry is whether there is anything that can be said, done, or acted in the face of the ideology of hopelessness.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and go away from them! (Jer 8:22—9:2) In his opening concerning the balm, the prophet asks a question. He does not make an affirmation as in the African American spiritual (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”), but leaves the question unanswered. The second question is asked in deeper pathos: Is there no doctor? [12] Failing an answer he must now deepen his expression of pain. The answer was not given because answering is the way of royal Israel. Now it is time not for answers but for questions that defy answers because the royal answering service no longer functions. Answers from that source presume control and symmetry. And that is gone.

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

  Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach. The Rorschach tests also taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people. For most of us a man coming down the street is just someone taking a walk. A rape victim, however, may see a person who is about to molest her and go into a panic. A stern schoolteacher may be an intimidating presence to an average kid, but for a child whose stepfather beats him up, she may represent a torturer and precipitate a rage attack or a terrified cowering in the corner. Stuck in TraumaOur clinic was inundated with veterans seeking psychiatric help. However, because of an acute shortage of qualified doctors, all we could do was put most of them on a waiting list, even as they continued brutalizing themselves and their families. We began seeing a sharp increase in arrests of veterans for violent offenses and drunken brawls—as well as an alarming number of suicides. I received permission to start a group for young Vietnam veterans to serve as a sort of holding tank until “real” therapy could start.

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

  Next I asked him to stay focused on it and see how he felt toward it now. He said he was curious to know more about it. I asked him how old it was. He said about seven. I asked him to have his critic show him what he protected. After a lengthy silence, still with his eyes closed, he told me that he was witnessing a scene from his childhood. His father was beating a little boy, him, and he was standing to one side thinking how stupid that kid was to provoke his dad. When I asked him how he felt about the boy who was getting hurt, he told me that he despised him. He was a weakling and a whiner; after showing even the least bit of defiance to his dad’s high-handed ways, he inevitably capitulated and whimpered that he would be a good little boy. He had no guts, no fire in his belly. I asked the critic if he would be willing to step aside so we could see what was going on with that boy. In response the critic appeared in full force and called him names like “wimp” and “sissy.” I asked Peter again if the critic would be willing to step aside and give the boy a chance to speak. He shut down completely and left the session saying that he was unlikely ever to set foot in my office again. But the following week he was back: As she had threatened, his wife had gone to a lawyer and filed for divorce. He was devastated and no longer looked anything like the perfectly put-together doctor whom I’d come to know and, in many ways, dread. Faced with the loss of his family, he became unhinged and felt comforted by the idea that if things got too bad he could take his life in his own hands. We went inside again and identified the part that was terrified of abandonment. Once he was in his mindful Self-state, I urged him to ask that terrified boy to show him the burdens he was carrying. Again, his first reaction was disgust at the boy’s weakness, but after I asked him to get that part to step back, he saw an image of himself as a young boy in his parents’ house, alone in his room, screaming in terror. Peter watched this scene for several minutes, weeping silently through much of it. I asked him if the boy had told him everything he wanted him to know. No, there were other scenes, like running to embrace his father at the door and getting slapped for having disobeyed his mother.