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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Our love affair with monogamy arguably comes at some cost. The Brazilian family therapist Michele Scheinkman says, “American culture has great tolerance for divorce—where there is a total breakdown of the loyalty bond and painful effects for the whole family—but it is a culture with no tolerance for sexual infidelity.” We would rather kill a relationship than question its structure. So entrenched is our faith in monogamy that most couples, particularly heterosexual couples, rarely broach the subject openly. They have no need to discuss what’s a given. Even those who are otherwise willing to probe sexuality in all its permutations are often reluctant to negotiate the hard lines around exclusivity. Monogamy has an absolute quality. According to this way of thinking, you can’t be mostly monogamous, or 98 percent monogamous, or periodically nonmonogamous. Discussing fidelity implies that it’s open to discussion, no longer an imperative. The prospect of betrayal is too dark, so we avoid the subject with practiced denial. We fear that the smallest chink in our armor will let in Sodom and Gomorrah. Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness. Finding the One Historically, monogamy was an externally imposed system of control over women’s reproduction. “Which child is mine? Who gets the cows when I die?” Fidelity, as a mainstay of patriarchal society, was about lineage and property; it had nothing to do with love. Today, particularly in the West, it has everything to do with love. When marriage shifted from a contractual arrangement to a matter of the heart, faithfulness became a mutual expression of love and commitment. Once a social prohibition directed at women, fidelity is now a personal choice for both sexes. Conviction has replaced convention.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  measured against crossing the finish line. And even a broken leg won’t make us quit when facing the choice between falling short or continuing on in pain. The Problem with Pass-Fail The benefits of setting goals are well known. Goals define your North Star and give you something to strive for. They motivate you to persist when things get tough. It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that goals that are both challenging and specific get you to work harder and are more effective than goals that are more amorphous and general. If you say, “I want to run sixteen miles a week” or “I’d like to raise my GPA by half a grade in the next semester,” you’ll make more progress toward achieving those things than if you say, “I’d like to run more” or “I want to try harder in school.” But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn’t mean that there isn’t a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment. Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School and Lisa Ordóñez, then of the University of Arizona, along with several other scholars including Max Bazerman, Adam Galinsky, and Bambi Douma, coauthored a number of papers making the case that goals have a dark side. They point to numerous negative consequences of goal setting, several of which interfere with rational quitting behavior. In particular, they note the pass-fail nature of goals, their inflexibility, and how pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available. The point the authors are echoing is that, while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. In part, what makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting in a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. Why? In part, because they are graded as pass-fail.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies. When we express our erotic yearnings we risk humiliation and rejection, which are equally devastating. I have witnessed the painful scene when a person’s preferences are condemned and labeled by his or her partner as perverse, deviant, and disgusting. It is no wonder that many of us prefer the security of workable sex as a shield against this harrowing scenario. We may be far from passion, but at least we feel normal. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a bad compromise. But then there are those who long to be known differently, to give themselves over and risk crossing that threshold. They muster the courage to confront the cultural prohibitions against sex—exuberant sex—at home. They hunger for full expression in the erotic realm, and resist the urge to withhold. For them sexual communion is far from dirty, but rather a sacred melding that puts us in touch with the divine. Erotic intimacy is the revelation of our memories, wishes, fears, expectations, and struggles within a sexual relationship. When our innermost desires are revealed, and are met by our loved one with acceptance and validation, the shame dissolves. It is an experience of profound empowerment and self-affirmation for the heart, body, and soul. When we can be present for both love and sex, we transcend the battleground of Puritanism and hedonism. 