Disappointment

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 Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Good sex matters because pleasure matters, and that makes bad sex matter. Most human beings are physiologically wired to seek sex, just like we’re wired to seek food, and the pleasure we get from it feeds our brain’s complicated rewards network. Yet as this book aims to show, the sex-to-pleasure pipeline is out of whack, for an untold number of sexually active young people. As humans, we have made such an enormous, weird deal out of sex—as an institution, as a threat, as a sacrament—that pleasure has taken a back seat. (As author Katherine Angel puts it: “How can sex matter less, so it can yield more?”) On one end of the spectrum, you have people who believe sex is so special they save it for their wedding night, which can cause problems, because good sex usually takes practice. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like me who believe sex is so unremarkable that they dissociate during doggy-style. (In the middle, you have a handful of people with fulfilling, pleasurable sex lives. Happy for them…) What is consistent across the sex-having spectrum, what we must immediately understand, is that sex means different things to different people, and there is no correct way to relate to it, as long as you’re not bothering other people. So, is sex, whatever it is, special? We know that it is, and I can think of one big reason why: pleasure. I’ll repeat: good sex matters because pleasure matters, and that makes bad sex matter. Pleasure, a physiological state of being that impacts almost every aspect of our wellness, is a public health issue, and sexual pleasure is a fundamental aspect of sexual health, rights, and well-being. Growing evidence shows that incorporating pleasure into sexual health promotion is more likely to thwart risky behavior, and STI- and HIV-prevention messages have better public health outcomes when they include portrayals of positive sexual experiences. For example, one of the biggest deterrents for condom use is the perception that wearing one will make sex feel worse. Public health campaigns are more effective when they include strategies to increase sexual pleasure while using condoms and other forms of birth control. The Pleasure Project, an advocacy organization founded in 2014 that aims to “eroticize safer sex,” trains sex educators to take more sex-positive, pleasure-based approaches. The ubiquity of social forces that limit, stigmatize, and otherwise criminalize pleasure make sex even more special, more worthy of our attention. Our experience of sex, whether pleasure is present or not, represents a fundamental aspect of our identity.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Cut to the next scene: my date’s face is atop my genitals, his tongue scrambling to find the clit. We had been making out on my couch, and he’d just transitioned to oral, a welcome treat. Bucatina wasn’t barking (growth!), but rather politely clearing her throat with concern. I took some deep breaths and tried to sink into the sensations I was laboring to feel in my body, just like I’d been practicing. But after less than a minute, he hoisted himself up, moving his dick toward my face. This is the part where I suck that part, I suppose? I obliged, disappointed that he had been on my parts for just a few seconds, but going along with the program anyway. He grabbed the back of my head, pulling it closer to him. I struggled not to gag. Okay, this is not ideal. No, this is not ideal … But we can do hard things, I said to myself. The phrase is self-help author Glennon Doyle’s life mantra (and podcast title). I’ve never read her books but the line has circulated Instagram enough for it to rattle around my brain, including during gaggings. Within moments, another competing line began rattling around, this one from my sex coach. Don’t endure. I pulled my head back slightly. I continued the sex act, this time able to breathe, and after ten or so minutes, the conflict seemed to resolve itself: he moved to go down on me again. The soft pressure of his tongue felt good. A few seconds later, he stopped—just as abruptly as before—and put on a condom, and we started having penetrative sex. My clit had been just a pit stop, a gesture en route to the main event. I wanted more oral sex, but I felt like I was in a dream where you try to speak but can’t. The sex felt nice; I didn’t feel like I was “enduring,” per se. It was consensual, I was aroused, and the body contact felt thrilling after nearly a year of solitude. But I was settling. I’d been able to bring so much to the sex that I’d learned from working on this book: more presence, more sensation, and a clearer understanding of what I wanted. But I could not bring myself to communicate. I could not bring myself to ask for what I wanted. This was the final frontier. Communication is hard! It is hard in general, and it is even harder when genitals are involved. As it turns out, our comfort level talking about our bodies outside of sex is directly correlated with our comfort level talking about our bodies during sex. So, if we’re completely uncomfortable with everything, where do we start?

