Loneliness

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)

  For Naomi, I’m one of those people. She needs to see me as immune, invulnerable, as living outside the rules of reality in which we are all survivors or survivors-to-be. It helps her see me as strong enough to be with her, but nevertheless that need to see me as pain-free leaves her alone again, connected to idealized others and with the feeling that no one can truly know her. “I feel so alone,” she says, and I share with her the feeling that we all need another human to bear witness and accompany us on the emotional journey of life, another person who can accept our feelings and process them with us. We need to be known. When Naomi was a child, her pain wasn’t recognized and thus she couldn’t make sense of it and had to deny it. The emotional holding that parents provide for their children is about accompanying them in their lives, giving names to their feelings, helping them tolerate the intense emotions that come with being alive. Now Naomi gets in touch with her loneliness, conflicted about trusting that I could understand, aware of her worry of knowing too much about her own pain as well as about Isabella’s. It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty, a place where we can recognize the other and don’t try to know better, to fix or give optimistic advice. Instead we are available to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human. In the last few weeks of Isabella’s life, Naomi sits with Isabella’s family next to her hospice bed, holding her hand. Isabella’s older child goes to school and acts as if nothing is happening. It is always confusing to witness the way children deal with loss, to understand the things they are worried about that may sound trivial (“Who is going to put me to bed at night?”) and not to confuse their dissociated state with lack of care or to blame them for being selfish. Grief is a tricky and unpredictable creature. It changes its face every minute and often appears in disguise. In some ways, in those unbearable moments, we are all children who need someone to tell us that there is life after death. Lying in her bed, Isabella becomes more and more disconnected. “I feel far away,” she tells Naomi. “I looked in the mirror today and I felt that I had already left.” Naomi tells me about her guilt and the pain of separation. “She is agitated and angry,” she says. “I constantly feel that I have done something wrong, that I could be more helpful, that I could do it better.”

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

  She gave me the assignment of living an ordinary life. This was the most frightening challenge since leaving polygamy. Oddly, what is more unsettling for me is to be an average member of a mainstream community. When I try doing this, I feel like a fish out of water flailing around. My experiences are so out of the ordinary that I find it difficult to find common ground with others my age. I can speak in front of a roomful of students at New York University without too much thought. But if you place me in a high school auditorium filled with delighted parents, teachers, and community members celebrating that year's graduating class, I am suddenly pulled back into my own pain and social awkwardness. I never attended junior high or high school. Not onlythat, I can't name one adult who made it a priority that I graduate with a high school diploma. Isolation is. a common practice among most polygamist families in Utah, as is denyingtheir children an education, a choice about dating and marriage, the right to vote, orto be recognized as citizens bythe public. Because of this background, I find that isolation is something I can slip into easily. There is a huge gap between my experiences growing up and the experiences of others in mainstream society. Finding common ground with the people around me now is difficult. Once they find out I grew up in polygamy, curiosity and many prying ques tions follow. At those moments I feel as if I am standing on one side of the Grand Canyon while most everyone else I know is standing on the other side. Today I am forty-one years old. I struggle with different challenges-maintaining employment, keeping a house, raising four daughters, and overseeing services for my seventeen-year-old autistic son. My own daughters are navigating their way through territory with which I am painfully unfamiliar. They have the opportunity to experience so much more than I did attheir ages. Sometimes I look on with so much pride and satisfaction, yet it is painful to never have had the same opportunities. I have accomplished and experienced so much in my life so far; nevertheless, I am still working on the one thing that would make me feel that my leaving was successful. It is something so fundamental to so many people, yet it is monumental for me personally. I would like to feel as if I belong in a community. I would feel successful if I conquered the mind manipulations, spiritual abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse I experienced as a child. These experiences still separate me from others. The gap between my life inside and my life outside of the cult remains so wide that it is painfully awkward. Sometimes it feels almost as though it was someone else born in the cult and I am an adult without a past that I can share.

• From Less (2017)

