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 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Besides, he’s read both the Globe and the Herald cover to cover. Not yet spring and not quite warm, not yet, but warming. Cabs slowly pass, en route somewhere. He awakens to a hand in his pocket, yells out. A dread-locked man hisses, teeters back and forth into the shadow of Trinity, a stiff-legged crackhead walk. My father stands, touches his pockets, unsure what was there, what might be gone, begins to follow the crazy thief, turns and walks quickly in the other direction. The library won’t open for six more hours. A bus stop on the corner, he could wait for a bus, but no buses run, not at this hour. He could sit in the kiosk but the crackhead will find him, waiting just out of sight for him to fall asleep again, to run his hands all over him. My father’s trying to hold on to a few dollars for morning, for coffee, to buy some time inside, but the crackhead will find it, will take anything, laugh in your face, crazy bastard, even a sandwich, where can you hide anything, what can you hold on to? You might as well wake up each morning shipwrecked on a deserted beach, all your belongings washed away. If it rains he will remember the kiosk, which does have a roof, three sides out of the weather. But you cannot stretch out on the benches, there are armrests welded on. In the back of the library he sees a discarded blanket—closer he sees it is a man curled up on a grate. Hot, wet air steams up from the grate, warming the man like a dumpling. He’s seen this before, bums sprawled out and drinking, but he never actually stood above the blowers, let the hot air seep into his clothes. The air is sucked out of the library, he can hear the dim whir of machinery below him, the excess from the heating system, even on the coldest nights there is too much heat inside, books cooking in superheated rooms, enough to heat the sidewalks, to heat the air outside. When it snows the snow will not stick to the grate—a dark, wet spot in a whiteout. The drunks fall there, driven by cops, by clubs, by the cold. Some inner radar keeps them alive, they stagger through the storm, blind drunk and goofy until they find the steam and then they fall. Like coming upon an oasis in the desert, their bodies melt into the grates, the steam seeps into their coats, into their pores. It’s another prison, these blowers, because once you’ve landed you cannot leave, not if there is nowhere to go, not without a destination, because one step off the blower is cold, hypothermia cold, now that you are sodden. Blankets rise off your body in the fan’s heat, hang above your sleep like a dream before sailing off into the slush.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You are thinking of these episodes when you begin to experience pregnancy symptoms in the Dream House. You vomit into the toilet, you feel swollen and out of sorts. The two of you have talked about a child for so long—a little girl, Clementine, hair poufy like a Q-Tip, like hers—that you abandon all reason and wonder if you could be pregnant. You have had so much sex, and the intensity between you feels as real as anything. You consider saying to her, “Ha! I’m sick like I’m pregnant, isn’t that weird?” But you are terrified—of the radical body modification that is pregnancy, the dangers of childbirth, the unforgiving nature of motherhood, and—most importantly—of what she’ll accuse you of. What she’ll do afterward. You drink ginger ale, you lie down for a long time, you forgo food for an evening under the pretense of having snacked, which you definitely did not do. You cannot be pregnant, you cannot be pregnant, you literally absolutely could not be pregnant under any circumstances.39 You take a pregnancy test anyway, like an idiot, and of course it’s negative because you haven’t had a penis anywhere near your body in years. You are afraid she’ll find the test, so you put it in a Ziploc bag and throw it out in someone’s trash can on the street after she’s gone to class.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 33. Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend: ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’”34. It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.”35. It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety. (Other ways in which the conversation remains inadequate: devaluing the narratives of nonwhite victims, insufficiently addressing nonmonosexuality, rarely taking noncisgendered people into account.)36. In a 1991 article about a white lesbian in Boise, Idaho, who successfully used “battered-wife syndrome” as a defense for killing her abusive girlfriend, the reporter emphasized that the defendant was a “diminutive 4-foot-10.” The prosecutor in the case speculated that the reason for the acquittal was that the abused wife “seemed more heterosexual,” and the abuser “more ‘lesbian.’”Dream House as UndeadI think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