7 Erotic BlueprintsTell Me How You Were Loved, and I’ll Tell You How You Make Love Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard A HOST OF INSTITUTIONS LOOK out for our best interest. Religion, government, medicine, education, the media, and pop culture all labor tirelessly to define and regulate the parameters of our sexual well-being. The incentives and prohibitions surrounding the voluptuousness of the body are the mother’s milk of society. Much of what we learn about sex comes from the street, the movies, television, and school. But before any of these reach us, our family gets to us first. We are members of a society, but we’re also the children of our parents. (This includes grandparents, stepparents, guardians, foster parents, and anyone else who is entrusted with our early well-being.) No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers. The Archaeology of Desire

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

  237Lecture 24—Apocalyptic Faith in the 1800s and Beyond õDarby said that after the rapture, the Antichrist will appear. This is a religious tyrant who’s backed by churches that have fallen away from the true Christian message. Darby also said to look out for the rise of an evil political leader, the Beast of Revelation. õDarby also thought that the Bible predicts the return of Jews to Palestine, where he said they will suffer intense persecution; some will convert and accept Jesus as the Messiah. And Darby predicted the personal return of Christ with his army of saints to defeat the forces of evil and to establish his earthly reign of 1,000 years. THE END TIMES õDarby’s ideas got a big boost because he was able to convince some of the most prominent evangelists of the day that it was true. Darby’s theory also had intellectual appeal, and there seem to be three main reasons for this. ✳First, it was scientific and supernatural at the same time. Darby taught that the Bible is a divinely inspired science and history textbook, as long as you learn to crack the code. ✳Second, Darby’s theory was accessible to the uneducated layperson. That’s because Darby argued that anyone could understand even the most complicated, ambiguous parts of the Bible. ✳Third, this view of the end times provided a reassuring explanation for a period of change. During the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, a lot of conservative Protestants felt they were losing control of America because of cultural and social changes. World war brought unprecedented death and devastation. Darby’s version of premillennialism explained this chaos. Here was a theory that said things are going from bad to worse, but this is God’s plan. 238The History of Christianity II õThe year 1945 triggered a f lood of new prophecy. Up to that point, prophecy writers had envisioned the apocalypse in terms of terrible natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that all changed. The atomic bomb had to be proof of the end times.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  We frequently shake when we are cold, anxious, angry or fearful. We may also tremble when in love or at the climax of orgasm. Patients sometimes shake uncontrollably, in cold shivers, as they awake from anesthesia. Wild animals often tremble when they are stressed or confined. Shaking and trembling reactions are also reported during the practices of traditional healing and spiritual pathways of the East. In Qigong and Kundalini yoga, for example, adepts who employ subtle movement, breathing and meditation techniques may experience ecstatic and blissful states accompanied by shaking and trembling. All of these “tremblings,” experienced in diverse circumstances and having a multiplicity of other functions, hold the potential for catalyzing authentic transformation, deep healing and awe. Although the fearful trembling of anxiety does not in itself ensure a resetting and return to equilibrium, it can hold its own solution when guided and experienced in the “right way.” The distinguished Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz notes: “The divine psychic core of the soul, the self, is activated in cases of extreme danger.”3 And, in the Bible, it is said that “God is found where you have trembled.” What do all of these involuntary shakes and shivers have in common? Why do we quake when frightened or tremble in anger? Why do we quiver at sexual climax? And what might be the physiological function of trembling in spiritual awe? What is the commonality of all these shivers and shakes, quivers and quakes? And what have they to do with transforming trauma, regulating stress and living life to its fullest? These gyrations and undulations are ways that our nervous system “shakes off” the last rousing experience and “grounds” us in readiness for the next encounter with danger, lust and life. They are mechanisms that help restore our equilibrium after we have been threatened or highly aroused. They bring us back down to earth, so to speak. Indeed, such physiological reactions are at the core of self-regulation and resilience. The experience of emergent resilience gives us a treasure beyond imagination. In the words of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, The fear and trembling engendered by shock comes to an individual at first in such a way that he sees himself placed at a disadvantage … this is only transitory. When the ordeal is over, he experiences relief, and thus the very terror he had to endure at the outset brings good fortune in the long run.4 Learning to live through states of high arousal (no matter what their source) allows us to maintain equilibrium and sanity. It enables us to live life in its full range and richness—from agony to ecstasy. The intrinsic relationship of these spontaneous autonomic responses to the broad phenomenon of resilience, flow and transformation is a central theme of this book.