  “Yes.” She smiles at the memory and sniffs the glass. “It smells just like my grandmother’s cha-cha! ” The cha-cha proves too much for the birthday girl, and by eleven thirty, he and Mohammed are leading her up to her room as she smiles and thanks them. He puts her, happily drunk, to bed. She is speaking French to Mohammed, who comforts her in the same language and then again in English. As Less tucks her in, she says, “Well, that was ridiculous, Arthur, I’m sorry.” As he closes her door, he realizes that he will spend his fiftieth birthday alone. He turns; not alone. “Mohammed, how many languages do you speak?” “Seven!” he says brightly, striding to the elevator. “I learn from school. They make fun of my Arabic when I come to the city, it is old-fashioned, I learned in Berber school, so I work more hard. And from tourists! Sorry, still learning English. And you, Arthur?” “Seven! My God!” The elevator is completely mirrored, and as the doors close, Less is confronted by a vision: infinite Mohammeds in red polo shirts beside infinite versions of his father at fifty, which is to say himself. “I…I speak English and German—” “Ich auch!” says Mohammed. The following is translated from the German: “I lived for two years in Berlin! Such boring music!” “I have been coming from there! Is excellent your German!” “And yours is good. Here we are, you first, Arthur. Are you ready for your birthday?” “I am fear of the age.” “Don’t be frightened. Fifty is nothing. You’re a handsome man, and healthy, and rich.” He wants to say he is not rich but stops himself. “How many year have you?” “I’m fifty-three. You see, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s get you a glass of champagne.” “I am fear of the old, I am fear of the lonely.” “You have nothing to fear.” He turns to a woman who has taken over the station behind the bar, easily his height with her hair in a ponytail, and speaks to her in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Perhaps he is asking for champagne for the American, who has just turned fifty. The bartender beams at Less, raises her eyebrows, and says something. Mohammed laughs; Less just stands with his idiot’s grin. “Happy birthday, sir,” she says in English, pouring out a glass of French champagne. “This is my treat.” Less offers to buy Mohammed a drink, but the man will indulge only in energy drinks. Not because of Islam, he explains; he is agnostic. “Because alcohol makes me crazy. Crazy! But I smoke hashish. Would you like?” “No, no, not tonight. It makes me crazy. Mohammed, are you really a tour guide?” “I must to make a living,” Mohammed says, suddenly shy in his English. “But in truth, I am writer. Like you.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I’m not sure, but it was okay,” he says nonchalantly, “I didn’t mind that Mom ignored me.” There is something touching about the way he describes himself sitting next to his mother and listening to her talking. I feel his love, his longing, his loneliness, as well as his acceptance of being invisible. He is the one who is there, but it’s as if he doesn’t exist, as if he is the dead child, and his dead sister is the one who is still alive inside his mother. We sit in silence for a long minute and I realize that in my silence I might become Jon’s neglectful mother, of whom he asks nothing. Very often and without awareness, the therapist joins the patient’s childhood scenario, taking the role of one of their caretakers. Childhood attachments shape the therapeutic relationship in the same way that they form other relationships outside therapy. Those who expect to be loved often make sure others love them, while those who expect to be neglected might evoke neglect. Our goal as therapists is to examine those patterns; to ask ourselves in what ways our patients relive their early relationships with us, to question who we become to them, and to process those old attachments while creating new, different ones. As with his mother, Jon doesn’t ask me for much. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I have a baby now, and I know how hard it is. Since Jenny was born, I constantly think about my parents. They had five kids. One of them died, can you imagine? They had to take care of three young children and a baby in the aftermath of her death. No one can do that,” he concludes. “Mom was broken. So yes. She ignored me.” Jon isn’t angry with his mother simply because, even after she died, he still longs for her. The more neglectful she was, the more his need and longing for her increased. As a child, he had no other source of security. He tried to see her as “good” because he preferred to have a neglectful mother than no mother at all. I realize that it is easier for him to identify with his mother and with her loss than to imagine himself as a child and recognize his own pain. Unconsciously, however, he keeps repeating the pattern of neglect: fighting his unsatisfied needs and worrying about all the other ways the world might reject him.

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

  As she speaks I am thinking of the founders of the city, of the soldier-God in his glass coffin, the youthful body lapped in silver, riding down the river towards his tomb. Or of that great square negro head reverberating with a concept of God conceived in the spirit of pure intellectual play — Plotinus. It is as if the preoccupations of this landscape were centred somewhere out of reach of the average inhabitant — in a region where the flesh, stripped by over-indulgence of its final reticences, must yield to a preoccupation vastly more comprehensive: or perish in the kind of exhaustion represented by the works of the Mouseion, the guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses; the burning stupid metaphor of Berenice’s hair glittering in the night sky above Melissa’s sleeping face. ‘Ah!’ said Justine once ‘that there should be something free, something Polynesian about the licence in which we live.’ Or even Mediterranean, she might have added, for the connotation of every kiss would be different in Italy or Spain; here our bodies were chafed by the harsh desiccated winds blowing up out of the deserts of Africa and for love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which emphasized loneliness rather than expurgated it. Now even the city had two centres of gravity — the true and magnetic north of its personality: and between them the temperament of its inhabitants sparked harshly like a leaky electric discharge. Its spiritual centre was the forgotten site of the Soma where once the confused young soldier’s body lay in its borrowed Godhead; its temporal site the Brokers’ Club where like Caballi* the cotton brokers sat to sip their coffee, puff rank cheroots and watch Capodistria — as people upon a river-bank will watch the progress of a fisherman or an artist. The one symbolized for me the great conquests of man in the realms of matter, space and time — which must inevitably yield their harsh knowledge of defeat to the conqueror in his coffin; the other was no symbol but the living limbo of free-will in which my beloved Justine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself. In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.* Anything pressed too far becomes a sin.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Both have their types - their ingénues and grandes dames, their rising stars, their falling stars, their bill-toppers, their hacks ...All this I learned, slowly but steadily, in the first few weeks of my apprenticeship, just as I had learned my music-hall trade at Kitty’s side. Luckily for me, I found a friend and adviser - a boy with whom I fell into conversation late one night, as we sheltered together from a sudden shower in the doorway of a building on the edge of Soho Square. He was a very girlish type - what they call a true mary-anne - and, like many of them, he gave himself a girl’s name: Alice.‘That’s my sister’s name!’ I said, when he told me, and he smiled: it was his sister’s name, too - only his sister, he said, was dead. I said I didn’t know if mine was dead or not, and didn’t care; and this did not surprise him.This Alice was, I guessed, about my age. He was as pretty as a girl - prettier, indeed, than most girls (including me), for he had glossy black hair and a heart-shaped face, and eye-lashes impossibly long and dark and thick. He had rented, he said, since he was twelve; renting, now, was the only life he knew, but he liked it well enough. ‘It’s better, anyway,’ he said, ‘than working in an office or a shop. I believe that, if I had to work in the same little room all day, perched on the same little stool and staring at the same dull faces, I would go mad, just mad!’When he asked for my history, I told him that I had come up to London from Kent, that I had been treated rather badly by someone, and was now forced to find my living on the streets; all of which was true enough, in its way.