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

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Through the Body’s “I”Just as she did every morning at work, Sharon was reading over her emails. It was a crisp, clear, New York autumn day—the kind of a day that makes one feel excited to be alive. Startled by a thunderous, deafening crash, she turned to witness the walls in her office moving twenty feet in her direction. Though Sharon was immediately mobilized, springing to her feet and readying to flee for her life, she was slowly and methodically led down eighty floors via stairwells filled with the suffocating, acrid smell of burning jet fuel and debris. After finally reaching the mezzanine in the north tower of the World Trade Center one hour and twenty minutes later, the south tower suddenly collapsed. The shock waves lifted Sharon into the air, violently throwing her on top of a crushed, bloody body. An off-duty police detective discovered her, dazed and disoriented, atop the dead man. He helped her find her way out of the wreckage and away from the site, through absolutely thick, pitch-blackness. She met a few other survivors sitting in front of a church, and together they gave thanks to be alive. In the weeks following her miraculous survival, a dense yellow fog enveloped her in a deadening numbness. Sharon felt indifferent by day, merely going through the motions of living with little passion, direction or pleasure. Just a week before she had loved classical music; now it no longer interested her: she “couldn’t stand listening to it.” Numb most of the time, she was periodically assaulted by panic attacks. Sleep became her enemy; at night she was awakened by her own screaming and sobbing. For the first time in her life, this once highly motivated executive could not imagine a future for herself; terror had become the organizing principle of her life.§ Sharon’s terror was not focused on anything in particular; it appeared everywhere, projected “out there”—onto a world that felt threatening, even when everything was objectively safe and predictable. It kept her from flying, riding the subway or being in public places. She was constantly on guard, whether awake or asleep. Sharon saw me on a television interview, tracked me down through my institute and then traveled four days and nights, by train, to see me in Los Angeles, where I was teaching. On December 1, 2001, we did the session summarized below.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Owning the pier was the latest venture, but the only illegal activity they had come up with so far was bringing in mercury-tainted swordfish from Canada, which was banned in the U.S. and so brought a decent price on the black market. The weekend they rented out the pier to the Mob, Tony and Liam sat in a car and watched what was happening, deciding right then and there to enter the big time. Red and the Goon, two henchmen from the Winter Hill days, were with them. Armed with shotguns (easy to keep in the trunk of a car, you could be a hunter), they kicked open their doors, four doors opening at once like in a twentieth-century western, walked up to the head mobster, sitting in his own car overseeing the unloading, and kidnapped him. They brought him to the fish house and held him there at gunpoint for two days, demanding a million dollars. As unlikely as it seems, they got it, and overnight took over the business of bringing drugs into the East Coast. Tony owned the pier, the boats, the trucks, the drivers, the mechanics, the legit business front, and he’d just proven himself fearless. Liam’s girlfriend (my mother) worked in a bank, which eased the flow of thousands of dollars daily. “Laundering,” it’s called. Within a year Tony’s gang is awash in cash. Liam made two successful runs, more were planned. They let go of the other, lesser criminal activities and focus on smuggling. Charismatic and generous, Tony’s charm allows him to avoid capture over the next few years, as he has a few cops and a judge in his pocket. I begin unloading fishing boats under the watchful eye of the DEA, who camp out full-time on surrounding rooftops, filming. The pier boss, Dex, sleeps in his car, and his car never moves. Parked facing the harbor, overlooking the pier, he shoots up, drifts off. The pier is in an abandoned industrial yard, near where the Pilgrims landed. Dex isn’t dumb, he’s been to a few semesters of college—real college, not the “college” everyone else gets sentenced to. Maybe in his mid-thirties but he looks ancient—the teeth, junkie teeth, few and fewer, and he doesn’t seem to care. He sleeps in the clothes he wears to unload the boats, caked with gurry and fish slime, he sleeps a lot. We all stink of fish, but Dex has given up on any pretense of even trying to clean up. Waiting for a boat to appear on the horizon, we hammer together fish boxes, “coopering,” it’s called, and for those few hours we call ourselves “coopers.” As the fall drags on, fewer and fewer boats come in, so we cooper more and more. By the end of October we have hundreds of boxes, stacked taller than a man.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  pear By the time I’m nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I’ve heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information. Lately I’ve been studying horror movies on tv, my favorites being The Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons. But even better is when my mother’s latest boyfriend takes my brother and me to see zombie and mayhem movies at the drive-in— Scream and Scream Again, Bloody Mama —the more gruesome the better. One night, walking through the Harbor at dusk with my grandmother, where we’d gone to buy yarn for her crewelwork, we stop at the musty bookshop run by Isabel and Rose, the spinster sisters. I thumb through a new edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while my grandmother scans the murder/romances. She likes her books fat and lurid. I’ve never bought a book before, but for some reason I have to have this one. Under a streetlight outside I try to read the first page, but know instantly I’m over my head—I can decipher maybe half of it. When I get home I try again, then put it aside, knowing I’ll be able to read it in a couple years, if I apply myself in third grade. I’ll pick it up again in fifth grade and read it through in one night. That same year I’ll memorize Poe’s “The Raven,” and draw coffins and bloody curved daggers in my notebooks. I want to be a writer, a horror writer. This is before I learn that my father