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)

  I knew my mother wouldn’t be happy about it—she never wanted to have pets in the house—but I made up my mind to do anything to convince her to adopt this puppy. “I remember walking into the house, giving the puppy some water that I poured into a glass, and looking for my mother. She was in bed. When I’m thinking about it now, she was always in bed,” Eve says. “Ha, I never thought about it,” she adds, and continues. “I sat next to her in the bed and whispered, ‘Mom, I found a puppy.’” I listen to Eve and remember the dogs her grandmother mentioned before she died. Eve continues. “My mother didn’t open her eyes and just mumbled, ‘What do you mean you found it?’ “I said, ‘It followed me on the street and I felt bad leaving it there alone. I thought we could take care of this puppy and—’ “My mom stopped me; her eyes were still closed. ‘We won’t,’ she said firmly. ‘Bring it back to where you found it.’ “‘But, Mom’—I started to cry—‘I can’t. The puppy doesn’t have parents; she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. I promise you, you won’t have to do anything. I will do everything. I’ll take care of it myself. Please, Mom, please.’ “My mother opened her eyes. “‘Eve, don’t make me angry,’ she said. ‘Did you hear what I just said? Bring it back to where you found it. We won’t have dogs in this house.’” Eve looks devastated. She starts to sob. “I had no choice and took the dog outside and left it on the street. The next day I found the puppy dead across the street from our building. Someone told me that she was hit by a car. I thought it was all because she tried to follow me back home.” Eve is weeping and I try to hold back my own tears. I feel her anger and helplessness as she identifies with the abandoned puppy, who, like her mother, doesn’t have a mother, doesn’t have anyone to take care of her. That dog, which was thrown back to the street, was also like herself as a child, abandoned again and again, walking alone in the world, and hoping that someone would adopt her and transform her life. The dead dog represented all the deadness Eve carried inside her: her dead grandmother, her traumatized and emotionally dead mother, and her dead self.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  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. 6 UNWELCOME BABIES JON DOESN’T REMEMBER his sister, Jane. She died when he was only a few months old. Throughout his childhood, he heard stories about her tragic death. He knew that she had been riding her bike in the suburban neighborhood where they grew up, on her way to visit a friend, when she was hit by a car. She died right away. Jane was twelve, the oldest and the only girl in a family of five children. Each of Jon’s three older brothers has his own recollection of that morning in mid-May. His middle brother remembers the dress their mother was wearing. His third brother says he can’t forget the sound of the siren, but he isn’t sure if it was from the ambulance or the police car that came to inform them of Jane’s death. His oldest brother, Jake, swears that his mother dropped the baby, Jon himself, as she was running out the door, but their father insisted that had never happened. They all feel that their parents were never the same after Jane’s death.

• 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)