• 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 Heptaméron (1559)

  There was in Valencia a gentleman who for five or six years had loved a lady with so much propriety that the honour and conscience of neither had suffered any blemish. The gentleman's intention was to marry her — an intention the more reasonable as he was handsome, rich, and of good family. Before engaging in the lady's service, he had an explanation with her on the subject of marriage, respecting which she referred him to her relations. They assembled to consider the question, and resolved that the match was a very suitable one, provided the young lady was willing. But she, whether thinking to do better, or willing to dissemble her love for the gentleman, started so many objections that the as- sembly broke up, regretting that they had not been able to bring the affair to a conclusion, advantageous as it would have been on both sides. The most sorely disap- pointed of all was the poor lover, who would have borne 32 49^ THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {N<rjd 64. his rejection with patience if he could have persuaded himself that it was not the maiden's fault, but her re- lations'. But as the truth was well known to him, his affliction was so extreme that, without speaking to his mistress or anyone, he went home, and, after setting his affairs in order, retired to a deserted spot to try to forget his love, and turn it wholly towards our Lord, to whom he was more bound in gratitude than to his mistress. During his abode there he heard nothing from the lady or her relations, and resolved, after having missed the happiest life he could have hoped for, to choose ihe most austere and disagreeable he could imagine. In this dismal state of mind, which might well be called despair, he betook himself, with a view to becoming a monk, to a Franciscan monastery, which was not far from the residence of several of his relations. As soon as they were aware of his purpose, they did all they could to dissuade him from it, but his resolution was so fixed that nothing could shake it. As the cause of the mischief was known to them, they sought a remedy at the hands of her who had given occasion to such a pre- cipitate fit of devotion. She was greatly surprised and distressed at this news ; and as her intention had only been to try her lover's fervour by refusing him for a while, and not to lose him for ever, as she saw she was about to do, she wrote him a letter earnestly beseeching him to forego his dismal resolution, and return to her who loved him, and was ready to be wholly his own, as she had always desired to be, even when she affected coyness for the purpose of proving the sincerity of his love, whereof she was now fully convinced.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Reality, Grief, and Hope , and most recently in The Practice of Prophetic Imagination , as well as less explicitly in many of my publications. [4] While my journal articles have been scattered and varied, I think that two of my most durable journal articles further serve the same paradigm. First, in “The Costly Loss of Lament,” I have considered what could happen—as does happen in the bourgeoisie church and in bourgeoisie political culture—when the ancient practices of lament, protest, and complaint are silenced and avoided in the interest of happy, uncritical well-being. [5] In civic culture, the loss of lament invites denial and so enhances the dominant social system as though it were beyond failure or critique. In the church, with such a loss, the gospel becomes one of unmitigated happiness where “never is heard a discouraging word.” Many pastors, moreover, are paid to sustain exactly such a practice. But of course, in prophetic realism (as with real-life realism), such an illusion is unsustainable because there is much about which to lament, protest, and complain. The “costly loss” is to sign on for the illusion of well-being, or in theology it is an exercise in a “Theology of Glory” to the disregard of a summoning “Theology of the Cross.” [6] Second, in my article, “The Liturgy of Abundance and the Myth of Scarcity,” it becomes clear that “scarcity” is an element in a strategy for injustice. [7] A regime that operates with a claim of scarcity can legitimate hoarding, accumulation, and eventually monopoly to the disregard of the needs of others, even when such strategies evoke and legitimate the violence of the strong against the weak. (Thus, we have “class war” that is characteristically conducted from above; as Warren Buffett has observed in our economy: “There is a class war and we are winning.”) Israel’s doxologies of abundance (as in Psalms 104 and 145) affirm the generative generosity of the creator God. Thus, the sloganeering of scarcity contradicts the claims of the generativity of the creator. And of course, the endless frantic acquisitiveness evoked by market ideology (our specific form of totalism) serves to counter the claims of faith in a way that has real-life practical consequences. [8] I need hardly attest that the profound tension between totalism and prophetic imagination is ferociously active among us as Donald Trump has eagerly

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  What had become clear to me throughout my research is that the most important determinant of pleasurable, satisfying sex is good communication. It’s not even close. You can Kegel every morning and fall asleep to masturbation meditations every night, but if you can’t communicate during sex and about sex, you will be disappointed. A lot of us are disappointed. Indeed, one of life’s great tragedies is that other people cannot magically anticipate our desires; they require explicit cues, usually words. But, oh, how we long for them to magically anticipate! How we long for partners to intuit what we want, like sensitive Bill Hader types do in the movies, because that would mean our raw chemistry was so powerful that words were rendered obsolete. From rom-com sex scenes and most porn, we’ve learned that if people cannot telepathically predict the exact kind of sex we want to have or the exact way we like to be touched, we must be incompatible. We either settle for this, convincing ourselves that sexual compatibility isn’t everything in a relationship or a one-night