Relief

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 Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I walked out of court and the light of day hit my face and I said, “Sweet Jesus, I am never going back there again.” It had been only a week, in a cell that wasn’t terribly uncomfortable with food that wasn’t half bad, but a week in jail is a long, long time. A week without shoelaces is a long, long time. A week with no clocks, with no sun, can feel like an eternity. The thought of anything worse, the thought of doing real time in a real prison, I couldn’t even imagine. — I drove with Mlungisi to his place, took a shower, and slept there. The next day he dropped me back at my mom’s house. I strolled up the driveway acting real casual. My plan was to say I’d been crashing with Mlungisi for a few days. I walked into the house like nothing had happened. “Hey, Mom! What’s up?” Mom didn’t say anything, didn’t ask me any questions. I was like, Okay. Cool. We’re good. I stayed for most of the day. Later in the afternoon we were sitting at the kitchen table, talking. I was telling all these stories, going on about everything Mlungisi and I had been up to that week, and I caught my mom giving me this look, slowly shaking her head. It was a different look than I had ever seen her give before. It wasn’t “One day, I’m going to catch you.” It wasn’t anger or disapproval. It was disappointment. She was hurt. “What?” I said. “What is it?” She said, “Boy, who do you think paid your bail? Hmm? Who do you think paid your lawyer? Do you think I’m an idiot? Did you think no one would tell me?” The truth came spilling out. Of course she’d known: the car. It had been missing the whole time. I’d been so wrapped up in dealing with jail and covering my tracks I’d forgotten that the proof of my crime was right there in the yard, the red Mazda missing from the driveway. And of course when I called my friend and he’d asked his dad for the money for the lawyer, the dad had pressed him on what the money was for and, being a parent himself, had called my mother immediately. She’d given my friend the money to pay the lawyer. She’d given my cousin the money to pay my bail. I’d spent the whole week in jail thinking I was so slick. But she’d known everything the whole time. “I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at you,” she said, “but you forget the reason I ride you so hard and give you so much shit is because I love you. Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love. If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Marx and colleagues do seem to amend their position in a direction more compatible with mine when they suggest that “for clinical purposes, it may matter less if TI among humans is an ‘all or none’ phenomenon, as the intensity of the TI response among humans may be an important factor in the onset and maintenance of posttraumatic psychopathology.” 34 Questions like this exemplify important areas for interdisciplinary discussion. Indeed, one of the impediments to the progress of truly effective trauma therapy has been that clinicians, experimentalists and theoreticians have not worked in ongoing partnerships to address such pivotal questions. To summarize: It is my observation that a precondition for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder is that a person is both frightened and perceives that he or she is trapped. The interaction of intense fear and immobility is fundamental in the formation of trauma, in its maintenance and in its deconstruction, resolution and transformation. I shall elaborate on the therapeutic implications of this relationship in Chapters 5 through 9. The Shame, Blame, Immobility Spiral It should be no surprise, given the nature of fear-induced immobility, that a majority of rape victims predictably describe feeling paralyzed (sometimes also suffocated) and unable to move. Being held down and terrorized by someone much larger, stronger and heavier is virtually guaranteed to induce long-lasting immobility and, thus, trauma. Rape not only forces one to keep still, it induces an inner immobility because of the terror (fear-potentiated immobility). In one study, 88% of the victims of childhood sexual assault and 75% of the victims of adult sexual assault reported moderate to high levels of paralysis during the assault. 35 In addition, because of the high levels of dissociation, it is likely that many victims do not remember feeling paralyzed or deny the paralysis because they feel so guilty for not having “fought back.” Similarly, soldiers under fire can rarely flee or even physically fight. They must frequently stay pinned close to the ground (resisting both active fight and flight urges), while “calmly” trying to steady, aim and fire their guns. I interviewed a soldier who was threatened with a court martial for “cowardice under fire.” He was an embedded translator with a special-forces assault team in Iraq—although the only foreign languages he knew were Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian; he did not know Farsi or any Arabic language! He had not been trained for combat duty, and when his crack Marine unit was ambushed, he did not fire back.