Fear

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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He was depressed and sinking deeper into an emotional crisis. From the time he was burned as a child, he had always feared fire, heat, and small spaces. As the prisoners talked more and more about the details of the Evans’s execution and Wayne Ritter’s impending execution, Myers became more and more distraught. On the night of the Ritter execution, Myers was in full crisis, sobbing in his cell. There is a tradition on death row in Alabama that, at the time scheduled for the execution, the condemned prisoners bang on their cell doors with cups in protest. At midnight, while all the other prisoners banged away, Myers curled up on the floor in the corner of his cell, hyperventilating and flinching with each clang he heard. When the stench of burned flesh that many on the row claimed they could smell during the execution wafted into his cell, Myers dissolved. He called Tate the next morning and told him that he would say whatever he wanted if he would get him off death row. Tate initially justified keeping Myers and McMillian on death row for safety reasons. But Tate immediately picked Myers up and brought him back to the county jail the day after the Ritter execution. Tate didn’t appear to discuss with anyone the decision to move Myers off death row. Ordinarily, the Alabama Department of Corrections couldn’t just put people on death row or let them off without court orders or legal filings—and certainly no prison warden could do so on his own. But nothing about the prosecution of Walter McMillian was turning out to be ordinary. Once removed from death row and back in Monroe County, Myers affirmed his initial accusations against McMillian. With Myers back as the primary witness and Bill Hooks ready to say that he saw Walter’s truck at the crime scene, the district attorney believed that he could proceed against McMillian. The case was scheduled for trial in February 1988. Ted Pearson had been the district attorney for nearly twenty years. He and his family had lived in South Alabama for generations. He knew the local customs, values, and traditions well and had put them to good use in the courtroom. He was getting older and had plans to retire soon, but he hated that his office had been criticized for failing to solve the Morrison murder more quickly. Pearson was determined to leave office with a victory and likely saw the prosecution of Walter McMillian as one of the most important cases of his career. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, even though there are sixteen majority-black counties in the state. When African Americans began to exercise their right to vote in the 1970s, there was deep concern among some prosecutors and judges about how the racial demographics in some counties would complicate their reelections. Legislators had aligned counties to maintain white majorities for judicial circuits that included a majority-black county.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Now stroke the back of your neck. What do these two gestures convey to you? Do they make you feel more or less secure? How about when you are wringing your hands versus when they are steepled, fingertip to fingertip? What differences do you notice? Emotion Facial expressions are at the next level of behavior and are generally considered to be largely involuntary. These micro-expressions are what the renowned Paul Ekman 88 studied in his pioneering research spanning over four decades. With practice and patience, one can develop the skills necessary to observe these very brief changes of muscle tension (often in a fraction of a second) throughout parts of the face. ‖ The specific patterns of these muscle contractions communicate the full range of emotional nuances to oneself and to others. a Giving clients feedback about their facial expressions can help them contact emotions of which they may be partially or fully unaware. Posture The third level of less conscious awareness in the behavior category is posture. Here I’m not referring to gross voluntary postural adjustments like those demanded by parents or teachers, such as “sit-up straight,” “don’t slump” or “shoulders back,” which refer to voluntary movements. These belong instead to the category of voluntary gestures. Sir Charles Sherrington, the grandfather of modern neurophysiology, alleges that “much of the reflex reaction expressed by the skeletal musculature is not motile, but postural, and has as its result not a movement but the steady maintenance of an attitude.” 89 I would add that postures are the platforms from which intrinsic movement is initiated. In the words of A. E. Gisell, a student of Sherrington’s, “the requisite motor equipment for behavior is established well in advance of the behavior itself.” In underscoring how important posture is in the generation of new behaviors, sensations, feelings and meanings, Gisell added, “The embryogenesis of mind must be sought in the beginnings of postural behavior.” 90 Although relatively few therapists have cultivated the precise reading of postures, they are still being impacted by them. We all subconsciously mirror the postures of others and register them as sensations in our own bodies. This occurs presumably through the operation of mirror neurons and postural resonance. Since spontaneous postural changes are generally subtle, it takes a lot of practice to observe them. Resonance is particularly compelling with survival-based postures such as the nuanced varieties associated with the premovements and movements of flight, fight, freeze/fright and collapse. If a posture is rigid from bracing or is collapsed, we can assume that it was a preparation for some particular action, an action that was thwarted and that the muscles are still programmed to complete. If this dormant sensorimotor trajectory had not been impeded, it would most likely have had a more triumphant outcome—as it still can retroactively.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Déjà VuShe says she loves you, sometimes. She sees your qualities, and you should be ashamed of them. If only you were the only one for her. She’d keep you safe, she’d grow old with you, if she could trust you. You’re not sexy, but she will have sex with you. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something stunningly cruel, and there is a kick of fear between your shoulder blades. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like she’s determining the best way to take you apart. Dream House as Murder MysteryLightning flashes, the power dies, and when the electricity comes back on again a dinner guest is folded over the dessert course with a dagger in her back. The handle of the blade is inlaid with precious gems, but her tiara is missing. When the undercover detective reveals herself—the plucky reporter, of course!—the mystery deepens: the cost of the gems in the handle of the knife far outweighs the value of the stolen tiara, whose diamonds were merely glass. Who among them would give up a tool of such immeasurable value to take something so worthless? And so boldly, in front of so many people? The plucky reporter paces on the Persian carpet in front of the suspects. Was it Heathcliff, the brawny dockworker turned mob boss? Ethan, the foppish social climber with eyes like the distant radiance of Mars? Samson, the experimental artist with a murky and enigmatic past? The reporter crosses dozens of times in front of a slight, blonde woman sitting in the corner, but never includes her on the list. The blonde woman is leaning back with flinty cool, following the action. She nods and listens, and every so often tilts her chin in the direction of the plucky reporter and lets loose a dazzling smile. The plucky reporter turns to Samson with a trembling, gloved finger. Samson stands to defend himself. Ethan begins shouting, Heathcliff glowers. And no one pays attention to the blonde woman, who stands and walks toward the corpse of the dinner guest. She grips the blade with both hands and pulls it out like King Arthur deflowering the stone. The body of the dinner guest, whose eyes are wide and wet with betrayal, lifts with the movement and then slams back down on the place setting, lemon cake squashed against her bosom. The blonde woman wipes the blood off the blade onto the dinner guest’s dress and replaces it in her purse. Everyone continues to argue as she walks out the front door and into the night. IVThe trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  these millions of buyers and sellers up and down the line. They became infected with the lure of easy money. This made even the most educated investor emotional. Studies and experts were pulled in to bolster ideas that people were already disposed to believe in— such as the proverbial “this time it’s different” and “housing prices never go down.” A wave of unbridled optimism swept through masses of people. Then came the panic and crash and the ugly confrontation with reality. Instead of coming to terms with the orgy of speculation that had overwhelmed one and all, making smart people look like idiots, fingers were pointed at outside forces, anything to deflect the real source of the madness. This is not something peculiar to the crash of 2008. The same types of explanations were trotted out after the crashes of 1987 and 1929, the railway mania in the 1840s in England, and the South Sea bubble of the 1720s, also in England. People spoke of reforming the system; laws were passed to limit speculation. And none of this worked. Bubbles occur because of the intense emotional pull they have on people, which overwhelms any reasoning powers an individual mind might possess. They stimulate our natural tendencies toward greed, easy money, and quick results. It is hard to see other people making money and not join in. There is no regulatory force on the planet that can control human nature. And because we do not confront the real source of the problem, bubbles and crashes keep repeating, and will keep repeating as long as there are suckers and people who do not read history. The recurrence of this mirrors the recurrence in our own lives of the same problems and mistakes, forming negative patterns. It is hard to learn from experience when we are not looking inward, at the true causes. Understand: The first step toward becoming rational is to understand our fundamental irrationality . There are two factors that should render this more palatable to our egos: nobody is exempt from the irresistible effect of emotions on the mind, not even the wisest among us; and to some extent irrationality is a function of the structure of our brains and is wired into our very nature by the way we process emotions. Being irrational is almost beyond our control. To understand this, we must look at the evolution of emotions themselves. For millions of years, living organisms depended on finely tuned instincts for survival. In a split second, a reptile could sense danger in the environment and respond with an instantaneous flight from the scene. There was no separation between impulse and action. Then, slowly, for some animals this sensation evolved into something larger and longer—a feeling of fear. In the beginning this fear merely consisted of a high level of arousal with the release of certain chemicals, alerting the animal to a possible danger. With this arousal and the attention that came with it, the animal could respond in

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  225Lecture 23—Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism FUNDAMENTALIST OPPOSITION õ Today, Pentecostalism is a thriving international branch of Christianity. A 2011 Pew study estimated that more than 580 million people worldwide practice Pentecostal Christianity or its cousin, Charismatic Christianity. õ But 100 years ago, most Christians found Pentecostal beliefs and practices totally outrageous. Much anti-Pentecostal backlash came from the diverse subculture of conservative Protestants who were, by the turn of the 20 th century, beginning to think of themselves as fundamentalists. They believed they were the only Christians left who really stood by the fundamentals of the faith. õ This conflict between fundamentalists and modernists hinged on the question of how Western Protestants ought to respond to the big changes of the 19 th century. Such changes include intellectual developments like the theory of evolution, but also social and economic changes too: the growth of noisy, smelly cities; the influx of immigrants, many of whom were not Protestant or even Christian; and the rise of first-wave feminism. õ The fundamentalists were those Protestants who strongly opposed these developments and fought against efforts to back away from a literal reading of, for example, Genesis. They fought against the drive to embrace modern scholarly methods and even to entertain the thought that other religions might be valid ways to know the divine. õ Fundamentalists found all that outrageous, and they fought hard to keep control of their churches, seminaries, and missions organizations between roughly 1900 and 1930. In most cases, they lost. Many—although not all—of them broke away to found their own denominations. õ The fundamentalists’ exact beliefs varied between Baptist fundamentalists, Presbyterians, or Mennonite fundamentalists. But in general, they shared some basic things with the Pentecostals. 