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 The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self—the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards from friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved—full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption—like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself forever. Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Back online, computer games of all sorts continued to break new technological ground. Fifteen years after MUD1 went live, there were hundreds of such games, with many variant technologies, populated by thousands of users. These worlds were still difficult to use and virtually unknown outside of hard-core computing circles, but that was starting to change. In 1993, Julian Dibbell, a journalist at New York’s Village Voice, published an essay about an incident that happened in one of these worlds, a popular online hangout known as LambdaMOO. (A MOO is a MUD variant. The acronym stands for “MUD, Object Oriented,” which describes in computer terms the way in-game elements are handled by the central server.) LambdaMOO was a rich and active community of experienced MUDders—a mature and sophisticated virtual society. It was the kind of MUD that did not involve battling monsters; it was a “What do you do here?” kind of place. As such, LambdaMOO’s society tended to be dominated by players who were au fait both with the technology and with netsex. It was a vibrant place, though it was virtually unknown beyond its own community. It was only when something terrible happened there that the outside world took notice. Dibbell’s essay, “A Rape In Cyberspace,” was, for many people, the introduction both to virtual worlds and virtual sex. It was not a pleasant introduction. Dibbell chronicles the story of a LambdaMOO resident who worked out how to hack the game’s code in a way that allowed him to attribute actions to other characters within the game. He then proceeded to act out rape fantasies using members of this online community as pawns. He caused lines of text to appear on people’s screens like “Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy.” It’s unpleasant enough out of context, but probably just enough to classify the writer as a jackass rather than a psychopath. But for the Pennsylvania woman whose online persona was Moondreamer, and for the many other highly developed player/avatar pairs who were victims and witnesses of such attacks, the effect was profound. Dibbell recounts how one victim had “posttraumatic tears” streaming down her face. He describes a violation far different from merely accidentally reading an offensive passage of text, or even from experiencing a game like Custer’s Revenge. Novelists sometimes talk about how their characters become so real that they weep when their creations face death, hardship or tragedy. MUDders spent years developing and crafting their online personas, giving them such complexity, nuance and humanity that they became as close to real as any fiction could possibly get. The bond between player and avatar goes beyond that of novelist and character. Whatever similarities or differences there are between creator and creation, the avatar on some level is the player, or at least is an extension thereof. It’s what makes netsex so different from other forms of erotica, and it’s what makes virtual sexual violence unlike any other depiction or description.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. Maybe this is a time for honest, searching doubt, repentance, and a yearning for holiness in a world that has lost its bearings. The best theologians and teachers have never been afraid to admit that in the last resort, there may be Nothing out there. That is why they spoke of a God who in some sense did not exist. It is why the Buddha refused to comment on the metaphysical status of a Buddha after death, and why Confucius would not speak of the Tao. What is vital to all of the traditions, however, is that we have a duty to make the best of the only thing that remains to us— ourselves. Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies. September 11 changed my life once again. Suddenly my subject had acquired a terrible new relevance. I wish with all my heart that it had not happened in this way. I have spent most of the months since that fearful day in the United States trying to share my understanding of Islam and fundamentalism. I have spoken to senators and congressmen, to members of the State Department, and at the United Nations. I see this as a form of ministry. The September apocalypse was a revelation—an “unveiling” of a reality that had been there all the time but which we had not seen clearly enough before: we live in one world. What happens in Gaza or Afghanistan today will have repercussions in New York or London tomorrow. We in the First World cannot continue to isolate ourselves in our wealth and good fortune. If we do that, those who feel dispossessed or excluded will come to us, in a terrible form.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Instead of reaching out to the Jews in their midst, instead of trying to learn from Islam (a far more advanced civilization than their own), the Crusaders had been unable to govern their fears and resentment. They had killed, maimed, burned, desecrated, and destroyed what they were psychologically incapable of understanding. And in doing so, they had vitiated their own integrity and their own moral vision. Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead, but I realized that as long as Western people continued to accept the old distorted portrait of Islam, they would simply compound the original error. Perhaps this series could show the viewers that Islam was not the demon that haunted their imaginations, and that Muslims could be as flawed, imperfect, courageous, and idealistic as their own heroes. If we could achieve this, we would do something important. But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings.