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I returned for a time to my sexual loneliness and to my attempts to imagine one of the neighborhood girls in the nude or to give consistency and life to pin-up photographs. My attempt to escape from my aloneness had only forced me back on myself, all the poorer for the loss of my illusions. How I envied Sitboun, who dreamed at night of the girls he had noticed the day before! But I had reached a stage in my life when I was no longer satisfied with myself. As I got over the bitterness I felt after my first adventure and as my memories of it became blurred, there remained only the ghost of a woman whose pubes or breasts I still tried to recall. Then, driven by a new urge, I returned to the narrow alley of the red-light district. I was no less disappointed, but I was less surprised about it. I realized that this is all there is to physical love and that it always leaves one unassuaged. I did not return to search for rarer pleasures, but for something else which was not to be found. So I stayed away again for a while, but naturally came back again, each time promising myself never to return to the filth and disappointment and bitterness and loss of self-respect I experienced after each visit. Besides it was expensive, and I had to be careful. Thereafter, my sex-life, like all the rest of my life, went from one extreme to the other, from attempts at communion with others to hasty and nauseated retreats into despair. My disappointments were not merely physical, as a result of the hurried and indifferent behavior of the girls. I had not found what I was looking for and had hoped for so long: to make love to a human being. The girls’ faces remained blank and impersonal. One of them smoked, and another gossiped while I had my fun alone. Once, someone came along and banged on the door just as I was reaching the moment, so brief, when a man forgets where he is and with whom. Sometimes, the next customer standing outside would express his impatience, and I would try to take no more notice of it than of the other noises in the street. For some reason, the girl, on one such occasion, lost her temper and started to hurl insults at the waiting man. He replied in kind, and this vile dialogue continued across my body.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The time of year you couldn’t even go to the beach because of the toxic red tide, the time when the city dropped to its knees like ancient Sodom, praying for redemption. We sat in the car down the block from Barry’s house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree. But there was no point in trying to convince her to go home. She no longer spoke the language I did. I broke a carob pod under my nose and smelled the musky scent and pretended I was waiting for my father, a plumber inspecting some pipes in this small brick house with its dandelion-dotted lawn, its leaded picture window with a lamp in it. Then Barry came out, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion, funky little John Lennon sunglasses, his hair in its ponytail. He got in the old gold Lincoln and drove away. “Come on,” my mother said. She put on a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind the photo editor used when he handled stills, and threw me a pair. I didn’t want to go with her but didn’t want to be left in the car either, so I went. We walked up the path to his house as if we belonged there, and my mother reached into the Balinese spirit house he kept on the porch and pulled out a key. Inside, I was seized again by the sadness of what had happened, the finality. Once I had thought I might even live there, with the big wayang kulit puppets, batik pillows, and dragon kites hanging from the ceiling. His statues of Shiva and Parvati in their eternal embrace hadn’t bothered me before, when I thought he and my mother would be like that, that it would last forever and engender a new universe. But now I hated them. My mother turned on his computer at the great carved desk. The machine whirred. She typed something in and all the things on the screen disappeared. I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked “backup.” “I almost feel sorry for him,” she said as she turned the computer off. “But not quite.” She took her X-acto knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. “How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement.” She laid it on the bed and slashed it into fringe. Then she tucked a white oleander into a buttonhole. SOMEONE WAS pounding on our door. She looked up from a new poem she was writing.