226 The History of Christianity II They believed that the Bible was wholly free of error. They believed that modern scholarship usually couldn’t be trusted. They believed God was all-powerful. And many of them believed that the world was ending soon. õ Below is a list of five key fundamentalist doctrines, though it is not an exhaustive list of fundamentalist beliefs: 1. The miracles in the Bible really did happen. They were not optical illusions, or myths, as renegade modernist scholars in Germany and elsewhere had argued. 2. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. 3. Jesus experienced bodily resurrection after crucifixion. 4. Jesus came from a virgin birth. 5. The Bible is completely without error, even when it comes to historical fact.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAM õ In 1996, the Harvard political scientist Sam Huntington published a book called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This book, probably more than any other, has shaped the way Western Christians think about Islam. õ In the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a lot of people in the West were optimistic. They published reams of articles and books that said essentially the Cold War is over and the forces of democracy won. õ Huntington, however, said the Cold War may be over but the clash of civilizations has only just begun. He divided up the world into a few different civilizations: ✳ The United States, Canada, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand. ✳ Latin America. ✳ The Orthodox world of Russia and Eastern Europe. ✳ The Hindu civilization of India, Nepal, and Bhutan. ✳ The Confucian civilization of China, Korea, and their spheres of influence. ✳ The Muslim world, which included the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia, parts of Africa, and other majority-Muslim countries. õ Huntington wrote that these Muslim lands tend to have “bloody borders:” that is, they tend to get into fights with non-Muslim neighbors. Islam, like Christianity, is an exclusive faith that denies any other religion can be true. Lecture 36—The Challenge of 21st-Century Christianity 351 õ But unlike Western Christian communities, Muslims have not had a long history of adjusting their beliefs and practices to the values of pluralism, democracy, and the Enlightenment. It’s true that in centuries past, some Muslim empires extended remarkable toleration to non-Muslims, but these subjects had to acknowledge their inferiority and accept Muslim domination. õ Couple this cultural legacy with the population boom in many Muslim regions, and the fact that globalization has brought us all closer together while also leaving many Muslims feeling like economic have- nots, and you have a recipe for violence, particularly between Muslims and Christians. õ This was Huntington’s basic argument. Three years before his book came out, Islamic terrorists had attacked New York’s World Trade Center for the first time, detonating a truck bomb underneath the North Tower. After the attack, this “clash of civilizations” idea made sense to a growing number of Westerners. 352 The History of Christianity II

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  DEFINING THE APOCALYPSE õ The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word for “uncovering.” It means “disclosure,” “lifting the veil,” or “revelation.” The last book of the New Testament is known as the Apocalypse, or Revelation, of St. John. In it, John receives a divine message about the victory of good over evil at the end of human history. The events that are predicted to occur are revealed to him. That’s how people normally use the term revelation—it’s a prophetic message. õ Christianity itself began as an apocalyptic movement. Both Jesus and John the Baptist were apocalyptic prophets, and that means they told their followers of an abrupt world change that was right around the corner. This change would overturn the present order and mark the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. õ Jesus’s message came out of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, which began in the writings of the ancient Hebrew prophets. Prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel told the ancient Israelites that they had a message straight from God. This message confirmed the final vindication of God’s chosen people, Israel, at a time when God would separate the righteous from the wicked. õ The prophets warned that when that happened, there would be bloody wars. The enemies of Israel would fall, and God would signal this time with a series of natural disasters. õ The New Testament picked up on these themes. For instance, in three of the gospels, there’s a passage known as the Little Apocalypse. Here, the authors give an account of Jesus’s speech to his disciples two days before his own death. In this speech, Jesus tells them about the signs of the last days. õ Jesus warns them of “wars and rumors of wars,” and says that when Jesus’s followers have preached the gospel to all nations, then the end will come. The earliest Christians believed that this end-time scenario would happen within their own lifetimes, and they would live to see Jesus return to earth. Lecture 24—Apocalyptic Faith in the 1800s and Beyond 231

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  The other word, σινδών (linen), is also rare and associated with the tomb, and therefore unsurprisingly attractive to commentators’ attention. Now, given the extraordinary range of quality of “linen” that was produced in antiquity, the numerous locations producing flax for linen, and the variety of uses to which linen was put in the ancient world, as well as its limited appearance in Mark, it is almost impossible to conclude anything concretely regarding the appearance of this fabric in 14:51–52. Nevertheless, given its employment in burial practices (especial y in Egypt), 72 and the fact that “linen is used to identify the garment in which the presumably naked Jesus was wrapped after being taken down from the cross and which was left behind in the empty tomb,73 there may indeed be a further connection here between our young man and Jesus. There certainly is a garment of σινδών that is abandoned by two men in what is very likely a context that causes both men and women to flee, presumably for fear. Might there be oral–scribal intersections with our text along these lines? In order to answer this question, we return to our analysis of innertexture since lexical clustering can help to give us a clearer notion not only of the author’s own language but the language or languages with which our text overlaps.74 As we have seen, there is some repetition of words in 14:51–52 elsewhere in Mark; however, there is almost no clustering of the same words in any other text upon which an author like Mark might draw, and the clustering in texts that may have drawn on Mark is minimal. For example, we do not find anyone else in the NT or LXX described by the verb περιβάλλω as specifical y being clothed in σινδών, even though the verb itself is used in relation to other named fabrics, garments, or colors. 