• From Wild (2012)

  Paul reached for me and squeezed my leg, consoling me. I couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him I would cry. We’d agreed to this together, but I knew that if I turned to him and proposed we forget about divorcing and get back together instead, he would agree. I didn’t turn. Something inside of me whirred like a machine that I had started but could not stop. I put my hand down and placed it on top of Paul’s hand on my leg. Sometimes we wondered together if things would have turned out differently if one thing that was true hadn’t been true. If my mother hadn’t died, for example, would I still have cheated on him? Or if I hadn’t cheated on him, would he have cheated on me? And what if nothing had happened—no mother dying, no cheating on anyone—would we still be getting divorced anyway, having simply married too young? We couldn’t know, but we were open to knowing. As close as we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true. “Now that we’ve been through all this, we should stay together,” I half joked in the tender wake of our last heartrending, soul-baring discussion—the one we’d had to decide at last whether or not to get divorced. We were sitting on the couch in the dark of my apartment, having talked through the afternoon and into the evening, both of us too shattered by the time the sun set to get up and switch on a light. “I hope you can do that someday with someone else,” I said when he didn’t reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. “I hope you can too,” he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me. I thought of my mother. Thought of how in the last days of her life so many horrible things had happened. Small, horrible things. My mother’s whimsical, delirious babblings. The blood pooling to blacken the backs of her bedridden arms. The way she begged for something that wasn’t even mercy. For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what we don’t even have a word for. Those were the worst days, I believed at the time, and yet the moment she died I’d have given anything to have them back. One small, horrible, glorious day after the other. Maybe it would be that way with Paul as well, I thought, sitting beside him on the night we decided to divorce. Maybe once they were over, I’d want these horrible days back too.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Be my rock-brother and I’ll be your stone-wife. Remember that gumball machine outside the Ranch 99 where he skinned fish? Remember how you only wanted the green ones, the ones you said would taste like our planet, and when you got the red one, you cried? Your father fed it more quarters, but the next one was white, then yellow, then pink, then white again. The gumballs stained your palms like a crime scene, and still you asked for green. He went inside the store and exchanged half a day’s wage for more quarters, kept feeding the machine until you got your green, your planet to suck soft, to embalm in spit. This is the man I want you to remember, the one who committed himself to your hunger: his hands cradling quarters, your green mouth glowing go like a stoplight. Don’t tell me when to stop. Here’s the third story, the one you need to believe. There was a god sent to earth, looking for disciples. He walked the forest—not jungle—and told all the animals that he was starving. The snakes volunteered to steal him an egg. The birds left to hunt him a mouse. The fox skulked off to rob a neighboring chicken farm in Arkansas. Only the rabbit offered itself. It leapt straight into the starving man’s cooking fire, inviting teeth to its meat. To commemorate the rabbit, the god hung the rabbit’s bones in the sky. And that is the moon. That’s how we know all sources of light begin as sacrifice. Your father, born year of the rabbit, hated that story. He thought no god was owed flesh or fidelity. But he still expected both of me. The year we were married I asked him to