considers himself a poet. I’ve only met him once that I can remember, the day he appeared in my grandmother’s driveway with his second wife and my half-sister. This is your sister , he said, say hi . He looked like the Cowardly Lion, his wife looked like Cher. My half-sister was a swaddled infant, indistinguishable from her blanket. Hi , I said. There’d always been books around our house—my mother and brother were voracious, compulsive readers. Henry Miller’s Sexus was hidden in my mother’s lingerie drawer, alongside her gun and painkillers. She bought the gun the year before to protect herself, but she never said from what. The painkillers were for her migraines, which kept her in bed some days, all day. A family story was that my brother was found reading the newspaper as a toddler, before he’d uttered a word, and to see him, all those years, with a sci-fi book hidden in his lap at the dinner table, his head bowed, it seemed possible. In my grandmother’s attic were stacks of books salvaged from her marriage, only accessible by tightroping along the joists between the pink insulation. Forbidden and dangerous, I spent hours up there, poring through these treasures, looking for answers. In the early 1970s, when I was eleven or twelve, my fascination with horror led me to the occult.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The application of this perennial philosophy to trauma is the very principle that allows sensations and feelings that had previously been overwhelming to be processed and transformed in present time. In this way, trauma, when transformed, parallels Kabalistic philosophy. Trauma, Death and Suffering Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. —Psalm 23 It would be an error to equate trauma with suffering and suffering, in turn, with transformation. At the same time, however, in virtually every spiritual tradition suffering is understood as a doorway to awakening. In the West, this connection can be seen in the biblical story of Job and, powerfully, in Psalm 23. It is found as the dark night of the soul in medieval mysticism—and, of course, in the passion of Christ. In Buddhism an important distinction is made between suffering and unnecessary suffering. According to the Buddha, “When touched with a feeling of pain, the ordinary person laments ... becomes distraught ... contracts ... so he feels two pains ... just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another ... so that he would feel the pains of two arrows ...” Trauma sufferers are so frightened of their bodily sensations that they recoil from feeling them. It is as though they believe that by feeling them they will be destroyed or, at the very least, make things worse. Hence they remain stuck. In this way, they shoot themselves with the second arrow—FDR’s “fear of fear itself.” With support and guidance, however, they are able to gradually learn to befriend and transform their trauma-based sensations. In both the Buddhist and Taoist traditions, four pathways are said to lead to spiritual awakening. 171 The first is death. A second route to freedom from unnecessary human suffering can come from many years of austere meditative contemplation. The third gateway to liberation is through special forms of (tantric) sexual ecstasy. And the fourth portal is said, by these traditions, to be trauma. Death, meditation, sex and trauma, in serving as great portals, share a common element. They are all potential catalysts for profound surrender. The ability to feel the physical sensations of paralysis (without becoming overwhelmed) and surrender to them is the key in transforming trauma. When we are able to touch into that deathlike void even briefly, rather than recoil from it, the immobilization releases. In this way the second arrow of unnecessary suffering is eliminated. The “standing back” from fear allows the individual to emerge from the strangulation of trauma.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Army suggests that the speed with which the brain reads emotions in the body language of others and interprets sensations in one’s own body is central to avoiding imminent threats like hidden booby traps, who might be carrying a hidden bomb or who had recently buried one. 17 In this same article, the neurologist Antonio Damasio adds that “emotions are practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, in all of us.” Therapeutic approaches that neglect the body, focusing mainly on thoughts (top-down processing), will consequently be limited. I propose instead that, in the initial stages of restorative work, bottom-up processing needs to be standard operating procedure. In other words, addressing a client’s “bodyspeak” first and then, gradually , enlisting his or her emotion, perception and cognition is not merely valuable, it’s essential. The “talking cure” for trauma survivors should give way to the unspoken voice of the silent, but strikingly powerful, bodily expressions as they surface to “sound off” on behalf of the wisdom of the deeper self . Challenges of Therapy Therapists working with traumatized individuals frequently “pick up” and mirror the postures of their clients and hence their emotions of fear, terror, anger, rage and helplessness. The way we respond to these signifiers will be pivotal in helping traumatized individuals deal with those difficult sensations and emotions. If we recoil because we cannot contain and accept them, then we abandon our clients … if we are overwhelmed, then we are both lost. If we embody some small portion of a Dalai Lama–like equanimity and “composure,” we are able to share and help contain our client’s terrors in a “blanket of compassion.” We should not underestimate how compelling instinctual fear reactions are and how readily they can become maladaptive. In the event of a fire, for example, people will tend to adopt the uptight, frightened body posture of the person next to them. They are then readied to spring into action and flee the movie theater. However, such behavior can also set the ground for contagious panic. As each person mirrors the fear posture of those nearby, he or she simultaneously senses fear and transmits that fear-posture to others in the group. Transmittance of fear through postural resonance creates an escalating situation, a positive feedback loop (with negative consequences). Panic contagion can spread to the whole group almost instantly. FDR presciently warned us about avoiding this kind of contagion. If a moment presents itself, we may beneficially ask ourselves, is there really something threatening?

