Grief

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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “Before we went to sleep she made me a cup of tea and served it with a slice of the chocolate cake she had baked for me. “‘I know how much you like chocolate,’ my grandmother said, and hugged me. Then she held my shoulders, making sure I looked at her. ‘Lara, please don’t take my problems on you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be sad because bad things happened to me. Worse things happen to people. That’s life; my life isn’t so special.’ “‘You had to keep a secret for so many years, Grandma,’ I said, and hugged her as tight as I could. But she just kept nodding. ‘I didn’t keep a secret. It was something I didn’t always remember. The secret kept itself.’” “I think I found my ‘me-search,’” Lara tells me as she wipes her tears. She will go on to study the tormenting and deceptive impact of incest and sexual abuse on the next generation, those aspects that are hard to research, as they are seemingly irrational, puzzling, and unformulated experiences, but that Lara lived through in her own childhood. We both recognize that one way to face that transmission from generation to generation is to process those experiences and help others process and own them, too. Demons tend to vanish when we turn on the lights. 3SEX, SUICIDE, AND THE RIDDLE OF GRIEF“I’m cursed,” Leonardo whispers, looking straight into my eyes. “Do you know what I mean?” He then concludes decisively, “You know what I mean. Of course you do.” Leonardo started coming to see me two years earlier, right after a breakup with his partner, Milo. In the first months, he couldn’t stop crying. He said that although he knew he and Milo never got along, his pain was intolerable. Two years have passed and his agony has not diminished. He still feels paralyzed, lost. He tells me that he is not ready to meet anyone else and fears that he will remain sad forever. “Somehow I’m stuck,” he says, and we agree that at this point it seems like his grief is not just about Milo anymore. We try to understand what it is that he lost when that relationship ended. Separations are emotional deaths that we have to mourn. In breakups, we always lose more than just the person we love. We lose a life, a future, everything that we have dreamed about and hoped for. And while we know whom we have lost, we might not understand what we have lost. Leonardo and I try to figure out what it is that he keeps mourning. “I want to move on,” he says. “Milo and I were together for only a year and I have been grieving for two years already,” he says, irritated. “I wish you could program my brain and delete parts of my memory so I could forget my past and move forward.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “We were proud to be chosen to serve in that unit, teenagers who didn’t think about life or death, who wanted to be brave men, not little boys. Only now I’m thinking to myself, what is so wrong about being a boy? Now, when I’m about to have a child myself, it all comes back to me. I wake up in the middle of the night and see the man’s face—I can’t stop seeing those eyes, I can’t stop thinking about his children and remembering what I’d done.” Ben starts sobbing. “I’m not crying about myself,” he says. “I can’t fix the past. I’m crying for the injustice. I’m crying for the inhumanity. I’m crying for the children.” The tears are streaming down his face. I am aware of the intermingling of life and death, of past and future, the father he killed and his son, who is about to be born. Ben tried to fix the trauma and the humiliation of the past. He wanted to be a hero who brings home victory and repairs his grandfather’s pride, his father’s trauma, and the wounds of history. Instead he was brought right into that trauma. Instead of being only the victim he became both victim and aggressor. Killing another human killed his own soul, too. “It is time to cry,” I say, referencing his father in his dream. “There is a lot to cry for. Your father was right.” Ben nods. “I was a boy who thought he was a man. Now I’m a man who is about to have a boy. I will protect my son. You are my witness.” He wipes his eyes as I feel my own welling up. Boy soldiers don’t cry. But men, and fathers, can finally begin to mourn. 8DEAD BROTHER, DEAD SISTEROur emotional inheritance shapes our behaviors, our perceptions, our feelings, and even our memories. From a young age, we learn to follow our parents’ signals; we learn to walk around their wounds, try not to mention and absolutely not touch what mustn’t be disturbed. In our attempt to avoid their pain and our own, we blind ourselves to that which is right before our eyes. In “The Purloined Letter,” the third of Edgar Allan Poe’s three short detective stories, a letter is stolen from a woman’s boudoir. The reader doesn’t know the contents of that letter, but we know that it is secretive and forbidden. The police enter the house where they believe the letter is kept. They look everywhere, but they can’t find it. As it turns out, the letter is not hidden at all; it is in an ordinary card rack in plain sight and this confuses the police, who expect to uncover a secret truth.