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The Williamses were not actually married. Jane Cleveland, who came from the middle class, had married a high-ranking English soldier, only to find out he was an abusive brute. When she met the handsome Edward Williams—a military man who had lived in India, as Jane had—she fell instantly in love. In 1819, although Jane was still married to her first husband, she and Edward left for the Continent, posing as a married couple. Like the Shelleys, they also had lived in Switzerland and had come to Italy for adventure and the good weather. Jane was now expecting her second child with Edward, just as Mary was now pregnant again. It seemed, in a fateful way, that they had much in common. More important, Mary empathized deeply with their love affair and how much they had sacrificed for each other. Then Jane had her second child. Now the two women could bond as young mothers. Finally someone to talk to about the difficulties of raising infants in a foreign land, something Mary’s husband could care less about. Besides, the Shelleys had no English friends, since English expatriates in Italy avoided them like the plague. It would be such a relief to have some daily companionship in this moment of turbulence in her life. Mary quickly became dependent on Jane’s company and forgot any misgivings she might have had about her. Shelley seemed to warm up to the couple as well. Edward was so officious in offering to help Shelley in any way. Edward loved sailing and boasted of his navigational skills. Sailing was an obsession of Shelley’s, despite the fact he had never learned to swim. Perhaps Edward could help him design the perfect sailing boat. And Jane began to intrigue him the more he spent time around her. Jane was so different from Mary. She never argued. She only looked at him admiringly and seconded everything he said. She was so cheerful. He could be her teacher, instructing her in poetry, and she could be his new muse, a role his depressed wife could not fill anymore. He bought Jane a guitar and loved to listen to the songs from India she seemed to know so well. She had a beautiful voice. He wrote poems in her honor and slowly became infatuated. Mary noticed all this. She knew well her husband’s pattern. He was always looking for a woman very different from the one he was with to inspire him and break the monotony of a relationship. His first wife, Harriet, had been more like Jane, pretty and simple, and so he fell for the much more complicated Mary. Now the pattern was repeating as he fell for the simpler Jane. But how could she take Jane seriously as a rival? She was so ordinary. He was simply poeticizing her; he would eventually see her as she was and grow bored. Mary did not fear losing him. In 1822 the Shelleys and Williamses, now rather inseparable,

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Ruth’s face softened as I drove. She called out the names of all the beautiful wild weeds. The anxiety of Manhattan melted into the distance behind us. The upcoming tension was hundreds of miles ahead. Somewhere between here and there Ruth and I really met each other all over again. As we finally turned off the Thruway and headed toward Canandaigua Lake, Ruth grew visibly excited. “See?” she pointed to a condominium development. “That used to be Roseland Amusement Park. Pull over. Let me dtive now.’ Ruth knew those roads like the veins on her hands. Stone Butch Blues 303 We passed fields of sunflowers. “That’s a new crop since I grew up here.” I recognized the goldenrod and purple asters that Ruth captured as memories in her watercolors. She pulled over near the lake and parked in a space no wider than three car widths. “I could never figure out if this lake mirrored my mood swings or if my moods reflected the changes in the lake. Every square inch around the lake is private now except for two little spaces like this one and the patch behind the country store. They’re even posting the hills now.” She turned the key in the ignition and backed the cat out. “The summer people killed my daddy.” Her voice was flat and cold. “A couple in a car stopped on a hairpin curve to watch the deer. My daddy swerved to avoid them. Went off the road right over there.” We drove past in silence. “I hate the summer people. Only problem is, my mama’s one of them.” I didn’t speak. Ruth knew what she was and wasn’t willing to say. “Of course, my mama was a renter. Her people weren't yuppies. She fell in love with my daddy before the summer passed. But if you loved that man, you knew he’d never leave this valley. He and my Uncle Dale hear the hills calling them like lovers.” Ruth smiled. “Funny thing. My mama’s a city girl, but after my daddy died she stayed here in these 304 Leslie Feinberg hills he loved. I’m like him. My heart’s in these hills, but I left for the city.” We pulled up in front of a small home at the edge of the woods. A golden Labrador retriever barked and clawed at the screen door as Ruth turned off the ignition. “This is Dale’s place.” She handed me a piece of paper. “Here are directions to pick me up at my mama’s house.” I nodded. We sat in the car until our artival was acknowledged. “Robbie!” I heard Dale call out to Ruth. “Robbie, you’re home!” Ruth sighed. We both got out of the car. I watched how their bodies fit as they hugged, how their hands knew each othet’s back and shouldets. Ruth pulled away. “Dale, this is my friend, Jess. She lives in Manhattan, too.