Guilt

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)

  She greets me with a shy smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch. Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the eyes of a young girl, she seems lost. I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her mother might never come. I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at times she seems flat. Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense emotion, and she lapses into long silences. I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control, and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it might take a while for her to look at me or say anything. “I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week. Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe way to communicate. “When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said ‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe a chat room where they share information and give each other advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles but seems sadder than ever. She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.” She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.” Eve takes a breath, as if she is trying to calm herself, and then adds with a smile, “Josh thinks SoulCycle can make money from selling an ‘alibi package,’ where people can buy false memberships at a discount price.” I smile back, even as I know that none of this is funny. There is so much confusion, guilt, and fear in her witty way of telling me things. Suddenly she is fully present and I feel the intensity of her pain.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I realize that the beginning of Jenny’s life might feel like the end of Jon’s life, in the same way that the beginning of his life was the end of his sister Jane’s life. “When one is born, the other dies,” I say, almost whispering, and Jon raises his head to look at me. “That’s how it feels.” He nods. “But it’s wrong, I know. There should be enough room for everyone.” I feel a wave of sadness. Is it possible that in Jon’s mind only one of them could stay alive? Does he believe that Jane died because he was born? Is this the hidden narrative of his family? “I’m here, in therapy, because I feel guilty,” he says. “And I’m devastated by the idea that my daughter is now having the same experience that I had as a child. I’m worried that like me, she now has a sad parent who can’t function. I don’t want to be like my mother.” I’m curious to hear more about his mother. I imagine her sadness, her guilt, her emotional withdrawal. Jon tells me that his mother died about five years ago and that his father died a year after that. “Both of my parents have died, and now I have no one to ask about my childhood.” “Do you have any memories at all?” I ask. Jon hesitates. He thinks for a long moment, then says, “I remember the porch of our house. I remember the entrance. I would come home from school and it was dark and I couldn’t tell if anyone was home. I never liked that house.” “There are no people in this memory, did you notice?” I ask. “We were four boys but I mostly grew up alone,” he answers. “My brothers were older, and they left home one after the other. I left home relatively late, when I was in my mid-twenties. It’s like I felt responsible for my parents and had to stay with them. And then, when my mother got sick I took care of her. I remember the last few days of her life, when she was in the hospital. It felt like she was waiting for death. I would sit next to her bed for hours, and it was the first time I heard her talking about Jane. It sounded like she couldn’t wait to reunite with her.” “What did she say to you?” I ask. “It wasn’t me she was talking to,” Jon clarifies. “I sat there but she ignored me and kept talking, maybe to herself, or maybe to Jane. I’m not sure, but it was okay,” he says nonchalantly, “I didn’t mind that Mom ignored me.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Like many people, Alice struggles with the feelings that her inability to get pregnant might be a sign that she is not supposed to have a baby, that she doesn’t deserve it, and that she won’t be a good mother. She tries to push those painful feelings aside. She sees herself as damaged with bad genes and defends against her disappointment. While disappointed in herself, she is preoccupied with the ways she disappoints others, especially, as I come to learn, the surrogate mother . “I feel like she wants me to be involved in this process but I constantly forget to call her. I feel guilty that I don’t care about her or the baby. I’ve heard that some people talk with their surrogate every few days. I call her only once in a while. What am I supposed to ask her? How is she feeling? Sure, I can do that, but it would be fake. I don’t really care to hear the details about how she is doing. The most difficult decision I have to make now is whether I should be there when she gives birth. I mean in the room,” she clarifies. “What do you think?” “I think it’s hard to have someone else carry and give birth to your baby while making believe that it’s only easy and happy. It evokes a lot of feelings, positive and negative. It can be insulting and disappointing,” I say. “Exactly,” Alice agrees. “Finally someone understands. People don’t get it. They say how happy they are for me and how exciting it is that we will have a baby soon, as if it’s all good. A friend told me the other day, ‘The minute you have the baby, you don’t remember how it came into the world.’ What nonsense.” Alice sounds angry. “People are so stupid, or maybe they just feel bad for me and try to console me. But that’s dishonest and it makes me feel totally invisible. Like they don’t see what I’m going through. Also, I feel absolutely weird about being in the room with her when she gives birth. I wouldn’t want some woman to be there, looking between my legs, if I were giving birth. I want to give her privacy. I don’t know. How do you think she feels? What do other people do?” I believe Alice is afraid that it might be too painful for her to witness another woman giving birth to her daughter. “I think you are worried about what you might feel there, in the delivery room,” I say. “I’ll be an outsider,” Alice states. She is silent for a moment and then adds, “Now I understand how fathers feel. They don’t carry babies inside them, they don’t give birth to them, they don’t breastfeed them. Nothing.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control, and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it might take a while for her to look at me or say anything. “I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week. Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe way to communicate. “When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said ‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe a chat room where they share information and give each other advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles but seems sadder than ever. She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.” She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.” Eve takes a breath, as if she is trying to calm herself, and then adds with a smile, “Josh thinks SoulCycle can make money from selling an ‘alibi package,’ where people can buy false memberships at a discount price.” I smile back, even as I know that none of this is funny. There is so much confusion, guilt, and fear in her witty way of telling me things. Suddenly she is fully present and I feel the intensity of her pain. She is alive, I think, and I wonder out loud if she wants to say more about her love affair. During our first session Eve told me that she was married and had two children. Her daughter had just turned twelve and her son was nine. She told me she had decided to start therapy because something terrible had happened, something that made her realize she needed help. Then she told me about Josh. Eve spends a few evenings a week in Josh’s office. Josh is a creature of habit and they have a routine: first they have sex, then they order food, and when they have finished eating he drives her home. Eve tells me about their sex, first hesitantly and then in detail.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  That dynamic revived the original family she had lost as a child but was also a rehearsal for the family she was about to have. “Art and I had a little fight about it this weekend,” she says, and I am aware that it’s the first time I’ve heard of them having a conflict. “I think I told you, a long time ago, when I told my father about our infertility and the IVF and everything, he offered to pay some of the bills. I was shocked and immediately said no. I was worried that he wanted to bribe me and I didn’t want him to control me. So even though we didn’t have the money, we took a loan from the bank instead. But my father didn’t give up. He kept saying that he wanted to be part of this process. I told him I’d think about it but I never got back to him.” “Like in your childhood.” I cut her off, and she nods. “This weekend, Art and I talked about my childhood. I told him that in therapy I realized that I always dismissed my father’s attempts to be close to me. I just didn’t trust him. I told Art that I see things a little differently now. He understood what I was saying but he said that I still don’t let my father into my life and that when he tries to give me something, I reject him.” Alice smiles. “You know how Art speaks like a parent sometimes? He is smart that way.” I hear her slight ambivalence about Art’s parental position and I smile and nod. Alice laughs. “I know,” she says. “He can be annoying the way parents are sometimes. He argued that parents feel good just being able to give their child something she needs, and that it’s not always just a power move, the way I usually interpret it. He said that financial support is one way for parents to express their love. He talked about love languages and how each person has their own way of showing love, some through words and some through actions, and that one way isn’t better than another. “I started to raise my voice and said that my father’s actions are not something he should be proud of. He cheated on my mother as a way to express his unhappiness, which I don’t respect. I said that I’d rather he express his feelings in words, not in actions. Art said that I’m totally wrong and that, in fact, it’s the act of loving that counts, not just the words or the feeling. He argued that people are truthful when their words and their actions are synchronized, and that my father’s act of betrayal was awful because his words and actions contradicted each other. But that doesn’t mean he is not allowed to try to repair it with a loving act.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Some kings, however, notably Louis XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV, fretted about committing a double adultery and, from the standpoint of mortal sin, would have preferred unmarried mistresses, thereby halving their carnal transgressions. Louis XIV was content with single Louise de La Vallière for seven years—during which time she scandalously provided him with four children. When he fell for the very married Athénaïs de Montespan—who provided him with seven—he grew more worried about the salvation of his soul. So worried, in fact, that after the queen died he secretly married the formidable old virgin Madame de Maintenon to enjoy sex without guilt. In the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Louis XV, who didn’t seem horribly concerned about betraying his own wife, suffered for the sin of bedding another man’s wife, Madame de Pompadour. His pangs of conscience were especially keen during Lent, the time to weigh one’s trespasses throughout the preceding year. But Louis had no qualms about marrying off his final mistress, the ravishing prostitute Jeanne Becu, to an impoverished nobleman to raise her status. Louis had the taverns and brothels of France searched for her pimp’s brother, the comte du Barry. At the altar, the man was given a bag of gold, a pension for life, and a horse to ride away on. This respectable married woman, now a countess, could be presented at court despite the sneers behind painted fans. The phony marriage would come back to haunt the lovers, however. Four years later, in 1773, the ailing and now widowed monarch considered marrying his favorite and so dying in a state of sanctified grace as had his great-grandfather Louis XIV with Madame de Maintenon. For her part, Madame du Barry was ecstatic. After suffering constant humiliation at court, she saw herself as queen of France before whom all her enemies would have to scrape and bow. But then it was remembered that she had a husband of sorts, drinking somewhere, who about that time sent word to the king that he would make an embarrassing appearance at Versailles unless sufficiently reimbursed. He was speedily paid off with several thousand livres and made a knight of the Order of St. Louis—a medal given for outstanding merit, though in this case outstanding blackmail. All thoughts of marriage were dropped. In the tenth century B.C., King David rid himself of Bathsheba’s inconvenient husband Uriah the Hittite by sending him into the front lines of battle. By the seventeenth century, kings had adopted a slightly more humane solution—exiling the husband to foreign parts under the cover of a diplomatic mission. Such was the case of Roger Palmer, the husband of Charles II’s Barbara, Lady Castlemaine. Roger trudged grudgingly about the courts of Europe on Charles’s orders. He was yanked back whenever Barbara was about to give birth to a royal bastard, and he was expected to hover solicitously until after the birth as if the child were his.

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

  Ex-cultists need to know that their reactions usually are related to cultic suggestions, practices, and manipulations, and to their actual separation from the cult."3 Treatment of former cult members might involve the following: • An educational program about mechanisms of influence and control typically used in cults, and the power of those persuasive efforts • Counseling sessions focusing on adjustment difficulties in relationships, careers, and so on • Treatment of post-traumatic symptoms and complications • Treatment of any preexisting psychological or emotional difficulties • Medication for symptomatic relief of anxiety or depression, if necessary. The ability to see through recruitment ploys and tactics, understand the use of thought reform and manipulation, and dispel the magical thinking of the group is an important prerequisite to effective therapy. A client can gain these abilities through an exit-counseling session in an organized workshop with other former members, or in private consultation with an exit counselor. Even if the therapist is quite familiar with the cult in question, it may be less expensive, easier, and faster for the client to participate in an exit-counseling session or use the in-house services of a rehabilitation center (this option is the focus of the next case illustration). The clinician may find it helpful to explore with the former member the series of questions found at the end of Chapters 4 and 6. If the client is able to consider and answer those questions, it indicates an understanding and acceptance of the cult experience. Even so, the clinician is in an important position to normalize the former member's confusion, emotional disturbances, identity issues, and cognitive distortions by helping her consider those symptoms as the consequence of a coordinated thought-reform program rather than an indication of psychopathology. Because former cult members are particularly vulnerable to authority figures, the clinician's stance can either enhance recovery or, by pathologizing the symptoms, increase the client's discomfort and possibly produce iatrogenic damage, as happened to Jessie. It is particularly helpful to assist the former member in objectively exploring any vulnerabilities that may have existed prior to encountering the cult or abusive partner. This exploration will help the client understand how the cult's persuasive and controlling aspects exploited those vulnerabilities. This understanding will help reduce the client's guilt and shame while promoting insight and self-acceptance. Therapists can help clients work through such major adjustment issues as these: • Emotional volatility • Dissociative symptoms • Depression • Loneliness • Guilt • Indecisiveness • Difficulty communicating • Fear of retribution (spiritual or physical) • Spiritual, philosophical, or ideological void • Conflicts with family [or friends]' The therapist must take an active stance in the therapeutic process. The client's normal thoughts and feelings have been reinterpreted and/or suppressed by the group or relationship, perhaps for many years. The former cult member in therapy needs active feedback from the therapist in order to unravel cultinstilled distortions and beliefs and their residuals.

• From Less (2017)

  Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled, meals had to be delayed; liquor had to be bought, as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet’s to make, and it was as often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house; the habit, the habit, the habit; the morning coffee and books and poetry, the silence until noon. Could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could, he always could; it was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired; but a morning walk meant work undone, and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit, help the habit; lay out the coffee and poetry; keep the silence; smile when he walked sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Taking nothing personally. And did you sometimes leave an art book around with a thought that it would be the key to his mind? And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained. Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you’d never met but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better. Life with doubt. Doubt in the morning, with the oil beading on a cup of coffee. Doubt in the pee break, not catching his eye. Doubt in the sound of the front door opening and closing—a restless walk, no good-bye—and in the return. Doubt in the slow sound of typewriter keys. Doubt at lunchtime, taken in his room. Doubt vanishing in the afternoon like the fog. Doubt driven away. Doubt forgotten. Four in the morning, feeling him stirring awake, knowing he is staring at the darkness, at Doubt. Life with Doubt: A Memoir. What made it happen? What made it not happen? Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding. Was it worth it? Luck in days of endless golden words. Luck in checks in the mail. Luck in prize ceremonies and trips to Rome and London. Luck in tuxedos and hands secretly held beside the mayor or the governor or, one time, the president.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I started to raise my voice and said that my father’s actions are not something he should be proud of. He cheated on my mother as a way to express his unhappiness, which I don’t respect. I said that I’d rather he express his feelings in words, not in actions. Art said that I’m totally wrong and that, in fact, it’s the act of loving that counts, not just the words or the feeling. He argued that people are truthful when their words and their actions are synchronized, and that my father’s act of betrayal was awful because his words and actions contradicted each other. But that doesn’t mean he is not allowed to try to repair it with a loving act. Art thinks my father is trying to give me money as a way to tell me that he wants to make up for everything he did wrong, to find a way to be a father to me and a grandfather to our daughter, and that my rejection is a way to control him and not the other way around. “Honestly, I never thought about it that way. I never thought that by refusing to accept money from my father I control him and make sure he isn’t too close to me. It reminded me of something you said about how money and sex are areas that people are most dishonest and hypocritical about. I mean, my father supported my mother and me financially all those years. I never thanked him, even though I knew he wasn’t wealthy and therefore had to sacrifice. I didn’t thank him for the gifts he sent me, not for the summer camps or the college tuition he paid, not for the big trip I took after I graduated. I didn’t want to feel that I needed him or to give him that power over us. I felt that it was his responsibility to pay. The truth is that sometimes I felt that I was doing him a favor by letting him give me money, as if it was something I gave him and not the other way around. Now I want to do it differently, to be able to give him something by accepting his money and to feel appreciative for what he gives me. What do you think, Galit, does it make sense to accept his offer?” I think about the betrayal of her mother, wondering if Alice is aware that it was her conflict of loyalty that prevented her from thanking her father for anything he gave her. If she let herself know that she missed her father, that she needed him, she might be breaking her mother’s heart again. She had to make herself forget about her father. Now she is asking for my permission to let him in and to forgive him.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I feel like she wants me to be involved in this process but I constantly forget to call her. I feel guilty that I don’t care about her or the baby. I’ve heard that some people talk with their surrogate every few days. I call her only once in a while. What am I supposed to ask her? How is she feeling? Sure, I can do that, but it would be fake. I don’t really care to hear the details about how she is doing. The most difficult decision I have to make now is whether I should be there when she gives birth. I mean in the room,” she clarifies. “What do you think?” “I think it’s hard to have someone else carry and give birth to your baby while making believe that it’s only easy and happy. It evokes a lot of feelings, positive and negative. It can be insulting and disappointing,” I say. “Exactly,” Alice agrees. “Finally someone understands. People don’t get it. They say how happy they are for me and how exciting it is that we will have a baby soon, as if it’s all good. A friend told me the other day, ‘The minute you have the baby, you don’t remember how it came into the world.’ What nonsense.” Alice sounds angry. “People are so stupid, or maybe they just feel bad for me and try to console me. But that’s dishonest and it makes me feel totally invisible. Like they don’t see what I’m going through. Also, I feel absolutely weird about being in the room with her when she gives birth. I wouldn’t want some woman to be there, looking between my legs, if I were giving birth. I want to give her privacy. I don’t know. How do you think she feels? What do other people do?” I believe Alice is afraid that it might be too painful for her to witness another woman giving birth to her daughter. “I think you are worried about what you might feel there, in the delivery room,” I say. “I’ll be an outsider,” Alice states. She is silent for a moment and then adds, “Now I understand how fathers feel. They don’t carry babies inside them, they don’t give birth to them, they don’t breastfeed them. Nothing. That brings me to my next dilemma,” she continues, and then she presents one of the questions many women in her situation struggle with. “Should I take hormones so I can breastfeed the baby? What do you think?”

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

  was given fund-raising goals each day, which were to be met through the sale of raffle tickets on the street. Underfed and working twelve to eighteen hours a day, Ann always met her quotas, but felt terribly guilty about sometimes withholding money to purchase an occasional candy bar for herself. Judging herself as evil, selfish, and weak, she now heaped shame upon guilt, out of fear that the group would discover that she was holding out. Trauma and recovery specialist Judith Herman discusses the guilt and shame experienced by rape victims. Her insights are equally applicable to those who have been in cults or abusive relationships: "Beyond the issues of shame and doubt, traumatized people struggle to arrive at a fair and reasonable assessment of their conduct, finding a balance between unrealistic guilt and denial of all moral responsibility. In coming to terms with issues of guilt, the survivor needs the help of others who are willing to recognize that a traumatic event has occurred, to suspend their preconceived judgments, and simply to bear witness to her tale."5 The cultic system produces a continuous cycle of guilt, shame, and fear. The challenge now is to identify actions you regret, given decent standards that are not contaminated by the cult's self-serving ideology. At the same time, you need to identify the dynamics in the group or relationship that worked to diminish your capacity to make voluntary, informed choices. You must sort out the actions you should take responsibility for from those that are the responsibility of the group and/or leader. DepressionGrief and mourning, specifically when combined with despair, ennui, anxiety, inward anger, and shame, can produce an incapacitating depression. For some time after leaving the group, you may find yourself dealing with deep feelings of depression. Symptoms include sadness, disinterest, feeling lost or directionless, and such physical symptoms as marked changes in appetite, sleep patterns, or personality. When you are no longer part of a group or relationship that filled your life with purpose and direction (even if that purpose and direction had negative effects for you), your sense of loss may be palpable and wrenching. Your awareness of the broken promises and disillusionment, coupled with the challenges and difficulties of creating a new life for yourself, may be overwhelming. The key to dealing with depression and other intense emotions is to express them somehow, sometime, to someone. Keeping a journal is one way to do that. Writing an account of your cult experience is an excellent way to make sense of it. It gets the feelings out of your head and body and onto paper. Use your creativity to express yourself: write, draw, paint, sculpt, knit, or crochet how you feel. Finding someone to listen to your experiences and feelings can be another vital method of healing.

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

  Emptiness and isolation: the abuser is given so much power that separation diminishes the abused person's sense of self. Without this magical person, life seems to lose meaning. 4. Sexual confusion: sexual thoughts, feelings, sensations, and impulses that are contradictory and conflicted. Abusers usually exploit this sexual confusion. 5. Impaired ability to trust: victims doubt their ability to trust others or their own judgment. 6. Identity and role reversal: the victim is manipulated into taking care of the abuser. Sexualization of the relationship sometimes begins with the abuser talking about his problems to gain sympathy, which is then used to manipulate and exploit the victim. 7. Emotional lability or dyscontrol: intense, chaotic, and unpredictable emotions are experienced and expressed, from laughter to sobbing to raging. Sudden and profound depressions may appear just when emotional balance seems to be emerging. 8. Suppressed rage: like survivors of incest, rape, or physical abuse, victims may have had to deny, suppress, or hide their anger. This may result in a deep and powerful rage, which they are unable to act upon, talk about, or even acknowledge for long periods of time. 9. Depression and increased suicidal risk: rage toward the abuser may be turned against the self. Irrational guilt or shame may lead to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and suicidal thoughts. io. Cognitive dysfunction: attention and concentration may be disturbed by flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, unbidden images, nightmares, and other symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Intellectual impairment may also occur. This cognitive difficulty is caused by indoctrination into fallacious beliefs and distorted realities, and may be prolonged by resocialization or conversion experiences that pull victims deeper into the abuse cycle. At some point, former cult members who were sexually abused need to confront the abuse. Because this can be difficult, feelings related to sexual abuse may be the deepest and last layer of cult-related trauma to be explored. Acknowledging sexual exploitation and abuse can be exceedingly painful; therefore, victims may deny, rationalize, minimize, or distort the meaning of the experience. In the extreme, victims may dissociate, separate from, split off, or even try to forget the experience in order to tolerate continued membership in the group. This denial and dissociation may continue after victims leave the group. Unearthing and confronting these experiences and feelings can help to restore a person's capacity for intimate and sexual relationships. Working through guilt and shame, including sorting through sexual values, beliefs, and preferences, are major developmental tasks. Journaling, creative self-expression, support groups, and counseling with a trusted therapist can be helpful in this process. Violence in CultsSexual abuse is one form of violence found in cults. Beatings and physical punishments, assault against others, and occasionally even murder are other forms. Violence may be used as a means of control, an expression of power, an outlet for rage or frustration, or for the sadistic enjoyment of the hierarchy.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It was already a lot.” Naomi shakes her head. “I feel like such a bad friend,” she says. “Isabella needed me to imagine with her how it feels to say goodbye to her children and know that she will never see them again. She needed me to know that they will need her and that she won’t be there for them. And I just couldn’t. I wish I could put my selfish pain aside and help her. I wish I had the courage to ask her what else she was trying to tell me.” Naomi leaves my office and I’m glad that she is my last patient of the night. Walking home, I listen to the familiar hum of the city, which like the white noise machine in my office helps me to daydream when I’m alone. The Bowery neighborhood in Manhattan is never peaceful, and its hectic rhythm allows my thoughts to flow freely. I feel a strong urge to rush home and hug my own kids, to hold them tight and not let them go. I remember that feeling from when they were babies, how I used to hurry back, imagining our reunion—their smiles, their smells. Instead, I end up wandering. I walk aimlessly around the Bowery, back and forth on the same route that I take every day from my home to my office, and I cry. I cry for Isabella. I cry for her young children. I cry for Naomi and I cry for what I know Naomi doesn’t know about my life: that my life partner, Lew, is sick with bladder cancer and is fighting for his life. I walk on the street, carrying my patient’s pain, my own pain, not knowing yet that sooner than anyone expects, Isabella will die, and that not so long after, on a cold February morning, I will lose Lew to cancer . I find myself gazing at a group of young people waiting outside for a table at a trendy new restaurant. The days when I used to be one of them seem far away. I look at them with longing and see only purity, innocence, naïveté. They all look so happy, so glamorous, as if they have never lost anyone, never felt devastated or realized that cancer could be waiting around the corner, unaware that they might lose everything they have. Splitting, that primitive defense mechanism of all or nothing, takes place again, as it does in moments of devastation, dividing the world into good and bad, those who suffer and those whom we believe don’t know pain. And we look at them with wonder and envy, the healthy people who we imagine don’t know the taste of sorrow. For Naomi, I’m one of those people.

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

  Koresh had fathered many of the children who died, and he intentionally kept them with him during the siege, while he chose to release some of the other children to the authorities-and to live. He wasn't so kindly toward his own bloodline. A team of specialists at nearby Baylor College of Medicine studied the twentyone children who were released. Dr. Bruce Perry, the chief of that team, concluded that the children's development-physical, psychological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral-was far from normal. For one, their little hearts beat thirty to fifty percent faster than normal. Their drawings and doodling depicted Koresh as God, and they referred to Koresh as their father and thought of their own birth parents merely as adult members of the group. Their views of family were distorted or undeveloped, as were their own self-images. Perry and his colleagues noted that the children found it nearly impossible to think or act independently. Taught well by their leader, they held firm to a vision of the world as the enemy.14 On a positive note, ten years later, in 2003, some of these children appeared on a televised news program, and it was heartening to see how they have been able to go forward and achieve success in their lives as children, teens, and young adults. There are countless examples of trauma in the lives of cult children. Two followers of the Ecclesia Athletic Association were found guilty of beating an eight-year-old girl to death, and seven other members were indicted for enslaving more than fifty children." The leader of the Christian Fellowship Church was sentenced to thirty-one years in an Illinois prison for sexual assault, abuse, and child pornography-while charges against him and two others for similar abuses were also brought in California. 16 These abusive behaviors are not unique to the United States. For example, Paul Schaefer, the German leader of a religious cult and farming commune, Colonia Dignidad in Chile, was convicted in absentia of sexually abusing twenty-six children. One of the most wanted men in Chile, he was arrested in 2005 in Argentina after having been a fugitive for eight years.'? Although the suffering of children in cults may not yet be fully documented, such anecdotal examples as these fill the public records and the files of those of us who study cults. What can be done? At the conclusion of her comparative study of childrearing in five totalistic groups, sociologist Amy Siskind notes: "This chapter has not argued that cult leaders set out deliberately and maliciously to abuse children. Nor would I argue that child abuse is inevitable in all cults. But I think a clear pattern has emerged from our discussion regarding the absence of both external and internal checks and balances to limit such abuse when it does take place. The absence of these checks and balances makes cult children more vulnerable than children within the larger society, which does have these checks and balances (however imperfectly they are sometimes implemented).

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Eve pauses briefly. She doesn’t look at me and continues. “There is something unusual about being in Josh’s arms. Something about his touch. It’s like he is both strong and gentle at the same time and I feel that I totally lose myself when I’m with him. It’s a feeling I’ve never had before. But I guess that was the problem. That’s why the night ended so badly.” She sighs. “I woke up at 6 a.m. and when I left the hotel I turned on my phone. I had ten voice mails and many texts from the babysitter saying that my son had had an asthma attack and that they were at the hospital. I started sobbing, trying to reach the doctor on the phone. I just couldn’t believe that I had let that happen. That was the moment when I realized that I had lost control of my life and was in big trouble. That’s when I decided to see a therapist.” She turns to me and asks in a desperate tone, “What am I going to do? Tell me. Is it crazy that I love him?” Freud wrote that one of his least favorite things to do was to work with patients who were in love. For Freud, love was an irrational feeling and the person in love was in a semi-psychotic phase, out of touch with reality. He believed that this phase did not allow the patient to be in touch with any emotional reality other than their love and erotic feelings, and thus genuine awareness was almost impossible. Irvin Yalom opens his book Love’s Executioner by saying that he, too, doesn’t like to work with patients who are in love. He assumes this is because of envy. “I, too, crave enchantment,” he writes with honesty. No doubt the therapist, almost like the child who peeks into his parents’ bedroom, is an “outsider” witness of his patient’s love affair and might feel left out and jealous. However, the therapist doesn’t identify only with the excluded outsider, meaning the child, but also with the insiders, the ones who fall in love. It becomes more complicated, though, when that love is an illicit one and when there are many moral and ethical components to it. Like most people, therapists can have many feelings about that kind of love; they can have a moral conflict, feel guilty, or identify with the betrayed partner; they can feel envious of the patient who is able to do something they themselves may want to do; they might want to make the patient a “better person” and help him or her end the affair; they may even have a romantic fantasy about the patient running away with her lover.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “Like her, he fought back; he wasn’t afraid. I watched him from the sidelines and I felt jealous that he was so brave; but I also felt guilty that he was the one my father attacked, while I was able to hide. And then one day, when Ram was maybe fifteen years old and almost as tall as my dad, he came home from school with a girl, and my father got angry and smacked him in front of her. Instead of apologizing, which is what I would have done, Ram slowly walked toward him. He put his finger on my father’s forehead and whispered angrily, ‘You. If you touch me one more time, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ My father stepped back and Ram walked away. I think it was the last time my father hit him. I remember my mother and I walked away too, as if nothing had happened. It was unbelievable, how they switched roles and my brother became the aggressor. I remember that I suddenly felt sorry for my father. I almost wanted to help him. How fucked up is that?” Guy’s voice becomes louder. “When I turned twenty, I left. I’m sorry. I had to leave. I just had to,” he says angrily. “What are you sorry for?” I ask. “What do you mean?” “You just said ‘I’m sorry’ again.” “Did I?” Guy looks at me, startled. “I guess I did. I guess I feel that I have something to apologize for, don’t I? Maybe I feel bad that I ran away and left them all behind. A family of sick people. I saved my life, but what about them?” The loyalty to the people we are attached to often keeps a part of us with them even when we leave. Our parents tend to live inside us without our permission. Our relationships with them are the first we have, and our future relationships exist only in dialogue with them. Guy had to move away but he still struggles with the guilt of leaving—and living. As I have come to learn from him over time, he hasn’t been able to create a safe-enough home in New York or to have an intimate relationship. He isn’t sure that he can love or trust others, and he certainly doesn’t trust himself to protect the people he loves from his legacy of brutality and abuse. Being alone feels like the best way to hide, and hiding, after all, is the only way to survive. In our first session, hiding behind his gray winter coat, Guy told me that he had researched me, wondering about who I was and about the people I had left behind. He questioned if therapy was even for him: Could he have an honest relationship, where he felt known, without being too vulnerable or threatened? Could he heal the abused boy he once was without feeling humiliated and ashamed? Could he ever love and be loved?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I know it sounds strange, but honestly, I never thought about how he felt when I didn’t want to see him anymore. I never imagined how he felt when he walked into his office that Monday morning. It didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother did this to hurt him and not only to heal herself. Even when I say it now, it feels wrong. I don’t think she had bad intentions.” I hear how through Art’s eyes, Alice’s view of her father became more nuanced. She could start seeing him and her mother as complex humans who struggled to survive. “After about a month of nightly conversations with Art, when we talked about absolutely everything, I agreed to meet him outside of the office. And that was it.” Alice pauses. “We spent that night together and knew that we would spend every night of the rest of our lives together. A month later we tried to get pregnant.” “And you felt like you were betraying your mother,” I say. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I obviously told my mother right away and she was happy for me, but I knew that I had crossed some secret line. I was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t legally divorced yet. I was afraid she would see that as a move toward my father and would worry that I might forgive him and leave her. So I told her gradually. “At first she just listened, as she always did. She was always a good listener. And then she asked, ‘Is he a good man, Alice?’ And that made me so uncomfortable because I knew what she really wanted to ask. I knew she was thinking about my father. But she didn’t want to ruin it for me. She just kept asking if he was a good man. “‘Why do you keep asking that, Mom? Of course he is,’ I answered, and she noticed that I was irritated. “‘I love you more than anything,’ she said. ‘I want you to be with a good man. I want you to be happy. One day you will have a daughter and you will understand that.’” Alice looks at me. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “it did ruin it for me. It made me worried. I felt her doubt and I thought that maybe she could see something about Art that I couldn’t. When I was with him, I felt completely safe, but when I was with her, I felt her suspicion of him, and it made me doubt my own judgment.” I wonder out loud if it was her fear of losing Alice that made her mother so worried. Alice seems intrigued. “You know what Art likes to say? That it’s impossible to separate from my mother.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Every woman in the world could dance that way. “Well, this Indian stranger said he was in a desperate situation. His wife was dying of cancer and he needed money to pay for her medicine. I knew he was lying. I knew he’d stolen the outfit. I could always smell a thief.” Smell yourself, Ted. “And I knew I should call the police on this thief. I knew I should take that outfit away and find the real owner. But it was so beautiful, so perfect, that I gave the Indian stranger a thousand dollars and sent him on his way. And I kept the outfit.” Whoa, was Ted coming here to make a confession? And why had he chosen my grandmother’s funeral for his confession? “For years, I felt terrible. I’d look at that outfit hanging on the wall of my Montana cabin.” Mansion, Ted, it’s a mansion. Go ahead; you can say it: MANSION! “And then I decided to do some research. I hired an anthropologist, an expert, and he quickly pointed out that the outfit was obviously of Interior Salish origin. And after doing a little research, he discovered that the outfit was Spokane Indian, to be specific. And then, a few years ago, he visited your reservation undercover and learned that this stolen outfit once belonged to a woman named Grandmother Spirit.” We all gasped. This was a huge shock. I wondered if we were all part of some crazy reality show called When Billionaires Pretend to be Human . I looked around for the cameras. “Well, ever since I learned who really owned this outfit, I’ve been torn. I always wanted to give it back. But I wanted to keep it, too. I couldn’t sleep some nights because I was so