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The memories of the Holocaust live inside them even as they are unknown to them, and those invasive thoughts and images are often trivialized. Sometimes I learn about them only years into the therapy. When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has shaped their present lives. We identify the ways in which the past continues to play itself out in the present and how they live and relive their families’ untold stories. RACHEL’S GRANDFATHER WAS a Holocaust survivor. She mentions this briefly during our first session when I ask about her family history, but she doesn’t feel it is relevant to her current life. It certainly isn’t the reason she came to therapy. “So many things have happened in my family since. So many good things. There is nothing else to say.” Rachel smiles and apologizes. “Every family carries some trauma. This is our story, and it happened so long ago. How many years since the Second World War?” She looks at me and immediately answers, “More than seventy, I think. A long time. My grandparents have already passed away,” she says. Rachel’s grandfather was born in Budapest and he survived Auschwitz. When the Second World War ended, he immigrated to America, where he met Rachel’s grandmother, who came from a Jewish family that had escaped Europe when the war started. They fell in love, and a year later Rachel’s mother, their only child, was born. Her grandfather never talked about what happened during the war, and her mother described her childhood as a normal suburban American one. On the surface their family trauma ended when her grandfather left Europe and left the past behind. Rachel came to therapy to talk about other issues, to discuss her ambivalence about having children, a topic that was a source of tension with her husband, Marc. I am always curious to understand my patients’ life choices—why they choose to have, or not to have, sex, relationships, a family, a career. As the narrative unfolds, the gaps between what people want to have and what they can tolerate having become apparent. Why do so many people want love but can’t find it? Want a career but can’t succeed? Want to move forward but get caught in the same cycle over and over again? It is not unusual for people not to be able to handle or tolerate having what they think they want. Beneath the urge to have or not to have is usually another layer that navigates our lives.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Climbing out of love with him, I felt like a pelican trying to extract itself from an oil spill: lurching, falling, getting up, trying again. But even if the bird breaks free, its feathers remain saturated, forever marked. I realized that until the pain of loving him no longer interested me, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Why was the pain so very interesting? It felt as though the key to my soul was buried inside it. The unmatched enormity of the ache begged for attention. Taking solace in other compulsions, I made lots of lists. Lists of pros and cons. Lists of what I lost in losing him and what I would have lost if I’d kept him. Lists of what I have gained, what I have accomplished, whom I’ve dated. They meant nothing in the end, those lists, but they gave me something to do while I cried. I realized that I had to change in order to not want him. Who I had become wanted only him. I had to become someone else, yet again. This is how my former self died, how I killed her. But she did not go quietly into the night. No, she raged herself into extinction with one last blast of scorching pain. Pain to stop the pain. But perhaps masochism never heals, just changes form. Different objects, different manifestations. I feared I could not be happy without my pain. But I had to direct it outside myself now; inside I was soaked to the bone. After a while I started fucking men again—one by one. No longer obedient, I started telling them how to do it—“like this,” “like that”—and they obliged. Having been slave to the King, I was all Queen with them, spreading the word to my jesters, even as I closed my eyes and pretended they were him. Every now and then it worked. And when it worked, it was worst of all: the tears streamed down my cheeks while they thought I was in ecstasy. Is not every affair after the Great One just another state of mourning, prolonged and disguised as some form of continuity or bravery when there is neither? But I didn’t let anyone else—and a few tried—into my sacred backyard. Now a tunnel of despair, it had become hallowed ground, a battlefield, now quiet, but filled with ghosts. If those walls could talk . . . I figured no one else would ever get in there. How could they possibly earn the right? Who could ever be worthy? Who, in their right mind, would even dare? BACKDOOR BUDDHA The loss continued, intolerable and relentless, and the other men only made it worse. I needed help. Badly. Peace of mind was a distant intellectual concept; I was crying every day. I had finally suffered enough.