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Darlene told us later that a family on their way to church found us. They got some people to help get us to their home nearby. They didn’t take us to the hospital because they didn’t know if we were in trouble with the law or not. When Edwin came to, she gave them Darlene’s number. Darlene and her friends came and got us. Darlene took care of both of us at their apartment for a week before Ed or I were really coherent. “Where’s Ed, is she OK?” was the first thing I remember asking Darlene. “That’s the first thing she asked me—how you were,” Darlene answered. “Alive. You’te both alive, you stupid motherfuckers.” Neither of us ever saw an emergency room doctor for fear they’d call the cops to see if we were in any trouble. When Ed and I could sit up and even walk a little, we began recuperating in the living room together during the days while Darlene slept. The couch opened up as a bed. Ed gave me The Ballot and the Bullet by Malcolm X. She encouraged me to read W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. But we each had a headache so bad we could hardly read the newspaper. All day long we lay next to each other and watched television: “Get Smart,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,’ “Green Acres.” We healed in spite of it. Ed got disability pay during her absence. I lost my job as a printer. When Ed and I finally showed up at the Malibou a month later, someone pulled the plug on the jukebox and everyone rushed up to hug us. “No, wait, gently,’ we shouted, both backing up toward the door. “Notice the resemblance?” I asked, as Ed and I put out faces near each other. We had matching gashes overt our right eyebrows. Speaking for myself, I lost a lot of confidence after that beating. The pain in my rib cage reminded me with every breath how vulnerable I really was. I propped myself up at a back table and watched Stone Butch Blues 59 all my friends dancing together. It felt good to be back home. Peaches sat down next to me, draped her arm around my shoulders, and planted a long sweet kiss on my cheek. Cookie offered me a job as a bouncer on the weekends. I held my ribs and winced. She said I could wait on tables until I healed, if I wanted to. I sure needed the money. I watched Justine, a stunning drag queen, going from table to table with an empty Maxwell House coffee can, collecting money. She came over to the table where Peaches and I were sitting and began counting out the bills. “You don’t have to contribute, darlin’.” “What’s it for?” I asked. “For your new suit,” she answered, and continued counting the bills. “Whose new suit?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Instead of being weighed down by these encounters, you might even come to appreciate them as a chance to hone your skills of self-mastery and toughen yourself up. Outsmarting just one of these types will give you a great deal of confidence that you can handle the worst in human nature. Fourth, the Laws will teach you the true levers for motivating and influencing people, making your path in life that much easier. Normally, when we meet resistance to our ideas or plans, we cannot help trying to directly change people’s minds by arguing, lecturing, or cajoling them, all of which makes them more defensive. The Laws will teach you that people are naturally stubborn and resistant to influence. You must begin any attempt by lowering their resistance and never inadvertently feeding their defensive tendencies. You will train yourself to discern their insecurities and never inadvertently stir them up. You will think in terms of their self-interest and the self-opinion they need validated. Understanding the permeability of emotions, you will learn that the most effective means of influence is to alter your moods and attitude. People are responding to your energy and demeanor even more than to your words. You will get rid of any defensiveness on your part. Instead, feeling relaxed and genuinely interested in the other person will have a positive and hypnotic effect. You will learn that as a leader your best means of moving people in your direction lies in setting the right tone through your attitude, empathy, and work ethic. Fifth, the Laws