stand, or we don’t, jumping ship entirely. There is another, more difficult option, and that is opening a pathway to free and ongoing communication, which requires rejecting the idea of sexual chemistry as a fixed, rigid thing. “No one’s training us how to ask for what we want and need,” Pleasure Activism author adrienne maree brown told me. “How do we express a no and a yes, those very, very basic tools?” The payoff of this work—learning to ask for what we want and need—is significant. Couples who communicate about sex—particularly about their concerns—have been shown to have more satisfying sex lives. Communication is associated with better orgasms and greater overall sexual well-being, according to the Journal of Sex Research.1 But good communication pays off only when there’s good listening. When do we learn how to listen in bed? We don’t. The unfortunate reality is that without good communicating/good listening between partners, sex will usually be “endured,” as my sex coach put it. You will endure (and give) touch that isn’t quite right, and you will be too scared, tired, or insecure to say anything. Countless people I spoke with recognized that practicing communication would improve their sex lives, but still couldn’t bring themselves to do it—they didn’t want to hurt their partner’s feelings; they didn’t want to ruin the mood; they didn’t even know what, exactly, they wanted because enduring sex was all they’d ever known. After dry spelling and sex coaching and masturbation-journeying, I had made a vow to myself: I would never endure sex again just because it felt easier than speaking up.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Fortunately, I had prepared myself for this meeting, I had thought about it and had heard accounts of similar ones. I knew what I had to do and, whatever my shyness, it had to be done. I began by stroking her shoulders. After a while her very coldness gave me courage, and my desire, needing no such subtleties, became manifest. Slowly, I was spontaneous again. As she remained with her face to the ceiling, my hand became a little more daring and slipped down to her bosom. Without a word, but firmly, she removed my hand. I understood that I had reached an area that was out of bounds. Submissively and afraid to hurt her feelings, I kept away from it, skipped the breasts and descended further, with no more embarrassment than if I had been alone. Soon I had almost forgotten her existence and was in a suave solitary dream when, far too soon for my liking, she guessed I was ready and, in a blank voice, ordered: “Come on, now.” Obediently I let go of her. Without looking or changing position, she stretched her hand toward the table and soaked her fingers in a glass of olive oil, which I recognized by its odor. She rubbed some between her thighs, while I furtively looked on, in spite of myself and my shame. The mystery which had, in my dreams, been so disturbing, was really a little disgusting in its biological reality and its vulgar animality. Then, as I hesitated, she must have realized that I was inexperienced. She drew me toward her, and like a child, I clumsily let myself be guided. To be joined in this manner to her flesh along the whole length of my own body now maddened me, and when her grasp became more specific, I could wait no longer. This angered her, and she grunted as she hurriedly guided me. I had already nearly finished, and left the matter at that. My pleasure had been too hasty and left me all tense; I found it much less satisfying than self-abuse. Because I had depended on someone else, my enjoyment had been meager. She pushed me over to one side, slapped her hand between her legs, and went and sat on the basin. I also got up and stood there with my loins all tense and sticky. I wondered what I was supposed to do.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In particular, the scriptures tell the story of how Israel went into exile. In a sense, the whole story is about little else. The larger story, in which there is a single great “exile” in Babylon, is shot through at point after point with other “exiles,” which lead the eye up to the eventual one. Abraham goes down into Egypt and nearly gets into deep trouble. So does his son Isaac. Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, escaping his brother’s anger, runs away and stays in the land of his ancestors fourteen years before returning to the territory God had promised to Abraham. Jacob’s family goes into Egypt to escape a famine, and the Israelites remain there for four centuries, ending up as slaves, before the dramatic events of Passover and Exodus through which they are set free and led at last to their promised land. Once there, they struggle for survival and independence. Even when that is briefly attained under the kingship of David, an internal rebellion forces David himself to flee into exile before returning to resume his throne. Then, after the kingdom is divided into “north” (with its own non-Davidic kings) and “south” (still under Davidic rule), the northern tribes are captured by the Assyrians and taken away, never to return. The southern tribes—Benjamin, Judah, and those Levites who live among them—are left. But they too eventually succumb to the might of Babylon, and most of them are taken there as captives. The Temple is destroyed. According to Ezekiel, this is made possible because YHWH himself has abandoned it to its fate, following the shocking behavior of priests and people alike. The Babylonian captivity is what is normally referred to as “the exile.” What follows is in a way the most puzzling moment of all. After two generations, some of the exiles in Babylon return to their land. They rebuild the Temple. But they do not regain their independence, except for a few brief periods. They continue to tell and retell their own story as one of continuing “slavery.” There is a strong, widespread sense that the great prophecies about a glorious return (Isaiah and Ezekiel in particular) have not been fulfilled. The prophets of what we think of as the postexilic period (Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) warn that all is not well. In particular, they suggest that, though the exiles themselves (or some of them) had returned, YHWH himself had not, despite the promises of Isaiah 52, Ezekiel 43, and elsewhere. Malachi promises that he will return, but he seems not to have done so yet. Fresh divine action would be needed to undo the present slavery, to complete the story, to put all things right at last.