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Freud’s thinking was influenced by his wish to understand his own grief. He suffered painful losses, including the death of his daughter Sophie from complications of the Spanish flu and the tragic death of his beloved four-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Heinele. According to his biographers, the death of his grandson was the only occasion in Freud’s life when he shed tears and described himself as depressed. At first, Freud explained that the grief process was about letting go and breaking the tie to the one we have lost. From that perspective, a healthy process is when the drive to live is stronger than the wish to reunite with the dead (what he called “the death instinct”), and so we slowly detach and loosen our “cathexis,” the energy invested in the lost person. Later, Freud developed his thinking to differentiate between mourning and melancholia. He described that in mourning the world feels poor and empty, while in melancholia, the person herself feels poor and empty. She loses interest in the outside world, she loses the capacity to love, and her self-esteem is diminished. That melancholia, according to Freud, is an unconscious process in which, instead of detaching and withdrawing the emotional investment from the lost person, the melancholic preserves and keeps that person alive inside them through identification with the dead. If the person is me and I am them, then there is no loss. Keeping the lost person caged inside denies the loss, but at the same time it holds the melancholic person forever captive to it. As a result, she loses parts of her own investment in life and vitality. Whereas Freud’s two categories of mourning and melancholia were defined as opposites, in reality both conditions take place in different ways for different people. The process of mourning is multilayered, and a certain identification with the person we have lost, either to death or in a separation, will always take place. Like Leonardo, many people feel that they have lost a part of themselves with their loved ones. Many feel that they are dying with the dead, and they struggle with melancholic identification with those whom they have lost. The question Freud and many after him kept trying to explore was what a healthy mourning was, and how much we can actually let go of our loved ones. In 1929, Freud wrote in a letter to the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of existential psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger: We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  My grandparents spoke and wrote in Arabic and listened to Arabic music at home. When we visited them in Haifa, it was clear that the Arabic music bothered my mother, and she used to whisper in Arabic, “Can you please lower it a little?” Years later, I learned that at my parents’ wedding, my mother’s uncle, the singer, was invited to the stage. He had agreed to honor the bride and the groom and dedicate one of his famous songs to them, “Simcha Gedola Halaila” (“A Big Celebration Tonight”). My mother was devastated. The last thing she wanted at her wedding was Arabic music, and she started sobbing. Her uncle was asked to stop his singing and leave the stage. He never spoke with her again. Arabic music became the soundtrack of my sessions with Ben. We listened to it together, and I listened to the songs Ben emailed me after the sessions, knowing that he needed to give me not only the narrative of his family’s life, but also the flavors, the smells, the feelings that words alone could not convey. Ben carried his family history, the ghosts of immigration from east to west. The Arabic music was one way to rework that history, to confront it, to turn the passive experience of being a victim of racist contempt into an active practice of celebration, pride, and ownership. Ben, the boy who was holding his family’s shame of speaking the wrong language, tells me about becoming a proud soldier in an elite Israeli commando brigade unit, where fluency in Arabic was an advantage. His was a counterterrorism unit; they performed undercover operations in urban Arab territories and often disguised themselves while speaking Arabic, gathering intelligence. We began to process the significance of his military service and the part it played in the interplay of victims and victors, the ways in which one who feels inferior needs to become superior in an attempt to heal a trauma. That dynamic was true on the national level as well; a country founded on the trauma of persecution raised generations of soldiers and fighters. Every war was an opportunity to repeat and repair the Jews’ past defeats and humiliations. In 1982, right before the Lebanon War, the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, explained why that war was necessary. “Believe me,” he told his cabinet, “the alternative is Treblinka and we have decided that there will not be another Treblinka.” The wish to repair, and this time to emerge from battles victorious, is based on the illusion that when we do so, we become winners. But in fact a soldier’s victory is never just a triumph.