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 Blue Nights (2011)

  This seemed to be offered as encouraging news, and I accepted it as such. At that instant in April 2009 I realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die, afraid that I might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living. Had there been an instant when Tasha was afraid not to die? Had there been an instant when Quintana was afraid not to die? Toward the very end, say, for example on the August morning when I walked into the ICU overlooking the river at New York-Cornell and one of what must have been twenty doctors in the unit happened to mention (a point of interest, a teachable moment, Grand Rounds for two students, the husband and the mother of the patient) that they were doing hand compression because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the ventilator? Only he did not say “the ventilator,” he said “the vent”? And I asked dutifully (the attentive student, up on the vernacular) how long it had been since the patient could get enough oxygen through the vent? And the doctor said it had been at least an hour? Did I get this all wrong? Did I misunderstand a key point? Could they have actually let an hour go by without mentioning to me that her brain had already been damaged by insufficient oxygen? Put the question another way: what if the attentive student had never asked? Would they have mentioned it at all? One further turn of the screw: if I had never asked would she still be alive? Warehoused somewhere? No longer sentient but alive, not dead? What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead? Was there an instant when she knew what was in store for her that August morning in the ICU overlooking the river at New York–Cornell? Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying? Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was?

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Whatever our go-to response, the million-dollar questions is this: How do we get unstuck? Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, a “body first” approach to healing, teaches that trauma requires us to learn how to discharge the stored energy from our trauma responses in order to restore our nervous systems and return to a sense of safety. He was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system when he realized that animals are constantly under threat of death yet show no symptoms of trauma. In order to return to homeostasis, animals in the wild release survival energy by shaking, trembling, yawning, breathing deeply, moaning, and so forth. This allows them to turn off the threat response by completely cycling through the experience. Whether we realize it or not, humans have this capacity, too. We can learn to actively engage in behaviors that support trauma and stress release. For example, shaking your whole body as a yogic practice has been around for centuries. Studies have shown that chanting “om” stimulates the vagus nerve, which sends the signal that a threat is no longer active. We’ll dive into other methods in the “Caring for . . .” section below, but the point is, you can learn to silence the alarm bells and calm your system. And here’s why this is important: our nervous systems don’t forget. If our threat response is left perpetually firing, it creates both physical and psychological problems, including severe dysregulation and even dissociation. When Dad was dying, it felt like he was abandoning me. Even though I knew that wasn’t true, my body didn’t. So it’s no surprise that it kicked up my own PTSD from the lack of relationship I had with BD, as well as my cancer diagnosis. No wonder my body felt like it was falling apart. Try as I might, my go-to tools to keep my shit together were failing. At some point, even my wellness practices started to feel like I was just leaning on hollow platitudes to cover up the depths of fear and pain I felt. That’s when I knew I needed additional support to help me access the deeper, more hidden parts that needed tending. CARING FOR GRIEF & TRAUMAIf this conversation is the medicine you need right now, set the intention that whatever comes up is OK. You don’t need all the answers—you just need the willingness to explore. Start with talk therapy: Both grief and trauma need to be witnessed, and one of the most healing things we can do for ourselves and others is to tell our stories. Tell your story. Allow your feelings to move through your body: When you’re ready, explore working with body sensations to reach the unexamined parts of yourself, possibly for the very first time. Deep breaths, full-body sobs, gut-wrenching screams, ecstatic dance—whatever helps you release your emotions. Here are some therapeutic tools that may help:

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I met neither patients nor hospital personnel; I seemed to be in a deserted house. The infirmary had been set up in an abandoned old Arab fort, an ancient building of big roughly hewn stones that the weather had stripped of their coating of distemper. The ceilings revealed, in spots, huge scars of mortar from which, every once in a while, there fell a shower of sand. At noon I was visited by a Mohammedan soldier who held a plurality of offices in this infirmary: medical orderly, cook, and watchman. I told him I wanted to go away. He smiled without answering and went his way. I then gave up trying to get away from my bed, besieged by all this emptiness and by the terrifying silence of the mountains. One day, in that accursed period of my life, I thought that I was about to die of fright. I was awakened by dreadful howls. In a ward close to mine, somebody was beating the door with fists and feet, weeping and crying out aloud, then suddenly silent again, then beginning again frantically, as if all the sufferer’s