will make you realize how deeply the forces of human nature operate within you, giving you the power to alter your own negative patterns. Our natural response to reading or hearing about the darker qualities in human nature is to exclude ourselves. It is always the other person who is narcissistic, irrational, envious, grandiose, aggressive, or passive-aggressive. We almost always see ourselves as having the best intentions. If we go astray, it is the fault of circumstances or people forcing us to react negatively. The Laws will make you stop once and for all this self-deluding process. We are all cut from the same cloth, and we all share the same tendencies. The sooner you realize this, the greater your power will be in overcoming these potential negative traits within you. You will examine your own motives, look at your own shadow, and become aware of your own passive-aggressive tendencies. This will make it that much easier to spot such traits in others. You will also become humbler, realizing you’re not superior to others in the way you had imagined. This will not make you feel guilty or weighed down by your self-awareness, but quite the opposite. You will accept yourself as a complete individual, embracing both the good and the bad, dropping your falsified self- image as a saint. You will feel relieved of your hypocrisies and free to be more yourself. People will be drawn to this quality in you.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “You heard me.” Trevor set the Sprite down on the carpet, tapped my chest, indicating we’re leaving. “You gonna talk like that now?” the old man sputtered, his eyes stuck on the screen. “The fuck you gonna do?” Trevor said. “Go ’head, do something, make me burn.” Trevor took a step toward the chair. He knew something I didn’t. “You done?” The old man breathed in place. The rest of the house was dark and still, like a hospital at night. After a moment he spoke, in a strange high-pitched whine. “I did good, baby.” His fingers fidgeted the armrest. The people in the sitcom danced off his slick hair. I thought I saw Trevor nod once or twice, but the TV could’ve been playing tricks. “You just like James. That’s right. I know. You a burner, you gonna burn them up.” His voice wobbled. “See that? That’s Neil Young. A legend. A warrior. You like him, Trev.” He motioned toward the poster by the hall as the door closed across him, clickless. We slipped into the frosted air, walked to our bikes, the old man droning on, muffled behind us. The pavement drifted out beneath our wheels. We said nothing as the maples, lit by sodium lamps, loomed red and windless above us. It felt good to be free of his old man’s presence. We rode along the Connecticut River as night broke into itself, the moon freshly high above the oaks, its edges hazed by an unseasonably warm autumn. The current churned with white froth to our right. Once in a while, after two or three weeks without rain, a body would float up from its depths, a bleached flash of a shoulder tapping the surface, and the families cooking out along the banks would stop, and a hush would come down along the children, and then someone would shout, “Oh god, oh god,” and someone else would call 911. And sometimes it’s a false alarm: a refrigerator rusted and lichen-stained to the shade of a brown face. And sometimes it’s the fish, gone belly-up in the thousands for no reason, the river-face iridescent overnight.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  281Lecture 28—Vatican II and Global Renewal õ Marcos agreed to a new presidential election on February 7, 1986, which pitted him against the widow of the dead reformer, Corazon Aquino. Church leaders threw their weight behind Aquino, and when the election’s initial results showed that Marcos had won again, they denounced the results as a fraud. õ Average citizens who had held back from activism until this point had now had enough. For four days they poured into the main freeway around Manila. The crowd, including lots of priests and nuns wearing their full habits, stared down Marcos’s troops. When the leaders of the Air Force announced their support for Aquino, Marcos was finished. õ Vatican II didn’t directly cause the Filipino revolution. But it’s very unlikely the revolution would’ve unfolded the same way without Vatican II. SUGGESTED READING Linden, Global Catholicism. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What assumptions, aims, and experiences divided bishops at the council? ä How did the challenges of Catholics in the Global South compare to those facing believers in the West? ä Did Vatican II solve any problems? Did it create new ones? 282 LECTURE 29 SECULARISM AND THE DEATH OF GOD T his lecture takes a look at secularization—the process of religion losing its power and significance in society. First, this lecture tries to clear away a few myths about the notion of secularization. Then, it digs into what really has changed in Christianity’s role in the Western world over the past several centuries, and how it all came to a head in the 1960s.