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 Wild (2012)

  “We’ve got the empty Pepsi cans,” said the red-haired man. “We can pump water into your bottle and then pour it into two of those.” The sandy-haired man squatted at the pond’s shore with my empty water bottle and my purifier, and the red-haired man took his pack off and dug through it to get a couple of empty Pepsi cans. I stood watching them with my arms wrapped around myself, growing more chilled by the minute. The wet backs of my shorts and T-shirt and bra were now icy cold against my skin. “It’s really hard to pump,” the sandy-haired man said after a while. “You have to give it some muscle,” I said. “That’s just how my filter is.” “I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing coming out.” I went to him and saw that the float was all the way up near the cartridge and the open end of the intake tube had sunk into the muck at the shallow bottom of the pond. I took the purifier from him, pulled the tube up into the clear water, and tried to pump. It was entirely locked, jammed solid with muck. “You weren’t supposed to let the tube go into the mud like that,” I said. “You were supposed to keep it up in the water.” “Shit,” he said without apology. “What are we going to do?” his friend asked. “I’ve got to get something to drink.” I went to my pack, took out my first aid kit, and pulled out the little bottle of iodine pills I carried. I hadn’t used them since I was at that frog-ridden reservoir on Hat Creek Rim and half out of my head with dehydration myself. “We can use these,” I said, grimly understanding that I’d be drinking iodine water until I managed to repair my purifier, if it was even repairable. “What are they?” asked the sandy-haired man. “Iodine. You put them in and wait thirty minutes and then the water is safe to drink.” I went to the lake and submerged my two bottles in the clearest-looking spot I could reach and put iodine pills in each of them, the men followed suit with their Pepsi cans, and I put a pill in each. “Okay,” I said, looking at my watch. “The water will be good to go at seven ten.” I hoped that with that they’d hike away, but they only sat down, settling in. “So what are you doing out here all by yourself?” asked the sandy-haired man. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like the way he was looking me, openly appraising my body. “All by yourself?” “Yeah,” I said reluctantly, equal parts leery of telling the truth and afraid to concoct a lie that would only make me feel more jangled than I suddenly did.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Hey there,” I called amiably. I was holding the world’s loudest whistle, my hand having traveled to it unconsciously over the top of Monster and around to the nylon cord that dangled from my backpack’s frame. I hadn’t used the whistle since I’d seen that first bear on the trail, but ever since then, I had a constant and visceral awareness of where it was in relation to me, as if it weren’t only attached to my backpack by a cord, but another, invisible cord attached it to me. “Good morning,” the man said, and held his hand out to shake mine, his brown hair flopping over his eyes. He told me his name was Jimmy Carter, no relation, and that he couldn’t give me a ride because there was no room in his car. I looked and saw it was true. Every inch except the driver’s seat was crammed with newspapers, books, clothes, soda cans, and a jumble of other things that came up all the way to the windows. He wondered, instead, if he could talk to me. He said he was a reporter for a publication called the Hobo Times. He drove around the country interviewing “folks” who lived the hobo life. “I’m not a hobo,” I said, amused. “I’m a long-distance hiker.” I let go of the whistle and extended my arm toward the road, jabbing my upright thumb at a passing van. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I explained, glancing at him, wishing he’d get in his car and drive away. I needed to catch two rides on two different highways to get to Old Station and he wasn’t helping the cause. I was filthy and my clothes were even filthier, but I was still a woman alone. Jimmy Carter’s presence complicated things, altered the picture from the vantage point of the drivers passing by. I remembered how long I’d had to stand by the side of the road when I’d been trying to get to Sierra City with Greg. With Jimmy Carter beside me, no one was going to stop. “So how long have you been out on the road?” he asked, pulling a pen and a long, narrow reporter’s notebook from the back pocket of his thin corduroy pants. His hair was shaggy and unwashed. His bangs concealed then revealed his dark eyes, depending on how the wind blew. He struck me as someone who had a PhD in something airy and indescribable. The history of consciousness, perhaps, or comparative studies in discourse and society. “I told you. I’m not on the road,” I said, and laughed. Eager as I was to get a ride, I couldn’t help but feel a little delighted by Jimmy Carter’s company. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I repeated, gesturing by way of elaboration to the woods that edged up near the road, though in fact the PCT was about nine miles west of where we stood.