get baptized. Ma says our tribe used to have as many deities as trees, and that having many gods only multiplies your losses, diversifies your debts. The moon was our priest that night. I filled a kiddie pool with water from a park fountain. He said he wanted to be baptized in his own spit. I said no man can fit inside his own mouth. Get in. On the third day, your brother removes the paper from the windows. You decide that being nocturnal is lonely, and when you check the mirror, your eyes aren’t glowing. When your brother rips away the paper, I see you in the light for the first time in days, and your skin is no closer to being bone. When you go outside to feed your yard-holes, I drag you home by your calf. You bite my hand but I stay holding you. You’ll need more than teeth to be free of me. _ The last time I talked to Ba in person was after my wedding. My belly was filling with your brother, but I wouldn’t know for another month.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Martyrol. Hieronymianum (ed. Florentini, Luc. 1668, and in Migne’s Patrol. Lat. Opp. Hieron. xi. 434 sqq.); the Martyrol. Romanum (ed. Baron. 1586), the Menolog. Graec. (ed. Urbini, 1727); De Rossi, Roller, and other works on the Roman Catacombs. II. Works. John Foxe (or Fox, d. 1587): Acts and Monuments of the Church (commonly called Book of Martyrs), first pub. at Strasburg 1554, and Basle 1559; first complete ed. fol. London 1563; 9th ed. fol. 1684, 3 vols. fol.; best ed. by G. Townsend, Lond. 1843, 8 vols. 8o.; also many abridged editions. Foxe exhibits the entire history of Christian martyrdom, including the Protestant martyrs of the middle age and the sixteenth century, with polemical reference to the church of Rome as the successor of heathen Rome in the work of blood persecution. "The Ten Roman persecutions" are related in the first volume. Kortholdt: De persecutionibus eccl. primcevae. Kiel, 1629. Gibbon: chap. xvi. Münter: Die Christen im heidnischen Hause vor Constantin. Copenh. 1828. Schumann Von Mansegg (R.C.): Die Verfolgungen der ersten christlichen Kirche. Vienna, 1821. W. Ad. Schmidt: Geschichte der Denk u. Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums. Berl. 1847. Kritzler: Die Heldenzeiten des Christenthums. Vol. i. Der Kampf mit dem Heidthum. Leipz. 1856. Fr. W. Gass: Das christl. Märtyrerthum in den ersten Jahrhunderten. 1859–60 (in Niedner’s "Zeitschrift für Hist. Theol." for 1859, pp. 323–392, and 1860, pp. 315–381). F. Overbeck: Gesetze der röm. Kaiser gegen die Christen, in his Studien zur Gesch. der alten Kirche, I. Chemn. 1875. B. Aubé: Histoire des persécutions de l’église jusqu’ à la fin des Antonins. 2nd ed. Paris 1875 (Crowned by the Académie française). By the same: Histoire des persécutions de l’église, La polémique paÿenne à la fin du II. siècle, 1878. Les Chréstiens dans l’empire romain, de la fin des Antonins au milieu du IIIe siécle (180–249), 1881. L’église et L’état dans la seconde moitié du IIIe siécle, 1886. K. Wieseler: Die Christenverfolgungen der Cäsaren, Hist. und chronol. untersucht. Gütersloh, 1878. Gerh. Uhlhorn: Der Kampf des Christenthums mit dem Heidenthum. 3d ed. Stuttgart, 1879. Engl. transl. by Smyth & Ropes, 1879. Theod. Keim: Rom und das Christenthum. Berlin, 1881. E. Renan: Marc-Aurèle. Paris, 1882, pp. 53–69. § 13. General Survey. The persecutions of Christianity during the first three centuries appear like a long tragedy: first, foreboding signs; then a succession of bloody assaults of heathenism upon the religion of the cross; amidst the dark scenes of fiendish hatred and cruelty the bright exhibitions of suffering virtue; now and then a short pause; at last a fearful and desperate struggle of the old pagan empire for life and death, ending in the abiding victory of the Christian religion. Thus this bloody baptism of the church resulted in the birth of a Christian world. It was a repetition and prolongation of the crucifixion, but followed by a resurrection.