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

  As regards the commanded acts of the will, then, the will can suffer violence, in so far as violence can prevent the exterior members from executing the will’s command. But as to the will’s own proper act, violence cannot be done to the will. The reason of this is that the act of the will is nothing else than an inclination proceeding from the interior principle of knowledge: just as the natural appetite is an inclination proceeding from an interior principle without knowledge. Now what is compelled or violent is from an exterior principle. Consequently it is contrary to the nature of the will’s own act, that it should be subject to compulsion and violence: just as it is also contrary to the nature of a natural inclination or movement. For a stone may have an upward movement from violence, but that this violent movement be from its natural inclination is impossible. In like manner a man may be dragged by force: but it is contrary to the very notion of violence, that he be dragged of his own will. Reply to Objection 1: God Who is more powerful than the human will, can move the will of man, according to Prov. 21:1: “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will He shall turn it.” But if this were by compulsion, it would no longer be by an act of the will, nor would the will itself be moved, but something else against the will. Reply to Objection 2: It is not always a violent movement, when a passive subject is moved by its active principle; but only when this is done against the interior inclination of the passive subject. Otherwise every alteration and generation of simply bodies would be unnatural and violent: whereas they are natural by reason of the natural interior aptitude of the matter or subject to such a disposition. In like manner when the will is moved, according to its own inclination, by the appetible object, this movement is not violent but voluntary. Reply to Objection 3: That to which the will tends by sinning, although in reality it is evil and contrary to the rational nature, nevertheless is apprehended as something good and suitable to nature, in so far as it is suitable to man by reason of some pleasurable sensation or some vicious habit. Whether violence causes involuntariness?Objection 1: It would seem that violence does not cause involuntariness. For we speak of voluntariness and involuntariness in respect of the will. But violence cannot be done to the will, as shown above [1052](A[4]). Therefore violence cannot cause involuntariness. Objection 2: Further, that which is done involuntarily is done with grief, as Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 24) and the Philosopher (Ethic. iii, 5) say. But sometimes a man suffers compulsion without being grieved thereby. Therefore violence does not cause involuntariness.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Last, but by no means least, a fourth biological function of immobility is that it triggers a profoundly altered state of numbing. In this state, extreme pain and terror are dulled: so if the animal does survive an attack it will be, even though injured, less encumbered by debilitating pain and thus possibly able to escape if the opportunity arises. This “humane” analgesic effect is mediated by the flooding of endorphins, the body’s own profound morphine pain-relief system.21 For the gazelle, this means that it will not have to suffer the full agony of being torn apart by the cheetah’s sharp teeth and claws. The same is most likely true for a rape or accident victim.22 In this state of analgesia, the victim may witness the event as though from outside his or her body, as if it were happening to someone else (as I observed in my accident). Such distancing, called dissociation, helps to make the unbearable bearable. The African explorer David Livingstone graphically recorded such an experience in his encounter with a lion on the plains of Africa: I heard a shout. Startled, in looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me. I was upon a little height; he caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. This singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivore; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent creator for lessening the pain of death. [italics mine]23