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The voice—that of the Lord, he felt sure—promised to never leave him, to come back to him when he needed it. Almost immediately he felt a sense of tremendous relief, the burden of his doubts and anxiety lifted from his shoulders. He could not help but cry. Several nights later, while King was attending an MIA meeting, his house was bombed. By sheer luck, his wife and daughter were unharmed. When informed of what had happened, he remained calm. He felt that nothing could rattle him now. Addressing an angry crowd of black supporters who had congregated outside his home, he said, “We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.” After the bombing, his father pleaded with him to return with his family to Atlanta, but with Coretta’s support, he refused to leave. Over the following months there would be many challenges as he struggled to keep the boycott alive and maintain the pressure on the local government. Finally, toward the end of 1956, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision ending bus segregation in Montgomery. On the morning of December 18, King was the first passenger to board the bus and sit wherever he liked. It was a great victory. Now came national attention and fame, and with it endless new problems and headaches. The death threats continued. The older black leaders in the MIA and the NAACP came to resent the attention he now received. The infighting and the clash of egos became almost intolerable. King decided to start a new organization, to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, its purpose to take the movement beyond Montgomery. For King, however, the infighting and envy only followed him. In 1959 he returned to his hometown to serve as copastor at Ebenezer and to lead various SCLC campaigns from the headquarters in Atlanta. For some in the movement he was too charismatic, too domineering, and his campaigns too ambitious; for others he was too weak, too willing to compromise with white authorities. The criticism from both sides was relentless. But what added most of all to King’s burdens was the slippery and infuriating tactics of the whites in power, who had no intention of accepting any substantial changes in segregation laws or in practices that discouraged blacks from registering to vote. They negotiated with King and agreed to compromises, then as soon as the boycotts and sit-ins stopped, they found all kinds of loopholes in the agreements and backtracked.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Fresh grass is no longer associated with unpleasant sensations (old M); green, freshly groomed grass is good, parks are wonderful places and “all is well” (new M). She no longer feels nauseated or anxious again in that situation. The simple example above shows us how the elements of this biological model fit together to create a web of either fixity or flow. In nature, when one feels an internal sensation, frequently an image appears simultaneously or shortly afterward. If a client is bothered by an image, a sensation may accompany it that he is not aware of. When, with the therapist’s guidance, the client becomes conscious of both elements, a behavior, affect or new meaning generally follows. Once we understand the process and do not interfere with it, biology works to move it along. The sensation-based brain stem has the job of bringing homeostasis and, thus, goodness back to the body. Therefore, it naturally follows that when the client’s body’s behavior becomes conscious in the safety of the present moment, the thwarted movements come to an intrinsic resolution or a corrective experience —as happened with me, Nancy and the woman in the example above. This resolution leads to a discharge of energy, resulting in a fresh, new affect (A) that brings with it brand-new options or meanings. If the client is unaware of behavior or sensation, the fixed image generally leads to fixed affects and/or thoughts that were troubling the client to begin with. When a fixed behavior does not complete in a new way, the result is a habitual, or (over) coupled, affect. Because behavior reflects preparatory, protective and defensive orienting responses, assisting clients to follow their sensorimotor impulses to completion, as they come out of freeze, is a key to unlocking the constrictive and limiting prison of posttraumatic stress disorder. The therapist’s task as healer is to notice which SIBAM elements a client presents with are old, conditioned, ineffectual patterns and which are missing completely because they are unconsciously hidden. When we can read this map, we can provide the somatic tools to free the client from being tangled up in these habituated physiological associations from the past. In this way people are, thankfully, restored to a healthy, flexible and dynamic way of relating to all of the new experiences life brings. * Recall Step 3 (pendulation and containment) from Chapter 5. † It does this specifically from what are called “stretch receptors”—specialized fibers in the muscle called intrafusal fibers. ‡ The senses of sound and touch are actually similar. In the inner ear there is a membrane called the basilar. Sound waves make this membrane vibrate, stimulating hair receptors to send impulses to the brain. The hairs on our skin function in a similar way. Indeed, deaf individuals have some sense of hearing through the skin. § It takes a good deal of experience for therapists to be able to distinguish between their “own” sensations and those that they are “picking up” from their clients.