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The powerful effects of both the sympathetic and the vagus nerves on the viscera serve critical survival functions. The activation of these two systems is meant to be brief in response to acute emergency. When they become stuck (in either sympathetic overdrive or vagal overactivity), the survival function is drastically subverted: one may end up suffering from a painfully knotted gut, as in the case of persistent sympathetic hyperarousal, or be tormented by spasms of twisting cramps and disruptive diarrhea in chronic vagal hyperactivity.r When equilibrium is not restored, these states become chronic, and illness ensues. Together, these complex systems (the vagus and the enteric plexus), not unlike a great marriage, put gut and brain in either blissful harmony or in dreadful unending battle. When there is a coherent balance between the two, the hedonic (concerned with pleasure or pleasurable sensations) fulcrum is tipped toward heaven; when the regulatory relationship is disordered, the gates of hell are opened wide like the great maw of misery. The Medium Is the MessageOur nervous system assesses threat in two basic ways. First of all, we use our external sense organs to discern and evaluate threat from salient features in the environment. So, for example, a sudden shadow alerts one to a potential risk, while the large looming contours of a bear or the sleek, crouching silhouette of a mountain lion let one know that one is in grave danger. We also assess threat directly from the state of our viscera and our muscles—our internal sense organs. If our muscles are tense, we unconsciously interpret these tensions as foretelling the existence of danger, even when none actually exists. Tight muscles in the neck and shoulders may, for example, signal to the brain that you are likely to be hit. Tense legs, along with furtive eyes, may tell you that you need to run and escape, and taut arms may signal that you’re ready to strike out. We suffer even greater distress when our guts are persistently overstimulated by the vagus nerve. If we are nauseated, twisted in our guts, feel our muscles collapsing, and lack in energy, we feel helpless and hopeless—even though there is no actual decimating threat. In other words, the churning itself signals grave threat and dread to the brain, even when nothing is currently wrong—at least not externally. Our muscular and visceral states color both our perceptions and our evaluation of the intentions of others. While we may believe that certain individuals will do us no harm, we still feel endangered.s

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  She then became disturbed by what she described as a “sweaty, smelly, hot sensation” on her back, which left her feeling nauseated. Bonnie now seemed more agitated—her face turned pale, and she felt an urge to get up and leave the room. After reassurance, Bonnie chose to remain and continued tracking her discomfort. It intensified and then gradually diminished. Following this ebb and flow, Bonnie became aware of another sensation—a tension in the back of her right arm and shoulder. When she focused her attention on this, she started to feel an urge to thrust her elbow backward. I offered a hand as a support and as a resistance so that Bonnie could safely feel the power in her arm as she pushed it slowly backward. After pushing for several seconds, her body began to shake and tremble as she broke out into a profuse sweat. Her legs also began moving up and down as if they were on sewing machine treadles. As Bonnie’s arm continued its slow press backward, the body shaking decreased, and Bonnie felt as though her legs were getting stronger. She said that they felt “like they wanted to, and could, move.” She reported noticing a strong urge propelling her forward. Suddenly, a picture flashed before her—a streetlight and the image of the couple that had “helped her.” “I got away … I got away …,” she cried softly. It was then she remembered molding into the man’s torso as he held a knife to her throat. She went on, “I did that to make him think I was his … Then my body knew what to do, and it did it … That’s what let me escape.” Then the story that her body had been telling emerged in words: eighteen months earlier, Bonnie had been the victim of an attempted rape. While walking home after visiting a friend in another neighborhood, a stranger had pulled her into an alley and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. Somehow, she was able to break free and run to a lighted street corner where two passersby yelled for the police. Bonnie was politely interviewed by the police and then taken home by a friend. Surprisingly, she could not remember how she had escaped, but she was tearfully grateful to have been left unharmed. Afterward, her life appeared to return to normal, but when she felt stressed or in conflict, her body was still responding as it had when the knife was held to her throat.