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

  I started my job and began interviewing people to work with me. I hired several people who soon became my friends. What I didn't know at the time was thatthe personnel director who hired me-and most of the people I hiredwere part of a group known to outsiders as the Sullivanians. My first real introduction to this group came several months later. I mentioned to a co-worker that I thought I could use some counseling to help me do a bet ter job. As a new boss, I wanted to learn how to be friendly and compassionate while still providing structure and guidance to my subordinates. My co-worker gave me her therapist's name and assured me I would like her. I set up a consultation with the therapist in New York City and was soon seeing herthree times a week. The cost per session was low, which meant I could afford to see her often, and the philosophy of the therapy seemed sound to me. My therapist was well aware of problems I saw in American society and was supportive of my desires to make the world a better place for all (not just the rich). Soon I was being invited to parties in New York: wild parties where people danced, talked a lot, and seemed to be having fun. I was asked out for dinner dates, play dates, bicycling dates, and sleepovers. Suddenly I had quite an active social life in New York. My therapist suggested that I move to the city to be closer to my new friends. A bulletin board in her waiting room was filled with notices of people looking for roommates. Before long I moved into a household connected to the group, although I was not fully aware of what that meant. I knew it was a social scene: people to hang out with; people with similar political views (somewhat radical but not quite ready to be revolutionaries); and people who wanted to make changes in the world and who were experimenting with new ways of living. I had long been interested in communal living and various utopian experiments. Several years earlier, my brother had moved into a communal group in California, and he and his family seemed to be very happy there. I was ready to try something new, and this seemed right. Once I moved to New York, I spent all my time with people who were in therapy with my therapist or others in the group. I talked with my roommates and dates about my therapy sessions and heard about theirs. My therapist often asked me about my childhood, encouraging me to talk about painful events. She said it sounded like my parents didn't really want me, or at best were simply unable to love me because their parents hadn't been able to love them. She told me it would be best for my therapy if I didn't see my parents for a while, until I could understand my history better.