• From Wild (2012)

  I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. I called everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some said. Yes, it was true, said others, he’d been hanging out with a girl from St. Cloud named Sue. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that this was it. I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a little boy he was. My little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life, having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work. Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids. “I can’t do this,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I can’t live without Mom. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” “We have to,” I replied, though I couldn’t believe it myself. We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep. I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. By eight o’clock we were on our way to Duluth, my brother driving our mother’s car too fast while U2’s Joshua Tree blasted out of the speakers. We listened intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the snow on the sides of the road. When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. This was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. A nurse approached us in the hallway as we walked toward the station, and before I spoke she said, “We have ice on her eyes. She wanted to donate her corneas, so we need to keep the ice—” “What?” I said with such intensity that she jumped.

• From Wild (2012)

  “We’re going to Packer Lake Lodge if you want a ride,” the woman said after she rolled down the window. My heart sank, though I thanked her and got into the back seat. I’d read about Packer Lake Lodge in my guidebook days before. I could have taken a side trail to it a day out of Sierra City, but I’d decided to pass it by when I opted to stay on the PCT. As we drove, I could feel my northward progress reversing itself—all the miles I’d toiled to gain, lost in less than an hour—and yet to be in that car was a kind of heaven. I cleared a patch in the foggy window and watched the trees blaze past. Our top speed was perhaps twenty miles an hour as we crept around bends in the road, but it still felt to me as if we were moving unaccountably fast, the land made general rather than particular, no longer including me but standing quietly off to the side. I thought about the fox. I wondered if he’d returned to the fallen tree and wondered about me. I remembered the moment after he’d disappeared into the woods and I’d called out for my mother. It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn’t have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me. 10 RANGE OF LIGHTThe mere sight of Packer Lake Lodge felt like a blow. It was a restaurant. With food. And I might as well have been a German shepherd. I could smell it as soon as I got out of the car. I thanked the couple who’d given me a ride and walked toward the little building anyway, leaving Monster on the porch before I went inside. The place was crowded with tourists, most of them people who’d rented one of the rustic cabins that surrounded the restaurant. They didn’t seem to notice the way I stared at their plates as I made my way to the counter, stacks of pancakes skirted by bacon, eggs in exquisitely scrambled heaps, or—most painful of all—cheeseburgers buried by jagged mounds of French fries. I was devastated by the sight of them. “What have you heard about the snow levels up north of here?” I asked the woman who worked the cash register. I could tell that she was the boss by the way her eyes followed the waitress as she moved about the room with a coffeepot in hand. I’d never met this woman, but I’d worked for her a thousand times. It occurred to me that I could ask her for a job for the summer and quit the PCT.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "Moreover, we may not reckon him to have perished in the flower of his age, who had grown ripe in the sight of the Lord. For I consider all to have arrived at maturity who are summoned away by death; unless, perhaps, one would contend with Him, as if He can snatch away any one before his time. This, indeed, holds true of every one; but in regard to Louis, it is yet more certain on another and more peculiar ground. For he had arrived at that age, when, by true evidences, he could prove himself a member of the body of Christ: having put forth this fruit, he was taken from us and transplanted. Yes, instead of this transient and vanishing shadow of life, he has regained the real immortality of being. "Nor can you consider yourself to have lost him, whom you will recover in the blessed resurrection in the kingdom of God. For they had both so lived and so died, that I cannot doubt but they are now with the Lord. Let us, therefore, press forward toward this goal which they have reached. There can be no doubt but that Christ will bind together both them and us in the same inseparable society, in that incomparable participation of His own glory. Beware, therefore, that you do not lament your son as lost, whom you acknowledge to be preserved by the Lord, that he may remain yours forever, who, at the pleasure of His own will, lent him to you only for a season .... "Neither do I insist upon your laying aside all grief. Nor, in the school of Christ, do we learn any such philosophy as requires us to put off that common humanity with which God has endowed us, that, being men, we should be tamed into stones.604 These considerations reach only so far as this, that you do set bounds, and, as it were, temper even your most reasonable sadness, that, having shed those tears which were due to nature and to fatherly affection, you by no means give way to senseless wailing. Nor do I by any means interfere because I am distrustful of your prudence, firmness, or high-mindedness; but only lest I might here be wanting, and come short in my duty to you. "Moreover, I have requested Melanchthon and Bucer that they would also add their letters to mine, because I entertained the hope that it would not be unacceptable that they too should afford some evidence of their good-will toward you. "Adieu, most distinguished sir, and my much-respected in the Lord. May Christ the Lord keep you and your family, and direct you all with His own Spirit, until you may arrive where Louis and Claude have gone before." CHAPTER XII.CALVIN’S SECOND SOJOURN AND LABORS AT GENEVA. 1541–1564.The sources on this and the following chapters in § 81, p. 347. § 93. The State of Geneva after the expulsion of the Reformers.

• From Bold Move

  She says that I’m not a true partner, someone she can rely on. And after eight years, she says she’s had enough. I don’t think I can change her mind, but I need to figure out how to behave differently, because I know that while I only have my family’s best interests at heart, they don’t see it that way, and that kills me.” For Ricardo, this decision between success at work and dependability for his family had been particularly painful because he often found himself choosing success at work and compromising his family life. When Ricardo’s wife finally asked for the divorce, he was crushed because in his heart he deeply loved her and fully understood why she was upset. In fact, he shared her frustrations with his own behavior! He wanted to change but didn’t know how to stop avoiding by doing what he had always done. I often find myself stuck just like Ricardo, and perhaps some of you reading this feel the same. Every day I wake up and say to myself, I will exercise this morning! Then, before I know it, Diego is up, gives me a hug and a gorgeous smile, and asks: “Mamãe, vamos brincar? ” (“Mom, let’s play?”) At this point, my heart melts and all I want is to spend every second of the rest of my life with him and any and all hope of spending my morning on a stair-climber or picking up a barbell goes out the window. I prioritize him at that moment (and all such moments), and it feels good . . . momentarily! But it also has an unpleasant whiff of avoidance to it because this choice always has me stuck in place, doing what I usually do, with forty pounds to lose and feeling physically tired and achy, none of which will get easier to fix as time goes on. Luckily, we don’t have to wait until a breaking point to identify areas of our lives where values are colliding. These areas are usually ripe with avoidance. So, take a moment to complete the reflection below and uncover where in your life you might be hitting a crossroad. Is Remaining Always Avoidance?When I am teaching the idea that sometimes we stay in situations as a form of avoidance, one question I often get from trainees is: Are you telling me that the person stuck in a domestic violence situation is avoiding? Domestic violence is a serious and multifaceted situation. I know this not only as an expert who has treated many trauma survivors over the past two decades, but also from witnessing my mom go through it for years. When it comes to situations that can be life and death, there is only one certainty: safety comes first. So, if you are reading this book and find yourself in this situation, I strongly urge you to find a provider or a close friend and to ensure you care for your safety above all else.

• From Bold Move

  So, I taught this trick to Filomena and Ted, and they were able to implement it successfully. Unfortunately, by the time we started to implement the opposite action plan for Filomena, her relationship with Ted was already fraying and, before long, Ted broke up with her. Filomena mentioned to me that she felt as if the damage to the relationship had been done and no matter how much she tried, Ted still felt wary around her. Filomena was devastated at first, often crying in my office and saying things like, “If I had just known this stuff earlier, I could have saved the relationship.” We talked a lot about the fact that our brains always want to make sense of things and come up with one conclusion or another to minimize dissonance, so it made sense that she wanted to blame herself. And she wasn’t wrong: I agreed with her that not knowing her avoidance pattern certainly made the relationship challenging. Yet I often remind my clients who find themselves in the midst of romantic turmoil that it really takes two to tango, and in this case, Ted inevitably had a role in the breakup as well. Filomena continued to work on opposite action when her fear of abandonment would arrive, including with her parents. And so it was with some delight that I recently received an email from Filomena, in which she wrote that she is now happily married with a newborn. From what she shared with me, her dating life was challenging for a while, but she was finally able to break her own avoidance pattern and came out the other side truly happy and (finally) comfortable in a romantic relationship. Oliver’s Opposite Action PlanAs for fiery Oliver, most of his reactions were triggered by feelings of anger, and he would go from zero to sixty in seconds before exploding. When it comes to anger, DBT teaches a clear plan of opposite action involving a few different methods. One method is the simplest: you can just avoid the person you are angry with until the anger passes. In other words, as soon as Oliver felt anger toward Martha for making a mistake at work, his opposite action would be to stay away from her—instead of engaging in a pointless and hurtful verbal attack—until he was no longer in amygdala hijack. Sometimes this is too hard for the client, and instead they could take a time-out, where they substitute “go shriek at so-and-so” with “take a walk around the block.” Whatever it is, I would recommend that you have a plan in place before you find yourself on the brink of exploding into anger.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE CONCEPTION OF GOD l8l tion that all who aresaved at all will enjoy an equal bliss. Purgatory was a great balancer and equalizer.) Finally, Christianity has taught that God allots suffering with wise and loving intent, tempering it according to our strength, relieving it in response to our prayer, and using it to chasten our pride, towin us from earthliness to himself, and to prepare us for heaven. This interpretation does notassert the justice of every suffering, taken by itself, but doesmaintainits loving intention. All these are powerful and comforting considerations. But they areshaken by the bulk of the unjust suffering in sight of the modern mind. These Christian ideas are largely true as long as welook at a normal village com- munity and its individuals and families. But they are jarred by mass disasters. The optimism of the age of rationalism wasshaken by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, when 30,000 people were killed together, just and unjust. TheWar has deeply affected the religious assurance of our own time, and will lessen itstill more when the ex- citement is over and theaftermath of innocent suffering becomes clear. But that impression of undeserved mass misery which the war has brought home tothe thought- less, has long been weighing on allwho understood the socialconditions ofour civilization. The sufferings of a single righteous mancould deeply move the psalmists or the poet of Job. To-day entire social classes sit inthe ashes and challenge the justice of the God who has af- flictedthem by fathering the present social system. The moral and religious problem of suffering has entered on a new stage with the awakening of the social conscious- ness and the spread of social knowledge.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I said all the things I had to say, we both fell onto the floor and sobbed. The next day, Paul moved out. Slowly we told our friends that we were splitting up. We hoped we could work it out, we said. We were not necessarily going to get divorced. First, they were in disbelief—we’d seemed so happy, they all said. Next, they were mad—not at us, but at me. One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me. Another made out with Paul. When I was hurt and jealous about this, I was told by another friend that this was exactly what I deserved: a taste of my own medicine. I couldn’t rightfully disagree, but still my heart was broken. I lay alone on our futon feeling myself almost levitate from pain. Three months into our separation, we were still in a torturous limbo. I wanted neither to get back together with Paul nor to get divorced. I wanted to be two people so I could do both. Paul was dating a smattering of women, but I was suddenly celibate. Now that I’d smashed up my marriage over sex, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. “You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she said. Within the week, I quit my waitressing job, loaded up my truck, and drove west, traveling the same route I’d take exactly one year later on my way to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. By the time I reached Montana, I knew I’d done the right thing—the wide green land visible for miles outside my windshield, the sky going on even farther. The city of Portland flickered beyond, out of sight. It would be my luscious escape, if only for a brief time. There, I’d leave my troubles behind, I thought. Instead, I only found more.