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  At first, Freud explained that the grief process was about letting go and breaking the tie to the one we have lost. From that perspective, a healthy process is when the drive to live is stronger than the wish to reunite with the dead (what he called “the death instinct”), and so we slowly detach and loosen our “cathexis,” the energy invested in the lost person. Later, Freud developed his thinking to differentiate between mourning and melancholia. He described that in mourning the world feels poor and empty, while in melancholia, the person herself feels poor and empty. She loses interest in the outside world, she loses the capacity to love, and her self-esteem is diminished. That melancholia, according to Freud, is an unconscious process in which, instead of detaching and withdrawing the emotional investment from the lost person, the melancholic preserves and keeps that person alive inside them through identification with the dead. If the person is me and I am them, then there is no loss. Keeping the lost person caged inside denies the loss, but at the same time it holds the melancholic person forever captive to it. As a result, she loses parts of her own investment in life and vitality. Whereas Freud’s two categories of mourning and melancholia were defined as opposites, in reality both conditions take place in different ways for different people. The process of mourning is multilayered, and a certain identification with the person we have lost, either to death or in a separation, will always take place. Like Leonardo, many people feel that they have lost a part of themselves with their loved ones. Many feel that they are dying with the dead, and they struggle with melancholic identification with those whom they have lost. The question Freud and many after him kept trying to explore was what a healthy mourning was, and how much we can actually let go of our loved ones. In 1929, Freud wrote in a letter to the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of existential psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger: We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. Here, Freud emphasizes that the loved one is always present, even as we slowly fill the gap of her or his absence. A part of us moves on, and another, more hidden part remains “something else,” connected and loyal to that love. Life goes on and we visit and revisit our separations and losses. We mourn them again and again, every time from a different place. We think about them, discover new layers, process from different angles. We accept them and give these losses new meanings.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She cries and I sometimes cry with her, explaining to her what she is crying about, how confused and scared she is, how it makes her feel guilty and ugly and dirty. How she had watched her parents fall apart and couldn’t do anything. How she had died with her brother. Slowly, she begins to feel less overwhelmed and starts reengaging in life. DURING THE LAST year of Dana’s therapy, I give birth to my third child, Mia. “She will have an older brother,” my mother cries when she hears the news. I know she remembers herself as a younger sister, and I find myself thinking about Dana. A few days later I get an email from Dana. “Welcome, baby girl,” she writes to my new daughter. “I’m writing to you, new sister, as a younger sister who has been brought back to life.” PART III OURSELVES Breaking the Cycle PART III IS about the secrets we keep from ourselves and about the search for the truth: the exploration of true love, genuine intimacy, real friendship, and the process of healing. It examines the journey we have to take in order to know ourselves, to work through the traumas of our past and to accept our own flaws and limitations as well as those of the people around us. Analyzing the emotional inheritance we might pass on to the next generation is a step toward breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma. This is the emotional work we do not only for those who came before us, but for our children as well. The hazard of intimacy frequently plays itself out in families. Parents communicate with their children their ambivalence about being vulnerable. They often either avoid a real intimate exchange or hide behind their wounds and create false intimacy, making their children become their caretakers. As children, we experience our parents’ fears and inherit them, perceiving the world the way our parents did, defending ourselves in similar ways. We are invested in keeping our family secrets but mostly we are trying to keep secrets from ourselves. What we can’t let ourselves know leaves us unfamiliar to ourselves, unable to know others or to be fully known by them. Part III describes the ongoing process of examining our lives, the scars of childhood trauma, and the wish to be better parents than our parents were. It examines conflicts of loyalty as they appear in romantic relationships, between parents and children, and in women’s friendships. The growing ability to integrate and process pain helps us find meaning, heal, live life to the fullest, and raise the next generation with honesty and integrity. 9 THE TASTE OF SORROW IT IS RARE that I find myself taken off guard by a patient’s secret. But I was not prepared for what I discovered after Isabella’s death. I have never met Isabella. She was my patient Naomi’s best friend.