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

  A small shift in attention like this could well lead to large changes in your overall health and well-being. Try This Micro-moment Practice: Reflect on Your Social Connections Each night, for a few weeks, review your entire day and call to mind the three longest social interactions you had that day. Thinking of these three interactions all together, consider how true each of the following two statements is for you: • During these social interactions, I felt “in tune” with the person/s around me. • During these social interactions, I felt close to the person/s. Rate the truth of these two statements on a scale from 1 to 7, on which 1= not at all true , and 7= very true . You may record your responses anywhere, for instance in a notebook or computer spreadsheet that you create. Or you can use the online recording tools on the website that accompanies this book by visiting www.PositivityResonance.com . One benefit of recording your responses online is that you can also choose to rate your emotions each day, and thereby, as the weeks progress, you can see whether your positivity ratio rises in step with your greater attention to social connections. Donna’s Story Not long ago, I shared this preliminary finding on the impact of merely reflecting on social connections with Donna, a friend of mine who for years has been trying out new tools for increasing well-being. At the time, Donna had been facing a series of setbacks and disappointments at work and had lost some close, work-based friendships. Being single, she also felt emotionally isolated. With her stress levels at an all-time high, she was losing sleep, feeling lethargic, and had little remaining self-confidence. She was feeling her absolute worst at a time when she needed a lot of strength just to get through a workday. Over breakfast, I shared with her that Bethany and I had serendipitously stumbled upon what we thought might be a bouillon cube version of our loving-kindness interventions: a condensed, minute-long thought exercise that might well yield comparable results. Having tried out several other positive psychology interventions, Donna was immediately curious. She asked more about the technique. I shared that what our participants had done was extraordinarily simple—just answer those two questions about their three longest social interactions of the day. Donna soaked up our fresh data with great interest and wondered how her own life might be different if her three longest interactions each day were life-giving rather than life-draining, sources of strength rather than disappointment. Right then, she transformed our accidental finding into her own, self-styled well-being intervention. She set herself a new goal of seeking out at least three interactions each day that held positivity resonance. While she could hardly control the influx of uncertainty and setbacks in her day-to-day life, she could strive to cultivate more loving connections each day.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Okay,” I said, and wrote Eddie’s address, though in truth my connection to Eddie in the four years since my mother died had become so pained and distant I couldn’t rightly consider him my stepfather anymore. I had no “home,” even though the house we built still stood. Leif and Karen and I were inextricably bound as siblings, but we spoke and saw one another rarely, our lives profoundly different. Paul and I had finalized our divorce the month before, after a harrowing yearlong separation. I had beloved friends whom I sometimes referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and intermittent, more familial in word than in deed. Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms. “Here you are,” I said to the woman, sliding the form across the counter in her direction, though she didn’t turn to me for several moments. She was watching a small television that sat on a table behind the counter. The evening news. Something about the O. J. Simpson trial. “Do you think he’s guilty?” she asked, still looking at the TV. “It seems like it, but it’s too soon to know, I guess. We don’t have all the information yet.” “Of course he did it!” she shouted. When she finally gave me a key, I walked across the parking lot to a door at the far end of the building, unlocked it and went inside, and set my things down and sat on the soft bed. I was in the Mojave Desert, but the room was strangely dank, smelling of wet carpet and Lysol. A vented white metal box in the corner roared to life—a swamp cooler that blew icy air for a few minutes and then turned itself off with a dramatic clatter that only exacerbated my sense of uneasy solitude. I thought about going out and finding myself a companion. It was such an easy thing to do. The previous years had been a veritable feast of one- and two- and three-night stands. They seemed so ridiculous to me now, all that intimacy with people I didn’t love, and yet still I ached for the simple sensation of a body pressed against mine, obliterating everything else. I stood up from the bed to shake off the longing, to stop my mind from its hungry whir: I could go to a bar. I could let a man buy me a drink. We could be back here in a flash.

• From Wild (2012)

  There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world. Oprah’s note: I love words, and there are some sentences that I love spoon-feeding to myself. This is one of those spoon-fed sentences. “A longing so naked and sorry”: even if you’ve never had that kind of longing, it so accurately describes it that you know what that feels like. Click here to return to the text. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me. Oprah’s note: That may be my favorite line in the whole book. First of all, it’s so beautifully constructed, and it captures what this journey was all about. She started out looking to find herself—looking for clarity—and that’s exactly what happens. The essence of the book is held right there in that sentence. It means that every step was worth it. It means all the skepticism of whether this hike is the right thing or not the right thing—it all gets resolved in that sentence. Click here to return to the text. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with her hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller. I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth remembering how I had felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter drove away. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay. Oprah’s note: I liked the self-realization that’s coming here: that if you can’t be alone with yourself and be happy, then you can never be happy. All her life she’s been running from herself, and finally she has this moment where she sees that she’s alone—and that’s really okay. Click here to return to the text. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one. Oprah’s note:

• From Wild (2012)