  Leonardo and I begin to piece together a picture of the context of his loss of Milo: his grandfather’s struggle with his homosexuality and his identity; his inability to mourn the loss of his illicit love; his suicide, leaving behind a devastated little boy, Jim, who believed that if his dad had only loved him enough he wouldn’t have left him. Many layers of unprocessed loss. A known secret that shelters another secret, a forbidden one. For years, Leonardo’s father kept the gift he had made for his father for his birthday, just a few days before he died. He had created a small ceramic vase in the futile hope of making his father happy for a day and keeping him alive. Jim had clung to this vase as a child, and then for the rest of his life. When Jim died, Leonardo inherited it, and he kept it on a shelf in his clothes closet. But it wasn’t only the vase that he had inherited. It was also the trauma and the losses of earlier generations, unprocessed losses that were held in his closet and in symbolic ways lived with his own belongings, until it was too hard to differentiate what was his and what wasn’t. Leonardo picks up his bag. “Maybe I’m not cursed after all,” he says as he heads to the door. “Maybe this is just a sad story with a hopeful ending.” He walks into the next session looking pleased. “I had a good week and I even met someone,” he says. “I feel encouraged.” He opens his bag. “Also, I brought something to show you.” He pulls out a small box wrapped in layers of newspaper. “I had to bring it in, just to show you how amazing this is.” There it is, a small blue ceramic vase: his father’s vase. “For years,” Leonardo says, “I imagined my father as a boy, holding in his hands this gift he made at school for his father’s birthday in his favorite color, blue. That gift that I saw so many times as a child, and that I kept in my closet after my father’s death.” Leonardo pauses and then exhales deeply in relief. “Only after our last session,” he says, “did I realize what I’ve been using it for.” He hands me the vase and I peek inside, where I see three single, mismatched cuff links. I look at Leonardo, puzzled. He explains that he stored each of them there when they lost their mate. We look at each other and Leonardo shrugs and smiles. “They’ve been waiting all these years for their loved ones to come back.” 4THE RADIOACTIVITY OF TRAUMAIn Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Ha’Shoah, is a national holiday.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Then she started to question her memory and said that it all sounded much worse than it actually was, that things were different then. “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. 6 UNWELCOME BABIES J on doesn’t remember his sister, Jane. She died when he was only a few months old. Throughout his childhood, he heard stories about her tragic death. He knew that she had been riding her bike in the suburban neighborhood where they grew up, on her way to visit a friend, when she was hit by a car. She died right away. Jane was twelve, the oldest and the only girl in a family of five children. Each of Jon’s three older brothers has his own recollection of that morning in mid-May. His middle brother remembers the dress their mother was wearing. His third brother says he can’t forget the sound of the siren, but he isn’t sure if it was from the ambulance or the police car that came to inform them of Jane’s death. His oldest brother, Jake, swears that his mother dropped the baby, Jon himself, as she was running out the door, but their father insisted that had never happened .

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

  I have learned that suppressing my feelings and obeying the code of silence demanded by the cult has been almost as harmful as the cult itself. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work on grief has been invaluable to me. I feel as though I am mourning a death-grieving for the loss of my innocence and the youth I never had. As time goes by, and I continue to cycle through the stages of grief, my soul-shattering sorrow lessens, and my searing and uncontrollable anger becomes more manageable. The support of my therapist and the love of my friends have sustained me thus far, and I feel that inner peace is within my grasp. Learning to Conquer My Polygamist Pastby Laura Chapman Laura Chapman grew up in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), well-known for its practice of polygamy and its location on the Utah/Arizona border. (FLDS has an estimated ten thousand followers. The polygamous sect split from mainstream Mormonism after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced plural marriage in 1890.) Since leaving the cult, Laura has earned two degrees and has worked in child protection, advocating for abused or neglected children. She enjoys her family, gardening, music, dance, horses, and the peace she experiences in nature. Doing extraordinary things was a driving force in my life for as long as I can remember. At the age of ten, I could make a dozen loaves of bread. At thirteen, I could cook an elaborate dinner for a family with forty members, and sew my own clothes. By the time I was seventeen, I was home-schooling eighteen second-grade students. There was a strange irony in my being a teacher-not only in my age but also in the fact that I had been pulled out of public school at eleven and taught at home. My marriage was arranged when I was eighteen. For me, extremes are strangely familiar. I was born and raised in a polygamist cult. My father and his four wives raised me in Sandy, Utah. I am the twentyfifth child in his brood of thirty-one children. My life outside of a polygamist cult began in 1991. I was twenty-eight. I left my arranged marriage of eleven years when mythirty-two-year-old husband took a sixteen-year-old girl as his second wife. I left him, the religion, and my community to begin a life in unfamiliar territory. I needed desperately to prove to myself and to others that I could be normal, even though my childhood was anything but normal. Some days I felt so free, I wanted to stand on the rooftops and declare it to the world. At other times, this much freedom terrified me. Most of all, I hung onto the belief that I was nottoo wounded to develop a more healthful existence for my five children and me. I had no parents, husband, community, or religion. I was truly floating in an existence I knew quite little about.