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is the same double set of questions and answers that we find if we ask, “Why did Jesus die?” You can give historical reasons: the chief priests were angry because of what he did in the Temple; the Romans were suspicious that he might be some kind of rebel leader; the Pharisees hated him because his kingdom vision clashed at several points with their own. Or, still within historical reasons, you could say that Jesus died because his followers failed to defend him, and one of them actually betrayed him to the authorities. The question “Why,” even at the historical level, can get quite complicated. But we can also ask the theological “Why?” What was the divine reason? Already in Acts we find the strange combination: God meant it, but you (the Jewish leaders) were wicked in carrying it out by handing Jesus over to the pagans (2:23; 4:27–28). And here is the point: the Western church, looking for the “theological” answer to the question “Why?” (“How did Jesus’s death mean that sins could be forgiven so we could go to heaven?”), has largely ignored the historical answer, and indeed the historical questions. They have been regarded as irrelevant circumstantial details. But are they? The answer, clearly, is no. The historical questions and answers are the place to go if we want to find the theological answer. If we cannot see it there, that might be an indication that we are trying to answer the wrong question. If the gospels do not seem to be “saying the right stuff,” maybe it is our idea of the “right stuff” that needs adjusting. The main theme that makes this point graphically is the relationship, which we have already noted in relation to Jesus’s own understanding of his vocation, between the proclamation of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the crucifixion, on the other. In much reading, teaching, preaching, and indeed scholarship, these have appeared to be almost contradictory: the positive message and moment of the kingdom program followed by the negative and disastrous moment of the cross. Alternately, if the cross is given a positive value (“He died for our sins so we could go to heaven”), then what was the “kingdom” theme all about? But in all four gospels the two themes clearly belong together. They explain one another. The kingdom comes through Jesus’s entire work, which finds its intended fulfillment in his shameful death. The cross is the cross of the “king of the Jews.” Our traditions, including our traditions of atonement theology, have separated themes that belonged inextricably together. Listening to the Evangelists

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The staircase which rose from the middle of the hall turned in front of the rooms of the first floor, so that the occupants could see the visitors waiting below. Suddenly, a door opened and a disheveled woman in a negligee appeared: it was his wife. She placed both hands on the banisters and started screaming. I could not clearly understand what she was saying, and caught only bits of sentences which poured like a hailstorm from the gallery: “... bothering people... thinking only of your own little person... rudeness... selfishness, etc., etc...” I was amazed that my request should have made her so angry and could find nothing to say; besides, it was uncomfortable to speak from one floor to the next. In any case, I was not given time to think: she had said what she wanted to say and had slammed the door shut. I pushed the heavy Arab door open and was once again in the silence of the gardens. My plans were going badly: I had just lost my trump card and an illusion. I had been childishly disappointed and was sad that I had seen my symbol of dignity and politeness turn into a Fury. Besides, my disappointment seemed to me absurd. I had made myself an ideal of this woman and was now surprised that she had not lived up to it. I went off in the direction of Poinsot’s villa. He was not on my list, but I needed to talk to straighten out my ideas. I carefully avoided the main streets for fear of police dragnets; the Germans had not waited for the deadline for the community’s reply and had begun raiding the streets. It took me a long time, in my panic, to climb the hill I had so often climbed full of hope. Following the instructions of the Civilian Defense Authorities, the Poinsots had abandoned their house to live in the cellar. I found Poinsot all bewildered and lost without his books, quite at sea among the absurd wooden props which were supposed to sustain the ceiling in case of a bomb hit. I told him about the requisition orders; he had already heard and seemed overwhelmed. I told him the latest news and of the panic of our community, which was so unused to this sort of warfare. I also reported to him the arrest of some of his former pupils and my own decision to stay in hiding and await developments. Was I right or wrong to try to save only myself? I was doing nobody any harm, neither could I be of much help. Besides, my health would not be able to withstand the camps. The inspecting doctor of the school, Dr.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But Paula’s network of her church, hospital clinics, and home-care organizations began to yield potential group members. The Stanford renal dialysis unit referred the first, Jim, a nineteen-year-old with severe kidney disease. Though he must have known that his life span was short, he had little interest in deepening his acquaintance with death. Jim avoided eye contact with Paula and me and, for that matter, any form of engagement—with anyone. “I’m a man without a future,” he said. “Who would want me as a husband or a friend? Why keep facing the pain of rejection? I’ve talked enough. Been rejected enough. I’m doing okay without anyone.” Paula and I saw him only twice; he did not return for a third session. Jim, we concluded, was too healthy. Renal dialysis offers too much hope, postponing death so long that denial takes root. No, we needed the doomed, the short-timers on death row, those without hope. Then Rob and