  “Standard-issue hobo care package,” he said, turning to give me a can of cold Budweiser beer and a plastic grocery bag weighed down with a handful of items at its bottom. “But I’m not a hobo,” I echoed for the last time, with less fervor than I had before, afraid he’d finally believe me and take the standard-issue hobo care package away. “Thanks for the interview,” he said, and shut the trunk. “Stay safe out here.” “Yeah. You too,” I said. “You have a gun, I assume. At least I hope you do.” I shrugged, unwilling to commit either way. “ ’Cause, I know you’ve been south of here, but now you’re going north, which means you’re soon entering Bigfoot country.” “Bigfoot?” “Yeah. You know, Sasquatch? No lie. From here all the way up to the border and into Oregon you’re in the territory where most of the Bigfoot sightings in the world are reported.” He turned to the trees as if one might come barreling out at us. “A lot of folks believe in them. A lot of hobo folks—folks who are out here. Folks who know. I hear Bigfoot stories all the time.” “Well, I’m okay, I think. At least so far,” I said, and laughed, though my stomach did a little somersault. In the weeks preceding my hike on the PCT, when I’d decided not to be afraid of anything, I’d been thinking about bears and snakes and mountain lions and strange people I met along the way. I hadn’t pondered hairy humanoid bipedal beasts. “But you’re probably fine. I wouldn’t worry. Chances are, they’ll leave you alone. Especially if you have a gun.” “Right.” I nodded. “Good luck on your hike,” he said, getting into his car. “Good luck … finding hobos,” I said, and waved as he drove away. I stood there for a while, letting cars pass without even trying to get them to give me a ride. I felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. The sun beat down on me hot, even through my hat. I wondered where Stacy and Trina were. The man who’d picked them up was only going to take them about twelve miles east, to the junction of the next highway we needed to catch a ride on, which would take us north and then back west to Old Station, where we’d rejoin the PCT. We’d agreed to meet at that junction. I remotely regretted having encouraged them to leave me behind when that ride had come along. I jabbed my thumb at another car and realized only after it passed that it didn’t look so good that I was holding a can of beer. I pressed its cool aluminum against my hot forehead and suddenly had the urge to drink it. Why shouldn’t I? It would only get warm in my pack.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Do you know what you walked into, honey?” the white man asked me when he’d recovered, and I shook my head. He and the black man looked to be in their sixties, the Latino barely out of his teens. “You see this here mountain?” he asked. He pointed straight ahead through the windshield from his position behind the wheel. “We’re getting ready to blow that mountain up.” He explained to me that a mining operation had bought rights to this patch of land and they were mining for decorative rock that people use in their yards. “My name’s Frank,” he said, tapping the brim of his cowboy hat. “And technically you’re trespassing, young lady, but we won’t hold that against you.” He looked at me and winked. “We’re just miners. We don’t own the land or else we’d have to shoot you.” He laughed again and then gestured to the Latino in the middle and told me his name was Carlos. “I’m Walter,” said the black man sitting by the passenger window. They were the first people I’d seen since the two guys in the minivan with the Colorado plates who’d dropped me by the side of the road more than a week before. When I spoke, my voice sounded funny to me, seemed to be higher and faster than I’d remembered, as if it were something I couldn’t quite catch and hold on to, as if every word were a small bird fluttering away. They told me to get in the back of the truck, and we drove the short distance around the bend to retrieve my pack. Frank stopped and they all got out. Walter picked up my pack and was shocked by the weight. “I was in Korea,” he said, hoisting it onto the truck’s metal bed with considerable effort. “And we ain’t never carried a pack that heavy. Or maybe once I carried one that heavy, but that was when I was being punished.” Quickly, without my being much involved, it was decided I’d go home with Frank, where his wife would feed me dinner and I could bathe and sleep in a bed. In the morning, he’d help me get someplace where I could have my stove repaired. “Now explain all this to me again?” Frank asked a few times, and each time all three of them listened with confused and rapt attention. They lived perhaps twenty miles from the Pacific Crest Trail and yet none of them had ever heard of it. None could fathom what business a woman had hiking it by herself, and Frank and Walter told me so, in jovial, gentlemanly terms. “I think it’s kind of cool,” said Carlos after a while. He was eighteen, he told me, about to join the military. “Maybe you should do this instead,” I suggested. “Nah,” he said.

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

  For young children and youth, this is a damaging scenario. I know it was for me. As I reached my mid-to-late teens and attended non-UC schools, a whole world began to open up. For many years, I managed to live in two worlds, as though I were split into two different people and dimensions. The strange thing is that somehow I was never completely compromised, nor did I believe my own lies. Many members who remain on the fence go through such psychological and emotional torment that they become polarized, and in the end have to pick one side or the other. I was spared that conflict. The next serious condition was my self-esteem. I had far more self-esteem than most because I had not been completely disempowered. This was due, in part, to my position as the "first blessed child in the western world," but perhaps it was primarily due to my parents, particularly my father, who instilled in me a sense of integrity, right, wrong, and determination. Those very gifts were the ones that carried me through, even when my parents were still involved with the UC and were trying to encourage me to remain. Isn't life odd sometimes? But even with that extra armor, I was inept emotionally for the grand toll of freedom. As the lyrics to the Eagles' song "Desperado" state, ". . . freedom, oh freedom, that's just some people talking, your prison is walking through this world all alone. . . ," that appeared to be my fate. The more I was exposed to the outside world, the more the "inside" world began to drift away. Friends who had the same doubts as I had became fearful, and instead of standing together, we stood alone and would get picked off by parents, elders, and peer pressure. We would abandon our plans to exit the movement. There was a Stalinist feel to the way friends and family members informed on one another in the UC. Private details were disclosed, and gossip flowed along with ridicule, damnation, and character assassination. It can be argued that these are psychological or spiritual traps, but it feels like a physical hold on you, or a wall you cannot climb. What you know is that if you do leave permanently, and particularly if you are open about why, it's like leaving your country as a traitor, knowing you can never return. It occurred to me in the end that there was no future for me in the UC, and that I could not live a double life forever. What made all the difference in my case was access to information, educational pursuits like psychology, and a supportive network of friends. I was lucky to attend university for a few years. But even before that, I constantly read books aboutthe human condition, which helped me understand why I had fears of abandonment, as well as trust and loyalty issues.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It helps her see me as strong enough to be with her, but nevertheless that need to see me as pain-free leaves her alone again, connected to idealized others and with the feeling that no one can truly know her. “I feel so alone,” she says, and I share with her the feeling that we all need another human to bear witness and accompany us on the emotional journey of life, another person who can accept our feelings and process them with us. We need to be known. When Naomi was a child, her pain wasn’t recognized and thus she couldn’t make sense of it and had to deny it. The emotional holding that parents provide for their children is about accompanying them in their lives, giving names to their feelings, helping them tolerate the intense emotions that come with being alive. Now Naomi gets in touch with her loneliness, conflicted about trusting that I could understand, aware of her worry of knowing too much about her own pain as well as about Isabella’s. It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty, a place where we can recognize the other and don’t try to know better, to fix or give optimistic advice. Instead we are available to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human. In the last few weeks of Isabella’s life, Naomi sits with Isabella’s family next to her hospice bed, holding her hand. Isabella’s older child goes to school and acts as if nothing is happening. It is always confusing to witness the way children deal with loss, to understand the things they are worried about that may sound trivial (“Who is going to put me to bed at night?”) and not to confuse their dissociated state with lack of care or to blame them for being selfish. Grief is a tricky and unpredictable creature. It changes its face every minute and often appears in disguise. In some ways, in those unbearable moments, we are all children who need someone to tell us that there is life after death. Lying in her bed, Isabella becomes more and more disconnected. “I feel far away,” she tells Naomi. “I looked in the mirror today and I felt that I had already left.” Naomi tells me about her guilt and the pain of separation. “She is agitated and angry,” she says. “I constantly feel that I have done something wrong, that I could be more helpful, that I could do it better.” I know that Naomi’s guilt is about being healthy and alive.