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Her story involved nightmares, too, and a memory that was processed through the body. One day in her early twenties Amy woke up from a horrible nightmare. In her dream, she had been on an airplane that crashed, and she was burning alive. Amy hadn’t known her father. He had died in an airplane crash when her mother was pregnant with her, and Amy grew up with the fact of his tragic death but never thought it had affected her life. Why was it that she had suddenly experienced his trauma as if it were her own? Why, in her dream, was she the one who was burning to death? The nightmare recurred, and for a month Amy couldn’t go to sleep without feeling that she was about to die. She started to have panic attacks, and the traumatic image of the burning plane didn’t leave her. She went to see a doctor and to her surprise found out that she was pregnant. It was Amy’s pregnancy that brought her family trauma to the surface: the trauma of her father who had died while expecting a baby, the trauma of a pregnant woman who had lost her husband, and the trauma of an unborn baby who would never meet her father. Her body knew what her mind couldn’t remember. The idea that people are connected to one another beyond the conscious mind and communicate with one another in nonverbal ways has always been a topic of psychological investigation. Unlike in popular culture, psychologists do not attribute those aspects of our minds to magical thinking or to supernatural phenomena, but to a basic concept: the unconscious. Unconscious communication is the idea that one person can communicate with another without passing through consciousness and without intention or even awareness on either person’s part. The implications of this are profound—we are interconnected in ways we don’t fully recognize and cannot control, and we know more about one another than we are consciously aware of. Amy lost that pregnancy and for the first time got in touch with the grief she carried underneath: mourning a baby never born, a father never met. As it had with Noah, unprocessed family tragedy kept Amy unconsciously connected to the past, identified with the dead, whom she had never known. Unburying their family traumas, processing the losses and the profound impact those losses had on their lives, allowed each of them to untie their invisible bond to the past and free themselves to create their own future. PART III OURSELVES Breaking the Cycle P art III is about the secrets we keep from ourselves and about the search for the truth: the exploration of true love, genuine intimacy, real friendship, and the process of healing.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  And I witness and identify with my mother and with Dana—a dead sister to a dead brother. All of those roles—some more conscious, some less so—accompany us on our journey. “In some ways, we mourn forever,” I say. My words are an emotional reminder of the fact that the process of loss continues across decades and generations, and that my children and I live with that unprocessed loss, which my mother, still alive today, survived more than sixty years earlier. That grief lives inside each of us, and in that sense, it is part of our family’s heritage. DANA REMEMBERS THE moment vividly. It was just a few days before summer break. Although everyone had showed up for class, it was clear that even the teachers had given up on school. The kids were planning the end-of-the-year party when there was a knock on the classroom door. My own mother was sitting near the dining room table, doing her homework, staring at her notebook. She was an excellent student and always finished her homework on time. Suddenly she heard a scream. It was her mother’s voice, sounding like a wounded animal. Dana was gazing out the window when she heard the knock. The teacher went to open the door, and Dana saw the nurse whispering something in the teacher’s ear. They both seemed serious and then the teacher said, “Dana Goren, the nurse needs you in her office.” My mother heard her own mother yelling, sobbing, screaming, “My son, where is my son? Bring me back my son.” The whole neighborhood heard her and people came over and gathered in the house, crying and praying to God that this was all a big mistake. Suddenly, her mother was lying on the floor. Dana walked silently with the nurse to her office, and as the door opened she saw her parents. They asked her to sit next to them. “From there I don’t remember much. I remember that I didn’t really understand what was going on. Everyone was upset and I was invisible. I knew that something terrible had happened.” Dana is crying. I cry with her, and it feels as if this is the first time I have heard something so terrible, so painful, so devastating. It is the first time I have had to think about a younger sister losing her brother, and, in so many ways, it is indeed the first time I have allowed myself to imagine the unimaginable. Like my mother, I had never let myself think about that experience, to live through it or to feel it. Dana took me to a place where a family secret was buried. Not remembering allows us to keep things “far from home” and to avoid wading into territory that might otherwise be too dangerous. I went there with Dana without fully realizing where I was going, silently following her to visit a hidden grave. Dana weeps for days, for months.