• From Wild (2012)

  It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. I hate him, I’d said during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy. There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by, bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we were all going to die right then and there. Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running through the icy snow. He shut Leif, Karen, and me out of our house a couple of times when we lived in Pennsylvania, when my mother was at work and he was left to care for us and he wanted a break. He ordered us into the back yard and locked the doors, my sister and me holding our barely walking baby brother by his gummy hands. We wandered through the grass weeping and then forgot about being upset and played house and rodeo queen. Later, enraged and bored, we approached the back door and pounded and hollered. I remember the door distinctly and also the three concrete stairs that led up to it, the way I had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window in the upper half.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Remembering and reenacting suffering is part of the Jewish tradition, and it is threaded through many rituals, such as the Passover seder, where the “memory” of slavery and liberation is relived through our senses and our actions. The reenactment of trauma links the past and the future, our history and our destiny. It turns passive victims into active agents, victims into victors. The identity of the Israeli state, founded only three years after the Holocaust, is based on the ongoing Jewish trauma of persecution and on the dream of creating a safe home for the Jews. It is that dynamic of turning passive into active, which I discuss at length in Chapter 7 , that aims to liberate victims from defeat and helplessness while denying their own aggression. The dilemma of memorializing of trauma on the one hand holds the need to honor the victims, to cherish an identity and a legacy, and to try to prevent crimes from happening again. On the other hand it binds together past, present, and future as one. The next generation is called to identify with the previous one, and it will be entangled with the trauma and losses of those who came before. When it comes to talking about trauma, we always walk the delicate line between too much and not enough, between what is too explicit and what is secretive, what is traumatizing and what is repressed and thus remains in its raw, wordless form. We are usually caught in that binary between the two extremes because when it comes to trauma, regulation is always a challenge. Rachel tells me that she wishes she knew more. Her family story was silenced and her unprocessed family trauma became a repressed secret with no words or symbolic thinking associated with it. Those kinds of secrets live as strangers within our minds, ones that we can’t identify, touch, or change, that are passed to the next generation as phantoms, felt but not recognized. “As a little girl, I used to be afraid of everything,” Rachel says. She pauses for a long while. “You know, when I was six years old I started sleeping with a knife under my pillow,” she says softly. “My parents didn’t know about it. It was my secret. I remember the first time I did this. It was midnight and everyone was already asleep. I went to the kitchen. I looked in the drawer, found an orange knife, and took it to my room.” “What were you afraid of?” I ask. “That night I’d woken up from a scary dream.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Many of those analysts were Jews who had escaped Europe. Their patients were Holocaust survivors and later the offspring of those trauma survivors, children who carried some unconscious trace of their ancestors’ pain . Starting in the 1970s, neuroscience validated the psychoanalytic findings that survivors’ trauma—even the darkest secrets they never talked about—had a real effect on their children’s and grandchildren’s lives. In the 1990s, studies were focused on epigenetics, the nongenetic influences and modifications of gene expression. They analyzed how genes were altered in the descendants of trauma survivors and studied the ways in which the environment, and especially trauma, could leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes that is passed down to the next generation. That empirical research emphasized the major role that stress hormones play in how the brain develops, and thus in the biological mechanisms by which trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. A large body of research done at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of traumatic stress studies, and her team reveals that the offspring of Holocaust survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body bounce back after trauma. It was found that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress-hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Research indicates that healthy offspring of Holocaust survivors as well as of enslaved people, of war veterans, and of parents who experienced major trauma are more likely to present symptoms of PTSD after traumatic events or after witnessing a violent incident. From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of those kinds of epigenetic changes might be to biologically prepare children for an environment similar to that of their parents and help them survive, but in fact they often leave them more vulnerable to carrying symptoms of trauma that they didn’t experience firsthand. This research is not surprising for those of us who study the human mind. In our clinical work we see how traumatic experience invades the psyche of the next generation and shows itself in uncanny and often surprising ways. The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, we know what was not explicitly conveyed to us, and these things shape our lives in ways that we don’t always understand. We inherit family traumas, even those that we haven’t been told about. Working in Paris with Holocaust survivors and their children, the Hungarian-born psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham used the word “phantom” to describe the many ways in which the second generation felt their parents’ devastation and losses, even when the parents never talked about them.