Sal came through our door. Neither of them met our qualifications precisely: Rob often denied that he was dying, and Sal claimed that he had already come to terms with his illness and needed no help from us. Rob, only twenty-seven, had lived for six months with a highly malignant brain tumor. Lurching in and out of denial, he would insist, at one moment, “You’ll see, I’ll be backpacking in the Alps in six weeks” (I don’t believe poor Rob had ever been east of Nevada), and, a few moments later, curse his paralyzed legs for preventing him from searching for his life insurance policy: “I’ve got to find out whether the benefits to my wife and kids will be canceled if I commit suicide.” Although we knew the group was not large enough, we started with four members—Paula, Sal, Rob, and I. Since Sal and Paula needed no help and I was the therapist, Rob became the group’s raison d’être. But Rob obstinately refused to give us much satisfaction. We tried to offer him comfort and guidance while respecting his choice to deny. Supporting denial, however, is an unsatisfying, duplicitous endeavor, especially when what we wanted was to help Rob accept his dying and get the most out of what life he had left. None of us looked forward to our meetings. After two months Rob’s headaches grew more severe, and one night he died quietly in his sleep. I doubt we were useful to him.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I started to feel uncomfortable, my clitoris agitated and confused. I gave up. The experience reminded me of sexual encounters where I’d come close but hadn’t made it, and berated myself for it afterward, for my unwillingness to take up more of my partner’s time or communicate my need for a different thing. The truth is, in most of my sexual encounters, I haven’t even come close; I’ve just run out the clock. Pleasure, it became painfully clear, was a practice I needed more of, and I’m hardly alone. The business of sexual pleasure has swelled into a billion-dollar industry, with companies selling apps, toys, coaching sessions, even THC-infused lubricant that gets your partner high while they eat you out. Sexual wellness brands have flooded Instagram, with Glossier-like styling, many purporting to smash stigma while adhering to a sanitized aesthetic that is explicitly inexplicit. Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop, for example, now makes vibrators, but don’t you worry, they look nothing like vibrators! “So many vibrators look hypersexualized,” she told the Times in an interview. “They’re either really phallic or they look like something you would buy in a sex shop. I was really intrigued by the idea that this would be something that looked really pretty and cool, and that you could leave it on your nightstand without embarrassing yourself or somebody else.” She elaborated, “I think we were just trying to do something … perhaps a little more intellectual.” Are strap-ons not intellectual? Tell that to the millions of people for whom strap-ons are a deeply pleasurable, affirming part of their lives. Are sex shops déclassé, unsophisticated? I don’t know, Gwyneth, that still sounds moralizing to me—suggesting it would be embarrassing to have a veiny, lifelike dildo on your bed stand. For some people, that veiny dildo might be a prized piece of décor. As sexual pleasure becomes more mainstream, as it should, there will inevitably be this calculus of palatability, particularly for entrepreneurs like Paltrow who want to make more accessible something that so, so many people are still not comfortable with.

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

  Diagnosing Posttraumatic StressIn those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue. Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also sometimes making things worse. A turning point arrived in 1980, when a group of Vietnam veterans, aided by the New York psychoanalysts Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments. Inspired by the possibilities presented by this new diagnosis, I proposed a study on the biology of traumatic memories to the VA. Did the memories of those suffering from PTSD differ from those of others? For most people the memory of an unpleasant event eventually fades or is transformed into something more benign. But most of our patients were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago.[7] The opening line of the grant rejection read: “It has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration.” Since then, of course, the mission of the VA has become organized around the diagnosis of PTSD and brain injury, and considerable resources are dedicated to applying “evidence-based treatments” to traumatized war veterans. But at the time things were different and, unwilling to keep working in an organization whose view of reality was so at odds with my own, I handed in my resignation; in 1982 I took a position at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, the Harvard teaching hospital where I had trained to become a psychiatrist. My new responsibility was to teach a fledgling area of study: psychopharmacology, the administration of drugs to alleviate mental illness.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When Georg Frideric Handel set scripture passages to music in his oratorio Messiah , this text from Revelation was used in his “Hallelujah Chorus,” a powerful celebration of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. But my point is not just this chorus itself. What matters even more is where the chorus comes in the work as a whole. The selection and arrangement of texts were not random. The oratorio divides into three parts: first, the hope for the Messiah, and his birth and public career; second, his death and resurrection and the worldwide preaching of the gospel; third, the resurrection of the dead and the joy of the new creation. The “Hallelujah Chorus” celebrates the fact that the true God now reigns over the whole world, so that their kingdoms have become his; and it is placed not at the end of the third and final part, but at the end of the second part. This reflects closely the view of mission held by many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the first performance of Messiah was in 1742). First would come the worldwide kingdom, achieved through the