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

  And in this sense we may say that there is a natural fear; and it is distinguished from non-natural fear, by reason of the diversity of its object. For, as the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5), there is a fear of “corruptive evil,” which nature shrinks from on account of its natural desire to exist; and such fear is said to be natural. Again, there is a fear of “painful evil,” which is repugnant not to nature, but to the desire of the appetite; and such fear is not natural. In this sense we have stated above ([1373]Q[26], A[1];[1374] Q[30], A[3];[1375] Q[31], A[7]) that love, desire, and pleasure are divisible into natural and non-natural. But in the first sense of the word “natural,” we must observe that certain passions of the soul are sometimes said to be natural, as love, desire, and hope; whereas the others cannot be called natural. The reason of this is because love and hatred, desire and avoidance, imply a certain inclination to pursue what is good or to avoid what is evil; which inclination is to be found in the natural appetite also. Consequently there is a natural love; while we may also speak of desire and hope as being even in natural things devoid of knowledge. On the other hand the other passions of the soul denote certain movements, whereto the natural inclination is nowise sufficient. This is due either to the fact that perception or knowledge is essential to these passions (thus we have said[1376], Q[31], AA[1],3;[1377] Q[35], A[1], that apprehension is a necessary condition of pleasure and sorrow), wherefore things devoid of knowledge cannot be said to take pleasure or to be sorrowful: or else it is because such like movements are contrary to the very nature of natural inclination: for instance, despair flies from good on account of some difficulty; and fear shrinks from repelling a contrary evil; both of which are contrary to the inclination of nature. Wherefore such like passions are in no way ascribed to inanimate beings. Thus the Replies to the Objections are evident. Whether the species of fear is suitably assigned?Objection 1: It would seem that six species of fear are unsuitably assigned by Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 15); namely, “laziness, shamefacedness, shame, amazement, stupor, and anxiety.” Because, as the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5), “fear regards a saddening evil.” Therefore the species of fear should correspond to the species of sorrow. Now there are four species of sorrow, as stated above ([1378]Q[35], A[8]). Therefore there should only be four species of fear corresponding to them. Objection 2: Further, that which consists in an action of our own is in our power. But fear regards an evil that surpasses our power, as stated above [1379](A[2]). Therefore laziness, shamefacedness, and shame, which regard our own actions, should not be reckoned as species of fear.