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  was in a left-wing political cult that taught its members "to take initiative within the bounds of discipline." This was supposed to mean that members were to apply all their creativity and intelligence to whatever situation they were in without violating the group's strict norms and policies. This rule allowed the leadership to constantly criticize members because just about any independent behavior could be deemed outside the bounds of discipline-and yet to not act in a given situation could be criticized as wimpy, cowardly, or passive. At a demonstration in front of City Hall protesting a cut in city workers' wages, Jackson saw the mayor approaching. Thinking himself a brave militant ready to defend his organization's stand, Jackson walked directly up to the mayor and asked him what he was going to do about the wage cuts. When this action was reported to his cult leader, she became furious and ordered Jackson to be harshly criticized for breaking discipline, being self-centered, promoting only himself, and trying to grab power. One week later, Jackson was sent to another picket line, where a union boss was expected to show up. The leader told Jackson that he had better be prepared to confront the union boss. "What about?" Jackson asked, trembling. "You know damn well what about!" exclaimed his leader. As this example illustrates, double binds magnify dependence by injecting an additional element of unpredictability into cult members' lives. Consequently, members can never become too comfortable. Fear prevents them from challenging those on whom they have become dependent. When this tactic is successful, members are unable to move out of a state of dependence. They spend most of their time feeling as though they are walking on eggshells, knowing that they must act-yet fearing that any action might bring rebuke, punishment, or worse. Living with such blatant manipulations and mixed messages can make people feel as though they are going crazy, which increases the ongoing stress of life in a cult. Formation of the Cult IdentityThe following list from West and Singer includes practices and behaviors that are likely to be part of successful cult indoctrination.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I was recruited at a time of great instability in my life, and I left my home in California to join the 0 in their Minnesota headquarters. While in the cult, I married another member and we adopted two children; the cult leader recommended both actions. Eventually, after ten long and miserable years, I was able to leave the group with my children and three other members. About a year after I left, my husband managed to leave also. My postcult recovery can be divided into three stages: the immediate crisis of leaving, getting back on my feet, and longer-term issues. The First Stage: The Immediate CrisisThis period lasted about a year, an extraordinarily difficult year. Most of the work in this period was merely to survive the crisis and not cave in to it. This survival was practical as well as psychological. Many former members struggle to find housing while atthe same time perhaps fightinga custody battle, as I was doing. Often finances are a huge issue, including disentangling financial arrangements and employment. Reconnecting with family members may be another issue. The quantity of problems is overwhelming, particularly if you have children. You have to sort out priorities. And while you're coping with these practical problems, you also have to deal with a kind of psychological earthquake. My major emotion in this immediate crisis period was fear, and there were three types of fear. One was extreme fear that the leader would cause us physical harm. That first year, I woke up in the middle of the night, almost every night, certain that he was in the house and about to enter my bedroom to assault or kill me. Did I have cause for this fear? Well, he had murdered a man and I knew that. We didn't think he would actually kill us, but we had to constantly work through this fear and deal with it. I did receive anonymous threatening and abusive phone calls during this period. Another fear was of other nonviolent means of retribution. In my case, I feared I would lose my children. The leader instructed my husband to try to gain full custody of the children, which drove me into a fiercely protective mode of defending the children and myself from the leader's attempt to keep them in the cult. My days were filled with a kind of unknown foreboding: "What is he going to do next?" Finally, and no less terrible than the other types of fear, was what I call an existential fear, or the fear of disappearance, of nothingness. I felt that by having leftthe cult, I had thrown myself into a vast empty space. It was an absolutely primal kind of terror. I felt completely alone. My roots had been destroyed and my identity was gone. There was no ground beneath my feet, no history, no fellow human being, no culture, and no belief system. I had lost myself and my connection to others. Depression was another common emotion.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  As he walked the length of the Rue Fuad he felt the entire pavement turn to sponge beneath his feet; he was foundering waistdeep in it before the illusion vanished. At two-thirty that afternoon he rose from a feverish sleep, dressed and set off to confirm an overpowering intuition that both Pastroudi and the Café Dordali were empty. They were, and the fact filled him with triumphant relief; but it was short-lived, for on returning to his room he felt all of a sudden as if his heart were being expelled from his body by the short mechanical movements of an air-pump. He had come to hate and fear this room of his. He would stand for a long time listening until the noise came again — the slither of wires being uncoiled upon the floor and the noise of some small animal, its shrieks being stifled, as it was bundled into a bag. Then distinctly the noise of suitcase-hasps being fastened with a snap and the breathing of someone who stood against the wall next door, listening for the least sound. Nessim removed his shoes and tip-toed to the bay-window in an attempt to see into the room next door. His assailant, it seemed to him, was an elderly man, gaunt and sharpfeatured, with the sunk reddish eyes of a bear. He was unable to confirm this. Then, waking early on the very morning upon which the invitations for the great shoot must be issued he saw with horror from the bedroom window two suspicious-looking men in Arab dress tying a rope to a sort of windlass on the roof. They pointed to him and spoke together in low tones. Then they began to lower something heavy, wrapped in a fur coat, into the open street below. His hands trembled as he filled in the large white squares of pasteboard with that flowing script, selecting his names from the huge typewritten list which Selim had left on his desk. Nevertheless he smiled as well when he recalled how large a space was devoted in the local press each year to this memorable event — the great shoot on Mareotis. With so much to occupy him he felt that nothing should be left to chance and though the solicitous Selim hovered near, he pursed his lips and insisted on attending to all the invitations himself. My own, charged with every presage of disaster, stared at me now from the mantelpiece. I gazed at it, my attention scattered by nicotine and wine, recognizing that here, in some indefinable way, was the solution towards which we all had moved. (‘Where science leaves off nerves begin.’ Moeurs.)