• From Bold Move

  This experience was really painful for me, and it took me months to be able to sit early in the mornings and work through this reflection and feel the pain. At first it was just raw pain and tears, like the fire that my patient Miriam referenced. Some mornings I would allow myself to cry, and some mornings I would just be angry. But slowly the intensity came down and I could really start to look behind that pain and ask myself: What value of mine would I have to not care about for this pain not to exist? I kept asking myself, Why is this still hurting so much? And I finally arrived at my answer: trust . Trust is one of my core values, and one that is really challenging for me. As an adult I understand that I was never able to trust my father. He was simply too unreliable. Of course, my wonderful mom was always there, so that has long been my model for trust. But I had also seen early in life how she couldn’t trust my father either, so trust has always felt like a precious stone that I only share with those who are closest to me. This is not uncommon for individuals who have had traumatic experiences, especially early on in life.18 So the experience with Robert hurt so much because I felt I could no longer trust him, and all the memories that are associated with this time in my life are related to a violation of trust in some form or another. So for me to have been able to say, “To hell with Robert; he’s out of line!” without any pain, I would have needed to not care about trust, and that just isn’t me. I need to trust those around me to feel safe in the world so I can function, and that is why this experience hurt so much. After identifying the value behind my pain, I was able to start healing and find a way to really consider what I would do today if I hit a similar crossroad. For some of you reading, if you were to be in my situation with Robert, trust might not have been what impacted you the most. It could have been another value, like integrity, truth, or fairness. The value that was compromised is unique to me and my views of the world, but the underlying principle is universal to all of us. For example, if you really care about growth but find yourself in a job where you are constantly underperforming or being asked to do things that you feel underutilize or stymy you, you will likely feel stress in your work life. Similarly, if you care about justice but find yourself in situations where there is constant injustice, you can expect to feel strong emotions.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  That had hit home, and I returned to my script and started again. This time, I made myself remember some of the more positive things about the convent years. I recalled the excitement of those first days in the postulantship, when I had been convinced that I had embarked on the road to holiness; the beauty of the liturgy; the kindness of some of my superiors; and the grief that I had felt when it had become clear that I must leave. I realized that the order had itself been undergoing a painful period of transition. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to feel the attraction of the ideal that had propelled me into the convent and kept me there. June had been far more satisfied with this second attempt. A final draft, with some fine-tuning and additions, took only a few weeks, and the manuscript was ready for the publishers. It had been sold at auction just a year after Sally had sat me down at her father’s desk and forced me to make a start. I had told the headmistress about the book, of course, and promised that I would confine my writing to the school holidays and weekends, so that it did not detract from my schoolwork. She had smiled and wished me luck. I see now that she probably expected the book to creep humbly into the back of the book-stores, gain a couple of kind notices in some obscure religious journals, and die an early death. That did not happen. June had sold the serial rights to a tabloid newspaper, which had also run a big interview with me, complete with photographs, in the Sunday edition. There were more profiles and photographs in some of the women’s magazines, and I had appeared on several radio and television programs. The children were agog, arriving in school each day brandishing copies of the Express and looking at me with new eyes. I was no longer just a boring teacher who nagged them about their punctuation, but had suddenly acquired celebrity status and had a kinky past. Of course, it was only a nine days’ wonder, and by the time I received my quietus from the school, the excitement had long subsided. The head had never remonstrated with me about the fuss, but she did not need to. A grim air of disapproval and reserve had made her position quite clear. This kind of notoriety was not what she expected from her staff. I myself had doubts about the wisdom of this publicity. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had been an act of restoration and self-discovery. It had redeemed the time I had spent in the religious life and set it in proper perspective. As I had unearthed more and more layers of the experience, I had felt that I was reclaiming my past.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.”