75 In fact, the substantive σινδών itself is found only twice in the LXX: Jdg 14:12 and Prov 31:24 and four of the six times it is used in the NT are the ones that we have already noted in Mark (14:51–52 2x and 15:46 2x). 76 Even the word νεανίσκος, which is certainly not as rare in the LXX, is found elsewhere in the NT only eight times (Matt 19:20, 22; Acts 2:17; 5:10; 23:18; 23:22; 1 John 2:13, 14). the message to Peter ever be delivered by the women who have fled in fear? To assert a message of “forgiveness and restoration” can only be drawn from the larger biblical witness, not from Mark alone. 72 Anastasia (Frankfurt/Main) Pekridou-Gorecki et al., “Linen, Flax,” in Brill’s New Pauly (New Pauly Online; Leiden: Bril , 2006). 73 Robert C. Tannehil , “The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role,” JR 57.4 (1977): 403

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Under this type of stress, people may react to an innocuous question with the same degree of irritability and confusion as when they are exposed to a significant provocation. One wonders how many domestic arguments, often around trite frictions, arise out of simple sleep deprivation. In the paradoxical phase, or Pavlov’s second reaction to protracted stress, the animals exhibited a reversal of their conditioned responses. Something had happened in their brains that made the dogs respond more actively to weak stimuli than to strong ones. This is something that does not normally happen to individuals unless they have been traumatized. The Vietnam veteran who ducks for cover when a distant car backfires, but spends his afternoon at the firing range, demonstrates this phase of breakdown. Another example might be the rape victim who startles to every passing shadow yet hangs out in seedy bars. Pavlov named the third and final chapter in the breakdown saga following unmitigated stress ultra-paradoxical but also referred to it as the transmarginal phase. In this final phase of “supramaximal” stimulation, a critical point was reached. Going beyond this apex would cause many of his dogs to just shut down; they became unresponsive for an extended period of time. Pavlov believed that this shutdown was a biological defense against neural overload. (In this way Pavlov set the stage for the study of conservation-withdrawal as investigated by Engle and later by Porges with the formation of his polyvagal theory.) In addition, as his animals “recovered” from being stunned, they exhibited extremely odd and inexplicable behaviors. The aggressive dogs became docile while the timid ones turned hyper-aggressive, as mentioned earlier. Similarly, trainers for whom the dogs had shown affection prior to the flood were now confronted with aggressive snarls and lunges. Other dogs, who had previously disliked their handlers, greeted them with showers of tail wagging and affection. These about-face counterintuitive behaviors are analogous to those of highly traumatized humans. The loving husband who attacks his wife upon returning from the Iraq War is one such possible example. Another involves hostages who exhibit the Stockholm syndrome. They are not only compliant but may behave as though they have fallen in love with their captors, even refusing to leave when their rescuers arrive. There are a multitude of examples where victims of kidnapping have regularly visited their previous attackers in prison for years and have even married them. Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter, described her Iraq abduction in almost cheerful terms but then, a day or two later, talked about being in seclusion because of her trauma. And then, hopefully back to equilibrium, she made the statement, “I finally feel like I am alive again.” In addition, traumatized individuals generally find themselves, as with Pavlov’s transmarginal phase, swinging wildly and unpredictably between being numb and shut down on the one hand and being flooded by emotions, including terror and rage, on the other. These bipolar swings are often erratic and capricious.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Just like the gazelles, humans are acutely attuned to danger and prepared to act decisively to meet it. The posture, gestures and facial expressions of people tell the untold tale of what did and did not happen when threatened and overwhelmed. Habitual postures tell us what paths need to be retraced and resolved. In order to facilitate bottom-up processing, therapists need to have a precise feel for the instinctual imperative that was thwarted in their client at a moment of overwhelming fright. The traumatized body-mind was, in other words, poised in readiness but failed to fully orchestrate its meaningful course of action. As in my accident (Chapter 1) we have to help clients discover just where in her body she readied for action, and which action had been blocked in its execution. Other research confirms the pertinence of instantaneous body reading. A recent study carried out by the U.S. Army suggests that the speed with which the brain reads emotions in the body language of others and interprets sensations in one’s own body is central to avoiding imminent threats like hidden booby traps, who might be carrying a hidden bomb or who had recently buried one.17 In this same article, the neurologist Antonio Damasio adds that “emotions are practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, in all of us.” Therapeutic approaches that neglect the body, focusing mainly on thoughts (top-down processing), will consequently be limited. I propose instead that, in the initial stages of restorative work, bottom-up processing needs to be standard operating procedure. In other words, addressing a client’s “bodyspeak” first and then, gradually, enlisting his or her emotion, perception and cognition is not merely valuable, it’s essential. The “talking cure” for trauma survivors should give way to the unspoken voice of the silent, but strikingly powerful, bodily expressions as they surface to “sound off” on behalf of the wisdom of the deeper self. Challenges of TherapyTherapists working with traumatized individuals frequently “pick up” and mirror the postures of their clients and hence their emotions of fear, terror, anger, rage and helplessness. The way we respond to these signifiers will be pivotal in helping traumatized individuals deal with those difficult sensations and emotions. If we recoil because we cannot contain and accept them, then we abandon our clients … if we are overwhelmed, then we are both lost. If we embody some small portion of a Dalai Lama–like equanimity and “composure,” we are able to share and help contain our client’s terrors in a “blanket of compassion.