preaching of the gospel; then, and only then, the final resurrection. The aim of “mission” was therefore then to bring the nations into submission to God the Creator and to his Son, Jesus the Messiah. That is, after all, what Psalm 2 had indicated as the divine purpose. And Psalm 2, speaking of the dramatic divine victory over all enemies, was the text set immediately before the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was quite clear what view of “mission” was being advocated. By the late eighteenth century, however, a very different mood began to prevail. Many Christians in Europe and America continued to pour energy into social and cultural reform. But many others saw this as a distraction from “preaching the gospel,” by which they meant “saving souls for heaven.” Had the texts of Messiah been selected a hundred years later, in the 1840s, one might imagine that the “Hallelujah Chorus” would have been placed at the very end, celebrating the worship of heaven—though the text from Revelation about the world’s kingdoms now belonging to the one God and his Messiah might then have looked strange, since the new mood insisted that the world’s kingdoms were irrelevant. Had not Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world”? (No, actually. What he said in John 18:36 was that his kingdom was not from this world, but the text, in its misleading King James Version, was quoted endlessly to show the folly of any kind of social, cultural, or political “mission.”) New mood, new mission: now the mission would try to snatch souls from the world, not to bring the kingdom of God into the world. This second mood contributed to the cultural movement that called itself the “Enlightenment.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I lay down alongside her body. She fixed the hard horsehair pillow beneath her head, threw back her arms, and was motionless. So much passivity, such an absent manner, disconcerted me indeed. Vaguely, I had rather expected some sort of gentle communion, a game we would play together. I tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the ceiling. Fortunately, I had prepared myself for this meeting, I had thought about it and had heard accounts of similar ones. I knew what I had to do and, whatever my shyness, it had to be done. I began by stroking her shoulders. After a while her very coldness gave me courage, and my desire, needing no such subtleties, became manifest. Slowly, I was spontaneous again. As she remained with her face to the ceiling, my hand became a little more daring and slipped down to her bosom. Without a word, but firmly, she removed my hand. I understood that I had reached an area that was out of bounds. Submissively and afraid to hurt her feelings, I kept away from it, skipped the breasts and descended further, with no more embarrassment than if I had been alone. Soon I had almost forgotten her existence and was in a suave solitary dream when, far too soon for my liking, she guessed I was ready and, in a blank voice, ordered: “Come on, now.” Obediently I let go of her. Without looking or changing position, she stretched her hand toward the table and soaked her fingers in a glass of olive oil, which I recognized by its odor. She rubbed some between her thighs, while I furtively looked on, in spite of myself and my shame. The mystery which had, in my dreams, been so disturbing, was really a little disgusting in its biological reality and its vulgar animality. Then, as I hesitated, she must have realized that I was inexperienced. She drew me toward her, and like a child, I clumsily let myself be guided. To be joined in this manner to her flesh along the whole length of my own body now maddened me, and when her grasp became more specific, I could wait no longer. This angered her, and she grunted as she hurriedly guided me. I had already nearly finished, and left the matter at that. My pleasure had been too hasty and left me all tense; I found it much less satisfying than self-abuse. Because I had depended on someone else, my enjoyment had been meager. She pushed me over to one side, slapped her hand between her legs, and went and sat on the basin. I also got up and stood there with my loins all tense and sticky. I wondered what I was supposed to do. I could not put my clothes on over this mess. Meanwhile, she was quickly washing herself with careful movements that splashed the water from the basin all over the red distemper of the walls.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Platonizing tendency in Christian theology, because of which the goal of “atonement” has been seen not as God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but as God’s people being rescued from earth and taken to heaven instead, has also taught us by implication to shrink the meaning of the gospel narratives so that they become mere vehicles for displaying something else, illustrations of the “truth” rather than expositions of it, of the way in which, in John’s version, “the Word became flesh.” As far as the four evangelists are concerned, then, the meaning of Jesus’s death is not a theological theme to be abstracted from this narrative or superimposed upon it. The meaning of Jesus’s death is not a “heavenly” truth for which this “earthly” story is simply a distant analogy or “type.” Nor is the actual historical story merely the backdrop against which a “supernatural” or nonhistorical drama is acted out. The marginalization of the four gospels within much normal “atonement” theology is not simply an accident. It is the direct, long-term result of the way in which “atonement” has been seen as a transaction taking place, as it were, in midair, with results that likewise are only tangentially related to actual human life, to the ongoing human story. The “goal” has been seen as the distant one of “going to heaven,” and since the gospels are not basically talking about that (though they are of course aware of the ultimate postmortem future), but about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven, they have been set aside, being only occasionally mined for the odd saying that, taken out of context, appears to serve the goal that later theology has had in view. The result, as we have seen, has been the moralization of the human vocation and the paganizing of atonement theology. A