• From Wild (2012)

  The following day I hiked over Santiam Pass and crossed into the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, named for the dark and stately summit to my north. I hiked past the rocky multipeaked Three Fingered Jack, which rose like a fractured hand into the sky, and continued hiking into the evening as the sun disappeared behind a blanket of clouds and a thick mist slowly enveloped me. The day had been hot, but within thirty minutes the temperature dropped 20 degrees as the wind picked up and then suddenly stilled. I walked as quickly as I could up the trail, the sweat dripping from my body in spite of the chill, searching for a place to camp. It was precariously close to dark, but there was no place flat or clear enough to pitch my tent. By the time I found a spot near a small pond, it was as if I were inside a cloud, the air eerily still and silent. In the time it took me to pitch my tent and filter a bottle of water with my insufferably slow water purifier, the wind started up again in great violent gasps, whipping the branches of the trees overhead. I’d never been in a mountain storm. I’m not afraid, I reminded myself as I crawled into my tent without eating dinner, feeling too vulnerable outside, though I knew my tent offered little protection. I sat in expectant wonder and fear, bracing for a mighty storm that never came. An hour after dark, the air went still again and I heard coyotes yipping in the distance, as if they were celebrating the fact that the coast was clear. August had turned to September; the temperatures at night were almost always bitingly cold. I got out of my tent to pee, wearing my hat and gloves. When I scanned the trees with my headlamp, they caught on something, and I froze as the reflection of two bright pairs of eyes gazed back at me. I never found out whose they were. An instant later they were gone. The next day was hot and sunny, as if the strange storm the night before had been only a dream. I missed a fork in the trail and later discovered that I was no longer on the PCT but on the Oregon Skyline Trail, which paralleled the PCT roughly a mile to the west. It was an alternate route my guidebook detailed adequately, so I continued on, unworried. The trail would lead back to the PCT the next day. The day after that I’d be at Olallie Lake. Hop, skip, jump, done. I walked in a dense forest all afternoon, once rounding a bend to come upon a trio of enormous elks, who ran into the trees with a thunderous clamor of hooves. That evening, only moments after I stopped to make camp near a trailside pond, two bow hunters appeared, walking southbound down the trail. “You got any water?” one of them burst out immediately.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Two weeks go by and I don’t hear from Guy. Frankly, part of me is relieved. I recognize that since our session I’ve been a bit restless and I try to understand why. I find myself thinking of Guy when I am out walking, and I look around to make sure no one suspicious is following me. When I am on my phone, I have the fleeting thought that he might be listening. And I have the urge to google his name and learn more about him. Maybe he is a criminal or some secret agent, I think. “And besides,” I hear myself repeating his words, “these days, who knows, strange people are everywhere.” I’m able to make sense of my thoughts and remind myself that paranoid thinking by nature is contagious. People can evoke fear in each other in unpredictable and powerful ways and without awareness. That unconscious force is one of the reasons conspiracy theories and fear are so easy to spread. It is why leaders can easily frighten people by pointing to the enemy and promising them they will be protected and saved. Guy was right, I think. In that one session I really learned something profound about his internal world and especially about how threatened he feels. As the days pass, I become more and more curious about the feelings I’m left with. When Guy reaches out again, I offer to meet him for one more session and only then decide if we would like to start working together. It is a cold day in March when Guy comes to my office for the second time. He greets me and asks to keep his coat on. “It’s crazy outside,” he says, and points at the window. “What the hell? I’m telling you, climate change is going to kill us soon.” “Yes, it’s scary,” I say. “It’s more than scary,” he replies. “It’s a catastrophe. It’s out of control and we will find ourselves dead very soon.” Many of my patients speak about climate change, but Guy sounds a little different. His fear seems immediate, as if he is currently struggling to stay alive. He sits down. “We did it to ourselves. We destroyed ourselves,” he concludes. “Actually,” he then says angrily, “it’s them. They fucking did it to us.” “They?” I ask. Guy looks right into my eyes. “It’s their fault,” he says. “Generations of people who didn’t take care of the planet. Our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. They created this disaster with their own hands and now we have to deal with it. What a mess. There is no way we’ll be able to fix it; that’s the problem.”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘Originally I believed that she must be allowed to struggle towards me through the jungle of the Check. Whenever the wounding thought of her infidelity came upon me I reminded myself that she was not a pleasure-seeker, but a hunter of pain in search of herself — and me. I thought that if one man could release her from herself she would then become accessible to all men, and so to me who had most claim upon her. But when I began to see her melting like a summer ice-cap, a horrible thought came to me: namely that he who broke the Check must keep her forever, since the peace he gave her was precisely that for which she was hunting so frantically through our bodies and fortunes. For the first time my jealousy, helped forward by my fear, mastered me.’ He might have explained it thus. Yet it has always seemed fantastic to me that even now he was jealous of everyone except the true author of Justine’s present concern — myself. Despite the overwhelming mass of evidence he hardly dared to allow himself to suspect me. It was not love that is blind, but jealousy. It was a long time before he could bring himself to trust the mass of documentation his agents had piled up around us, around our meetings, our behaviour. But by now the facts had obtruded themselves so clearly that there was no possibility of error. The problem was how to dispose of me — I do not mean in the flesh so much. For I’d become merely an image standing in his light. He saw me perhaps dying, perhaps going away. He did not know. The very uncertainty was exciting to the pitch of drunkenness. Of course I am only supposing this. But side by side with these preoccupations were others — the posthumous problems which Arnauti had been unable to solve and which Nessim had been following up with true Oriental curiosity over a period of years. He was now near to the man with the black patch over one eye — nearer than any of us had ever been. Here was another piece of knowledge which as yet he could not decide how best to use. If Justine was really ridding herself of him, however, what good would there be in revenging himself upon the true person of the mysterious being? On the other hand if I was about to step into the place vacated by the image? … I asked Selim point-blank whether he had ever visited my flat to warn one-eyed Hamid. He did not reply but lowered his head and said under his breath, ‘My master is not himself these days.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  There is laughter and clapping as lots are drawn for the makeup of the various parties. We will have to take up widely dispersed positions around the lake, and those who draw the western butts will have to make a long detour by road through Mex and the desert fringes. The leaders of each party draw paper strips in turn from a hat, each with a guest’s name written upon it. Nessim has already drawn Capodistria who is clad in a natty leather jerkin with velvet cuffs, khaki gaberdine plus-fours and check socks. He wears an old tweed hat with a cock-pheasant’s feather in it, and is festooned with bandoliers full of cartridges. Next comes Ralli the old Greek general, with ash-coloured bags under his eyes and darned riding-breeches; Pallis the French Chargé d’Affaires in a sheepskin coat; lastly myself. Justine and Pombal are joining Lord Errol’s party. It is clear now that we are to be separated. All of a sudden, for the first time, I feel real fear as I watch the expressionless glitter of Nessim’s eyes. We take our various places in the shooting-brakes. Selim is doing up the straps of a heavy pigskin gun-case. His hands tremble. With all the dispositions made the cars start up with a roar of engines, and at this signal a flock of servants scamper out of the great house with glasses of champagne to offer us a stirrup-cup. This diversion enables Justine to come across to our car and under the pretext of handing me a packet of smokeless cartridges to press my arm once, warmly, and to fix me for a half-second with those expressive black eyes shining now with an expression I might almost mistake for relief. I try to form a smile with my lips. We move off steadily with Nessim at the wheel and catch the last rays of the sunset as we clear the town to run along the shallow dunelands towards Aboukir. Everyone is in excellent spirits, Ralli talking nineteen to the dozen and Capodistria keeping us entertained with anecdotes of his fabulous mad father. (‘His first act on going mad was to file a suit against his two sons accusing them of wilful and persistent illegitimacy.’) From time to time he raises a finger to touch the cotton compress which is held in position over his left eye by the black patch. How is it that I have never yet recognized in Capodistria the author of all Justine's misfortunes — the man with the black patch? Pallis has produced an old deerstalker with large ear-flaps which make him look like a speculative Gallic rabbit. From time to time in the driving mirror I catch Nessim’s eye and he smiles.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  This profound separation from the world leads you to think you can never leave, and you enter a kind of emotional and psychological state of paralysis (not to mention that many members have little to no access to money, and on the practical side, doubt they could go far even if they did leave). FearAnother reason people don't leave cults is simply because they are afraid. Many groups chase after defectors. They threaten them, punish them, or even place them under house arrest. If members try to get away, they are stopped by the cult. If they make the mistake of telling someone they are thinking of leaving, they are suspended from group activities, ostracized, and punished. They are criticized, put in the "hot seat," and, in most cases, rather quickly "convinced" to stay. As a member of the group, you come to know of these occurrences and dread such a fate befalling you. Once again, leaving does not seem like a feasible option. In some cases, members are