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Had I not sensed the raw muscular power of my survival instincts, contrasting with my helpless condition, I surely would have developed the debilitating symptoms of PTSD that had so shadowed and crippled Nancy. I would have, like Nancy, been left too frightened to venture out confidently into the world again. Just as Nancy was able to escape her tormenters in retrospect, I was able to both escape my destruction and preventatively “reset” my nervous system in real time. When acutely threatened, we mobilize vast energies to protect and defend ourselves. We duck, dodge, twist, stiffen and retract. Our muscles contract to fight or flee. However, if our actions are ineffective, we freeze or collapse. Nancy’s four-year-old body had tried to escape from her masked predators. Her body wanted to run away and escape, but it could not. She was overpowered and held down against her will by all-powerful masked and gowned giants. In our hour together Nancy’s body contradicted her panicky feelings of being overwhelmed and trapped. And as her body learned this, so did her mind. When any organism perceives overwhelming mortal danger (with little or no chance for escape) the biological response is a global one of paralysis and shutdown. Ethologists call this innate response tonic immobility (TI). Humans experience this frozen state as helpless terror and panic. Such a state of shutdown and paralysis is meant to be temporary. A wild animal exhibiting this acute physiological shock reaction will either be eaten or, if spared, presumably resume life as before its brush with death; it will be none the worse for the encounter and perhaps wiser. It may be more vigilant (not to be confused with hypervigilant) about similar future sources of threat and thus of early intimations of danger. A deer might, for example, avoid certain rocky outcroppings where it had previously escaped the lunging attack of a mountain lion. Humans, in contrast to animals, frequently remain stuck in a kind of limbo, not fully reengaging in life after experiencing threat as overwhelming terror or horror. In addition, they exhibit a propensity for freezing in situations where a non-traumatized individual might only sense danger or even feel some excitement. Rather than being a last-ditch reaction to inescapable threat, paralysis becomes a “default” response to a wide variety of situations in which one’s feelings are highly aroused. For example, the arousal of sex may turn unexpectedly from excitement to frigidity, revulsion or avoidance.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Much of philosophy and early psychology were of the logical, “common-sense” conviction regarding the sequence by which an emotion was generated. Today, like the early philosophers, we resort to similar explanations. For example, when something provocative happened to René Descartes (perhaps someone raised his fist and called him a jerk or alternatively patted him and told him, “You’re a great guy”), he might have believed that his brain recognized this provocation as being worthy of an emotional response—anger, fear, sadness or elation. Had the physiology of his times been more advanced, he would have interpreted the next step as his brain telling his body what to do: increase your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing; tense your muscles, secrete sweat and/or make goose bumps. These are responses controlled by the autonomic (involuntary) nervous system, preparing the organism for various actions related to fight or flight. For Descartes, and for most of us, this sequence makes perfectly logical sense and seems to describe how we experience emotion. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, William James, who had studied with the experimental psychologists of his time, took an experiential, rather than philosophical and speculative, approach to the study of emotions. James would set up imagined situations, such as being chased by a bear, and then through experiential introspection would attempt to infer the chain of events by which an emotion, such as fear, was generated. In these subjective experiments he would sense into the interior of his body, as well as noting his thoughts and internal images. Ultimately, he arrived at a rather unexpected conclusion. Common sense dictates that when we see a bear, we are frightened, and then motivated by fear, we flee. However, in his careful, reflective observations, James concluded that rather than running because we are afraid, we are afraid because we are running (from the bear). In James’s words, My theory … is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. “Common sense” says we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations may first be interposed between, and the more rational (accurate) statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.145

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

  Reply to Objection 2: When the kingdom of heaven is said to be at hand, we are to understand that the king is on his way, not only to reward but also to punish. Wherefore John the Baptist said (Mat. 3:7): “Ye brood of vipers, who hath showed you to flee from the wrath to come?” Reply to Objection 3: Even the movement of fear proceeds from God’s act in turning the heart; wherefore it is written (Dt. 5:29): “Who shall give them to have such a mind, to fear Me?” And so the fact that penance results from fear does not hinder its resulting from the act of God in turning the heart. Whether penance is the first of the virtues?Objection 1: It would seem that penance is the first of the virtues. Because, on Mat. 3:2, “Do penance,” etc., a gloss says: “The first virtue is to destroy the old man, and hate sin by means of penance.” Objection 2: Further, withdrawal from one extreme seems to precede approach to the other. Now all the other virtues seem to regard approach to a term, because they all direct man to do good; whereas penance seems to direct him to withdraw from evil. Therefore it seems that penance precedes all the other virtues. Objection 3: Further, before penance, there is sin in the soul. Now no virtue is compatible with sin in the soul. Therefore no virtue precedes penance, which is itself the first of all and opens the door to the others by expelling sin. On the contrary, Penance results from faith, hope, and charity, as already stated ([4745]AA[2],5). Therefore penance is not the first of the virtues.