sentence like Mark 10:45, with its allusion to Isaiah 53, has been taken out of context and made to serve the “works contract” rather than the “covenant of vocation,” in which, right across the Bible, sins are dealt with so that humans can be set free to become image-bearers, part of the larger purposes of the creator God. The vision of the cross in all four gospels does not allow us to rest content with a detached, ahistorical understanding of either the kingdom or atonement. Second, therefore, even before we get to Paul, we find the challenge of the cross reaching us in quite new ways. It is indeed revolutionary. Nothing is lost. We do not (of course!) have to give up the idea of Jesus “dying for our sins.” Indeed, that remains at the very center. But that idea is refocused, recontextualized, placed within a narrative not of divine petulance, but of unbreakable divine covenant love, embodied in the actual person, life, actions, and teaching of Jesus himself.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When, of an evening, I would slip into one of their tents where they were still awake around a carefully camouflaged light, they would make room for me and often give me the place of honor, but they changed the topic of their conversation at once and became self-conscious. They avoided, for instance, all trivialities. I told them my father was an artisan, but they did not believe me. Those who did had more respect for me: a son of the people who has worked his way up is more to be admired than a middle-class boy. As for me, must I confess that I never really felt at ease among them? I wanted to love them, and I fear I managed only to be sorry for them. I reproached myself for this pity because I so much wanted to be one of them! In spite of myself, I watched myself and played a part. Perhaps, as is so natural to me, I exaggerate my guilt; had I been one of them, I could not have helped them. But what I did not see clearly at the time was that I was seeking in the camp and in the approbation of others only my own self-respect; after a few months, I was sure I had failed. It seemed clear to me that the men respected or distrusted me but that they would never adopt me. I saw this well one evening. As we had returned too late from work to eat by daylight, we had retired to our tents to sit around the lamps. I had left the scouts to join one of the other groups. We had started eating when one of the workers had such a violent fit of vomiting that he had no time to leave our little circle of light. The others noisily protested and insulted him. He got up with difficulty, went over to the second pole, and leaned against it; there, with his hands in the air and his head hanging, he went on throwing up spasmodically. Finally, he tottered to the door and, no sooner had he passed it than he doubled up, hugged his stomach, and fell howling to the ground, clawing at the earth in his pain. In the half-light on the parched grass, he was like a big animal struggling in the grip of an unknown disease. How could one relieve such an attack of appendicitis in a work-camp? Maddened by the pain, the sick man had become a child again and was calling his mother. I knelt beside him and tried to touch his stomach, but he pushed me away so brutally that I got up, disconcerted by his violent refusal. All the workers left their tents and stood helplessly around him. At last the camp tailor, an elderly man who had been forgotten here in spite of his large family, took him gently on his knees and nursed him like a child.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  To my great surprise, they chose those that were most green and most acid. But I never reached that stage, though some of my schoolmates may actually have been fortunate enough to like the green berries. Toward the same time of year, we were also offered the jujube fruits, small wild berries that were shiny as beads of brown marble or all wrinkled like the cheeks of an old woman, and much more attractive to look at than good to eat. Later, there were also oranges and dates, especially the big yellow dates that have an astringent effect on the mouth, leaving it all dry and resistant to any liquid. Of all the hucksters, only “Birdie” managed, in all seasons, to achieve the miracle of bringing us real goodies at a reasonable price. He was a tiny man of no specific age, who had adopted as his dress for all times an ancient pair of tuxedo pants, a jacket that had a patch over the left elbow, and a cap of Persian lamb that seemed to overwhelm his birdlike head. He owed his nickname to the sweets of the “Bird” brand that he sold in a biscuit box. This tin box could easily be concealed whenever the cops turned up, as the police, God alone knows why, seemed to be intent on mercilessly pursuing all the little hucksters; so Birdie’s biscuit box was his stroke of genius, his secret weapon of defense that allowed him to remain invulnerable, whereas all his colleagues were sooner or later arrested. This miracle box always contained a few defective candies from one or the other of the better makers, some excellent pastries that had been spoiled in the process of baking, or some candied almonds that had failed to acquire the right color while cooking, all of this stock having been sold to Birdie for next to nothing. Even if we failed to get any of these treats, we found at least some cakes made of heavy semolina that were full of bits of straw and somehow numbed our stomachs that were always underfed. For some time Birdie had been offering us flat Nestlé chocolate bars, together with a colored card. The Nestlé firm was launching a very successful commercial campaign: in the wrapping of each bar they put one or two of these picture cards of which a complete set would fill an album. The prize, for whoever turned in a full album by a certain deadline, was something pretty serious: a bicycle, if I remember right. Each one of these chocolate bars cost seven pennies, but since I had only two pennies a day to spend, I was disqualified from the start. However, I was not aware of this handicap and, as the Nestlé firm gave its albums away free, I went to collect one too. Every Friday, on the morning before Sabbath, classes began and finished an hour earlier, which seemed to us to be a considerable gain.