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

  But the reality is that when it comes to decisions about whether to continue or withdraw, what matters is whether the next life is worth putting at risk, as much as we instinctively want to take into account the lives already lost. If we continue, are our chances of getting the outcome we want worth risking additional lives and imposing those losses on other families? The Difference between Knowing and DoingThere are lots of intuitions people have about cognitive biases, including the sunk cost fallacy. One of the most common is that if you are educated on the topic and know about it, that will stop you from committing the error. I know it seems we’ve already spent a lot of time on stories about scaling mountains. But to demonstrate the difference between knowing and doing, please indulge me while I tell one more. This one is about an experienced outdoorsman and mountain climber named Jeffrey R., who had set a goal for himself of climbing the one hundred highest peaks in New England. In the climbing community, this is considered a significant achievement. Several of the peaks do not have official trails and can be reached only along snowmobile tracks, old logging roads, or herd paths. Some of those involve “bushwhacking,” where a climber has to force their way through forested or overgrown areas. Jeffrey R. had climbed ninety-nine of the peaks and was climbing the last one, Fort Mountain, in Maine. When the weather turned bad and a fog came in, his climbing partner decided to turn around. Jeffrey R. disagreed and continued climbing alone. His body was found several days later. He apparently fell to his death. Why am I telling you this story, so similar to some of the others? One person turns around. The other continues to go on, with tragic consequences. The Jeffrey R. in this story is Jeffrey Rubin, the same Jeffrey Rubin who, with Joel Brockner, studied the behavior of people waiting for a crossword puzzle dictionary that never came, and followed it up with an impressive and influential body of work on escalation of commitment right up to his death in 1995. If anybody understood the problem of being entrapped in a course of action, unable to cut your losses even in the face of clear signals that you ought to be quitting, it would have been him. Yet he became entrapped that day. This should be a warning to all of us. Don’t think that, just because you’ve read up to this point in the book or understand the sunk cost fallacy, this knowledge alone is going to help you overcome it. If Rubin was unable to quit, that should open our eyes to how hard it is for the rest of us. Knowing is not the same as doing. You Can’t Jedi Mind Trick Being Fresh to a DecisionA lot of people who know about the sunk cost fallacy tell me they’ve come up with a solution.

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

  Back at Base Camp, the expedition leader had impressed on the clients the importance of having strictly observed turnaround times for each day’s climb up the mountain as they ascended from the foot of Everest to each intermediate camp and, ultimately, to the summit. While at Base Camp, the expedition leader set the turnaround time on summit day at 1 p.m. A turnaround time is, simply put, the time at which climbers are to stop their ascent, even if they haven’t yet reached their destination, and return to camp. Turnaround times are meant to protect climbers from putting themselves in danger on the descent, which requires more skill than ascending the mountain. Climbers on the descent can suffer from a combination of fatigue, oxygen deprivation (hypoxia), frostbite, changing weather, becoming lost or disoriented, falling into a crevasse, and darkness if they persist too long in their summit attempt. The darkness and fatigue multiply the likelihood of making a mistake and slipping on the narrow Southeast Ridge, where a misstep can cause you to fall 8,000 feet to your death into Tibet, or 12,000 feet to your death into Nepal. In fact, eight times more people die on Everest on the way down than on the way up. No client makes the sacrifices needed to get to the top of Everest with the intent of stopping short of the summit. And the pull of the summit goes beyond the amateur climbers. Assistant expedition guides prove their ability by summiting Everest, or doing it multiple times. Expedition leaders, competing with each other for business, market their successes in getting their clients to the top of the mountain. Sherpas aren’t immune to the pull either. Their marketability and local standing are enhanced by summiting. Turnaround times are there to prevent people from making poor decisions to keep going when they’re in the shadow of the summit, building into a climbing plan three crucial concepts. The first is that persistence is not always a virtue. Whether it is prudent to continue up the mountain depends both on the climbing conditions and the condition of the climbers. When those conditions warrant quitting, it is a good decision to heed those signals. The second is that making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it.” On