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The rest of the visit is uneventful, except for one night toward the end when you both come in from the pool just after sunset. You open the sliding glass door to air-conditioning and escalating voices, and as you cross the kitchen together, you see her father stepping toward her mother. He’s holding a drink, and he’s shouting about—something. She is tight against the counter. Your girlfriend keeps moving, without pause, but you stop for a beat and look at them. Her mother flashes you a glance, and then tilts her chin up toward her husband and says, “I need to finish dinner,” before turning her back to him. The moment feels fraught, but it passes and he stalks away. In your girlfriend’s bedroom, you are shaking. Outside, the air is filled with prestorm pressure. She strips down to nothing and stands there covered in goosebumps. “I don’t want to be like him,” she says, “but sometimes I worry that I am.” It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to you. When the storm breaks, the thunder is as loud as a gun. Dream House as BluebeardBluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock.14 But we all know that was just the beginning, a test. She failed (and lived to tell the tale, as I have), but even if she’d passed, even if she’d listened, there would have been some other request, a little larger, a little stranger, and if she’d kept going—kept allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller—there’d have been a scene where Bluebeard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely, suppressing growing horror, swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breastbone. And then later, another scene, in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies (women, they’d once been women) and she just stared dead into the middle distance, seeking some mute purgatory where she could live forever. (Some scholars believe that Bluebeard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature; easier to accept than being brought to heel by a simple man. But isn’t that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn’t have to be a man.)

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We make decisions based on rational considerations, on what will benefit us the most. We have free will. We know who we are, more or less. But in one particular aspect of life these self-opinions are all easily shattered— when we fall in love. When in love, we become prey to emotions we cannot control. We make choices of partners we cannot rationally explain, and often these choices end up being unfortunate. Many of us will have at least one successful relationship in our lives, but we will tend to have many more that were decidedly unsuccessful, that ended unhappily. And often we repeat the same types of bad choices of partners, as if compelled by some inner demon. We like to tell ourselves in retrospect that when we were in love, a type of temporary madness overcame us. We think of such moments as representing the exception, not the rule, to our character. But let us entertain for the moment the opposite possibility—in our conscious day-to-day life, we are sleepwalking, unaware of who we really are; we present a front of reasonableness to the world, and we mistake the mask for reality. When we fall in love, we are actually being more ourselves. The mask slips off. We realize then how deeply unconscious forces determine many of our actions. We are more connected to the reality of the essential irrationality in our nature. Let us look at some of the common changes that occur when we are in love. Normally our minds are in a state of distraction. The deeper we fall in love, however, the more our attention is completely absorbed in one person. We become obsessive. We like to present a particular appearance to the world, one that highlights our strengths. When in love, however, opposite traits often come to the fore. A person who is normally strong and independent can suddenly become rather helpless, dependent, and hysterical. A nurturing, empathetic person can suddenly become tyrannical, demanding, and self-absorbed. As adults we feel relatively mature and practical, but in love we can suddenly regress to behavior that can only be seen as childish. We experience fears and insecurities that are greatly exaggerated. We feel terror at the thought of being abandoned, like a baby who has been left alone for a few minutes. We have wild mood swings— from love to hate, from trust to paranoia. Normally we like to imagine that we are good judges of other people’s character. Once infatuated or in love, however, we mistake the narcissist for a genius, the suffocator for a nurturer, the slacker for the exciting rebel, the control freak for the protector. Others can often see the truth and try to disabuse us of our fantasies, but we won’t listen. And what is worse, we will often continue to make the same types of mistaken judgments again and again. In looking at these altered states, we might be tempted to describe them as forms of possession.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  To become self-regulating and authentically autonomous, traumatized individuals must ultimately learn to access, tolerate and utilize their inner sensations. It would, however, be unwise to have one attempt a sustained focus on one’s body without adequate preparation. Initially, in contacting inner sensations, one may feel the threat of a consuming fear of the unknown. Or, premature focus on the sensations can be overwhelming, potentially causing retraumatization. For many wounded individuals, their body has become the enemy: the experience of almost any sensation is interpreted as an unbidden harbinger of renewed terror and helplessness. To solve this perplexing situation, a therapist who (while engaging in initial conversation) notices a momentary positive shift in a client’s affect—in facial expression, say, or a shift in posture—indicating relief and brightness, can seize the opportunity and try to direct the client toward attending to her sensations. “Touching in” to positive experiences gradually gives a client the confidence to explore her internal bodily landscape