strength were being concentrated in a tempest that could last each time but a moment. Between two waves of this storm, in the pause of calm, I could then hear the serene flight of the cicadas again, as if I had only dreamed it all. I was seized with panic and I jumped out of bed and rushed outside. In the yard, I found the medical orderly, seated on one foot, busy crushing red peppers. My terror could scarcely be reduced to calm by his human presence. I was still shivering with fright. He smiled and made up his mind to speak: “Don’t be scared. It’s a poor madman. We’ve locked him up and he’s complaining. Go back to bed if you want to get better.” I did get better, in order to get away from the howls of the madman, whose alternating bouts of screaming anger and of silence gave a rhythm to my suspense until I could leave the place. When I returned to the summer camp, I no longer felt like writing to my parents and began to reckon the weeks that still kept me away from them. I kept but one envelope for each week, to write to them. All my other envelopes I swapped against candy and, in my weekly letter, I now limited myself to a few set phrases, avoiding the tragic tone of my earlier letters home and asking my parents nothing, so that they even congratulated me on my having become reasonable. When I returned home, my mother found that I had lost so much weight that she was too surprised to weep with emotion.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The very emblem of youth—“ordinary” events, such as falls, accidents and medical procedures—when unresolved are suspects as hidden culprits that underlie a child’s angst. This was certainly the case with the toddler Sammy. Since children by their nature enjoy play, therapists and parents can help them to rebound, moving beyond their fears to gain mastery over their scariest moments through the vehicle of guided play. As children express their inner world through play, their bodies are directly communicating with us. Here is the story of Sammy, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, where setting up a play session led to a reparative experience with a victorious outcome. There are suggestions provided after this case story for therapists, medical professionals and parents. The following is an example of what can happen when an ordinary fall, requiring a visit to the emergency room for stitches, goes awry. It also shows how several months later, Sammy’s terrifying experience was transformed through play into a renewed sense of confidence and joy. Sammy has been spending the weekend with his grandparents, where I am their houseguest. He is being an impossible tyrant, aggressively and relentlessly trying to control his new environment. Nothing pleases him; he displays a foul temper every waking moment. When he is asleep, he tosses and turns as if wrestling with his bedclothes. This behavior is not entirely unexpected from a two-and-a-half-year-old whose parents have gone away for the weekend—children with separation anxiety often act it out. Sammy, however, has always enjoyed visiting his grandparents, and this behavior seemed extreme to them. They confided to me that six months earlier, Sammy fell off his high chair and split his chin open. Bleeding heavily, he was taken to the local emergency room. When the nurse came to take his temperature and blood pressure, he was so frightened that she was unable to record his vital signs. This vulnerable little boy was then strapped down in a “pediatric papoose” (a board with flaps and Velcro straps). With his torso and legs immobilized, the only parts of his body he could move were his head and neck—which, naturally, he did, as energetically as he could. The doctors responded by tightening the restraint and immobilizing his head with their hands in order to suture his chin. After this upsetting experience, mom and dad took Sammy out for a hamburger and then to the playground. His mother was very attentive and carefully validated his experience of being scared and hurt. Soon, all seemed forgotten. However, the boy’s overbearing attitude began shortly after this event. Could Sammy’s tantrums and controlling behavior be related to his perceived helplessness from this trauma?

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  She now innocently recalls how she had been excited to come to work that day. Her gesture is stronger and more definite. Continued attention to the physical feeling of the gesture deepens her sense of relaxation, stimulating an almost playful curiosity. As she looks quizzically at her hands, first one then the other, I breathe a sigh of relief. Such a seemingly insignificant shift has profound implications—playful curiosity being one of the prima facie “antidotes” for trauma. Curious exploration, pleasure and trauma cannot coexist in the nervous system; neurologically, they contradict one another. d This capacity to experience the positive bodily feelings (of interest and curiosity), while remaining in contact with her feelings of terror and helplessness, allows Sharon to do something she would not have been able to do a few minutes before. She can now begin to stand back and “simply” observe these difficult, uncomfortable, physical sensations and images without becoming overwhelmed by them. e They are, in other words, kept at bay. This dual consciousness induces a shift that allows sensations to be felt as they are: intrinsically energetic, vital and in present time, rather than as fragments, triggers and harbingers of fear and helplessness from the past. This felt distinction makes it possible for Sharon to review and assimilate many details of the horrific event without reliving it. This new “dexterity” for revisiting, without reliving, a traumatic experience is essential in the process of recovery and reengagement that I call renegotiation . People need to disengage the emotional and mental associations from the raw physical sensations they have come to experience as precursors of disaster but that are, ultimately, sensations of vitality. Reestablishing these enlivening affects is a central core of effective trauma treatment. Interestingly, it is also found in ancient healing practices, such as meditation, shamanism and yoga. Taking the Plunge When the first plane hit the building, only ten stories above her office, the explosion sent a shock wave of terror through her body. People’s immediate reaction to such terrifying events is to arrest, orient and then escape. This usually entails an intense urge to run. However, trapped eighty stories above ground with thousands of other people, Sharon needed to inhibit this primal reaction. Against the intense impulses to flee, she compelled herself to stay “calm” and walk in an orderly line down the stairs along with dozens of other terrified individuals; this was the case even though her body was “adrenaline-charged” to run at full throttle. Surely Sharon also felt the potential for any one of the other trapped office workers to suddenly panic and start a stampede that would further imperil them all. They, like her, also had to restrain their powerful primal urge to run.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Recall, the response to threat involves an initial mobilization to fight or flee . It is only when that response fails that it “defaults” to one’s freezing or being “scared stiff” or to collapsing helplessly. In my case, in the ambulance, it was in my limbs—in the micro-movements of my arms rising upward to protect my head from mortal injury—that I first felt an opposite experience that contradicted my sensation of helplessness. For Nancy, it was her legs running to escape the doctor’s surgical knife. In both cases, consciously feeling our way through these active self-protective reflexes with precision brought us the physical sense of agency and power. Together, these experiences countered our feelings of overwhelming helplessness. Step by step, our bodies learned that we were not helpless victims, that we had survived our ordeals, and that we were intact and alive to the core of our beings. Along with instilling active defensive responses (which reduces fear), individuals learn that when they experience the physical sensations of paralysis, it is with less and less fear—each time trauma loosens its grip. With such a body-based epiphany, the mind’s interpretation of what happened and the meaning of it to one’s life and who one is shifts profoundly. Step 6. Uncoupling fear from immobility My clinical observations, drawn from more than four decades of work with thousands of clients, have led me to the solid understanding that the “physio -logical ” ability to go into, and then come out of, the innate (hard-wired) immobility response is the key both to avoiding the prolonged debilitating effects of trauma and to healing even entrenched symptoms. 55 Basically, this is done by separating fear and helplessness from the (normally time-limited) biological immobility response as described in Chapter 4 . For a traumatized individual, to be able to touch into his or her immobility sensations, even for a brief moment, restores self-paced termination and allows the “unwinding” of fear and freeze to begin. Of equal importance in resolving trauma is therapeutic restraint in not allowing the unwinding to occur precipitously. As with the nontitrated chemical reaction, abrupt decoupling can be explosive, frightening and potentially retraumatizing to the client. Through titration, the client is gradually led into and out of the immobility sensations many times , each time returning to a calming equilibrium (the “Alka-Seltzer fizzle”). In exiting from immobility, there is an “initiation by fire”; the intense energy-packed sensations that are biologically coupled with undirected flight and rage-counterattack are released. Understandably, people commonly fear both entering and exiting immobility, especially when they are not aware of the benefit of doing so. Let us look more deeply into these fears. The fear of entering immobility: We avoid experiencing the sensations of immobility because of how powerful they are and how helpless and vulnerable they make us feel.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  As soon as the monk had left the lady's room, she said to one of her women (there were but two of them), " Run after the father, and learn what he wants ; for I know by his looks that he is not pleased." The girl, finding him in the court-yard, asked him if he wanted anything } He said he did, and drawing her into a cor- ner, he plunged into her bosom a poniard he carried in his sleeve. He had hardly done the deed when one of the gentleman's men, who had gone to receive the rent of a farm, entered the yard on horseback. As soon as he had dismounted, he saluted the Cordelier, who em- braced him, and buried the poniard in his back, after which he closed the gates of the chateau. The lady, seeing that her servant did not return, and surprised at her remaining so long with the Cordelier, said to the other woman, " Go see why your companion does not come back." The servant went, and no sooner came in sight of the Cordelier than he called her aside, and served her as he had done the other. Knowing that he was then alone in the house, he went to the lady, and told her that he had long loved her, and that it was time she should obey him. She, who could never have sus- pected him of anything of the kind, replied, " I believe. 294 ^'^^^- HEPTAMEKON OF THE [Novel 31. father, that if I were so unhappily inclined, 3011 would be the first to condemn me and cast a stone at me."' " Come out into the yard," said the monk, " and you will see what 1 have done."