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

  Antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal, Abilify, or Seroquel can significantly dampen the emotional brain and thus make patients less skittish or enraged, but they also may interfere with being able to appreciate subtle signals of pleasure, danger, or satisfaction. They also cause weight gain, increase the chance of developing diabetes, and make patients physically inert, which is likely to further increase their sense of alienation. These drugs are widely used to treat abused children who are inappropriately diagnosed with bipolar disorder or mood dysregulation disorder. More than half a million children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, which may calm them down but also interfere with learning age-appropriate skills and developing friendships with other children.[60] A Columbia University study recently found that prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs for privately insured two-to five-year-olds had doubled between 2000 and 2007.[61] Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment. Until it lost its patent, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson doled out LEGO blocks stamped with the word “Risperdal” for the waiting rooms of child psychiatrists. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines. In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children—including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.[62] There have been no studies on the effects of psychotropic medications on the developing brain. Dissociation, self-mutilation, fragmented memories, and amnesia generally do not respond to any of these medications. The Prozac study that I discussed in chapter 2 was the first to discover that traumatized civilians tend to respond much better to medications than do combat veterans.[63] Since then other studies have found similar discrepancies. In this light it is worrisome that the Department of Defense and the VA prescribe enormous quantities of medications to combat soldiers and returning veterans, often without providing other forms of therapy. Between 2001 and 2011 the VA spent about $1.5 billion on Seroquel and Risperdal, while Defense spent about $90 million during the same period, even though a research paper published in 2001 showed that Risperdal was no more effective than a placebo in treating PTSD.[64] Similarly, between 2001 and 2012 the VA spent $72.1 million and Defense spent $44.1 million on benzodiazepines[65]—medications that clinicians generally avoid prescribing to civilians with PTSD because of their addiction potential and lack of significant effectiveness for PTSD symptoms. The Road of Recovery Is the Road of LifeIn the first chapter of this book I introduced you to a patient named Bill whom I met over thirty years ago at the VA. Bill became one of my longtime patient-teachers, and our relationship is also the story of my evolution of trauma treatment.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On Friday evenings when they returned from work, several of the workers would go to the stream, in spite of the cold, to take an extra wash. They put on their least tattered clothes and slowly came back to the middle of the camp. I too had dressed up and awaited them with a few determined helpers, the group captains, and the scouts. We had agreed to stay at equal distances from each other and to form a circle. The men hesitated as they approached, argued among themselves and, in their minds, drew an imaginary circumference. At last they were all still. The moment I was about to open my mouth, a difficulty I had neglected occurred to me: although I had prepared my subject and even words which would be understood without awakening the suspicions of the guards who were looking on, I realized only now that I should speak in dialect. I think in French, and my interior monologues had for a long time been in French. When it happens that I speak to myself in dialect, I always have the strange impression, not so much of using a foreign language, as of hearing an obscure and obsolete part of myself, so forgotten that it is no longer native to me. I do not feel this strangeness when speaking to others, it is rather like playing on a musical instrument. But I did not know enough words of Judeo-Arabic to convey my whole meaning to them. I can express myself well enough in Arabic for concrete everyday purposes, but I have always used French in social and intellectual exchanges and the expression of ideas. I would have liked to speak at length to the men and, above all, convey to them certain things under the very noses of the guards. For that, certain subtleties which only French allowed me were necessary, but unfortunately their knowledge of French was deficient. In the last resort, I decided to attempt the experiment in French, although I realized how much closer I would have been to them and how much more intimate had I spoken their own tongue.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They: the young Sicilians, the Arab policeman, the French newspaper owner, our classmates at the lycée, the whole city in fact. And it was true that our native city was as hostile to us as an unnatural mother. We had been disappointed at one blow; it was final and couldn’t be healed. I admired Bissor and often asked myself if his reaction wasn’t the best. For a year I forced myself to go along with him and practice boxing in the same gym. I managed to acquire some skill, but I remained weak because I was undernourished. Nor did I ever manage to overcome the nausea that I experienced whenever I struck an opponent’s eyes, nose, or mouth. I was already suspicious of my body and disgusted whenever it affirmed its presence, for I knew that no amount of animal self-assertion could ever heal the wound my native city had inflicted on me. Later, I began to experience a strange new fear whenever I found myself in the bowel-like maze of the covered bazaar. I would feel a sudden nausea and that I must reach an open space as fast as possible, because otherwise I might knock my head against walls that were too close to me. ~ 2. HIGH SCHOOL ~ Created in the city’s image, the French lycée was peopled so variously that I immediately felt lost. I had French, Tunisian, Italian, Russian, Maltese, even Jewish classmates — but the latter were from a background so different from mine that they were as foreign to me as the others. They were rich Jews and of the second generation of Western culture; like all the others, they too made fun of the nasal ghetto accent which they imitated by confusing the French word savon (for soap) and savant (for scientist). Ill at ease in their presence, I was furious with them because of the facility with which they rolled the impossible r that Paris has imposed on the rest of France. I tried and resolved a thousand times to roll my r’s with the proper guttural sound until I found the right tone; but when I watched my speech, I lost the thread of my ideas and, if my thought was difficult to express, I had to leave my tongue in peace while I figured out what I wanted to say; it was then that I reverted to my peculiar speech with its sounds which were as foreign as those of Latin Americans or of exotic films, and deprived all that I said in French of any seriousness. But if I managed to speak as if I were clearing my throat, the others would laugh and imitate me. “You speak French like a German,” they would say, imitating the German accent.