and develop a tolerance for all of her sensations, comfortable and uncomfortable, pleasant and unpleasant. The client can now begin to allow the underlying disowned sensations—especially those of paralysis, helplessness and rage—to emerge into consciousness. She develops her experience of agency by choosing between the two opposing states: resistance/fear and acceptance/exploration. With a gentle rocking back and forth, oscillating between resistance and acceptance, fear and exploration, the client gradually sheds some of her protective armoring. The therapist guides her into a comforting rhythm—a supported shifting between paralyzing fear and the pure sensations associated with the immobility. In Gestalt psychology, these back-and-forth movements between two different states are described as figure/ground alternations (see Figure 5.1). This shifting, in turn, reduces fear’s grip and allows more access to the quintessential and unencumbered (by emotion) immobility sensations. This back-and-forth switching of attention (between the fear/resistance and the unadulterated physical sensations of immobility) deepens relaxation and enhances aliveness. It is the beginning of hope and the acquiring of tools that will empower her as she begins to navigate the interoceptive (or the direct felt experiencing of viscera, joints and muscles) landscape of trauma and healing. These skills lead to a core innate transformative process: pendulation. Figure and Ground Perception [image file=image_rsrc2N8.jpg] Figure 5.1 This figure demonstrates the alternation of figure and ground perception. Do you see the vase or the face? Keep looking. Now what do you see now? You will probably notice that the vase and face alternate but cannot be perceived at the same time. This is a useful concept in understanding how fear is uncoupled from immobility. When one experiences pure immobility, one cannot (like vase and face) also feel fear at the same time. This facilitates expansion and the gradual discharge of activation shown in Figure 5.2. Step 3. Pendulation and containment: the innate power of rhythmExpecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The explanation that is generally accepted for this phenomenon is that destruction of the visual cortex still leaves several other (primitive, subcortical) visual pathways intact. Sensory information to these somehow registers basic information that normally has the function of directing eye movements to garner more data. These data, however, also render a flimsy sketch of which we are largely unconscious. It is this unconscious information that evokes the readiness for movement (i.e., premovement). It is also this primitive circuitry that makes possible the reasonably accurate “guesses” that are observed in people with blindsight disorder. Hence, we are once again appreciative of the prompting to respond to events before we become overtly aware of them. Consider your response to the fleeting shadow, the subtle gesture of another person or a distant sound. Each of these events can evoke in us survival-bound responses without our ever being aware that something in our environment has triggered them. Notably, when we have been traumatized, we are particularly sensitized to (and hyperaroused by) these fleeting stimuli. Our senses of seeing, hearing and smell provide countless stimuli that cause us to overreact, even though we may be unaware of the presence of those subliminal stimuli and our premotor responses to them. As a result we may, and often do, attribute our actions to irrelevant or manufactured causes. This attribution of causation is like the subjects in Wegner’s experiments who falsely believed that they had willed the movement of the experimenter’s arms. It is specifically because we are unaware of our environmentally triggered premovement that we falsely believe we are consciously initiating and constructing the movement. Furthermore, when the (unacknowledged) premovement drive is strong, we may feel compelled to fully enact the entire movement sequence. Two confusions of causality occur for traumatized individuals. The first one is the unawareness of the premovement trigger. The second is the extent of the response. Imagine the consternation of an individual trapped in the full-blown, ferocious reenactment of a survival-bound response. Take for instance the Vietnam vet who wakes up to find himself strangling his terrified wife, unaware that it was the backfiring of a distant car, or even the light footsteps of their young child in the hallway, that provoked his freakish behavior and grossly exaggerated reaction. However, years earlier, when sleeping in a bamboo thicket, under fire from the Vietcong, his immediate kill-response was an essential, life-preserving action. It may only take a very mild stimulus to abruptly trigger the tightly coiled spring (the kill-or-be-killed survival reaction) into an intense, out-of-control, emotional eruption. I know of only one way to break compulsive cycles like this, and in the process expand consciousness toward greater freedom. It is to become aware of the premovement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence. It is to extinguish the spark before it ignites the tinder, as emphasized by Buddhist teachings. Many times in the past, I walked with my dog in the Colorado Mountains.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  228 The History of Christianity II and worried about reconciling faith with science. Fights between fundamentalists and modernists started among descendants of that reformed tradition, Presbyterians and Baptists. õ Another factor: In the early 20 th century, America was already a culturally diverse country, where vast distances separated different subcultures and an ocean—both geographic and cultural— divided Americans from the universities of Europe. For American fundamentalists, there was no sense of continuity or cultural kinship with the groundbreaking scholarship that flourished in Europe during the 19th century. õ Compare this with Canada, where most Christians felt themselves to be a part of the same intellectual culture as their peers in Britain. For example, they experienced Charles Darwin’s discoveries as events in their own society, and got used to them more gradually. American Christians were more likely to experience the theory of evolution or German theological ideas as foreign invasions. Fundamentalists fought these invasions with all the vigor they could muster. õ Additionally, American fundamentalism didn’t make much sense to Christians outside the West. American fundamentalists focused on proper Christian behavior, but they were also obsessed with the clash between faith and reason. They thought of scientists and university professors as vile enemies of the faith. They read the Bible in a very rationalistic way, as if it were a science textbook. As one Presbyterian theologian put it, “the Bible is a storehouse of facts.” õ This understanding of Christianity would not resonate much at all with, for example, Zulu tribesmen in South Africa, who were probably more worried about whether they would see their ancestors in heaven, or how to defend their children against witches, or how to survive the brutalities of the emerging apartheid system. 