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A Bedouin pushed the sliding door open and hesitated as he entered. The stink of a stable and of stale cooking fats spread throughout the car, as well as of something else that I was unable to identify. Through the still open door an unpleasant draft reached us. “Close the door!” the Sicilian masons shouted, though apparently without any hostility or clannish animosity. The Mohammedans in the car all pricked their ears up. For a while, the little game stopped. But the Sicilians had really intended no harm and we were quite clearly, one and all, a big family of Mediterraneans. One of the Mohammedans, to show that he appreciated it, even decided to join in the fun: “Close that door! Don’t they have doors, back home on your mountainside?” The Bedouin smiled foolishly and, without giving an answer, finally closed the door before sitting down heavily beside the French lady who, without making any display of it, grew tense and pulled herself together. She didn’t actually move, but my own antennae had already detected a violent disturbance in her magnetic equilibrium. The third odor of the Bedouin now became more recognizable in the closed car: the bitter and penetrating smell of burned charcoal. “Come on! Sell me your little tail,” the Djerban began again. The child’s attention had wandered, and he now started. “No! No!” “I’ll give you fifty francs for it.” “No!” “One hundred francs!” “No!” “Ah, you’re a tough number! Two hundred!” “No!” “Well, I’ll go all the way: a thousand francs!” “No!” The eyes of the Djerban tried to express greed. “And I’ll throw in a bag of candy too!” “No! No!” “So it’s no deal? Is that your last word?” shouted the Djerban, pretending now to be angry. “Repeat it once more: is it still no?” “No!” Then, suddenly, the Djerban threw himself on the child, pulling a terrifying face, and grabbed roughly at the boy’s fly. The child defended himself with his fists, shrieking in terror that was no longer a pretense, tore the fez off his aggressor’s head and began to pull at his hair. In the end, the Djerban, almost blinded and his face already bruised by the tiny hands, let go of the tiny little animal. The boy’s father was laughing out loud, the Djerban was doubled up with nervous laughter, and all our neighbors were smiling broadly. Even the lady who sat beside the Bedouin must have found it, deep inside her, quite funny. At last the child, still pale and distrustful, decided to smile at his partner in the game.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  What follows are notes I made about a figure who at an earlier point had populated her nightmares, a fantast she called The Broken Man and described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows. “He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man,” she repeatedly told me. “Short sleeves. He has his name always on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.” David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names? Name always on his shirt? On the right-hand side? Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it? After she became five she never ever dreamed about him? It was when she said “I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine” that I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own. 9On this question of fear. When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. The ways in which for example we write novels “just to show” each other. The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear. The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other. As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death. This fear. Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him. Once she was born I was never not afraid.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I knew she was remembering the years we had spent down there, her lovers, the color of the sea. But it wasn’t a strong enough spell, I wasn’t a word spinner like her, not good enough, and the image faded, returning to the screen of her obsession: Barry and the blond, Barry and the redhead, Barry in a seersucker bathrobe. “Too late,” she said. She pulled out her wallet, counted four twenties onto the counter. AT NIGHT she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet spinach-green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon. “WHAT’S DMSO?” I asked Michael one night when she had gone out. He was drinking scotch, real Johnnie Walker, celebrating because he’d gotten a job at the Music Center in Macbeth, though he couldn’t call it that, it was bad luck. All the witches and stuff. You were supposed to call it the Scottish play. Michael was taking no chances, it had been a year since he’d done anything but Books on Tape. “People use it for arthritis,” he said. I leafed through a Variety and tried to ask casually, “Is it dangerous?” “Completely harmless,” he said. He raised his glass and examined the amber liquor, then sipped slowly, his eyes closing in satisfaction. I hadn’t expected good news. “What’s it for, then?” “It helps drugs absorb through your skin. That’s how the nicotine patch works, and those seasickness patches. You put it on and the DMSO lets it get through your skin into the bloodstream. Marvelous stuff. I remember when they used to worry that hippies would mix it with LSD and paint the doorknobs of public buildings.” He laughed into his drink. “As if anybody would waste their acid on a bunch of straights.” I LOOKED for the bottle of DMSO. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked under the kitchen sink and in the bathroom, in the drawers—there just weren’t many places to hide things in our apartment, and anyway, hiding things wasn’t my mother’s style. I waited up for her. She came back late, with a handsome young man whose dark curls trailed halfway down his back. She held his hand. “This is Jesus,” she said. “He’s a poet. My daughter, Astrid.” “Hi,” I said. “Mom, can I talk to you for a second?” “You should be in bed,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She smiled at Jesus, let go of his hand, and walked me out onto the screen porch. She looked beautiful again, no circles under her eyes, hair like falling water.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  No one needed to explain that to me; it’s just something I innately felt. At his wake, I was so convinced of his continued presence that it was business as usual. I did what I always did when I said goodbye to him after a visit. I leaned over the casket to give him a kiss. Before I knew what hit me, my horrified neighbor swatted my ass. “That’s disrespectful!” Thankfully, I had enough maturity (even though I had yet to reach double digits!) to know that this was her issue, not mine. FYI, grief expert Julia Samuel shares many wonderful approaches to talk to children about death in honest and age-appropriate ways. Her book Grief Works is for all ages and among the most helpful I’ve read. Can someone please drop one off at my old neighbor’s house? Honoring death as the natural and sacred passage it is goes against the grain of most everything we’ve been taught by our age-phobic culture—especially as women. We spend billions of dollars to prolong our lives and look as young as possible forever. Girls as young as 13 line up for Botox as a “preventive” measure against natural aging. The message: your worth goes down as your age goes up. Aging is a visual reminder of where we’re all going—which scares the pants off us. Our fear of death is why many find comfort in religion and are endlessly fascinated by the cosmos. We desperately need to know the unknowable (or feel like we do) in order to feel a modicum of security in the vast uncertainty of our magnificent universe. So, we slather on the antiaging eye creams and focus our telescopes to the night sky, but when it comes to the inevitability of our mortality, we stubbornly stick our heads in the sand. Then guess what happens? Someone close to us enters the final season of their lives, and we have no idea what to do, how to support them, or even how to be in our own skin. At some point, that person will be us. None of us has that much time left, so we might as well drag death out of the sterile and lonely shadows in order to start feeling more capable, connected, and empowered in our mortality. TALKING ABOUT TALKING ABOUT IT While no one teaches us what to say, as his days counted down, Dad was one person who did want to talk about death. It felt selfish for me to keep resisting, just because I was clueless and scared and extremely underprepared. So, I googled it. How do you talk about dying with someone who’s dying? What do I say and not say? How do I do it without totally falling apart? I don’t know how to do this — help!

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  But more often than not, my negative fantasies would hold my brain hostage, and the next time Brian asked me if I knew where his glasses were, I’d tell him to consult his child bride. We humans are extremely creative creatures. Our imaginations have allowed us to invent microscopes to peer into the smallest cells of our bodies and rocket ships that hurtle us into the realm of the stars. But our imaginations can also freak us the fuck out. Think about it, is there anything scarier than all the awful stories we tell ourselves? We’re so damn good at devising the most frightening tales. Yet most of us have no desire to be Stephen King, channeling our darkest thoughts into best-selling horror novels. Instead, we do our best to bury our paranoid thoughts in the boneyard of our psyche and desperately try to become “fearless,” an impossible task that goes against our very DNA. THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD As the years ticked by and my disease remained stable (not advancing enough to warrant experimental treatment that might extend my life but not fully cure me), my time between scans increased and my fear decreased. At first my tests moved to every three months, then six months, then finally a year—which felt like a lifetime. With each graduation, I was better able to settle into my new life as a long-haul patient. When my scans got pushed to every two years, it was as if I’d won the lottery and might actually be able to go the distance with my incurable disease. But in the days before Dad was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for his Whipple surgery, my fear and anxiety roared back with a vengeance. I was down the street at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute getting my two-year checkup while Dad was getting ready to go back under the knife. Though I’d had plenty of experience with scans, too many to even count, my nerves were extra raw. Maybe it was because I was nervous for Dad. Maybe I was rattled by the small lump I’d recently found on my arm. Had my disease finally woken up and spread further? Whatever the reason, moments like these are when the rubber meets the road. All the mindset tools I’d cultivated stood ready for deployment. My heart was practically beating out of my chest as Brian and I checked in to get my scan results—my cue to find a private bathroom and glue myself together before things got worse. First, I focused on my breath. Next, I took a mental inventory of all the things that were right with my body. Sure, I had dozens of tumors in my lungs and liver, a strange lump on my arm, and a very vivid imagination, but there were sooo many parts of me that were working exceptionally well—including the parts that were struggling.