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I stood on the corner so long I forgot what I was waiting for. He came back with an amber vial. As I reached for it he pulled it back. I handed him a twenty dollar bill. “You take them four times a day. You gotta take all of them, you know? That’s what the man said.” I frowned. “What is it?” He shrugged. “Medicine. I told him what you told me. You got another ten dollars?” “Why?” I answered. That meant yes. “T got four codeine here. That oughta make you stop coughin’, or at least stop carin’.” I smiled and handed him another ten dollars. “Thanks,” I said, and meant it. He shook my hand. “You take care of yourself now, hear?” I bought two quarts of juice and found my way back to the abandoned space I called home. Every few hours when the coughing woke me, I'd pop a pill and codeine tablet and go back to sleep. When I woke up Sunday morning my bedroll was soaked. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I felt stronger. The illness was breaking up and leaving me. The rent on this place was due at the end of each week. I’d found a cheap hotel near the temp agencies where I could rent by the week until I could save up for a decent apartment—a real home. I looked around. I couldn’t believe I'd lived in this dump for a whole month. Stone Butch Blues 255 “How much?” I asked the super. “Three twenty-five a month with heat and hot water. The toilet’s in the hall. Three twenty-five security deposit.” I nodded. It had a small bedroom, kitchen, and living room, all in one straight line. I gave him the cash; he handed me the lease. “Wait,” I said as he turned to leave. “There’s no bathtub?” “There,” he pointed to a corner of the kitchen. It was a tub covered with a sheet of metal. Strange city. I locked the door of my apartment and turned to look around. It needed paint: yellow for the kitchen, sky blue for the bedroom, creamy tvory for the living room. I needed rugs. And dishes, silverware pots and pans. Cleanser for the sink. I opened my duffel bag to look for a pad and pen to make a list. There was the china kitten that Milli had left me. I placed it gingerly on the mantle in the living room. I put the amber glass, from the home > Theresa and I once had, on the windowsill in the kitchen and made a mental note to buy some flowers. I left the wedding ring Theresa had bought me on the mantle. I decided to buy yellow calico curtains for the living room windows, like the kind Betty had made 256 = Leslie Feinberg for my garage apartment. I glanced at the door once more to make sure it was locked.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  A therapist’s first job in reaching such shut- down clients is to help them mobilize their energy: to help them, first, to become aware of their physiological paralysis and shutdown in a way that normalizes it, and to shift toward (sympathetic) mobilization. The next step is to gently guide a client through the sudden defensive/self-protective activation that underlies the sympathetic state and back to equilibrium, to the here-and-now and a reengagement in life. Generally, as a client begins to exit the freeze state, the second most primitive system (sympathetic arousal) engages in preparation for fight or flight. Recall how Nancy went from sympathetic arousal (her heart rate shooting up wildly) to helpless terror and then abruptly to shutdown (her heart rate dropping precipitately), and then finally to mobilization and discharge when she activated her running muscles and escaped from the image of the tiger. The important therapeutic task in the sympathetic/mobilization phase is to ensure that a client contains these intense arousal sensations without becoming overwhelmed (I described this process in Chapter 5). In this way, they are experienced as intense but manageable waves of energy, as well as sensations associated with aggression and self-protection. These sensory experiences include vibration, tingling, and waves of heat and cold (I described both of these phenomena in Chapter 1 and in my report on Nancy in Chapter 2). When one is able to ride the sometimes bucking bronco of one’s arousal sensations through, and begin to befriend them in a slow and steady way, one is gradually able to discharge the energy that had