229Lecture 23—Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism õ From the 1930s into the Cold War era, American fundamentalists tended to fuse their understanding of Christian orthodoxy with a nationalistic vision of American world dominance. Conservative Protestants in Europe and the Global South were a bit leery of allying with them. SUGGESTED READING Espinosa, William J. Seymour. Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture . QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What aspects of modernity did Pentecostals and fundamentalists find frightening or dangerous? ä Why did so many worshippers at Azusa Street violate the social taboos of the day? ä How does the meaning of fundamentalist in today’s common speech compare to the term’s historical meaning? 230 LECTURE 24 APOCALYPTIC FAITH IN THE 1800s AND BEYOND T his lecture tackles the question of what exactly the apocalypse is and how Christians have interpreted it. Then, the lecture digs into the ideas about the end times that became popular in 19 th-century and 20 th-century America and remain influential today.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Horrible and shocking as this experience was, it allowed me to exercise the method for dealing with sudden trauma that I had developed, written about and taught for the past forty years. By listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terror without becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation. While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more “ordinary” events such as surgeries or invasive medical procedures.1 Orthopedic patients in a recent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery. Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receiving shocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into an auto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly common experiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to rebound from such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals, can subject us to PTSD—along with a myriad of physical and emotional symptoms. I dread to think how my accident might have turned out had I lacked my knowledge or not had the good fortune to be helped by that woman pediatrician and her scent of holding kindness. Finding MethodOver the past forty years, I have developed an approach to help people move through the many types of trauma, including what I went through that February day when I was struck by a car. This method is equally applicable directly after the trauma or many years later—my first serendipitous client, described in Chapter 2, was able to recover from a trauma that occurred about twenty years prior to our sessions together. Somatic Experiencing®, as I call the method, helps to create physiological, sensate and affective states that transform those of fear and helplessness. It does this by accessing various instinctual reactions through one’s awareness of physical body sensations.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, when “pro-social” behaviors do not resolve the threatening situation, a less evolved system is engaged. We mobilize our fight-or-flight response. Finally, in this “hierarchy of default”—when neither of the more recently acquired systems (social engagement or fight/flight) resolves the situation, or when death appears imminent—the last-ditch system is engaged. This most primitive system, which governs immobility, shutdown and dissociation, takes over and hijacks all survival efforts.§ [image file=image_rsrc2ND.jpg] Figure 6.2a This figure shows which part of the body is affected by each of the evolutionary subsystems. The concept of default hierarchies—first described by the preeminent neurologist of the later nineteenth century, Hughlings Jackson60—remains a fundamental principle of neurology‖ and is a primary assumption in Porges’s theory. Basically, Jackson observed that when the brain is injured or stressed, it reverts to a less refined, evolutionarily more primitive level of functioning. If there is subsequent recovery, this regression will reverse, returning the individual to the more refined functions. This is an example of “bottom-up processing,” so important in trauma therapy. Evolutionary Roots [image file=image_rsrc2NE.jpg] Figure 6.2b This shows the neural control of the three phylogenetic systems: primitive vagus, sympathetic/adrenal and “smart” (mammalian) vagus. The more primitive the operative system, the more power it has to take over the overall function of the organism. It does this by inhibiting the more recent and more refined neurological subsystems, effectively preventing them from functioning. In particular, the immobilization system all but completely suppresses the social engagement/attachment system. When you are “scared to death,” you have few resources left to orchestrate the complex behaviors that mediate attachment and calming; social engagement is essentially hijacked. The sympathetic nervous system also blocks the social engagement system, but not as completely as does the immobilization system (the most primitive of the three defenses). Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic Stages of Nervous Control [image file=image_rsrc2NF.jpg] Figure 6.2c This summarizes the phylogenetic stages of the sympathetic and polyvagal systems. Immobility and hyperarousal are, as I have explained, organismic responses to threat and prolonged stress. When they are operative, danger (in the case of fight or flight) and doom (with immobility) are what an individual perceives—regardless of the reality of the external situation. The human nervous system does not readily discriminate between a potential source of danger in the environment, such as an abruptly moving shadow, or distress about a situation long past.a Where the distress is generated internally (by muscles and viscera), one experiences an obsessive pressure to locate the source of threat or (when that’s not possible) to manufacture one as a way of explaining to oneself that there is an identifiable source of threat.