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It isn’t unusual for therapists to feel that we know our patients’ friends, lovers, and family. In some ways, we accompany those people from afar, as if they were characters in a beloved book. We will never meet them but we know them intimately and have feelings for them. We get attached to the people in our patients’ lives; we follow their stories; we watch them change with our patients and see their relationships develop or sometimes end. Naomi has been in therapy with me for three years, and that is how I have come to know Isabella, who has been her best friend since childhood. Both of them grew up as only children, and in some ways they have been sisters to each other. Naomi takes a tissue from the box on the side table. She is shaken. She tells me that Isabella has just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and that the doctors don’t know yet how bad it is or if it’s treatable. We are both silent. Isabella gave birth only a few months earlier. She always wanted a big family, and when she learned that she carried BRCA1, the so-called breast cancer gene, she and her husband decided to rush to have another child. Then she would have the surgery that she believed would save her life, a double mastectomy. “Now it’s too late,” Naomi says quietly and immediately adds, “But Isabella is brave. If anyone can make it, she can.” I recognize the way Naomi comforts herself, using her idealization of Isabella. Naomi and Isabella met when they were nine years old and both joined a musical theater group after school in the small town where they grew up. “Isabella was one of those girls you couldn’t miss,” Naomi told me in one of our first sessions. “She was beautiful even as a little girl and behaved as if she knew she was talented and attractive and didn’t need others for reassurance. We all wanted to be close to her, tried to be her friends, wished to be her.” In fourth grade, the musical theater group performed Aladdin, and Isabella got the lead role of Jasmine. “No one was surprised,” Naomi said, amused but also a bit annoyed. “Isabella wasn’t only talented; even as a young girl, she, like Jasmine, was a princess who believed in love and fought against injustices. All of us were envious of her freedom to express her opinions; she wasn’t afraid of adults and didn’t obey authority.” Isabella refused to accept the lead role.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn’t mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...’She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.’ She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn’t matter that we weren’t lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx’ - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don’t have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.’ Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,’ she said again, ‘I was hers...’She grew silent.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She went through radiation treatment and chemotherapy and was in a short remission, and then the cancer came back. She suffered through more rounds of chemo but only became sicker and sicker. Sara was fourteen years old when her mother died. “My mother, like me, was the oldest of four children and the only girl. She was her mother’s main caretaker and a responsible and devoted daughter. She told me that for months her mother would lie in bed all day with a high fever, and she would try to help, bringing her ice and wet towels to control the fever. But nothing worked. As time passed the fevers started earlier in the day and lasted all night. My grandfather moved to sleep in the living room; my mother would wake up in the middle of the night to check on her mother and would run home after school to see if she needed anything. “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  A couple of months later she was dead.” I can feel my heart beat as he continues. “She was the love of my life, but strangely, ever since she died I find myself thinking I just made her up, that she never actually existed. Do you know what I mean?” He looks at me, and I can see the tears in his eyes—and feel tears building up in my own. “Love needs a witness,” I say. “I know what you mean.” I’m thinking about Naomi and her devoted witnessing of Isabella’s life. I’m thinking of everything I know that this man doesn’t realize. I’m thinking of the major role this man played in Isabella’s life and of his painful loss. So many invisible characters, so many secrets. I decide to refer him to another therapist. He deserves his own separate treatment, and Naomi deserves my loyalty. I want to cherish her Isabella and not confuse her with the Isabella of the man I’ve just met. I am left stunned to process my own feelings, holding more secrets than ever. Is this the secret Isabella wanted to share with Naomi, or did Naomi know this and keep it as a secret from me? I may never know. I’m reminded of the enigma of the human mind, questioning whether we can ever fully know another person’s pain. 10 THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE ONE SNOWY DAY, Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly, “Like you, I am not used to this weather.” I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an explanation. “I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues, almost whispering. We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different languages—one innocent, the other dangerous. “So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?” That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.” He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows. “It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me. Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation in Italy.” How does he know that?