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I hear my shirt ripping. I am startled and again jump to the vantage of an observer hovering above my sprawling body. (26. The abruptness with which the shirt is removed restimulates the dissociation.) I watch uniformed strangers methodically attach electrodes to my chest. The Good Samaritan paramedic reports to someone that my pulse was 170. I hear my shirt ripping even more. (27. As I notice that I’m dissociating, I am able to bring myself back to my body.) I see the emergency team slip a collar onto my neck and then cautiously slide me onto a board. While they strap me down, I hear some garbled radio communication. The paramedics are requesting a full trauma team. Alarm jolts me. I ask to be taken to the nearest hospital only a mile away, but they tell me that my injuries may require the major trauma center in La Jolla, some thirty miles farther. My heart sinks. Surprisingly, though, the fear quickly subsides. (28. The surging and receding of the emotional arousal is evidence of deepening self-regulation.) As I am lifted into the ambulance, I close my eyes for the first time. A vague scent of the woman’s perfume and the look of her quiet, kind eyes linger. Again, I have that comforting feeling of being held by her presence. Opening my eyes in the ambulance, I feel a heightened alertness, as though I’m supercharged with adrenaline. (29. I am adequately resourced now—enough to close my eyes and stay with the hyperarousal sensations in my body; the lingering scent of the woman’s perfume helps calm my limbic system and body, providing additional support for exploring what’s going inside of me.) Though intense, this feeling does not overwhelm me. Even though my eyes want to dart around, to survey the unfamiliar and foreboding environment, I consciously direct myself to go inward. I begin to take stock of my body sensations. (30. The perception of danger that my life is being threatened is receding, and the ability to access my body is increasing.) This active focusing draws my attention to an intense, and uncomfortable, buzzing throughout my body.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as SanctuaryThe night she chased me in the Dream House and I locked myself in the bathroom, I remember sitting with my back against the wall, pleading with the universe that she wouldn’t have the tools or know-how to take the doorknob out of the door. Her technical incompetence was my luck, and my luck was that I could sit there, watching the door test its hinges with every blow. I could sit there on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe. When Debra Reid was eventually released on parole, she had to stay in prison longer than she needed to because securing housing was a condition of her release and she was having difficulty doing so. She told an interviewer, “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.” I can’t get Debra or her doorknob out of my mind. I hope she got what she needed. Dream House as Double CrossThis, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal. Dream House as Unreliable NarratorWhen I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen.” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me. Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, filled me with incandescent rage. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch. This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world. Dream House as ProofSo many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely—within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand. My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus. I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help make my case. Not in a court of law, exactly, because there are many things that happen to us that are beyond the purview of even a perfectly executed legal system. But the court of other people, the court of the body, the court of queer history. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.” That ephemera: The recorded sound waves of her speech on one axis and a precise measurement of the flood of adrenaline and cortisol in my body on the other. Witness statements from the strangers who anxiously looked at us sideways in public places. A photograph of her grip on my arm in Florida, with measurements of the shadows to indicate depth of indentation; an equation to represent the likely pressure. A wire looped through my hair, ready to record her hiss. The rancid smell of anger. The metal tang of fear in the back of my throat. None of these things exist. You have no reason to believe me. [image file=image_rsrc2K1.jpg] “Ephemeral evidence is rarely obvious,” Muñoz says, “because it is needed to stand against the harsh lights of mainstream visibility and the potential tyranny of the fact.” What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?