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

  By the end of summer, Catherine broke. Lonely, far from home, she simply couldn’t stand the isolation anymore. She apologized to Charles and welcomed his mistress into her inner circle as a friend. The queen and Lady Castlemaine were often crammed into a coach with the king between them. Grateful Charles became an attentive husband. His respect for Catherine became friendship and eventually a kind of love. When Lady Castlemaine demanded that she be the first to ride with the king in a revolutionary new open carriage—and threatened to have a miscarriage on the spot if she was not—Charles selected Catherine for the honor. As the king held the hand of his beaming wife, his mistress was forced to join the procession that followed on horseback, and dejectedly kept her distance from the boisterous courtiers. While bending her husband to her will by cheerful obedience, Catherine sometimes found herself in a position to exact revenge. Two days after Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her third royal bastard in September 1663, the queen—pretending to know nothing of royal bastards—insisted that Lady Castlemaine ride on horseback with her to Oxford or lose her position as lady of the bedchamber. The new mother, still sore and bleeding, clambered on top of the horse and rode uncomplaining, but gritting her teeth. It is ironic that when Queen Catherine became seriously ill in 1663, no one in England was more interested in her recovery than the king’s mistress. Lady Castlemaine knew that if Catherine died, Charles would marry the beautiful sixteen-year-old noblewoman Frances Stuart, who had aroused his lust but refused to assuage it. Lifted from the depths of bereavement into the heights of passion, Charles would have no need of his rancorous mistress. Barbara prayed heartily for the life of her royal lover’s wife. Similarly, in 1670 Charles’s mistresses—he now had a harem—rallied around Queen Catherine when Lord Buckingham presented Parliament with a bill enabling the king to divorce his stonily barren wife and remarry. Clucking and cackling, the royal mistresses insisted that the barren, powerless queen stay exactly where she was. A nubile new queen would certainly sink their ships with all their cargo. And heaven forbid the new queen would bear a passel of royal children. Certainly Charles would neglect his numerous royal bastards. But Charles, in an act of conscience, stopped the bill, stating, “It was a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because she was his wife and had no children by him, which was no fault of hers.”12 “An old, dull, deaf, peevish beast”In contrast to the glory of England’s merry monarch Charles II a half century earlier, beginning in 1714 “the Hanoverian dynasty seem[ed] to have brought in…a sort of triumph of pudding, turnips, and muddy ale, over the lace, maypoles, champagne and burgundy of the preceding period,” according to the courtier Brimley Johnson.13