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We tend to assume that what we can see must be known to us, but in fact, so much of what we don’t know about ourselves lies in the familiar, sometimes even in the obvious. Often we realize that it is in fact right before our eyes, and still we can’t see it. When I meet my patient Dana for the first time, I don’t know that her family traumas touch my own. My family trauma is unveiled and brought to life in the space between us. One ghost awakens another, and without awareness that brings us to new places. My mother’s older brother drowned in the sea when he was fourteen years old and she was only ten. In our family this was not a secret, but it was something we never talked about. We all knew that my mother was unable to speak about that part of her childhood. We understood that for her, remembering was a form of living through something that she couldn’t live through. The ten-year-old girl that she was had broken into pieces and never recovered. A part of her was gone with him, and only a picture in my grandparents’ living room hung as a reminder that many years ago, something was different. We, her children, were vigilant, trying never to touch what was clearly an open wound, and what became a sensitive spot for all of us. Once in a while, when someone whistled on the street, we all stopped breathing, waiting for my mother to briefly sigh, “My brother Eli,” her voice turning into that of a little girl. “He knew how to whistle, and his were absolutely the loudest.” Then she would pause for a moment and change the subject. In our attempt to protect the people we love from pain, we manage to keep those memories, stories, and facts forgotten, dissociated, hidden in our own minds. We know, and still we do not remember. Our unconscious minds are always loyal to our loved ones and to the unspeakable fact within their souls. So, while something familiar lives inside us, we treat it as a stranger within. Of course I knew that my mother had lost her brother. Of course I remembered every detail that I had ever learned. At the same time, I didn’t know and never remembered. That part of my mother’s childhood lived inside me in an isolated capsule, unintegrated with everything else, and when my patient Dana enters my office for the first time and tells me about her dead brother, I look at her tears and don’t remember, don’t realize in that moment, that she is my own mother who fell apart. I just know I can’t breathe. Dana tells me she wants to start therapy. “But it’s not about my dead brother. I’m just too emotional and I need to learn how to control my emotions,” she says.

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

  We were all urged to give our babies to "Ma" (Joyce's spiritual name). We were told that these children would eventually be Ma's successors. All this was handled discreetly through "the girls," a group of women who took personal care of Joyce and handled her dirty work. When I was six months pregnant with our first child, I was targeted. The girls worked on Harryfirst and had him work on me. After two months of hell, I finally agreed to their plan. I remember the precise moment when the switch flipped: "There is nothing greater that I could do for my child than give her to the divine mother." Four of us gave our first child to this woman. She raised them as twins, like two matched sets of dolls. Joyce assured me that I would be significantly involved in my daughter's care. As it turned out, I got to watch all the children sleep a few hours a night, four nights a week. Near the end of the first year, I was thrown out of the nursery after an argument with Joyce's tyrannical teenage daughter. Shortly after that, I left Kashi Ranch and joined Harry, who had left five months earlier. I did not take my daughter with me, though I desperately wanted to. I had begun to see a rather dark side of Joyce, but I couldn't give her up: she was still my guru, my god. I had to truly believe this to leave my daughter with her. Harry and I moved back to Colorado and started a new life. Six months later, I got pregnant. When I gave birth to our first son, I learned how it felt to actually keep my own child. It was such a healing experience to love and nurture my son, yet it was so disturbing to think about my daughter. How could I have done this? Two years passed; trying desperately to replace my daughter, I became pregnant with our second son. For years I endured the deepest grief known to a woman: a longing for her child. Finally, I got up the courage to visit the Ranch to see my daughter. My little girl, Ganga, was six years old on my first trip back. She was so beautiful and full of life, and we connected right away, but I had to be careful because she thought Ma was her mother. Seeing her was both relief and torture. I wanted her back in my life, but I didn't want to move back to the Ranch and surrender to Ma again. For four months, Joyce and her cohorts worked on Harry and me to move back there. Finally, I hit my,limit; something snapped. I was breaking through the cult mind-set: I didn't have to accept Joyce's reality anymore. But what in hell was I going to do about Ganga? . I knew that I desperately needed good professional help.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved...I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away.‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.But before she could reach it, I called her name.I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’‘You are!’