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

  327Lecture 33—Prophetic Religion in Modern Africa õEarlier, missionaries at the Baptist Missionary Society had rejected Kimbangu because he didn’t have enough education, they said, to preach. But now he felt compelled to go from village to village, laying his hands on sick people, and observers said that he healed them. Soon, Kimbangu had a growing number of followers who believed that the Holy Spirit was working through their leader. They called their church the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu. õThe Belgian church leaders and government officials were unnerved by Kimbangu’s growing inf luence. The colonial government arrested Kimbangu in 1921 and sentenced him to 120 lashes and the death penalty, although (after some missionaries protested) the Belgian king commuted that to a life sentence. õBut colonial authorities didn’t stop there—they persecuted his followers, even though Kimbangu had told them not to resist government authority. About 37,000 people were deported without trial, and most died in exile. This went on into the late 1950s. Kimbangu himself died in prison in 1951. The movement continued to spread through central Africa, but went underground. 328The History of Christianity II õHowever, in 1957, a delegation of believers went to the Belgian governor-general, the head of the colonial government. They handed him a letter signed by 600 of their fellow believers. Essentially, it said that they were going to gather, unarmed, in the sports stadium in the city of Kinshasha. They dared the authorities to massacre them. Then they headed to the stadium prepared to die, like the earliest Christian martyrs in the Roman coliseum. õThe governor-general was in a bind. A confrontation between police and thousands of peaceful Christians would be an international public relations disaster, and it might inspire a mass uprising. He granted the Kimbanguists religious toleration. AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE õA few years after the colonial government gave up its fight against the Kimbanguists, the Belgian Congo became an independent nation. (After several name changes, it is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) õMany of the prominent leaders of African independence movements were schooled in the Western Christian tradition. They had gone to church-run schools. In most cases colonial bureaucrats entrusted education to missionary churches, so these European-run Christian schools, Protestant and Catholic, played a huge role in shaping the elites of African society. õThe late 1950s kicked off the big era of African independence: Ghana gained it in 1957 and Guinea in 1958. Cameroon, Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Senegal, Nigeria, and others followed in 1960. More gained independence in the following years until the reign of European colonialism collapsed entirely in the late 1970s. õThe 1960s were years of enormous economic growth that contributed to optimism about the future of these new countries. However, these f ledgling governments gave way to corruption. Most Africans had no

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The Merry-Go-Round of TherapyWhen psychologists talk about change, they often equate it with insight. This assumption, though often subliminal, has had a profound influence on theories and therapies purported to help people deal with “mental” and “emotional” disorders. However, when we investigate this further, we see that understanding, talk and change frequently have little relationship to one other. Woody Allen, asked if he still had his same symptoms, quipped that he was only on his “fifteenth year” of psychoanalysis. If only he had known that the process of change has to do primarily with being able to alter one’s internal feeling states, and that “psychological” problems arise when these states have become habitual or “stuck.” These chronic emotional states in turn dominate our ways of thinking, imagining and behaving. An understanding of how deeply rooted feelings can change is at the core of any effective therapy. It is particularly germane to how traumatized individuals can begin to free themselves from the many behavioral reenactments and repetitive feelings of fear, numbness, rage, terror, helplessness and despair. The disparate roles of sensation, feeling and cognition in therapy have followed a convoluted and confounding path. At times emotions have been neglected, while cognition was esteemed. At other times, cognition has been dismissed, while emotions were practically worshiped. And most of the time, with very few exceptions, the therapeutic role of sensations has remained unknown. The balanced attention to sensation, feeling, cognition and élan vital (life-energy) remains the emergent therapeutic future for transforming the whole person. Freud, following his gifted teacher Charcot, initially believed that to cure neurosis, the patient must “relive” the painful (traumatic) memories that she had “repressed.” In addition, this reliving had to include a strong emotional component, a dramatic catharsis associated with the precipitating event. Employing this method, Freud came to believe that the precipitating event was frequently childhood molestation, usually perpetrated by the father on his daughter. (The vast majority of Freud’s patients were so-called hysterical women).