expelled, literally thrown out of the group, sometimes deposited in front of a hospital or their parents' home. Then, back at the cult, the expelled ones are denounced and demonized. They are entered on a roster of enemies and nonpeople. Horrendous lies may be told about them to reinforce the cult's position on why they are no longer members. Such denunciation is not a pleasant prospect for someone thinking of leaving. The pariah image looms large, and taking on that image seems a fate worse than death. Thoughts of leaving also bring up the threat that even if you get out, nonbelievers will not accept you. The minute they find out what you were, you are going to die on the spot or be chased away. Nobody will hire you; nobody will want you; you will never have a relationship. You are a loser. That vision has a paralyzing effect-it reinforces you to stay in the cult. Guilt over ParticipationThe final factor that closes the trap's door is the cult member's own active participation. Whether or not you want to admit it, you were invested in cult life. It's challenging to leave-in part because you may still want to believe that your cult could work, and also because of the shame and guilt you feel. Perhaps you were party to activities that in normal life you would never have considered, acts that are morally reprehensible, or that you never would have believed you could have carried out or witnessed. That kind of guilt and shame helps keep people in cults. It keeps them from simply saying, "I'm going to get up and go now. The EffectsThe totality of the cult experience and all these influences foster an enforced dependency. You may have started out as a completely autonomous, independent individual, but after a certain amount of time, even though you may not want to admit it, you became dependent on the group for social needs, family needs, self-image, and survival.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Pombal was badly shaken by this raid and went about looking over his shoulder for nearly a month afterwards, convinced that he was being shadowed. He also developed the delusion that one-eyed Hamid had been paid to poison him and would only eat food cooked at home after I had first tasted it. He was still waiting for his cross and his transfer and was very much afraid that the loss of the files would prejudice both, but as we had thoughtfully left him the classification-covers he was able to return them to their series with a minute to say that they had been burnt ‘according to instructions’. He had been having no small success lately with his carefully graduated cocktail-parties — into which he occasionally introduced guests from the humbler spheres of life like prostitution or the arts. But the expense and boredom were excruciating and I remember him explaining to me once, in tones of misery, the origin of these functions. ‘The cocktail-party — as the name itself indicates — was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.’ Nevertheless he persevered in them and was rewarded by the favours of his Consul-General whom, despite his contempt, he still regarded with a certain childish awe. He even persuaded Justine, after much humorous pleading, to put in an appearance at one of these functions in order to further his plans for crucifixion. This gave us a chance to study Pordre and the small diplomatic circle of Alexandria — for the most part people who gave the impression of being painted with an air-brush, so etiolated and diffused did their official personalities seem to me. Pordre himself was a whim rather than a man. He was born to be a cartoonist’s butt. He had a long pale spoiled face, set off by a splendid head of silver hair which he used to affect. But it was a lackey’s countenance. The falseness of his gestures (his exaggerated solicitude and friendship for the merest acquaintances) grated disagreeably and enabled me to understand both the motto my friend had composed for the French Foreign Office and also the epitaph which he once told me should be placed on the tomb of his Chief. (‘His mediocrity was his salvation.’) Indeed, his character was as thin as a single skin of gold leaf — the veneer of culture which diplomats are in a better position to acquire than most men.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  One afternoon a crumpled sheet began breathing and continued for a space of about half an hour, assuming the shape of the body it covered. One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail. Then the counter-agency of the powers of good — a message brought by a ladybird which settled on the notebook in which he was writing; the music of Weber’s Pan played every day between three and four on a piano in an adjoining house. He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy. The phenomenal world had begun to play tricks on him so that his senses were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency. He was in peril of a mental overthrow. Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony of foreign heartbeats. But when investigated it stopped and refused to continue for the benefit of Selim whom he had called into the room. The same day he saw his initials in gold upon a cloud reflected in a shop-window in the Rue St Saba. Everything seemed proved by this. That same week a stranger was seated in the corner always reserved for Balthazar in the Café Al Aktar sipping an arak — the arak he had intended to order. The figure bore a strong yet distorted resemblance to himself as he turned in the mirror, unfolding his lips from white teeth in a smile. He did not wait but hurried to the door.