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

  Being in tune with other members of our species via the VVC is enormously rewarding. What begins as the attuned play of mother and child continues with the rhythmicity of a good basketball game, the synchrony of tango dancing, and the harmony of choral singing or playing a piece of jazz or chamber music—all of which foster a deep sense of pleasure and connection. We can speak of trauma when that system fails: when you beg for your life, but the assailant ignores your pleas; when you are a terrified child lying in bed, hearing your mother scream as her boyfriend beats her up; when you see your buddy trapped under a piece of metal that you’re not strong enough to lift; when you want to push away the priest who is abusing you, but you’re afraid you’ll be punished. Immobilization is at the root of most traumas. When that occurs the DVC is likely to take over: Your heart slows down, your breathing becomes shallow, and, zombielike, you lose touch with yourself and your surroundings. You dissociate, faint and collapse. Defend or Relax?Steve Porges helped me realize that the natural state of mammals is to be somewhat on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences—or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves. The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, which I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 9, showed that women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood. Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence.[17] Many people feel safe as long as they can limit their social contact to superficial conversations, but actual physical contact can trigger intense reactions. However, as Porges points out, achieving any sort of deep intimacy—a close embrace, sleeping with a mate, and sex—requires allowing oneself to experience immobilization without fear.[18] It is especially challenging for traumatized people to discern when they are actually safe and to be able to activate their defenses when they are in danger. This requires having experiences that can restore the sense of physical safety, a topic to which we’ll return many times in the chapters that follow. New Approaches to TreatmentIf we understand that traumatized children and adults get stuck in fight/flight or in chronic shut-down, how do we help them to deactivate these defensive maneuvers that once ensured their survival?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But sometimes my mother was still angry from some outburst and would utter a curse: “Go away! May death carry you off!” Then I would immediately feel a shudder go right through me, and all day I would fear some dreadful event. Never have I been able to rid myself of this magic spell of language. Whenever a colleague curses me, “May you perish,” I feel cold at the back of my neck and foresee the horrors of death. Whenever anyone says “Drop dead!” I can already feel myself begin to fail. It is as if language, far from being a transparent tool, really shares some of the nature of the things it designates as well as some of their weight. For my ten o’clock snack, my mother always gave me two pennies and a big piece of bread crust, of the bread that she kneaded herself and took to the Arab oven to bake. With my two pennies, I could buy myself a piece of chocolate or the makings of a sandwich. Chaoul, the school janitor, did sell whole sandwiches made of exquisite small loaves of white bread, but these cost ten pennies. So Chaoul would dig with his agile finger into my piece of bread to bury in it a couple of green olives, as many black olives, a sliver of anchovy, a few crumbs of tuna fish, and a bit of boiled vegetable, all of which he then seasoned with olive oil. I watched this carefully to make sure that he gave me all the tuna I was entitled to and that he refrained from giving me any arissa, the strange sauce of fire-red peppers that all my compatriots carry with them wherever they travel, for fear of ever running out of it. Arissa always burned my palate and gave me a cold sweat. Generally, we reached the old gateway long before school-time. We enjoyed the freedom of chatting together before being locked up for three hours within those mouse-grey walls. Besides, we met there all the quick-getaway hucksters who offered us all sorts of cheap dainties. They had learned, from long experience, to classify schools according to the purchasing power of the pupils. We certainly came last but one on their list, only just ahead of the other school of the Alliance that was situated in the heart of the ghetto and where the midday meal and even the clothes of the pupils were distributed free. That is why all these little tradesmen used to bring us whatever they had failed to sell at the gates of the other schools.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Dad seemed to have an easier time with this shift to comfort care, like he had seen this moment coming. I never saw any outbursts or breakdowns, just a quiet, graceful transition to his transition. But while he was making peace with death and with himself, I was fighting like a hooked marlin. I didn’t want to let go of control because on some level, I believed that control was the only thing keeping him here and us all together. Letting go felt like letting him down—which I now know wasn’t true but at the time felt very real. But my need for control, and the pain it was causing me, kept me from staying present and experiencing the moments that mattered. Though I was terrified of what was to come, I was even more scared of having regrets later. I wanted Dad to feel every ounce of my love until his last breath. So for better or worse, I had to try to accept what was happening—even though I didn’t want to and wasn’t ready for it. Fighting reality, which includes pain, was only causing more suffering (which is hard to see when you’re in the vortex of loss). Surrendering to reality was clearly the way forward, but to do so I had to remember the medicine inherent in that action. Many of us equate surrender or acceptance with quitting or giving up, but I’ve come to learn that through the power of surrender we’re able to lay down the stress, anxiety, and heavy burdens that keep us running in the opposite direction of love. In the end, Dad didn’t just make peace with death, he made peace with himself, and in the process, he showed me a majestic picture window of what’s possible in my own life. Death and mortality will do that—reveal a hidden guide for life and healing. No matter how ferocious life can be, there’s always a way back home to ourselves, the safe place where we can find peace and be calmed by the presence of love. This may sound weird, but the more Dad did this work on himself, the more he started to literally shine. It wasn’t just the natural changes in the pallor of his skin as he got closer to the end; it was that he was filled with light, emanating a radiance that truly felt otherworldly. If we were strangers at a bar, I might have seen his glow and said to the bartender: “I’ll have whatever that guy’s having.” But we were not strangers. He was, in so many ways, my person. TOM SELLECK MUSTACHEWhile Dad wasn’t my biological father, he was my rock, and I was his “sweet pea.” Essential to our father-daughter bond was this simple fact: we chose each other.