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

  Pride, shame, guilt, fear, and love tend to work in concert to prevent members from acting in their own interests sooner. Once they do leave, they may have to deal with the awful realization that they were tricked, fooled, and exploited by the actual group or leader they idealized. Admitting that is most difficult, but it can be a great relief. Allowing Yourself to GrieveAfter losing your group, your sense of belonging, your state of innocence, your feelings of pride, your belief system, and your family and friends, is it any wonder that you may feel a profound sadness? Unsettling questions might arise: "If I'm so glad to be out of the group, why do I miss it?" or "How can I weep for the loss of something so horrid?" The worst thing to do in the face of such enormous loss is to deny it or push it aside. Remember this: there was nothing wrong with your commitment. What was wrong was that your commitment was turned against you, betrayed, and exploited. Your mourning is for you as much as it is for your group. Your grief is justified and righteous, and your healing will be swifter if you allow yourself to feel it. Also, there must have been good moments, good people, and good feelings in the cult, and it is normal to mourn those losses, too. But do not let your grief push you back into the group or into another abusive situation. The good that may have existed in that situation is outweighed and overshadowed by the lack of freedom, betrayal, exploitation, or abuse you experienced or witnessed. Let yourself grieve; then, move on to integrate the experience and rebuild your life ... your own life. The Specter of BoredomMore than one ex-member commenting about life in a cult has said, "At least it wasn't boring!" Indeed, the highs and lows of cult life produce memories that often are savored surreptitiously by former members. As cruel as a leader may have been, or as challenging as the tasks were, they often provided excitement, pleasure, or a sense of accomplishment. The emotional contortions, mystical journeys, and exotic pilgrimages may have spawned some unforgettable experiences. Hardships and challenges catapult life out of the ordinary. As such, leaving a cult and coming into the mundane world (most notably with the emotional baggage of the cult experience) may produce a sense of letdown, boredom, or ennui. Dissatisfaction, hopelessness, helplessness, fatigue and lethargy, vague longings, and a pinch of anger are the.ingredients of boredom and ennui. The antidote is to acknowledge the things in daily life that now give you pleasure: for example, being able to sleep late occasionally, choosing your own foods, choosing your own friends, or not having to take orders. As you recover from your sense of loss, new discoveries, new pleasures, new friends, new experiences, and new realizations will add meaning to your life.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In studying the intergenerational transmission of trauma, clinicians investigate how our ancestors’ trauma is passed down as an emotional inheritance, leaving a trace in our minds and in those of future generations. Emotional Inheritance is about silenced experiences that belong not only to us but to our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and about the ways they impact our lives. It is these secrets that often keep us from living to our full potential. They affect our mental and physical health, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts. This book will introduce the ties connecting past, present, and future and ask: how do we move forward? From a very young age, my siblings and I learned to recognize what wasn’t acceptable to talk about. We never asked about death. We tried not to mention sex, and it was better not to be too sad, too angry or disappointed, and absolutely not too loud. My parents didn’t burden us with unhappiness, and they believed in optimism. When they described their childhoods, they were painted in beautiful colors, hiding trauma, poverty, and the pain of racism and immigration. Both my parents were young children when their families left everything behind and emigrated to Israel, my father from Iran and my mother from Syria. Both grew up with six siblings in poor neighborhoods and struggled not only with poverty but also with the prejudice that came with being from an ethnic group considered inferior in Israel in the 1950s. I knew that my father had two sisters who got sick and died when they were toddlers, before he was born, and that as a baby he was very ill himself and almost didn’t survive. His father, my grandfather, who was blind from birth, needed my father to go to work with him, to sell newspapers on the street. As a child I was aware that my father hadn’t gone to school and had worked to support his family since he was seven years old. He taught me how to work hard, as he longed for me to get an education that he could never afford for himself. Like my father, my mother had also struggled as a baby with life-threatening illness. She had lost her oldest brother when she was ten years old, an enormous trauma for the whole family. My mother didn’t have many childhood memories and therefore those are unknown to me. I’m not sure my parents ever realized how similar their histories were, how their bond was silently tied with illness, poverty, early loss, and shame.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Sara was fourteen years old when her mother died. “My mother, like me, was the oldest of four children and the only girl. She was her mother’s main caretaker and a responsible and devoted daughter. She told me that for months her mother would lie in bed all day with a high fever, and she would try to help, bringing her ice and wet towels to control the fever. But nothing worked. As time passed the fevers started earlier in the day and lasted all night. My grandfather moved to sleep in the living room; my mother would wake up in the middle of the night to check on her mother and would run home after school to see if she needed anything. “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it. She thought that if she stayed in bed with her mother, she could keep her alive; that if she made sure she synchronized her breaths with her mother’s, they would breathe together forever. On Sara’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took seven deep breaths, each of them sounding like a sigh, and then one last breath.