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

  Each major diagnosis in the DSM had a workgroup responsible for suggesting revisions for the new edition. I presented the results of the field trial to our DSM-IV PTSD work group, and we voted nineteen to two to create a new trauma diagnosis for victims of interpersonal trauma: “Disorders of Extreme Stress, Not Otherwise Specified” (DESNOS), or “Complex PTSD” for short.[12],[13] We then eagerly anticipated the publication of the DSM-IV in May 1994. But much to our surprise the diagnosis that our work group had overwhelmingly approved did not appear in the final product. None of us had been consulted. This was a tragic exclusion. It meant that large numbers of patients could not be accurately diagnosed and that clinicians and researchers would be unable to scientifically develop appropriate treatments for them. You cannot develop a treatment for a condition that does not exist. Not having a diagnosis now confronts therapists with a serious dilemma: How do we treat people who are coping with the fall-out of abuse, betrayal and abandonment when we are forced to diagnose them with depression, panic disorder, bipolar illness, or borderline personality, which do not really address what they are coping with? The consequences of caretaker abuse and neglect are vastly more common and complex than the impact of hurricanes or motor vehicle accidents. Yet the decision makers who determined the shape of our diagnostic system decided not to recognize this evidence. To this day, after twenty years and four subsequent revisions, the DSM and the entire system based on it fail victims of child abuse and neglect—just as they ignored the plight of veterans before PTSD was introduced back in 1980. The Hidden EpidemicHow do you turn a newborn baby with all its promise and infinite capacities into a thirty-year-old homeless drunk? As with so many great discoveries, internist Vincent Felitti came across the answer to this question accidentally. In 1985 Felitti was chief of Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, which at the time was the largest medical screening program in the world. He was also running an obesity clinic that used a technique called “supplemented absolute fasting” to bring about dramatic weight loss without surgery. One day a twenty-eight-year-old nurse’s aide showed up in his office. Felitti accepted her claim that obesity was her principal problem and enrolled her in the program. Over the next fifty-one weeks her weight dropped from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. However, when Felitti next saw her a few months later, she had regained more weight than he thought was biologically possible in such a short time. What had happened? It turned out that her newly svelte body had attracted a male coworker, who started to flirt with her and then suggested sex. She went home and began to eat. She stuffed herself during the day and ate while sleepwalking at night. When Felitti probed this extreme reaction, she revealed a lengthy incest history with her grandfather.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Why then did I feel so sharp a sense of betrayal when I exchanged my California driver’s license for one issued by New York? Wasn’t that actually a straightforward enough transaction? Your birthday comes around, your license needs renewing, what difference does it make where you renew it? What difference does it make that you have had this single number on your license since it was assigned to you at age fifteen-and-a-half by the state of California? Wasn’t there always an error on that driver’s license anyway? An error you knew about? Didn’t that license say you were five-foot-two? When you knew perfectly well you were at best—(max height, top height ever, height before you lost a half inch to age)—when you knew perfectly well you were at best five-foot-one-and-three-quarters? Why did I make so much of the driver’s license? What was that about? Did giving up the California license say that I would never again be fifteen-and-a-half? Would I want to be? Or was the business with the license just one more case of “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event”? I put “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event” in quotes because it is not my phrase. Karl Menninger used it, in Man Against Himself, by way of describing the tendency to overreact to what might seem ordinary, even predictable, circumstances: a propensity, Dr. Menninger tells us, common among suicides. He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair. He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains. Notice: not one train, two trains. Think that over. Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in. “In these instances,” Dr. Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat that they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal.” Yes, clearly, no argument. “The hair, the golf, and the canary” had each been assigned an exaggerated value (as presumably had the second of those two missed trains), but why? Dr. Menninger himself asks this question, although only rhetorically: “But why should such extravagantly exaggerated over-estimations and incorrect evaluations exist?” Did he imagine that he had answered the question simply by raising it? Did he think that all he had to do was formulate the question and then retreat into a cloud of theoretical psychoanalytic references? Could I seriously have construed changing my driver’s license from California to New York as an experience involving “severed emotional bonds”? Did I seriously see it as loss? Did I truly see it as separation? And before we leave this subject of “severed emotional bonds”: