Hope

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 Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  When I played high school basketball, we all loved the games, but nobody loved drills. Nobody enjoyed running laps. Nobody showed up to practice excited about being yelled at by sadistic coaches who spent their free time dreaming up ways to drive us to exhaustion. Come game time, though, we were glad for every minute we had invested in our development. The pain was temporary, but the results were obvious. We had built endurance. We had developed our skills and our potential. We had become complete players. That was a long time ago. These days I play “for fun,” which is another way of saying none of us are going to work too hard at it. No coach is yelling at us to run laps. We don’t do drills. There are no weight goals or diet restrictions. Just a bunch of guys with dad bods showing up, talking smack, and trying not to pull any muscles. It is fun, for sure. But if anyone were to scout our pickup games (which will never happen), words like endurance, skilled , and complete would be absent from their clipboards. If you’re going to grow, you have to put in the work. And prayer is a big part of the work. Pray through your trials. Pray through your challenges. Pray through your doubts and fears. Pray through your screwups. Pray through your frustrations. Pray through your character flaws. Pray through your lack. Pray through your business ideas. Pray through your options. The more you pray about these things, the more God will speak to you and change you. I love this prayer that David wrote: Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23–24 David didn’t arrogantly assume he was right in everything. He knew he might have blind spots, ulterior motives, toxic thinking, or offensive behavior. So he submitted his heart to God in prayer. God will take you up on that prayer, by the way. I’ll talk more about that later, in a chapter called “These are dangerous prayers.” So only pray if you’re serious about growth. Trials will change you, if you let them. They’ll make you a better, more perfect version of yourself. It might take some blood, sweat, and tears, but the results are worth it. 2. Growth takes time. It takes your whole life, to be precise. I don’t mean that to sound discouraging—what I’m saying is that you will continue to grow for as long as you’re walking this planet. Growth is natural. It’s healthy. And it never stops. Many of us have the false assumption about growth that someday, if we try really hard, we will reach the pinnacle of perfection and never have to change again. That is not going to happen this side of heaven.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  A few weeks later, by random assignment, we determined which participants would learn loving-kindness meditation and which would not. All would continue to monitor their day-to-day emotions and social connections using our study website. Months later, weeks after the meditation workshop ended, one by one we invited all participants back to the PEP Lab, where we again measured their vagal tone under the same resting conditions as before. In May 2010, I had the immense honor of presenting the results of this experiment directly to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. A handful of scientists were invited to a private meeting to brief His Holiness on their latest discoveries about the effects of mind-training. After briefly describing to His Holiness the functions of the vagus nerve and the concept of vagal tone, I shared what my team and I had discovered in this most recent study: that vagal tone—which is commonly taken to be as stable an attribute as your adult height—actually improves significantly with mind-training. Here is your evidence-based reason for hope: No matter what your biological capacity for love is today, you can bolster that capacity by next season. For it was those study participants who had been assigned at random to learn loving-kindness meditation who changed the most. They devoted scarcely more than an hour of their time each week to the practice. Yet within a matter of months, completely unbeknownst to them, their vagus nerves began to respond more readily to the rhythms of their breathing, emitting more of that healthy arrhythmia that is the fingerprint of high vagal tone. Breath by breath —loving moment by loving moment—their capacity for positivity resonance matured. Moreover, through painstaking statistical analyses, we pinpointed that those who experienced the most frequent positivity resonance in connection with others showed the biggest increases in vagal tone. Love literally made people healthier. Upward Spirals Unleashed It’s time now to step back from isolated scientific findings and take in the big picture. Recall that your body’s positivity resonance operates within a much larger system. Along with love and all the other positive emotions, this system also includes your enduring resources—your physical health, your social bonds, your personality traits, and your resilience. Having assets like these certainly makes life easier, and more satisfying. In addition, though, such resources also serve as booster shots that increase the frequency and intensity of your micro-moments of positivity resonance. Love built those resources in you, and those resources in turn boost your experiences of love. This is not a simple case of cause and effect. The causal arrow instead runs in both directions at once, creating the dynamic and reciprocal causality that drives self-sustaining trajectories of growth. Through love, you become a better version of yourself. And as your better self, you experience love more readily. It is in this dance between your enduring resources and your micro-moments of love that life-giving upward spirals are born.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I’m not sure if this is true; I’d have to call all 12 of them and take a poll. But I think we had a dumb hope the whole year. Our hope had nothing to do with the not very good at all book we were collaboratively writing. I think our hope was that Ken Kesey would write another perfect book. That he still had one in him and that we could somehow get it out. But all he kept doing was drinking. No amount of our getting high with him or walking the beach with him or listening to his stories could resurrect the man within the man. Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are on my bookshelf next to As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom. Some books take your breath away. Is it the books, or the writers? When I hold Kesey’s books in my hands, when I open them, I can hear his voice. I can see him. Smell him. Feel him. But it’s the words that take my breath. Isn’t that enough? In the spring of the year of Kesey, on Easter, we walked up Mt. Pisgah to Jed’s resting place. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank from a flask. At the top the wind shuddered the leaves of trees. The mound of grass hill like one of Kesey’s shoulders. I liked being up there. Jed underneath us. I felt most alive near death anyway. I just didn’t talk about it much. Except a few times with Kesey. We embraced up there at one point. Toward the end of the year of Kesey at his house in Pleasant Hill he showed all 13 of us video clips of Neal Cassady. I think Babbs brought them over. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank. Faye was in the kitchen, then she went to church. We sat on the floor we sat on old stuffed chairs we sat on a sunken couch. When Neal Cassady came on the screen my chest filled with butterflies. He looked and acted exactly like a Kerouac sentence. The close up face of Neal Cassady … all that random quixotic fantastic gibberish and eye shifting and head bobbing and facial tic-ery … it was beautiful. Still though it seemed unreal, or surreal. We were nothing in the face of history but a bunch of waiting ducks. Someone could have picked us off one at a time in a pond. I sat there and wished our watching meant more.

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

  They need that. Our role as parents is not to do everything for our kids, but to help them believe in their own abilities and to encourage them in their purpose. In an interview with inc.com, Dr. Stephanie O’Leary, a clinical psychologist and author of Parenting in the Real World: The Rules Have Changed , insisted that letting children struggle, even fail, benefits them far more than doing everything for them. She stated, “Your willingness to see your child struggle communicates that you believe they are capable and that they can handle any outcome, even a negative one.”1 Our kids need to know that they are more than able to be successful on their own. They need supportive parents, yes, but they don’t need helicopter parents hovering overhead, making sure they are constantly happy and always perfect. They might be frustrated in the moment, but the very fact that you believe in them enough to let them muddle through is teaching them self-confidence. Plus, by trying and failing and trying again, they learn problem-solving, perseverance, and a bit of humility. Those are invaluable gifts. Now, if we as parents realize that, don’t you think God does too? In case you haven’t noticed, God is not a helicopter God. He’s always there, of course, but He’s not anxiously controlling our progress, stepping in to fix our mistakes when we color outside the lines, or yelling at us when we accidentally shatter a flower vase. God continually encourages us to try new things, to fail, to learn, to try again, to grow. He’s with us and for us, but He doesn’t do everything for us. Instead, He cheers us on as we move forward in our purpose. PRAYER AND PURPOSE Purpose . Think about that word for a moment. It implies a potential, a calling, a goal. It means participating in life, not just letting life happen. Good parents don’t just protect and provide for their kids. They help them find and achieve purpose. That includes purpose in the general sense of becoming a responsible human, but also purpose in a more specific sense, by inspiring them to dream big and nudging them to pursue their dreams. When it comes to prayer, doesn’t it make sense that our heavenly Father would also hand many of our requests back to us? That He would look beyond our immediate comfort and instead point us toward our purpose? That He would tactfully ignore the whining and remind us that we are capable, creative, well-resourced people made in His image? In other words, God doesn’t do everything for us, but He works with us to do everything that needs to be done. It’s a partnership. When we pray about what is worrying us, God usually involves us in the solution of the very thing we are praying for.

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

  Some counselors and group leaders are not credentialed. Some programs are fronts for cults. Even a well-meaning program may inadvertently promote long-term victimization. Although these groups are set up to reduce codependency, many participants become completely dependent on their 12-step meetings and friends. For a critical perspective on the recovery movement, read I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional by Wendy Kaminer (Vintage) and Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the 12 Steps by Charlotte Kasl (Perennial Currents). If you were subjected to or witnessed extreme forms of abuse, seek a therapist or counselor experienced in working with survivors of trauma. (See Chapter 13 on how to evaluate a therapist.) Also review the sections in this book on anger, fear, dissociation and triggers, post-traumatic stress, relationships, and self-expression. In all cases, denying your abuse will only prolong your misery. Our best advice is to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and work through the trauma so you can move on. [image file=img/img0019.jpg] Healing takes place in many different ways. Each person is different and responds to different things. In this chapter, we address some of the paths to recovery that have helped former cult members. One method is self-help, which includes an attitude as well as an effort that is key to regaining wholeness. Also, many former members find professional counseling useful. Finally, there is activism, which usually occurs at the middle or end stage of healing when a person feels ready to speak out or take part in educational activities. Self-HelpThe primary sources of self-help are education, creative expression, and support networks. Each of these is described here. Educating YourselfEducation is one of the most important ways to cope with and integrate a cult experience. Most former members go through a period of reading everything they can get their hands on. This is a crucial phase in the healing process because it helps to correct many misconceptions about cults and cult members. By reading about cultic influence processes, former members can begin to comprehend and assimilate what happened to them and why. Education can help them shed self-blaming stereotypes and attitudes, and it can help them explain their experience to others. There is a growing body of literature on cults, including books and articles on types of groups, specific groups, and theoretical issues. For example, the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) compiles useful bibliographies; ICSA also sells selected books, journals, pamphlets, and other material, and publishes a journal called the Cultic Studies Review. Back issues of that journal are a wonderful source of information. Some of the most useful and informative materials are listed in Appendix D. We also recommend perusing the endnotes of each chapter of this book (and other books you might read) for useful sources. Unfortunately, a number of good books are out of print, but often can be found at libraries, used bookstores, or through the Internet. Expressing YourselfSelf-expression-whether through writing, art, dance, music, drama, or some other medium-is key to shaping your postcult identity.

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

  Not a throne of condemnation. Not even a throne of exasperation or annoyance. It’s a throne of grace. When I confess my sins, weaknesses, failures, or faults to God, His response is pure grace. That reaction of grace is what gives us confidence to approach Him. We know that His first reaction is not to chastise us, but to aid us. Notice that the verse doesn’t just describe a grace to put up with us and our failures, but rather a grace “to help us in our time of need.” Grace is more than God’s patience. Grace is God’s power actively working to strengthen us when we are at our weakest. Is there anything you need to confess to God? Are you holding on to an attitude, a habit, or a plan that you know doesn’t reflect who you are in Christ? Bring it to God in prayer. You weren’t meant to carry your weaknesses alone. It’s a heavy burden, one that you don’t want or need. Confess it to God. Ask for help. Expect His grace—He promised it, after all. Then leave the past behind. God doesn’t hold your past against you, so don’t hold it against yourself. Confession and repentance lead to grace, and grace gives us hope, and hope points to the future. 3. HERE I AM; SEND ME. The prophet Isaiah once had a vision in which he heard God asking for someone willing to be His messenger to Israel. Isaiah’s response was, “Here am I. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8). God did send him, and Isaiah became one of the most well-known prophets in history. That prayer, “Here am I, send me!” is dangerous. It’s a rejection of a predictable, comfortable life in favor of an adventure into the unknown with God. It’s often used in the context of doing missions work overseas. But the prayer is much broader than that. Isaiah spent most of His life ministering to His own people and His own country, after all. “Send me” isn’t about geography. It’s about purpose . You may not end up thousands of miles away from home, eating unidentifiable foods and urgently learning the word for bathroom in a foreign language. You may not even leave your community. I would go so far as to say that if you can’t serve your local community, you don’t have any business crossing the world. Performative missions, charity photo-ops, and savior complexes are not how the world is going to see Jesus. They will see Jesus in your love. Start by loving those close to you, by letting God send you to your neighbor and co-worker and friend. Maybe He’ll send you to another nation, maybe not. But He will send you. Of that you can be sure. When you ask God to send you, you are praying to be used by Him to show His love to others. The prayer isn’t about tasks as much as about people.

• From The Lives of Great Christians (2007)

  1. Many of these letters dealt with matters of the moment, such as requesting certain foods or telling friends and family about his health. 2. In general, they were upbeat, suggesting that his arrest was a misunderstanding that would be cleared up. 3. A few months before his arrest, Bonhoeffer had written that the man who stands fast in difficult times is the one whose standard is not reason or conscience or freedom but who is willing to make any sacrifice in exclusive allegiance to God. 4. His arrest taught him the necessity to live a life of trust (faith). 5. Bonhoeffer became increasingly wary of what he called “religiosity,” recalling that the Hebrews did not utter God’s name. 6. He found himself reading the Old Testament more than the New and pondered why behavior that is praised in Hebrew scripture is ignored or condemned in the New Testament. 7. Bonhoeffer, in his later letters, introduces an idea that seems oxymoronic to many—religionless Christianity. a. The world has “come of age” and is a secular world. b. What do God and Christianity mean in a secular world, a world without the religious premise? c. Bonhoeffer draws a comparison of circumcision as a requirement of salvation for the Jews and religion as necessary for salvation in modern times. d. He feared that God was viewed as a God of the gaps, and as the gaps narrow, so God is squeezed out of modern life. e. Are most modern people concerned about the concept of the salvation of the individual? f. It is wrong and un-Christian to attack modernity; the question is: Who is Christ in this world come of age? g. For many Christians, redemption has come to mean freedom from cares and fears because of the promise of a better world beyond the grave. h. The biblical God is a weak and suffering God. IV. Maximilian Kolbe, another martyr of the Third Reich, was a Polish Franciscan who was starved at Auschwitz in 1941; in 1982, he became St. Maximilian Kolbe when John Paul II canonized him. ©2007 The Teaching Company. 92

• From The Fermata (1994)

  My right wrist hurt a lot—this marked, if I’m not mistaken, the beginning of my carpal-tunnel problem, which has bothered me on and off since. It isn’t clear to me now why Marian’s adventures ended up being so unremittingly ane-oriented in content—I like to think it was just a matter of mood. After all, I had never typed the word butthole before in my life. It isn’t a word that comes up much in business correspondence. Private coarseness is a known high. What was just as important, I wanted to minimize the chance that this Smith College woman would find my audiotaped company tame, and an anus or two livens up any gathering. I wanted my rotterly imagination to feed rather than limit hers, to extend without strain as far as hers would go; and I hoped that whatever she didn’t like she could filter out. I hoped that she would realize that I was an unusual man, possibly worth knowing. I didn’t leave my gift in her player right away, not wanting to be seen driving right there, brazenly next to her, when it came on. I started up time, accelerated, and moved a few cars ahead, then jogged back on foot to her car with the universe on pause and switched the tapes. Consequently I didn’t get to see her initial reaction. But I drove annoyingly slowly, forcing the buffer cars behind me to pass; very soon I had Adele in my rear-view mirror again. I put on sunglasses so that she wouldn’t be able to see when my eyes were flicking up to the mirror at her. I saw her doing something, leaning, examining: I guessed that she had ejected my tape and was checking for identifying marks. (It said only MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN on the label.) Then there was a long period where she—I’m fairly sure—listened to some or all of it. She passed me again, paying no attention to me; I Dropped for a second to verify that my tape was in her player and then let her proceed. We drove for quite a while together, over an hour, although I don’t think she noticed that I was keeping discreetly close to her. She fluffed her hair several times. I looked for signs of arousal: weaving, sudden slowing. There were none. I hoped she would be so aroused that she would have to stop at a motel very soon. To my surprise, she drove right past the turnoff for Route 91 and Northampton. She continued to drive west. Was she on her way to Chicago?

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  The science of resilience has deepened considerably within the last decade. We’ve seen not only a groundswell of scientific interest in the topic but also a fundamental shift in how resilience is viewed. Before, experts saw resilience in the face of adversity as a rare human feat; we now know that, in the context of a well-functioning emotion system, resilience can be normative, or standard. We also now know that people’s levels of resilience are not set in stone, or DNA. They can be improved through experience and training. So as you practice the skills, detailed in part II of this book, to increase your daily diet of positivity resonance, you’ll become more resilient, too, better able to adapt to life’s inevitable upsets and adversity. Resilient people don’t go it alone. Even as kids, they were especially adept at using humor to get others to smile or laugh along with them. In these and other ways, resilient kids are adept at stoking positivity resonance with their friends and caretakers. Developmental psychologists contend that resilient kids cultivated this capacity through their experiences of sensitive parenting as infants. Some parents, more than others, are adept at interpreting and matching their infant’s ever-changing emotional states. They can smoothly repair their infant’s distress to create micro-moments of positivity resonance. These more sensitive and attuned parents help their children to develop their own store of self-soothing techniques, coping mechanisms that ultimately allow the children to become ever more self-sufficient as they grow older. Resilience, then, doesn’t just originate from positive emotions; it originates from positivity resonance.

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

  However, many of today's cults use these socially acceptable routes as avenues to draw people in. It is not surprising, then, that many clinicians, who may have participated in New Age, transpersonal, or mass transformational therapies, fail to recognize in their clients the harm and aftereffects of cultic involvement. And even without such a background, it may be difficult for professionals in the therapeutic community to spot psychological or emotional troubles resulting from a cult involvement because many of these professionals have little or no knowledge of cult phenomena and their consequences. People rarely seek treatment specifically because of current or past involvement with a cult. The most frequent presenting problems among former cult members are depression and relationship difficulties. Often the person is unaware that there is any connection between previous cult involvement and current life problems. If the person is still in a cult and seeks therapy for some reason, again, she may not have made the connection that the difficulty is somehow connected to her cult involvement. This lack of awareness can easily be compounded by a therapist unfamiliar with the effects cult experiences can have on psychological functioning. A mental health professional may discount a client's cult involvement by treating it as a voluntary choice. Or, like some parents of cult members, the misguided professional may regard the cult involvement as a passing phase. Perhaps the fact that so many people start and stop meditation or join and quit various church groups helps perpetuate this misconception. Yet psychotherapy that focuses on cult experiences can be extremely beneficial to former cult members. Also, it may help current members evaluate their involvement clearly and take a self-protective approach instead of always putting the group, leader, or abusive partner first. For many, it can give them the strength and clarity they need to make the break. Therapist Moishe Spero observes: "Intensive psychotherapy is suitable if not mandatory for successful deregression from cultic commitment, for the return of adaptive cognitive and emotional functioning, and to dispose the ex-devotee to more healthy reintegration into normal living.... Diagnostic psychological testing objectively reveals significant forms of regression in numerous ego functions and cognitive processes as a consequence of cultic commitment and also reveals the dramatic reversal during and following psychotherapy of many of the indices of this regression." I Of course, most current cult members are not going to seek therapy unless it is approved by the leader or acceptable to the belief system. And many former members may not have the means (money or insurance) or may not be aware of the value of therapy. They may also consciously or unconsciously hold onto a cult-instilled stigma against therapy. Added to these difficulties is the fact that many therapists, social workers, and mental health professionals have no real experience or knowledge of cults or the emotional and psychological toll they can take. Without specific knowledge about cults, a therapist can do little to aid in postcult recovery, and may even unintentionally prolong it.

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

  And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” To recap the parable: A vulnerable widow who was desperate for justice pestered a selfish judge until he finally did his job, and justice was done. I love so many things about this story. First, notice that Jesus really wanted them to pray and not give up. He knew how easy it was to get discouraged or weary, so He specifically taught on the subject. God doesn’t hate it when we pray fervently and frequently; He loves it. He responds to it. Second, I love how the woman is one of the most vulnerable people in that society: a widow. She didn’t get justice because she had some sort of clout or leverage, or because she could give the judge a bribe, or because she was more important than other cases on his docket. She got justice because she asked for it repeatedly, unwaveringly, confidently. In the same way, God doesn’t answer prayers based on our merit. He doesn’t play favorites either. He listens to prayers, and prayers move His heart and hand. Third, it’s fascinating that the judge is a jerk. Jesus intentionally describes him as the worst kind of judge: He doesn’t obey God, he doesn’t care about people, and he’s unjust. He is the kind of judge that would have only responded to bribes or threats, not to pleas for mercy. Obviously, God is not this way. That’s the whole point here. Jesus is saying that if the worst judge imaginable would do justice for the least powerful person simply because she asked without ceasing , how much more will a good God respond to His children ? In other words, we have a lot going for us when we pray! God isn’t against us. He isn’t cold and unfeeling. He isn’t waiting for a bribe. We aren’t nameless faces in a courtroom. We aren’t a bother or hindrance or distraction to Him. We are the focus of His infinite goodness. Why would we not persevere in prayer? When Jesus finished His story, I can imagine the disciples laughing at the widow’s persistence and the judge’s exasperation. The irony of a powerful judge being confounded by the persistence of a tiny widow would have stayed in their minds. The point here is not just that there is power in persistence, but that God is predisposed to help us . The meaning of the parable hangs on the contrast between the unjust judge and our good God. We don’t have to nag God into helping us, because He already wants to. To Him, our prayers are not nagging at all.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In May 2010, I had the immense honor of presenting the results of this experiment directly to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. A handful of scientists were invited to a private meeting to brief His Holiness on their latest discoveries about the effects of mind-training. After briefly describing to His Holiness the functions of the vagus nerve and the concept of vagal tone, I shared what my team and I had discovered in this most recent study: that vagal tone—which is commonly taken to be as stable an attribute as your adult height—actually improves significantly with mind-training. Here is your evidence-based reason for hope: No matter what your biological capacity for love is today, you can bolster that capacity by next season. For it was those study participants who had been assigned at random to learn loving-kindness meditation who changed the most. They devoted scarcely more than an hour of their time each week to the practice. Yet within a matter of months, completely unbeknownst to them, their vagus nerves began to respond more readily to the rhythms of their breathing, emitting more of that healthy arrhythmia that is the fingerprint of high vagal tone. Breath by breath—loving moment by loving moment—their capacity for positivity resonance matured. Moreover, through painstaking statistical analyses, we pinpointed that those who experienced the most frequent positivity resonance in connection with others showed the biggest increases in vagal tone. Love literally made people healthier. Upward Spirals Unleashed It’s time now to step back from isolated scientific findings and take in the big picture. Recall that your body’s positivity resonance operates within a much larger system. Along with love and all the other positive emotions, this system also includes your enduring resources—your physical health, your social bonds, your personality traits, and your resilience. Having assets like these certainly makes life easier, and more satisfying. In addition, though, such resources also serve as booster shots that increase the frequency and intensity of your micro-moments of positivity resonance. Love built those resources in you, and those resources in turn boost your experiences of love. This is not a simple case of cause and effect. The causal arrow instead runs in both directions at once, creating the dynamic and reciprocal causality that drives self-sustaining trajectories of growth. Through love, you become a better version of yourself. And as your better self, you experience love more readily. It is in this dance between your enduring resources and your micro-moments of love that life-giving upward spirals are born. Looking out from this more encompassing vantage point, let’s revisit the scientific findings I shared with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. By learning how to self-generate love, you can raise your vagal tone. And with higher vagal tone, your attention and actions become more agile, more attuned to the people in your midst. You become better able to forge the interpersonal connections that give rise to positivity resonance. Through vagal tone, then, love begets love.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘Good Lord, no!’ said Scobie. ‘Just for home use.’ He rubbed his stomach reflectively and licked his lips. ‘Try a glass’ he said. ‘No thanks.’ The old man now consulted a huge watch and pursed his lips. ‘In a little while I must say an Ave Maria. I’ll have to push you out, old man. But just let’s have a look and see how the Mock Whisky is getting on for a moment, shall we?’ I was most curious to see how he was conducting these new experiments and willingly followed him out on to the landing again and into the shabby alcove which now housed a gaunt galvanized iron bath which he must have bought specially for these illicit purposes. It stood under a grimy closet window, and the shelves around it were crowded with the impedimenta of the new trade — a dozen empty beer bottles, two broken, and the huge chamberpot which Scobie always called ‘the Heirloom’; not to mention a tattered beach umbrella and a pair of goloshes. ‘What part do these play?’ I could not help asking, indicating the latter. ‘Do you tread the grapes or potatoes in them?’ Scobie took on an old-maidish, squinting-down-the-nose expression which always meant that levity on the topic under discussion was out of place. He listened keenly for a moment, as if to sounds of fermentation. Then he got down on one shaky knee and regarded the contents of the bath with a doubtful but intense eye. His glass eye gave him a more than mechanical expression as it stared into the rather tired-looking mixture with which the bath was brimming. He sniffed dispassionately and tutted once before rising again with creaking joints. ‘It doesn’t look as good as I hoped’ he admitted. ‘But give it time, it has to be given time.’ He tried some on his finger and rolled his glass eye. ‘It seems to have gone a bit turpid’ he admitted. ‘As if someone had peed in it.’ As Abdul and himself shared the only key to this illicit still I was able to look innocent. ‘Do you want to try it?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘Thank you, Scobie — no.’ ‘Ah well’ he said philosophically, ‘maybe the copper sulphate wasn’t fresh. I had to order the rhubarb from Blighty. Forty pounds. That looked pretty tired when it got here, I don’t mind telling you. But I know the proportions are right because I went into it all thoroughly with young Toby before he left. It needs time, that’s what it needs.’ And made buoyant once more by the hope, he led the way back into the bedroom, whistling under his breath a few staves of the famous song which he only sang aloud when he was drunk on brandy. It went something like this: ‘I want Someone to match my fancy I want Someone to match my style I’ve been good for an awful long while Now I’ll take her in my arms

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  These constraints may have been holding you back from reaching your full potential for health and happiness, and from making deeper contributions to the lives of others. Beyond sharing the latest science on love, my aim in this book has been to release you from these constraints. The task of upgrading love remains incomplete without self-reflection and self-change. Years ago, when I sat in a silent meditation retreat sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute held at the retreat center cofounded by my friend and collaborator Sharon Salzberg, one of our teachers shared a joke with us. It went something like this: On learning of a friend’s new (or renewed) devotion to meditation practice, an observer quipped, “Practice, practice, practice! All you ever do is practice! When’s the performance?” After a muted wave of chuckles rolled through the meditation hall, our teacher went on to say that there is indeed a performance scheduled; it’s called “Your Daily Life.” This is the mind-set about the practices in part II that I urge you to adopt. Whether you choose to shift your focus with formal meditation or with the informal micro-moment practices I’ve offered, I can guarantee you that merely dabbling in them one or two times will lead to no appreciable changes. You well know that engaging in one bout of vigorous physical exercise, or eating one stem of broccoli, will not do anything to improve your health. Your path to physical, emotional, and spiritual vitality is no different. So find activities that speak to you, and identify the recurring cues that might trigger you to do them. Let the micro-doses of positivity that these activities bring draw you to practice, practice, practice. Let these practices help you build new and life-expanding habits, habits that little by little remake you and the course of your day and your life from the inside out. Love 2.0: An Emotion Is Born? Even as I have been writing this book, the equivalent of a scholarly earthquake has been shaking the foundations of the science of emotions. The question at the root of this rattler is ages old, yet repeated most cogently now by my fellow emotions scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett with the force of considerable data. What Barrett and her collaborators (including one of my newest Carolina colleagues, Kristen Lindquist) have asked is simply, what is an emotion? William James himself devoted considerable attention to this very question back in 1884.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It is action oriented and endlessly repeated, and it never achieves its goal because it aims for triumph and absolute repair. It ignores the fact that there are no new complete beginnings and that forgiveness and recovery include pain. Josh could not repair the losses in Eve’s life. In fact, every time they said goodbye she felt helpless and relived those losses. In therapy Eve realizes that the exact battle she believed she was winning was a form of repetition of the past she was trying to avoid. She became aware that the same thing she thought was saving her life in fact made her an absent and dead mother to her own children, and so instead of repairing her history she was repeating it. When she realized that her son could have died, she had to stop the manic cycle and face reality, the painful truth that what has been done cannot be fully undone; it can only be processed and mourned. At the end of our session, Eve puts on her shoes, opens her bag, and grabs her keys, but she doesn’t put her glasses on right away. Instead, she sits a minute in silence and then smiles. “You know, I think I’m actually looking forward to driving myself today. I’m not sure why I never realized this before: that being the driver means I can choose where to go. I can go home. Or not. It’s up to me.” I watch Eve as she leaves my office, feeling hopeful for her for the first time since we met. 2 CONFUSION OF TONGUES I’M NOT SURPRISED when I get an email from Lara, who was my patient nineteen years ago. Lara was only ten years old when her parents suddenly ended her treatment and moved the family to the West Coast. In the years since, I have thought about her often, remembering her unusual story, wondering how she is doing. When I see her name in my inbox it is almost as if I am expecting it. “I’m writing to see if we could meet,” Lara writes. “I’m twenty-nine years old now and there is so much I would like to talk to you about. Do you even remember me?” It is hard not to remember Lara. She was one of my first child patients when I opened my private practice in New York City. I saw her for two years and often felt uneasy thinking about her unresolved family situation, which I have revisited in my head over all these years. Lara’s was one of the most confusing cases of sexual abuse that I have treated, and as time passed and I studied the nature of the intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse, I felt that I was able to make better sense of it. Maybe it was my ongoing desire to share those thoughts with Lara that made me hope that she would contact me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  A Door Opens T he ability to love, to invest in life, to create and fulfill our dreams, is in ongoing dialogue with our capacity to search for emotional truths, to tolerate pain, and to mourn. While our journeys to healing vary, each starts with the decision to search, to open the door, and, rather than turn away from the hurt of the past, to walk toward it. We choose to unpack our emotional inheritance, to be active agents in transforming our fate into destiny. The secrets of others become our own enigmas, and our secrets will inevitably find shelter and hide in the minds of others. The more concealed these secrets are, the more we become strangers to ourselves, held in captivity, afraid of the freedom to know and be known. The ghosts of the past are alive in our unconscious. To some degree, we are all gatekeepers of the unspeakable . The scars of our inherited trauma take their own unique shape. Our awareness, like detective work, follows the traces those ghosts leave in our minds. This awareness slowly sheds light on the ways the past affects and controls our present being. In ways that often feel mysterious, emotional material left unprocessed tends to appear and reappear in our lives. The unexamined life repeats itself and reverberates through the generations. The untold stories clamor for reenactment—they insist on being told. That which cannot be consciously identified forces itself into our reality and repeats itself. It is those now-seen patterns that we search for and unpack. Again and again, the human unconscious brings us to the original site of where things went wrong with the wish to do it all over again, repair the damage, and heal those who were hurt and wounded. We identify with previous generations—with those who have been injured, who have been humiliated, and who have died. In our fantasy, their cure is also our own. We plead for liberation from our bonds to the painful past and from the guilt of living and having a better life than the people who came before us. However, that unconscious wish to heal our ancestors often prevents us from mourning everything we cannot repair, save, or start again: our own childhoods, our parents’ wounds, and our grandparents’ trauma. It is the process of mourning and working through the pain that our parents couldn’t endure that paves the way to breaking the identification with those who suffered. Mourning differentiates the past from the present and separates those who died from those who stayed alive. We mourn what was out of our control, and therefore we mourn our lack of omnipotence, the fact that in reality we are not as powerful as we are in our fantasies. That emotional truth—our mortality, inherent vulnerability, and human limitations—leaves us humble and allows us to explore who we really are, to embrace future possibilities, and to raise the next generation with dignity.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I watch Eve as she leaves my office, feeling hopeful for her for the first time since we met. 2CONFUSION OF TONGUESI’m not surprised when I get an email from Lara, who was my patient nineteen years ago. Lara was only ten years old when her parents suddenly ended her treatment and moved the family to the West Coast. In the years since, I have thought about her often, remembering her unusual story, wondering how she is doing. When I see her name in my inbox it is almost as if I am expecting it. “I’m writing to see if we could meet,” Lara writes. “I’m twenty-nine years old now and there is so much I would like to talk to you about. Do you even remember me?” It is hard not to remember Lara. She was one of my first child patients when I opened my private practice in New York City. I saw her for two years and often felt uneasy thinking about her unresolved family situation, which I have revisited in my head over all these years. Lara’s was one of the most confusing cases of sexual abuse that I have treated, and as time passed and I studied the nature of the intergenerational aspect of sexual abuse, I felt that I was able to make better sense of it. Maybe it was my ongoing desire to share those thoughts with Lara that made me hope that she would contact me. I was researching the topic of sexual abuse in childhood when I started seeing Lara. Beatrice Beebe, one of my mentors and an infant researcher at Columbia University, is known for saying “Research is me-search.” By that she means that all psychological research, even when we are not aware of it, is our quest to understand and heal ourselves and the people who raised us. Starting this research, I was not sure what I was looking for. What was it that I really needed to know about myself and about the world around me? What was my “me-search”? That is the question I have asked every student I have mentored since, with the genuine belief that deep inside we continuously try to resolve the mysteries of our own minds. Feelings are always the motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the world around us.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Ending the intergenerational cycle of suffering is expressed in the quote from Jeremiah with which I open this book—the wish that in the future “people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’” (31:29). This is a prayer that children won’t have to carry the consequences of their parents’ lives, and the wish that our emotional inheritance can be worked through and altered. For years, we were used to accepting genetic heritage as fate. Biologists believed that environmental factors had little, if any, effect on DNA and that therefore psychological growth was separated from our genetic legacy. These days, the field of epigenetics gives us another framework for understanding how nature and nurture intermingle and how we respond to the environment on a molecular level. It emphasizes that genes have a “memory” that can be passed down from one generation to the next. The implications for this new research are bidirectional: we realize that trauma can be transmitted to the next generation but also that psychological work can alter and modify the biological effects of trauma. Stephen Stahl, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, argues that psychotherapy can be conceptualized as an “epigenetic drug” since it changes the circuitry of the brain in a manner similar to or complementary to drugs. Our hope lies in the understanding that our emotional work has a profound effect on who we, our children, and our grandchildren will become. Trauma is transmitted through our minds and through our bodies, but so are resilience and healing. The next generations carry not only the despair of the past, but also hope, because their mere existence is evidence that their family survived and that a future is possible. Reliving our ancestors’ pain allows us to reference the traumatic past as a way to imagine a possible future, a trajectory from chaos to order, from helplessness to agency, and from destruction to re-creation. In that sense, our work is a way to process and recall past liberation, and also look forward to future redemption . When we can learn to identify the emotional inheritance that lives within us, things start to make sense and our lives begin to change. Slowly, a door opens, a gateway between present life and past trauma. On our way to healing, that which seemed impossible now becomes tangible, the pain diminishes, and a new path appears—to love. Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Aron, whose devoted love, incredible wisdom, and constant support are always with me. My enormous gratitude goes to my patients, those whom I’ve written about and those whose stories are carried in my heart. Thank you for teaching me so much about the human mind and about myself. The patients whose stories are in this book helped me to alter the details and disguise their identities.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was wearing green. Green pants, green shirt, green bow in my hair. It was an outfit that my mother had sewn—she’d made clothes for me all of my life. Some of them were just what I dreamed of having, others less so. I wasn’t crazy about the green pantsuit, but I wore it anyway, as a penance, as an offering, as a talisman. All that day of the green pantsuit, as I accompanied my mother and stepfather, Eddie, from floor to floor of the Mayo Clinic while my mother went from one test to another, a prayer marched through my head, though prayer is not the right word to describe that march. I wasn’t humble before God. I didn’t even believe in God. My prayer was not: Please, God, take mercy on us. I was not going to ask for mercy. I didn’t need to. My mother was forty-five. She looked fine. For a good number of years she’d mostly been a vegetarian. She’d planted marigolds around her garden to keep bugs away instead of using pesticides. My siblings and I had been made to swallow raw cloves of garlic when we had colds. People like my mother did not get cancer. The tests at the Mayo Clinic would prove that, refuting what the doctors in Duluth had said. I was certain of this. Who were those doctors in Duluth anyway? What was Duluth? Duluth! Duluth was a freezing hick town where doctors who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about told forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish, garlic-eating, natural-remedy-using nonsmokers that they had late-stage lung cancer, that’s what. Fuck them. That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem. And yet, here was my mother at the Mayo Clinic getting worn out if she had to be on her feet for more than three minutes. “You want a wheelchair?” Eddie asked her when we came upon a row of them in a long carpeted hall. “She doesn’t need a wheelchair,” I said. “Just for a minute,” said my mother, almost collapsing into one, her eyes meeting mine before Eddie wheeled her toward the elevator. I followed behind, not allowing myself to think a thing. We were finally on our way up to see the last doctor. The real doctor, we kept calling him. The one who would gather everything that had been gathered about my mom and tell us what was true. As the elevator car lifted, my mother reached out to tug at my pants, rubbing the green cotton between her fingers proprietarily. “Perfect,” she said.