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, this process of emotional abreaction can become a self-perpetuating mechanism by which patients crave further “emotional release.” Unfortunately, this process moves into an ever-tightening spiral that frequently culminates in a therapeutic dead end. Such was the case, for example, in the 1970s, when Arthur Janov promoted his primal therapy. (Reich had warned his contemporaries about mindlessly using emotional catharsis, pejoratively calling its promoters “freedom peddlers.”) “Neo-Reichian release,” “encounter groups,” “primal therapy,” “rebirthing” and other dramatic therapies co-opted the staid preeminence of the “talking cure” with an exuberant expressive zeal. Presently, at the beginning of the third millennium, we are seeing an emerging synthesis, a movement toward a more balanced emphasis on emotion and reason. In particular, experiential therapies are emerging, such as those described by Diana Fosha and others.142 These include dialectical behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The ability to effectively contain and process extreme emotional states is one of the linchpins both of effective, truly dynamical trauma therapy and of living a vital, robust life. While love can sway us off our feet, powerful emotions like rage, fear and sorrow can pull our legs out from under us. We can be driven nearly insane by rage, paralyzed by fear and drowned by sorrow. Once triggered, such violent emotions can take over our existence. Rather than feeling our emotions, we become them; we are swallowed up by these emotions. This can be quite a dilemma because being informed by our emotions, not domineered by them, is crucial in directing our lives. We may have too much or too little; they may come upon us like a torrential flood or leave us dry like a parched desert. They may lead us in a positive direction or cause us untold suffering. They may prompt creative exultation or may provoke disastrous actions and poor decisions. They can lift us up or tear us down. No matter what the case, most of us realize that emotions (whatever they are) play a central role in the conduct of our lives. The key to not being swept away by intense emotional states is to catch them before they ignite and inflame us. The Buddhists have an expression for this: to “cool and extinguish the glowing embers before they ignite into a consuming flame.” Constraint allows us to tame and befriend emotions so that we may be guided by them. It is the way we can become aware of our emotional undercurrent before it becomes an out-of-control emotion. The tools that allow us to do this are the twin sisters of awareness and embodiment.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Whenever I passed through the utility room he groveled and abased himself, hoping to keep me there, then barked and hurled himself against the door as I went outside. This caused me some trouble. For almost a year now, ever since I started high school, I’d been sneaking out of the house after midnight to take the car for joy rides. Dwight wouldn’t teach me to drive—he claimed to believe that I would kill us both—so I had taken the teaching function upon myself. After Champion attached himself to me, I had to bring him along or he would raise the household with his cries. With Champion beside me on the front seat, gazing out the window like a real passenger or snapping his chops at the wind, I cruised the empty streets of the camp. When I got bored I took the car to a stretch of road halfway to Marblemount where I could get it up to a hundred miles an hour without having to make any turns. As Champion placidly watched the white line shivering between the headlights I chattered like a gibbon and wept tears of pure terror. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, turned it around, and did the same thing headed the other way. I drove a little farther each time. Someday, I thought, I would just keep going. One morning I backed the car into a ditch while turning it around for my run home. I spun the wheels for a while, then got out and looked things over. I spun the wheels some more, until I was dug in good and deep. Then I gave up and started the trek back to camp. It was nearly three o’clock, and the walk home would take at least four hours. They would find me missing before I got there. The car too. I let off a string of swear words, but they seemed to be coming at me, not from me, and I soon stopped. Champion ran ahead through the forest that crowded the road on both sides. The mountains were black all around, the stars brilliant in the inky sky. My footsteps were loud on the roadway. I heard them as if they came from somebody else. The movement of my legs began to feel foreign to me, and then the rest of my body, foreign and unconvincing, as if I were only pretending to be someone. I watched this body clomp along. I was outside it, watching it without belief. Its imitation of purpose seemed absurd and frightening. I did not know what it was, or what was watching it so anxiously, from so far away. And then a voice bawled, “Oh Maybelline!” I knew that voice. It was mine, and it was loud, and I got behind it. I sang “Maybelline” and another song, and another. I kept singing at the top of my voice.