been channeled into hyperarousal symptoms. This initial stage and foundational piece of the self-regulation pie, and the basic ingredient for restoring equilibrium, is what brought both Nancy and me out of limbo and back to life. Only after this point of intervention does the social engagement system, the third evolutionary subsystem, begin to come back online. An individual who has been able to move out of immobility, and then through sympathetic arousal, begins to experience a restorative and deepening calm. Along with these sensations of OK-ness and goodness, an urge, even a hunger, for face-to-face contact emerges. f Because that yearning may have been painfully unmet during critical periods of infancy, childhood and adolescence (or may have been associated with shame, invasion and abuse), many traumatized individuals also need particular guidance to negotiate this intimacy barrier.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ Factions formed and clashed right from the beginning. Rifts emerged between some of the more progressive theologians from northern Europe and more conservative bishops from Italy, not to mention the new perspectives and questions that bishops from outside of the West brought to the Council. õ As for women at Vatican II: The Catholic Church only permits men to seek ordination as priests and become bishops. But for a very long time, women have made up the majority of lay Catholic worshippers and the majority of religious orders. Women were finally allowed to attend as auditors in the third session of the council. There were only 15 allowed (seven laywomen and eight nuns. The pope told them they could attend the discussions “of interest to women” but they couldn’t vote or otherwise have a formal say. RELIGIOUS PLURALISM õ Three key areas of discussion at Vatican II were religious pluralism, authority in the church, and human sexuality. This lecture will first examine pluralism. The council radically revised the church’s relationship with other faiths. This was an issue close to John XXIII’s heart; when he served as papal nuncio in France at the end of World War II, he made it his mission to help Jewish refugees. õ The council issued statements that absolved Jews of the blame for the death of Jesus. This was a big deal, since blaming the Jewish people for murdering the Messiah had been a major justification for anti- Semitism over the centuries. õ The bishops also transformed Rome’s official position toward Protestants. They declared Protestants “separated brethren” who, while not in communion with the mother Church, were at least no longer heretics going to hell. Lecture 28—Vatican II and Global Renewal 275

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  After a few bumpy miles, I feel another strong tension pattern developing from the spine in my upper back. I sense my right arm wanting to extend outward—I see a momentary flash; the black asphalt road rushes toward me. I hear my hand slapping the pavement and feel a raw burning sensation on the palm of my right hand. I associate this with the perception of my hand extending to protect my head from smashing onto the road. I feel tremendous relief, along with a deep sense of gratitude that my body did not betray me, knowing exactly what to do to guard my fragile brain from a potentially mortal injury. As I continue to gently tremble, I sense a warm tingling wave along with an inner strength building up from deep within my body. As the shrill siren blasts away, the ambulance paramedic takes my blood pressure and records my EKG. When I ask her to tell me my vital signs, she informs me in a gentle professional manner that she cannot give me that information. I feel a subtle urge to extend our contact, to engage with her as a person. Calmly, I tell her that I’m a doctor (a half-truth). There is the light quality of a shared joke. She fiddles with the equipment and then indicates that it might be a false reading. A minute or two later she tells me that my heart rate is 74 and my blood pressure is 125/70. “What were my readings when you first hooked me up?” I ask. “Well, your heart rate was 150. The guy who took it before we came said it was about 170.” I breathe a deep sigh of relief. “Thank you,” I say, then add: “Thank God, I won’t be getting PTSD.” “What do you mean?” she asks with genuine curiosity. “Well, I mean that I probably won’t be getting posttraumatic stress disorder.” When she still looks perplexed, I explain how my shaking and following my self-protective responses had helped me to “reset” my nervous system and brought me back into my body. “This way,” I go on, “I am no longer in fight-or-flight mode.” “Hmm,” she comments, “is that why accident victims sometimes struggle with us—are they still in fight-or-flight?” “Yes, that’s right.” “You know,” she adds, “I’ve noticed that they often purposely stop people from shaking when we get them to the hospital. Sometimes they strap them down tight or give them a shot of Valium. Maybe that’s not so good?” “No, it’s not,” the teacher in me confirms. “It may give them temporary relief, but it just keeps them frozen and stuck.” She tells me that she recently took a course in “trauma first-aid” called Critical Incident Debriefing. “They tried it with us at the hospital.