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

  Some cults that currently appear harmless are in fact already doing serious damage about which the general public knows nothing, damage that cult leaders cover up and deny, damage that apologists for cults consistently refuse to admit or inspect." 18 Given our experience interviewing hundreds of former cult members from dozens and dozens of different groups, we agree with that assessment. SatanismCult-watching organizations and professionals in various fields are frequently divided over the reality or incidence of Satanism, particularly the phenomenon of multigenerational ritual-abuse cults. This controversy has been hotly debated in academia, at professional conferences, and in the media. Often the general public mixes up various traditions, such as Satanism, witchcraft or Wicca, paganism, voodoo, and the occult. The public has also been besieged with "urban legends." During the so-called satanic panic of the late i98os and early'9os, some religious spokespersons, scholars, professionals, and the media perpetuated the idea that there was a vast underground satanic conspiracy, with hundreds (if not thousands) of victims of brutal abuse-or even ritualistic murders. After intensive government investigations, no conclusive evidence was found. On the other hand, there is evidence of the phenomenon of "teen dabbling," specifically in rural areas, where some adolescents become fascinated with satanic symbols and rituals. Other evidence might include the alleged satanic murders uncovered in Matamoros, Mexico; but some believe those had more to do with a huge drug-smuggling operation than any actual cult activity. Yet some groups may engage in satanic-type practices and tout related slogans or symbols. At one increasingly isolated church in the small town of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, the pastor and members were accused of "engaging in cult-like sexual activity with children and animals inside the hall of worship.... Witnesses describe using robes, pentagrams on the church floor, sex with a dog, and the sacrifice of cats. The alleged victims, suspected to number up to two dozen, include children ranging from infants to young teens-some of them the offspring of those accused."19 Though this church employed seemingly satanic practices, we have chosen not to separate satanic cults from other types of cultic groups. We believe that abuse in cults exists on a continuum. Satanic cults may be at one extreme, but they are not alone or unique in the horror or perversity of their actions. Healing the PainMany cults perpetrate violence against the human body as well as the human spirit. Control is exerted in a variety of ways: through some form of threat, such as spiritual disfavor (e.g., being told that you are displeasing God or the leader); through the withdrawal of the leader's or other members' emotional support; through group pressure to conform; through withdrawal of privileges, food, or rest; and through overt physical abuse, including confinement, paddling and birching, beatings, sexual mistreatment, and torture, sometimes resulting in death. When physical or sexual violence is used in a group, it affects all the members. Witnessing or knowing of the abuse of others produces guilt and fear, and the effect is traumatizing.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I knew just what I wanted. In a cupboard beneath Kitty’s table there was a little tin box with a pile of coins and notes in it - a portion of our wages went there every week, for us to draw on as we chose. The key to it lay mixed up with her sticks of grease-paint, in the old cigar-box in which she kept her make-up. I took this box, and tipped it up; the sticks fell out, and so did the key — and so, I saw, did something else. There had always been a sheet of coloured paper at the bottom of the box, and I had never thought to lift it. Now it had come loose and behind it was a card. I picked it up with trembling fingers, and studied it. It was creased, and stained with make-up, but I knew it at once. On the front was a picture of an oyster-smack; two girls smiled from its deck through a patina of powder and grease, and on the sail someone had inked, ‘To London’. There was more writing on the back - Kitty’s address at the Canterbury Palace, and a message: ‘I can come!!! You must do without your dresser for a few nights, though, while I make all ready ...’ It was signed: ‘Fondly, Your Nan’.It was the card that I had sent her, so long ago, before we had even moved to Brixton; and she had kept it, secretly, as if she treasured it.I held the card between my fingers for a moment; then I returned it to its box and placed the paper sheet above it, as before. Then I laid my head upon the table, and wept, again, until I could weep no more.I opened the tin box at last, and took, without counting it, all the money that lay inside - about twenty pounds, as it would turn out, and only a fraction, of course, of my total earnings of the past twelve months; but I felt so dazed and ill at that moment I could hardly imagine what I would ever need money for, again. I put the cash into an envelope, tucked the envelope into my belt, and turned to go.I hadn’t glanced about me, yet, at all; now, however, I took a last look round. One thing only caught my eye, and made me hesitate: our rail of costumes. They were all here, the suits that I had worn upon the stage at Kitty’s side - the velvet breeches, the shirts, the serge jackets, the fancy waistcoats.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  For so many years she had tried not to think, not to know; she had disconnected when she felt too much. It was as if she had been locked in a dark basement, and now we are trying to slowly turn on the lights without blinding her eyes. It is hard not to feel alone when it comes to pain. To some extent all feelings are isolated, enigmatic, and we transform them, through words, into a form that we can share with others. But words do not always capture the essence of our feelings, and in that sense, we are always alone. This is especially true when it comes to trauma and loss. In order to survive, we disconnect not only from others but also from ourselves. And we cry for the losses—of the people we love, of the life we used to have, of our old self. Mourning is a private, lonely experience. It doesn’t necessarily unify people; it often splits them apart so that they are isolated in their pain, feeling unrecognized, misunderstood, or invisible. We need another mind to help us know our own mind, to feel and digest our loss and everything that we are too anxious to connect to: our shame, rage, identification with the dead, guilt, and even envy. Dana needs me to know her suffering from the inside, unaware, though perhaps she senses, that in fact I know her feelings better than both of us realize. I don’t need to remember my own history; I am living it. I am her therapist, I am my mother’s daughter, and I am a mother myself with a daughter and a son. 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.