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The fear of exiting immobility: In the wild, when a prey animal has succumbed to the immobility response, it remains motionless for a time. Then, just as easily as it stopped moving, it twitches, reorients and scampers off. But if the predator has remained and sees its prey returning to life, the story has a very different ending. As the prey comes back to life and sees the predator standing ready for a second (and this time lethal) attack, it either defaults to all-out rage and counterattacks, or it attempts to run away in frantic non-directed flight. Thus reaction is wild and “mindless.” As I mentioned in Chapter 4, I once saw a mouse counterattack a cat that had been batting it about with its paws (bringing the mouse out of its stupor), and then scurry away, leaving the cat dazed, like Tom-cat in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Just as the immobilized animal (in the presence of the predator) comes out ready for violent counterattack, so too does a traumatized person abruptly swing from paralysis and shutdown to hyper-agitation and rage. Fear of this rage and the associated hyper-intense sensations prevents a tolerable exit from immobility unless there is education, preparation, titration and guidance. The fear of rage is also the fear of violence—both toward others and against oneself. The exiting of immobility is inhibited by the following double bind: to come back to life, one must feel the sensations of rage and intense energy. However, at the same time, these sensations evoke the possibility of mortal harm. This possibility inhibits sustained contact with the very sensations that bring relief from the experience of immobility, thereby leading to resolution. Recall the prescience of Kahlbaum (in Chapter 4) when he wrote in 1874: “In most cases catatonia is preceded by grief and anxiety and in general by depressive moods and affects aimed against the patient by himself.”56 Because the rage associated with the termination of immobility is both intense and potentially violent, frequently traumatized people inadvertently turn this rage against themselves in the form of depression, self-hatred and self-harm. The inability to exit from the immobility response generates unbearable frustration, shame and corrosive self-hatred. The therapist must approach this Gordian knot carefully and untangle it through deliberate and careful titration, along with reliance on the experience of pendulation and a resolve to befriend intense aggressive sensations. In this way, the individual is able to move out of this “kill or be killed” counterattack bind. As one begins to open gradually to accepting one’s intense sensations, one enhances the capacity for healthy aggression, pleasure and goodness.

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

  Whether man is preserved by this sacrament from future sins?Objection 1: It seems that man is not preserved by this sacrament from future sins. For there are many that receive this sacrament worthily, who afterwards fall into sin. Now this would not happen if this sacrament were to preserve them from future sins. Consequently, it is not an effect of this sacrament to preserve from future sins. Objection 2: Further, the Eucharist is the sacrament of charity, as stated above [4627](A[4]). But charity does not seem to preserve from future sins, because it can be lost through sin after one has possessed it, as was stated in the [4628]SS, Q[24], A[11]. Therefore it seems that this sacrament does not preserve man from sin. Objection 3: Further, the origin of sin within us is “the law of sin, which is in our members,” as declared by the Apostle (Rom. 7:23). But the lessening of the fomes, which is the law of sin, is set down as an effect not of this sacrament, but rather of Baptism. Therefore preservation from sin is not an effect of this sacrament. On the contrary, our Lord said (Jn. 6:50): “This is the bread which cometh down from heaven; that if any man eat of it, he may not die”: which manifestly is not to be understood of the death of the body. Therefore it is to be understood that this sacrament preserves from spiritual death, which is through sin. I answer that, Sin is the spiritual death of the soul. Hence man is preserved from future sin in the same way as the body is preserved from future death of the body: and this happens in two ways. First of all, in so far as man’s nature is strengthened inwardly against inner decay, and so by means of food and medicine he is preserved from death. Secondly, by being guarded against outward assaults; and thus he is protected by means of arms by which he defends his body. Now this sacrament preserves man from sin in both of these ways. For, first of all, by uniting man with Christ through grace, it strengthens his spiritual life, as spiritual food and spiritual medicine, according to Ps. 103:5: “(That) bread strengthens [Vulg.: ‘may strengthen’] man’s heart.” Augustine likewise says (Tract. xxvi in Joan.): “Approach without fear; it is bread, not poison.” Secondly, inasmuch as it is a sign of Christ’s Passion, whereby the devils are conquered, it repels all the assaults of demons. Hence Chrysostom says (Hom. xlvi in Joan.): “Like lions breathing forth fire, thus do we depart from that table, being made terrible to the devil.”