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

  In 1972 the duke died in Paris. The duchess soon slipped into senility, drank even more heavily to calm the phantoms of the past, and was down to eighty-five pounds by 1977. And yet she lived until 1986, stubbornly clinging to life, even as her body shriveled and her mind wandered. As she lay there, immobile, was she haunted by visions of crowns and scepters? Of thrones and coronation robes and the glory that might have been? Charles and CamillaNearly seventy years after Edward VIII’s decision to marry his mistress, the same weighty question hangs over the head of a controversial prince. As a girl, Camilla Shand, the great-granddaughter of Edward VII’s last mistress, Alice Keppel, loved to hear Granny Alice stories and always laughed at her famous statement, “My job is to curtsy first…and then jump into bed!”11 Little did Camilla know that she would have her own chance to curtsy and jump. She met Prince Charles in 1970, as a pouring rain lashed the Windsor polo fields. Wearing a pair of muddy Wellington boots, twenty-three-year-old Camilla marched up to the twenty-two-year-old prince and introduced herself. “My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress,” she said. “How about it?”12 Camilla, indeed, possessed many of the qualities that had made her great-grandmother a successful royal mistress. Though neither was classically beautiful, both had a colorful personality, dry wit, kindness, and intelligence that attracted more than high cheekbones or full lips. Both were fiercely loyal to their royal lovers, reassuring, calm, capable, and—rare in a world of scepters and crowns—unpretentious. Both were described by their contemporaries as exuding a raw sex appeal that cannot be captured in photographs. Charles was immediately intrigued. Camilla was already an experienced woman of the world with the reputation of being a sizzling sex partner; the prince was comparatively inexperienced. The two of them dated for nearly three years, Charles wanting desperately to marry her. But the royal family was not amused—though from a proper English family, Camilla was no virgin. Nor was Camilla herself very interested in living in the fishbowl of Buckingham Palace. While Charles was in the Royal Navy, Camilla married her old flame Andrew Parker-Bowles. Hearing the news, the prince locked himself in his cabin for hours and emerged red-eyed. They remained friends, however, and became lovers once again in 1980 as Camilla’s marriage gracefully deteriorated. Camilla, always on the lookout for a potential royal bride, pushed Charles into the arms of Diana, Lady Spencer. Camilla felt Diana was young and pliable enough to mold herself to Charles and palace life. She was from a noble family and boasted that most vital prerequisite of a princess bride: an unpenetrated hymen. Charles, deeply in love with Camilla, had serious doubts; his wooing of Diana was halfhearted and lackluster. He had been raised, however, to do his duty for his country and so allowed himself to be pushed down the path to the altar.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I reached the trail on the other side, I felt stupid and weak and sorry for myself, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt on the trail before, envious of the couples who had each other, and of Rex and Stacy who had so easily become a hiking pair—when Rex left the trail in Seiad Valley, Stacy would be meeting her friend Dee so they could hike through Oregon together, but I’d forever be alone. And why? What did being alone do? I’m not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid. When I stopped for lunch, I lingered until the others caught up to me. They told me they’d met a backcountry ranger who warned them of a forest fire to the west and north, near Happy Valley. It hadn’t affected the PCT so far, but he’d told them to be on alert. I let them all hike ahead, saying I’d catch up to them by nightfall, and walked alone into the heat of the afternoon. A couple of hours later, I came to a spring in an idyllic meadow and stopped to get water. It was too beautiful a spot to leave, so afterwards I lingered, soaking my feet in the spring until I heard an ever-loudening jangle of bells. I had only just scrambled to my feet when a white llama rounded the bend and came bounding straight up to me with a toothy grin on his face. “Ah!” I yelled, the same as I had when I saw the bear, but I reached for the lead rope that dangled from his halter anyway, an old habit from my childhood with horses. The llama wore a pack that was strung with silver bells, not so unlike the belt on the woman I’d met at Toad Lake. “Easy,” I said to him as I stood, barefoot and stunned, wondering what to do next. He looked stunned too, his expression both comical and stern. It occurred to me that he might bite me, but I had no way to know. I’d never been so close to a llama. I’d never even been far from a llama. I’d had so little experience with llamas that I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that a llama was what he was. He smelled like burlap and morning breath. I pulled him discreetly in the direction of my boots and stuffed my feet into them and then petted his long bristly neck in a vigorous manner that I hoped struck him as commanding. After a few minutes, an old woman with two gray braids down the sides of her head came along.

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

  For a young person who's been in a cult, however, the emotional price of going forward (no matter how others respond) can be steep, particularly if that person's happiness and relative peace had always been contingent on the approval of others. If a young person has to figure it out alone, it may take a while to learn that one can be independent and still be accepted, and then decide to take the risk. If we admit mind control exists and that it can exert tremendous pressure and leave aftereffects on adults who have had prior lives in the outside world, consider how much of an effect being born and raised in a cult might have on a young person. It may be necessary to help relieve that young person of the feeling that he must go along with whatever he's told. It may even be necessary to show a young person that she truly has a choice. When a young person raised in a cult sees that autonomous action brings no dire consequences, the fear will diminish. Glorious Imperfectionby Donna Y. Collins Donna Collins was born and grew up inside the Unification Church. For more than a decade, she has been speaking publicly and writing about her unique experiences. She has counseled families and individuals, and has addressed audiences around the world about the issue of children growing up in cults. She is a writer, a poet, and a happily married mother of three young children. One's first memories of childhood are always a blur, but the smells, sounds, and faces are comforting. I remember being surrounded by idealistic, warmhearted, and well-meaning people; many are still in my life as surrogate aunts, uncles, mothers, and fathers. I can recall the sweet smell of grass and clean air in the Wiltshire countryside, the ponies I used to ride, and the cold morning frost on the windowpane in which I would etch my name. My name was Young Oon, after my mother's Spiritual Mother and the first Korean missionary to the West. Young Oon is not a common name in England or anywhere as far as I can tell, and it certainly was misplaced on me with my curly blonde hair and green eyes. I knew I was different, set apart from those in the outside world who had not yet found the so-called truth that everyone around me spouted from dawn to dusk, that a Korean man called Sun Myung Moon was the Messiah, The Second Coming of Christ. It was not an easy childhood; nonetheless, I had happy moments, and it's true what they say about children being resilient. Many children born into madness of one form or another grow up to be well-adjusted and wonderful people, just as there are those from ostensibly normal and comfortable homes who grow up to be selfish and sometimes even diabolical.