torn up by it.” Yep, even billionaires have DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL. “And, well, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I packed up the outfit and headed for your reservation, here, to hand-deliver the outfit back to Grandmother Spirit. And I get here only to discover that she’s passed on to the next world. It’s just devastating.” We were all completely silent. This was the weirdest thing any of us had ever witnessed. And we’re Indians, so trust me, we’ve seen some really weird stuff. “But I have the outfit here,” Ted said. He opened up his suitcase and pulled out the outfit and held it up. It was fifty pounds, so he struggled with it. Anybody would have struggled with it. “So if any of Grandmother Spirit’s children are here, I’d love to return her outfit to them.” My mother stood and walked up to Ted. “I’m Grandmother Spirit’s only daughter,” she said. My mother’s voice had gotten all formal.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Afterwards I spat his spendings out upon the cobbles, and he thanked me very graciously. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, buttoning himself up, ‘perhaps I shall see you again, in the same spot?’ I could not answer him - the fact was, I felt almost ready to weep. He handed me my sovereign; then, after a moment’s hesitation, he stepped to me and kissed my cheek. The gesture made me flinch; and when he felt the shudder, he misunderstood, and looked wistful. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t like that, you soldier-boys, do you?’ His tone was strange; when I studied him, I saw that his eyes were gleaming. His excitement had stirred me to strangeness, before; his emotion, now, made me terribly thoughtful. When he turned and left the court, I remained there, trembling - not with sadness, but with a creeping kind of relish. The man had looked like Walter; I had pleasured him, in some queer way, for Kitty’s sake; and the act had made me sicken. But he was not like Walter, who might take his pleasure where he chose it. His pleasure had turned, at the last, to a kind of grief; and his love was a love so fierce and so secret it must be satisfied, with a stranger, in a reeking court like this. I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you. I had kept my heart-beats smothered; and had been betrayed, anyway. And now I had betrayed another, like myself. I put away the gentleman’s sovereign, and walked to Leicester Square. This was one place which, in all my careless West End wanderings, I had tended to avoid or pass through swiftly: I was always mindful of the first trip I had made there, with Kitty and Walter, and it was not a memory I cared, very often, to revisit. Tonight, however, I walked there rather purposefully. I went to the statute of Shakespeare, where we had stood that time, and I leaned before it, gazing at the view that we had looked on then. I remembered Walter saying that we were at the very heart of London, and did I know what it was that made that great heart beat? Variety! I had looked around me that afternoon and seen, astonished, what I thought was all the world’s variety, brought together in one extraordinary place. I had seen rich and poor, splendid and squalid, white man and black man, all bustling side by side. I had seen them make a vast harmonious whole, and been thrilled to think that I was about to find my own particular place in it, as Kitty’s friend. How had my sense of the world been changed, since then!

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  141 The Chroniclers show Moses refraining from retaliation when the king of Edom refused to grant the Israelites safe passage through his territory during their journey to the Promised Land. 142 The most famous of these priestly writings is the creation story that opens the Hebrew Bible. The biblical redactors placed this priestly creation story before the earlier eighth-century tale of Yahweh’s creating a garden for Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. This priestly version extracted all the violence from the traditional Middle Eastern cosmogony. Instead of fighting a battle and slaying a monster, the god of Israel simply uttered words of command when he ordered the cosmos. On the last day of creation, he “saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.” 143 This god had no enemies: he blessed every one of his creatures, even his old enemy Leviathan. This principled benevolence is all the more remarkable when we consider that the community of exiles was under almost constant attack by hostile groups in Judea. When Nehemiah, dispatched from the Persian court to supervise the rebuilding of Jerusalem, was overseeing the restoration of the city wall, each of the laborers “did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other.” 144 The priestly writers could not afford to be antiwar but they seem troubled by military violence. They deleted some of the most belligerent episodes in the Deuteronomist history and brushed over Joshua’s conquests. They told the stories of David’s chivalric warfare but omitted his grim order to kill the blind and lame in Jerusalem, and it was the Chronicler who explained that David was forbidden to build the temple because he had shed too much blood. They also recorded a story about a military campaign against the Midianites, who had enticed the Israelites into idolatry. 145 There was no doubt that it was a just cause, and the Israelite armies behaved in perfect accordance with Deuteronomist law: the priests led the troops into battle, and the soldiers killed the Midianite kings, set fire to their town, and condemned to death both the married women who had tempted the Israelites and the boys who would grow up to be warriors. But even though they had “cleansed” Israel, they had been tainted by this righteous bloodshed. “You must camp for seven days outside the camp,” Moses told the returning warriors: “Purify yourselves, you and your prisoners.” 146 In one remarkable story, the Chronicler condemned the savagery of the Kingdom of Israel in a war against an idolatrous Judean king, even though Yahweh himself had sanctioned the campaign.