• From Wild (2012)

  After four hours I began to regret my decision. I might starve to death out there or be killed by marauding longhorn bulls, but on the PCT at least I knew where I was. I reread my guidebook, uncertain by now that I was even on one of the roads they’d described in a cursory way. I took out my map and compass every hour to assess and reassess my position. I pulled out Staying Found to read again how exactly to use a map and compass. I studied the sun. I passed a small herd of cows that were unbound by a fence and my heart leapt at the sight of them, though none moved in my direction. They only stopped eating to lift their heads and watch me pass while I delicately chanted to them, “Cow, cow, cow.” The land through which the road passed was surprisingly green in places, dry and rocky in others, and twice I passed tractors parked silent and eerie by the side of the road. I walked in a state of wonder at the beauty and the silence, but by late afternoon, apprehension rose in my throat. I was on a road, but I had not seen a human being in eight days. This was civilization and yet, aside from the free-range cows and the two abandoned tractors, and the road itself, there was no sign of it. I felt as if I were starring in a science fiction movie, as if I were the only person left on the planet, and for the first time in my journey, I felt like I might cry. I took a deep breath to push away my tears and took off my pack and set it in the dirt to regroup. There was a bend in the road ahead and I walked around it without my pack to see what I could. What I saw were three men sitting in the cab of a yellow pickup truck. One was white. One was black. One was Latino. It took perhaps sixty seconds for me to reach them on foot. They watched me with the same expression on their faces as I’d had when I saw the longhorn bull the day before. As if any moment they might yell “Moose!” My relief at the sight of them was enormous. Yet as I strode toward them my whole body tingled with the complicated knowledge that I was no longer the sole star in a film about a planet devoid of people. Now I was in a different kind of movie entirely: I was the sole woman with three men of unknown intent, character, and origin watching me from the shade of a yellow truck. When I explained my situation to them through the open driver’s-side window, they gazed at me silently, their eyes shifting from startled to stunned to scoffing until they all burst out laughing.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Then, in 1982, the Lebanon War erupted and I was old enough to recognize that something terrible was happening. To the school’s memorial wall were added more and more names, this time of young people we knew. Parents who had lost their boys came to the school for the ceremony of Memorial Day. I was proud to be the one singing for them, looking straight into their eyes and making sure I didn’t cry because then I would ruin the song and someone else might have to take my place behind the mic. We ended the ceremony every year with “Shir La Shalom” (“A Song for Peace”), one of the most well-known Israeli songs. We sang for peace from the depth of our hearts. We wanted to have a new beginning and liberate our future. I grew up on our parents’ promise that by the time the children were eighteen and had to serve in the army, there would be no more wars. But that, to this day, has not happened. I served in the army as a musician, praying for peace, traveling from one army base to another, crossing borders, singing for the soldiers. I was a nineteen-year-old soldier when the Gulf War started. We were on the road and the rock-and-roll music we played was loud, so loud that we had to make sure we didn’t miss the sound of the sirens and could run to the shelters to put on our gas masks in time. At some point, we decided to give up on the masks and the shelters and instead ran to the roofs every time there was a siren so we could watch the missiles from Iraq and try to guess where they would fall. After each thunderous explosion, we would go back to our music and play it even louder. We sang for the soldiers, who were also our childhood friends, neighbors, and siblings. And when they teared up, as they often did, I felt the power of touching another heart with my own, voicing the unspeakable. Our music expressed so much of what no one could say out loud: that we were scared but were not allowed to admit it even to ourselves, that we were still too young and wanted to go home, fall in love, travel far away. That we wanted normal lives but we were not sure what “normal” meant. Making music and singing out loud were meaningful and liberating. It was the beginning of my journey of a search for truths, the unveiling of the emotional inheritance within me. Eventually, some years later, I left my homeland, moved to New York City, and began studying the unspeakable—all those silent memories, feelings, and desires that are outside awareness. I became a psychoanalyst, exploring the unconscious.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  As surprising as Noah’s discovery seemed to me at the time, when I published his story in the Couch section of the New York Times in April 2015, neither of us expected the response it got. In the hours after the column was published I started receiving emails from people who wanted to share similar experiences. What Noah believed was his own esoteric story turned out to be the story of many people, each of whom in turn had assumed it was a cryptic and unusual thing that had happened only to them. People shared their stories of lost siblings, secrets they only uncovered later in life, and the ways those secrets showed themselves in their minds. Several wrote about discovering they had a twin who had died at birth and the impact of that trauma on their lives. Those coincidences between the secret reality and the way it appeared in their minds were often experienced as seemingly irrational, and sometimes hard to believe. All of these people were left with a powerful link between their past and their present, between a feeling that they initially couldn’t explain and family trauma. Most didn’t know how to make sense of the strange synchronicity between those family secrets and the way their minds and bodies responded to information they didn’t consciously know. I heard from a man I’ll call