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The bewildered family might not connect the child’s conduct or other symptoms with the source of his terror. Rather than expressing themselves in easily comprehensible ways, kids frequently show us that they are suffering inside in the most frustrating ways. They do this through their bodies. They may act bratty, clinging to parents or throwing tantrums. Or they might struggle with agitation, hyperactivity, nightmares or sleeplessness. Even, more troubling, they may act out their worries and hurts by steamrolling over a pet or a younger, weaker child. For other children, their distress may show up as head and tummy aches or bedwetting, or they may avoid people and things they used to enjoy in order to manage their unbearable anxiety. Parents ask where in the world these childhood symptoms can possibly come from? The very emblem of youth—“ordinary” events, such as falls, accidents and medical procedures—when unresolved are suspects as hidden culprits that underlie a child’s angst. This was certainly the case with the toddler Sammy. Since children by their nature enjoy play, therapists and parents can help them to rebound, moving beyond their fears to gain mastery over their scariest moments through the vehicle of guided play. As children express their inner world through play, their bodies are directly communicating with us . Here is the story of Sammy, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, where setting up a play session led to a reparative experience with a victorious outcome. There are suggestions provided after this case story for therapists, medical professionals and parents. The following is an example of what can happen when an ordinary fall, requiring a visit to the emergency room for stitches, goes awry. It also shows how several months later, Sammy’s terrifying experience was transformed through play into a renewed sense of confidence and joy. Sammy has been spending the weekend with his grandparents, where I am their houseguest. He is being an impossible tyrant, aggressively and relentlessly trying to control his new environment. Nothing pleases him; he displays a foul temper every waking moment. When he is asleep, he tosses and turns as if wrestling with his bedclothes. This behavior is not entirely unexpected from a two-and-a-half-year-old whose parents have gone away for the weekend—children with separation anxiety often act it out. Sammy, however, has always enjoyed visiting his grandparents, and this behavior seemed extreme to them. They confided to me that six months earlier, Sammy fell off his high chair and split his chin open. Bleeding heavily, he was taken to the local emergency room.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  As soon as the monk had left the lady's room, she said to one of her women (there were but two of them), " Run after the father, and learn what he wants ; for I know by his looks that he is not pleased." The girl, finding him in the court-yard, asked him if he wanted anything } He said he did, and drawing her into a cor- ner, he plunged into her bosom a poniard he carried in his sleeve. He had hardly done the deed when one of the gentleman's men, who had gone to receive the rent of a farm, entered the yard on horseback. As soon as he had dismounted, he saluted the Cordelier, who em- braced him, and buried the poniard in his back, after which he closed the gates of the chateau. The lady, seeing that her servant did not return, and surprised at her remaining so long with the Cordelier, said to the other woman, " Go see why your companion does not come back." The servant went, and no sooner came in sight of the Cordelier than he called her aside, and served her as he had done the other. Knowing that he was then alone in the house, he went to the lady, and told her that he had long loved her, and that it was time she should obey him. She, who could never have sus- pected him of anything of the kind, replied, " I believe. 294 ^'^^^- HEPTAMEKON OF THE [Novel 31. father, that if I were so unhappily inclined, 3011 would be the first to condemn me and cast a stone at me."' " Come out into the yard," said the monk, " and you will see what 1 have done."

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  And if we cannot localize the cause of our distress, then we will continue to search for one; a good example of this was Sharon’s struggle to understand her experience. We see this in Vietnam vets who are terrified by the sounds of the 4th of July fireworks, even though they “know” rationally that they are not in any danger. Other examples are people who fear driving a car after they have been involved in an accident or people who fear even leaving the house because they do not know where these danger signals are originating from. In fact, if we cannot find an explanation for what we are feeling, we will surely manufacture one, or many. We’ll often blame our spouses, children, bosses, neighbors (be they next door or another nation) or just plain bad luck. Our minds will stay on overdrive, obsessively searching for causes in the past and dreading the future. We will stay tense and on guard, feeling fear, terror and helplessness because our bodies continue to signal danger to our brains. Our minds may or may not “agree,” but these red flags (coming from nonconscious parts of the brain) will not disappear until the body completes its course of action. This is how we are made—it is our biological nature, hardwired into brain and body. These bodily reactions are not metaphors; they are literal postures that inform our emotional experience. For example, tightness in the neck, shoulders and chest and knots in the gut or throat are central to states of fear. Helplessness is signaled by a literal collapsing of the chest and shoulders, along with a folding at the diaphragm and weakness in the knees and legs. All of these “postural attitudes” represent action potentials. If they are allowed to complete their meaningful course of action, then all is well; if not, they live on in the theatre of the body . If frightening sensations, such as the ones Sharon was experiencing, are not given the time and attention needed to move through the body and resolve/dissolve (as in trembling and shaking), the individual will continue to be gripped by fear and other negative emotions. The stage is set for a trajectory of mercurial symptoms. Tension in the neck, shoulders and back will likely evolve over time to the syndrome of fibromyalgia. Migraines are also common somatic expressions of unresolved stress. The knots in the gut may mutate to common conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, severe PMS or other gastrointestinal problems such as spastic colon. These conditions deplete the energy resources of the sufferer and may take the form of chronic fatigue syndrome.