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Then we hope that the fragmented thoughts or demons or whatever is rattling around inside their heads get cleared out by morning. Side note: It’s even harder to shut down a kid at night than to shut down your word processor and forty-seven documents. I’m straying from the topic. Complaining about parenting is therapeutic, though, so thank you for listening. You can send me your bill. Prayer is a bit like resetting your soul. And just as with computers and small children, how exactly it helps can seem like a bit of a mystery. God’s ways are higher than our ways, after all. I know that when I pray, it settles and focuses my mind. It clears out some of those fragmented things—thoughts, projects, hurt, sin, emotions, challenges, plans—that rattle around in my soul. It definitely helps expel a few inner demons. Spending a few minutes in prayer refreshes us on the inside. It gives us a clean start and a new beginning. Prayer helps us process the things we have on our hearts and in our brains. In a sense, prayer is like going through those unsaved documents, deciding whether to save them or delete them or finish them, then closing them down and clearing up some headspace. There is a lot of pain, confusion, and trauma in life, but the Holy Spirit helps us work through those things. He gives us understanding into what matters and what doesn’t, what can be discarded and what we should hold on to. DEAR GOD, ARE YOU SERIOUS? Being able to process our pain, doubts, and trauma in God’s presence is part of an emotionally healthy spiritual walk. It’s also something that God-followers have done for thousands of years. Just look at the book of Psalms. David was an incredible example of someone who knew how to take things to God in prayer. When you read his psalms, you often see a progression that looks something like this: Pain: complaint, suffering, sorrowProcessing: struggling with the contradictionsPrayer: turning to God for helpProclamation: affirming faith and trust in GodPeace: settled, calm, and expectantIn other words, his prayers—just like ours—were dynamic. He learned and grew as he prayed. You don’t pray from a place of perfection. Your prayers are not carefully crafted, emotionless, self-controlled speeches to God. They come from the heart. If they don’t, they aren’t really prayer. You pray from a place of need, trust, humility, and even desperation. And as you pray through your circumstances, you find something happening on the inside. You change. You learn. You grow. And eventually, you reset. You sort through the fragmented thoughts that were holding you back. You work through the emotions that were taking so much of your focus. You find yourself once again full of faith and courage. This five-point progression isn’t a formula to follow, but rather an illustration of the dynamic nature of prayer. Let’s look at Psalm 22 as an example. 1.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can and the mind of the violator cannot. I thought I had died. Her sense of culpability mirrored my own, and my conviction that she was innocent helped me start to think I might be too. “Mr. Freeman had surely done something very wrong, but I was convinced that I had helped him to do it.” (When the rapist was freed early and found kicked to death behind the slaughterhouse, I felt a sick sense of justice.) Yet when Angelou’s in college and sleeps with a boy, there’s zero description. Kathryn Harrison’s college beau is likewise never described in any intimate way—nor her sexual reactions. Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood comes closest to the subject, but she has more erotic feelings when she buys a book: “I was tremendously excited by this act. It was the first expensive book I had ever bought with my own money.” Compare this to her impressions of the married man she drinks and makes out with in a hotel. I grew a little tired of his kisses, which did not excite me, perhaps because they were always the same. . . . I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought “easy.” Later, when in How I Grew she loses her virginity, she’s also completely without desire as she makes out with her guy in a parked car: I was wildly excited but not sexually excited. At the time, though, I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs. This led to many misunderstandings. . . . In fact, he became very educational, encouraging me to sit up and examine his stiffened organ, which to me looked quite repellent, all flushed and purplish. . . . Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing. It was as if I had been given chloroform.