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

  346The History of Christianity II JAPANESE DOMINATION õFrom 1910 to 1945, Korea was under Japanese domination. The Japanese wanted Korean subjects to sever all relations with missionary groups and other foreign organizations, and to take part in the rituals of Japanese traditional religion, Shinto. õIn the Shinto worldview, Japan was a paradise created by the gods, and participating in Shinto rites at public shrines was a required demonstration of political loyalty. The Vatican saw that Korean Catholics were in a tight spot and signed a concordat with the Japanese government in 1936, basically saying that Catholics can do that; their activity at the shrines is not idol-worship but an act of patriotism. õProtestants got into more tangles with the Japanese government: They pushed back against Japanese efforts to turn Korean schools into secular, Japanese-language operations. Christians were accused of trying to assassinate the governor general, and when some Korean activists got together in 1919 to sign a declaration of independence, nearly half of them were Protestant. õIn the government’s eyes, Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, seemed like a cult devoted to overthrowing the regime (even though most Korean Christians advocated for nonviolent resistance). Japanese troops burned churches, arrested and executed Christian leaders, and at least once herded Christians into their church and set it on fire. AFTER DIVISION õWith the end of World War II, the Allied powers ended Japanese rule in Korea. American forces occupied the south, and the Soviets held the north. This situation led to the establishment of two rival regimes: the Republic of Korea in the South, and the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North. Under the leadership of

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Ironically, even the closeness generated by good sex can have a boomerang effect. Like John and Beatrice, many couples experience their relationship as a dance in which great sex brings them close, but then this very closeness can make sex difficult again. The initial rapture facilitates a swift bonding and establishes an immediate connection. But while many of us relish the idea of losing ourselves in sex, the very oneness that we experience through the merging of our bodies can evoke a sense of obliteration. The intensity of sexual passion triggers a fear of engulfment. Of course, few of us are aware of these undercurrents as they’re happening. What we feel instead is the urge to pull out right after orgasm, or the sudden desire to make a sandwich, to light a cigarette. We welcome the intrusion of any random thought: I meant to send an e-mail to…These windows need cleaning…. I wonder how my friend Jack is doing? We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you. From “inter-” we go back to “intra-.” Having been all over each other, we retreat back into our own skin. Nowhere is the passage from connection to separateness represented more clearly than at the end of a sexual act. In his book Arousal, the psychoanalyst Michael Bader offers another explanation for John and Beatrice’s erotic impasse. In his view, intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness. Some people can’t allow themselves this selfishness, because they’re too absorbed with the well-being of the beloved. This emotional configuration is reminiscent of how John felt toward his mother—his awareness of her unhappiness overwhelmed him with worry and a sense of burden. The very caring he experiences makes it harder for him to focus on his own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually alive, and carefree. John has faced this vexing problem of loss of desire in every intimate relationship he’s been in. In the past, every time the block set in he interpreted it as meaning that he no longer loved the woman. In fact, the contrary is true. It is because he loves her so much that he carries this sense of responsibility for her and can’t enjoy the blithe quest for erotic rapture. Patterns Are Equal Employment Opportunities

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  He explains, “The degradation of romance, the waning of desire, is due not to the contamination of love by aggression, but to the inability to sustain the necessary tension between them.” Jed and Coral Jed is unassuming. He is a clean-shaven, mild-mannered architect, brilliant and well-spoken. He is kind, never the sort of person to get in your face about anything. But sexually, he’s another man. Jed discovered S-M (sadomasochism) as a teenager, and for years he has used eroticism as a venue for aggression. He loves leather, hard surfaces, chains, handcuffs. “I used to be shy, and it was hard for me to assert myself. But at the same time I was angry a lot, and I didn’t know where to go with it. I was too afraid of hurting people, so I kept it all inside.” “I can see why S-M was so attractive to you,” I reply. “You could make demands and not fear hurting anyone. The unambiguous codes, the negotiating beforehand, made it safe for you. Emotionally, you tend to put other people first. Sexual domination is a way for you to override the other person’s supremacy. It’s a clever answer to your more typical emotional subordination.” “Exactly,” he says. “But at the same time, you know, it’s all about their needs. I’m pleasing them—that’s the key piece. They want it. They have to be really into it, or it’s a no-go for me.” For years, Jed avoided getting serious with women. Becoming close felt obliterating. Haunted by the timid little boy he once was, he dreaded feeling powerless and dependent. “Coral was the first woman I ever loved who I didn’t feel indebted to. I wasn’t constantly on guard not to be sucked up by the relationship.” Jed grew up as a loner, had few friends, and spent much of his adolescence reading science fiction and listening to heavy metal in his room. Coral, who grew up in the same neighborhood, barely remembers him from high school. She was popular, pretty, outgoing. She edited the yearbook. “I wasn’t on the A-list, but I had a perfectly respectable place.” Even today, Coral has many friends. She is the hub of her social circle, and she has plenty of interests to supplement her rising career as a documentary filmmaker. Eleven years after graduating from high school they ran into each other at a wedding. Jed had learned to mask his shyness with satire, and Coral was drawn to his perceptiveness and offbeat sense of humor.