Benjamin, who said that for years, since he was a little boy, he had a dream in which he was buried underground. He would wake up frightened in the middle of the night and he would tell his parents that he was afraid to go back to sleep because he couldn’t breathe. His parents hoped that this dream would fade as he grew up but in fact things got worse, and at the age of thirteen Benjamin developed claustrophobia. His panic would be especially severe when he needed to take the subway. No one understood why he had developed these fears . Benjamin always knew that his mother’s family had been murdered in the Holocaust. He knew that she didn’t have her parents, grandparents, or uncles; that she had immigrated to the United States as a little girl survivor; and that she had met his father when she was sixteen years old. It was only when Benjamin was in his forties that he learned about the way his grandfather had died—he had been buried alive. His parents, unaware of the features of their emotional inheritance, had never made the connection between his nightmares and other symptoms and their family’s traumatic history. As in Rachel’s story in Chapter 4 , as horrifying as it was, learning about his grandfather’s brutal death allowed Benjamin to stop experiencing and carrying that fact in his body. When our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget. I also heard from Amy.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In my dream I’d been holding a baby, and someone was chasing us. I was supposed to protect that baby, and I ran with it in my arms.” She looks at me and adds, “I remember this well because after that night I had that dream almost every night, for many years.” “Did you hide with the baby?” I ask, remembering hiding with my baby brother. “No, I couldn’t find a place to hide, so I just ran and ran. There was no shelter, no place I could feel safe.” I imagine Rachel running for her life, a baby in her arms. She was just a child when she started to have this recurring dream. As we talk, many questions come up: Who is that baby? Is it Rachel herself, who feels unsafe in the world? What and whom was she running from? There was nowhere to hide and babies were not safe in that world. I ask her to share any associations that came to mind when telling me the dream. “The Nazis.” She nods. “It’s the only thing that comes to mind. Maybe I’m in Budapest, running from the Nazis. I slept with the orange knife every night. In the mornings, I would hide it in my desk, then I’d put it under my pillow again before I went to sleep. I never told anyone about it until now.” “You felt unsafe then and you are afraid to bring a baby into this unsafe world now. You don’t want the baby to feel the way you did as a child,” I say. “I want my child to be able to tell me anything. And if she or he is afraid, I want to hold the baby tight and help it feel safe.” Rachel starts imagining her own child. The more she talks about her childhood fears, the more she realizes why she couldn’t bear the idea of having a baby, assuming it would experience life the way she did. Not having that baby is her way of protecting it. Rachel sighs. “I had to hide my panic. I couldn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t want them to think that something was wrong with me. My fear was the biggest secret of my childhood,” she says. For years Rachel felt as though she carried a forbidden secret, but perhaps, I wonder out loud, her secret was a way to keep the secrets of others. “What was your grandfather’s secret?” I ask. Rachel doesn’t answer. She looks at me seriously. “Who knows,” she whispers. A few months later Rachel gets pregnant. She gives birth to a baby girl, whom she and her husband name Ruth .

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Perrault’s version ends with the wolf devouring Little Red Riding Hood, followed by a short poem that teaches the moral of the story: that good girls should be cautious when approached by men. As for wolves, he adds, these take on many different forms, and the nice ones are the most dangerous of all, especially those who follow young girls in the streets and into their homes. Perrault presented his readers with a somewhat refined version of the popular folktale, which was originally filled with sexual seduction, rape, and murder. His version speaks to the deceiving nature of nice wolves, who hurt their victims while pretending to offer something special, presenting sexual perversion as a form of love. It was to become even more highly refined over the years to the point where the sexual innuendo was entirely omitted and the story transformed into a children’s fairy tale. While fairy tales usually differentiate between good and bad people in ways that help children organize their world and feel safe, “nice wolves” leave children confused, unsure of what is dangerous and what is not. Abused children end up feeling that they themselves are bad, that they have done something wrong. That confusion of tongues between love and perversion will haunt them for years. “You are Little Red Riding Hood,” Lara says, and hands me the puppet of the girl with the red dress. “She is going to visit her grandmother,” she says and then whispers, “The girl thinks the grandmother is an old lady but she is actually a wolf. ” “A wolf?” I repeat her words and remember how she kept stating there were to be no wolves in our story. “You will see.” She smiles as if hiding something. “You will see what I mean soon. The grandmother has a lot of secrets.” But we don’t find out what the grandmother’s secrets are, nor do we ever get to her house. Instead Lara instructs me, as Red Riding Hood, to sit under a tree and wait for her to come pick me up. “I will be back soon,” she says firmly. She turns her back to me and starts playing on her own. I am left to sit there for a long while, knowing that I have been assigned to be the girl that Lara has been, lost alone in the woods, overwhelmed by the secrets of others. Sitting there in silence, waiting for Lara to come back, I feel like the little girl I used to be, when I was left to wait for my parents to come pick me up from the candy store. My “me-search” enters the room and I realize what I am looking for. I suddenly remember what I always knew. I was seven years old, younger than Lara. I had started second grade in a new school far from our home.