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

  When we met with him and his mother, he anxiously clung to her, hiding his face, while she kept saying, “Don’t be such a baby.” He startled when a door banged somewhere down the corridor and then burrowed deeper into his mom’s lap. When she pushed him away, he sat in a corner and started to bang his head. “He just does that to bug me,” his mother remarked. When we asked about her own background, she told us that she’d been abandoned by her parents and raised by a series of relatives who hit her, ignored her, and started to sexually abuse her at age thirteen. She’d become pregnant by a drunken boyfriend who left her when she told him she was carrying his child. Anthony was just like his father, she said—a good-for-nothing. She had had numerous violent rows with subsequent boyfriends, but she was sure that this had happened too late at night for Anthony to notice. If Anthony were admitted to a hospital, he would likely be diagnosed with a host of different psychiatric disorders: depression, oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety, reactive attachment disorder, ADHD, and PTSD. None of these diagnoses, however, would clarify what was wrong with Anthony: that he was scared to death and fighting for his life, and he did not trust that his mother could help him. Then there’s Maria, a fifteen-year-old Latina, one of the more than half a million kids in the United States who grow up in foster care and residential treatment programs. Maria is obese and aggressive. She has a history of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and has lived in more than twenty out-of-home placements since age eight. The pile of medical charts that arrived with her described her as mute, vengeful, impulsive, reckless, and self-harming, with extreme mood swings and an explosive temper. She describes herself as “garbage, worthless, rejected.” After multiple suicide attempts Maria was placed in one of our residential treatment centers. Initially she was mute and withdrawn and became violent when people got too close to her. After other approaches failed to work, she was placed in an equine therapy program where she groomed her horse daily and learned simple dressage. Two years later I spoke with Maria at her high school graduation. She had been accepted by a four-year college. When I asked her what had helped her most, she answered, “The horse I took care of.” She told me that she first started to feel safe with her horse; he was there every day, patiently waiting for her, seemingly glad upon her approach. She started to feel a visceral connection with another creature and began to talk to him like a friend. Gradually she started talking with the other kids in the program and, eventually, with her counselor.

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

  In the years since Bowlby’s and Winnicott’s ideas were introduced, attachment research around the world has shown that the vast majority of children are securely attached. When they grow up, their history of reliable, responsive caregiving will help to keep fear and anxiety at bay. Barring exposure to some overwhelming life event—trauma—that breaks down the self-regulatory system, they will maintain a fundamental state of emotional security throughout their lives. Secure attachment also forms a template for children’s relationships. They pick up what others are feeling and early on learn to tell a game from reality, and they develop a good nose for phony situations or dangerous people. Securely attached children usually become pleasant playmates and have lots of self-affirming experiences with their peers. Having learned to be in tune with other people, they tend to notice subtle changes in voices and faces and to adjust their behavior accordingly. They learn to live within a shared understanding of the world and are likely to become valued members of the community. This upward spiral can, however, be reversed by abuse or neglect. Abused kids are often very sensitive to changes in voices and faces, but they tend to respond to them as threats rather than as cues for staying in sync. Dr. Seth Pollak of the University of Wisconsin showed a series of faces to a group of normal eight-year-olds and compared their responses with those of a group of abused children the same age. Looking at this spectrum of angry to sad expressions, the abused kids were hyperalert to the slightest features of anger.[11] [image "A grayscale series of ten photos of a woman representing a spectrum of facial expressions." file=image_rsrc77M.jpg] Copyright © 2000, American Psychological Association This is one reason abused children so easily become defensive or scared. Imagine what it’s like to make your way through a sea of faces in the school corridor, trying to figure out who might assault you. Children who overreact to their peers’ aggression, who don’t pick up on other kids’ needs, who easily shut down or lose control of their impulses, are likely to be shunned and left out of sleepovers or play dates. Eventually they may learn to cover up their fear by putting up a tough front. Or they may spend more and more time alone, watching TV or playing computer games, falling even further behind on interpersonal skills and emotional self-regulation. The need for attachment never lessens. Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.