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

  Lillie was lonely in her last years, puttering around her garden, playing with her little dogs. The young nobleman she had married ignored her but pocketed her money, and all the lusty kings and regal queens of her youth were sleeping a marbled sleep. After Lillie’s death in 1929 at age seventy-five, a publisher who had known her wrote, “She always appeared to be a lingering leaf on an autumn tree which hangs on and will not die nor perish beneath the blast of Winter, because it has once belonged to a never-to-be-forgotten Summer. She could not let go. She fought in order not to let go.”53 Daisy Warwick, on the other hand, laid down her boxing gloves. Gone was the slender hourglass figure which had so entranced the Prince of Wales in the 1880s. By the 1930s she was too fat to get out of a chair by herself. She collected a large menagerie of birds, donkeys, monkeys, cats, and dogs, and would stagger about her gardens trailing a feather boa, feeding them. One visitor was shocked to see the famous royal mistress in such a condition. But Lady Warwick stated, truthfully, “I am a very happy woman.”54 TwelveMonarchs, Mistresses, and MarriageI would not be a Queen for all the world. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE IF THE FIRST RECORDED CASE IN WESTERN HISTORY OF A monarch marrying his mistress is that of King David and Bathsheba, the ensuing tragedy of sackcloth and ashes set the tone for millennia to come. The marriages of kings and their mistresses were almost always tinged with grief or bludgeoned with catastrophe. The world of past centuries was not round but pyramid-shaped, and the higher up one found oneself, the more tightly one was bound by religion and etiquette. Sitting at the apex, the king was so tightly constrained that he had little room to maneuver. Any monarch attempting to break through the conventions was soon engulfed in an international roar of derision. Worse than raising taxes, worse than waging a senseless war, far worse than these was the marriage of a monarch to his mistress. The bride and groom were not the only ones kneeling in front of the altar. The nation’s prestige was on its knees, utterly vanquished. Subjects found themselves gripped by foreboding, if not outright panic. As the monarch was the personification of a people and a nation, his disdain for ancient rules and traditions would taint them all. Many a mistress turned royal wife soon found that the unceasing vigilance required to retain her former position could not be tossed aside at the altar. The mistress-wife was constantly challenged to validate her position, even as she had been while mistress. She was usually more detested than she had been as mistress, because she had clearly overstepped prescribed social bounds. Sniffing a wounded animal, vicious courtiers circled her with the hopes of a bloody kill.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was woken, in the night, twice: the first time by the sound of shouting in the street, and the slam of doors and the rattle of the poker in the grate, in the house next door; and the second time by the crying of the baby, in Florence’s room. This sound, in the darkness, made me shiver, for it recalled to me all the awful nights that I had spent at Mrs Best’s, in that grey chamber overlooking Smithfield Market. It did not, however, last for very long. I heard Florence rise and step across the floor, and then return - with Cyril, I supposed - to bed. And after that he didn’t stir again, and neither did I. When I woke next morning it was at the slam of the back door: this was Ralph, I guessed, leaving for work, for the clock showed ten to seven. There was movement overhead soon after that, as Florence rose and dressed, and much activity in the street outside - amazingly close, it all sounded to me, who was used to slumbering undisturbed by early risers in Diana’s quiet villa. I lay quite still, the contentment of the night all seeping from me. I didn’t want to rise and face the day, to pull my pinching boots back on, bid Florence good-bye, and be a friendless girl again. The parlour had grown very cold overnight, and my little makeshift bed seemed the only warm place in it. I pulled the blankets over my head, and groaned; groaning, I found, was rather satisfying, so I groaned still louder... I stopped only when I heard the click of the parlour door - then lifted the blankets from my face to see Florence squinting at me, gravely, through the gloom. ‘You’re not ill again?’ she said. I shook my head. ‘No. I was only - groaning.’ ‘Oh.’ She looked away. ‘Ralph has left some tea. Shall I fetch you some?’ ‘Yes, please.’ ‘And then - then you must get up, I’m afraid.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I shall get up now.’ But when she had gone I found I could not get up, at all. I could only lie. I needed to visit the privy again, rather badly; I knew that it was dreadfully rude to lie abed like this, in a stranger’s parlour. Yet I felt as if I had been visited in the night by a surgeon, who had taken all my bones away and replaced them with bars of lead. I could no nothing at all - except lie ... Florence brought me my tea, and I drank it - then lay back again. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, washing the baby; then she returned and pulled the curtains open, meaningfully. ‘It’s a quarter to eight, Miss Astley,’ she said. ‘I have to take Cyril across the street. You will be up and dressed, now, won’t you, when I come back?