• 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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I’m excited when she comes to my office with Ruth, a tiny baby with a sweet face. Ruth looks at me and smiles. “Of course you are smiling.” Rachel holds her baby and speaks in a gentle tone. “You remember her voice from when you were in my belly.” She points at me. “Yes, you know that she helped your mommy have you. She made me realize that I can create a bubble of safety for you in my arms.” Rachel puts Ruth on her chest and Ruth falls asleep. She tells me that her mother chose the baby’s name. She told Rachel and Marc that this was the name she had wanted to give Rachel when she was born, a name that was written on the candle her parents used to light every Holocaust Day, but her parents strongly objected to that idea. “Ruth was a family member who was murdered at Auschwitz,” Rachel explains to me. “So when my mother wanted to give me that name, my grandparents argued that it was a bad idea. ‘There is no need to burden a baby with the name of one who died,’ my grandmother said to my parents with tears in her eyes. She looked at my grandfather, who stood there silently. My mother told me that her parents used to say that Jewish babies are the most important evidence that the Nazis didn’t win, that they didn’t destroy us. ‘Here is our next generation, right here,’ my grandmother said. ‘She should have an optimistic name.’ ” Rachel’s mother tried to convince her parents, but the more she argued, the more upset they became, and at some point Rachel’s grandfather got very angry. “A new baby should be connected to the future, not to old worlds. Our granddaughter should be associated with happiness, not with horror. What is wrong with you?” he shouted at Rachel’s mother, and left the room. “This was the most emotional my mother had ever seen him, before or after,” Rachel tells me. “He was a pretty steady, rational guy. She almost never saw him cry. She told me that when she was sad as a little girl, her father would pick her up and hug her until she could hardly breathe. Then he would look at her and ask, ‘Are you feeling better now?’ And when she nodded, he would set her back down and, without looking at each other, they would each go to their rooms. They never talked about emotions, and my mother didn’t know anything about his past. She only knew that he came from ‘there’ and that his whole family had been murdered at Auschwitz. She didn’t know how he had managed to be the only one who survived, and none of us dared to ask.” The past, Rachel and I now realize, was required to be forgotten.