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

  (Because many cults control members' clothing or eating choices, don't be surprised if you have difficulty in these areas.) Making lists may make life more manageable. In the evening, start a list of what you want to do the next day. Break your day into its smallest parts, beginning with getting up. Then list everything you need to do: brush teeth, take shower, get dressed, make the bed, and so on. One risk at this time is becoming overly dependent on family, friends, or another group. Sometimes it requires great effort and willpower to remain independent. Well-meaning family and friends need to step back now and encourage you to take responsibility for yourself and your decisions. Decision making gets easier with practice. Give yourself permission to make mistakes. Fears of making a mistake, of criticism, or of the leader's unpredictability no longer need to guide your actions. If you choose incorrectly, you can forgive yourself and take steps to remedy the situation. When you can rely on yourself for your choices, you will become autonomous again. Your selfesteem will increase, as will your capacity to exercise control over your life. Your dependency on others will lessen. Loaded LanguageAs discussed in Chapters 3 and 7, cult language tends to be loaded with special meanings or new words that carry cult-specific meanings. Consequently, words and their usual meanings must be reclaimed or relearned once you leave the group. Most likely you will want to discard some words and phrases that are unique to the cult. Spending time with words facilitates this process. Start slowly and build up. Work at a reasonable pace, but try to do something daily related to words, language, and reading. If the newspaper looks too dense or intimidating, try magazines or even comic books. Reread books you liked in the past. Listen to books on tape or CD. Get to know your local library. Bookstores that sell used books are a good source of low-cost material. Do crossword puzzles. Play ScrabbleTM with yourself or with a nonthreatening, noncompetitive friend or family member. Watch or listen to educational television or radio programs. If any of these activities make you feel uneasy or cause you to dissociate (for example, if listening to an audio book puts you into a tranced-out state), trust your feelings and discontinue the activity until you have regained control over your discomfort. Over time, and with some effort on your part, the world will become a manageable place again (or perhaps for the first time if you grew up in a cult). In time you will be able to communicate clearly with those around you. Black-and-White ThinkingBecause cults consider themselves superior to everything and everyone outside the group, they bring out the most judgmental and self-righteous features of each member. Such thoughtless and enforced judgmentalism, which is narrow, prejudicial, and damaging to self and others, becomes deeply ingrained in each member's mind and habits.