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  since he was a boy, he had dreaded the possibility that he might become king. Compared with his affable grandfather, Louis was quite shy around people; he was an awkward young man, always uncertain and fearful of making mistakes. He felt the august role of French king to be beyond his capacities. Now, having ascended the throne, he could no longer disguise his insecurities from the court and from the French people. But as he prepared for his coronation, to take place in the spring of 1775, Louis began to feel differently. He had decided to study the coronation ritual itself so that he could be prepared and not make mistakes; and what he learned actually filled him with the confidence that he desperately needed. According to legend, a dove sent from the Holy Spirit had deposited some sacred oil that was kept at a church in the town of Reims and was used to anoint all kings of France from the ninth century on. Once anointed with this oil, the king was suddenly elevated above the ranks of mere mortals and imbued with a divine nature, becoming God’s lieutenant on earth. The ritual represented the marriage of the new king with the church and the French people. In his body and spirit, the king would now embody the entire populace, their two fates intertwined. And, sanctified by God, the king could depend on the Lord’s guidance and protection. By the 1770s, many French people and progressive clergymen had come to see this ritual as a relic of a superstitious past. But Louis felt the opposite. To him, the ancientness of the rite was comforting. Believing in its significance would be the means to overcome his fears and doubts. He would be buoyed by a profound sense of mission, his divine nature made real by the anointment. Louis decided to reenact this sacred ritual in its more original form. And he would go even further. At the palace of Versailles he noticed that many of the paintings and statues of Louis XIV associated him with Roman gods, a way to symbolically strengthen the image of the French monarchy as something ancient and unshakable. The new king decided he would surround himself with similar imagery for the public part of the coronation, overwhelming his subjects with the spectacle and the symbols he had chosen. — Louis XVI’s coronation took place on June 11, 1775, and in the crowd outside the cathedral that warm day was a most unlikely tourist—a fifteen-year-old youth named Georges-Jacques Danton. He was a student at a boarding school in the town of Troyes. His family had come from the peasantry, but his father had managed to become a lawyer, raising the family up into the expanding French middle class. His father had died when Danton was three, and his mother had raised him with the hope that Danton would continue in his father’s footsteps, securing a solid career.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  As we went into the first curve I felt Pearl’s fingers sinking into my forearm. “Please, Dwight,” I said. “Please, Dwight ,” he said. And then he took us through the turns above the river, tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went, only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid. When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer. That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off. I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it. MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother. I said I didn’t remember, exactly. “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?” I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said. “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous. Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  If it is not cornered or hurt, and is able to clearly identify the human being as helpless and of no threat, the bear usually will not attack the intruder, going on its own way. The Greek root for angst is descriptive, meaning to “press tight” or to strangle. As conveyed in Edward Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream, our entire physiology and psyche become precipitously constricted in anxious terror. While it may afford a last-ditch survival function, fear is the killer of life. Pi (in the book The Life of Pi) tells us about this Achilles heal: It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease ... Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons of technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. [They are constantly on the prowl for more objects of fear.] Recall the case story of Sharon (in Chapter 8). She was the woman who had the horrific experience of working on the eightieth floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. During her session I guided her to the experience of being led down the staircase by a Port Authority employee and encountering a locked door on the seventieth floor. Suddenly trapped and unable to complete the escape, her body became paralyzed with fear. In working through this experience, which reestablished her running reflexes, she opened her eyes (toward the end of our session), looked at me and said, “I thought it was fear that gets you through ... but it’s not ... It’s something more powerful, something much bigger than fear ... It’s something that transcends fear.” And what a deep biological truth she reveals here.