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  We had to talk about how we felt after an accident. But talking made me and the other paramedics feel worse. I couldn’t sleep after we did it—but you weren’t talking about what happened. You were, it seemed to me, just shaking. Is that what brought your heart rate and blood pressure down?” “Yes,” I told her and added that it was also the small protective spontaneous movements my arms were making. “I’ll bet,” she mused, “that if the shaking that often occurs after surgery were allowed rather than suppressed, recovery would be quicker and maybe even postoperative pain would be reduced.” “That’s right,” I say, smiling in agreement. Horrible and shocking as this experience was, it allowed me to exercise the method for dealing with sudden trauma that I had developed, written about and taught for the past forty years. By listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terror without becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation. While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more “ordinary” events such as surgeries or invasive medical procedures. 1 Orthopedic patients in a recent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery. Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receiving shocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into an auto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly common experiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to rebound from such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals, can subject us to PTSD—along with a myriad of physical and emotional symptoms.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Step 7. Resolve arousal states by promoting discharge of the vast survival energy mobilized for life-preserving actionAs one’s passive responses are replaced by active ones in the exit from immobility, a particular physiological process occurs: one experiences waves of involuntary shaking and trembling, followed by spontaneous changes in breathing—from tight and shallow to deep and relaxed. These involuntary reactions function, essentially, to discharge the vast energy that, though mobilized to prepare the organism to fight, flee or otherwise self-protect, was not fully executed. (See Chapter 1 for my own experience of such reactions after my accident, and Chapter 2 for Nancy’s as she discharged the arousal energy that had been bound up in ever-increasing symptoms since her early-childhood tonsillectomy.) Perhaps the easiest way to visualize the release of energy is through an analogy from physics. Imagine a spring fastened firmly to the ceiling above you. A weight is attached to the free end of the spring (see Figure 5.4). You reach up and pull the weight down toward you, stretching the spring and creating in it potential energy. Then as you release the spring, the weight oscillates up and down until all of the spring’s energy is discharged. In this way, the potential energy held in the spring is transformed into the kinetic energy of movement. The spring finally comes to rest when all the stored potential energy that has been converted to this kinetic energy is fully discharged. Discharge of Traumatic Activation and Restoration of Equilibrium [image file=image_rsrc2NB.jpg] Figure 5.4 Stretching the spring increases its potential energy. Releasing the spring transforms this potential into kinetic energy, where it is discharged and equilibrium restored. Similarly, your muscles are energized (“stretched”) in preparation for action. However, when such mobilization is not carried out (whether fight-or-flight or some other protective response such as stiffening, twisting, retracting or ducking), then that potential energy becomes “stored” or “filed” as an unfinished procedure within the implicit memory of the sensorimotor system. When a conscious or unconscious association is activated through a general or specific stimulus, all of the original hormonal and chemical warriors reenergize the muscles as if the original threat were still operating. Later this energy can be released as trembling and vibration. Risking oversimplification, I can say that an amount of energy (arousal) similar to what was mobilized for fight-or-flight must be discharged, through effective action and/or through shaking and trembling. These can be dramatic as with Nancy (Chapter 2), while others are subtle. They may be expressed as gentle fasciculations and/or changes in skin temperature. Along with these autonomic nervous system releases, the self-protective and defensive responses that were incomplete at the time of the incident (and lie dormant as potential energy) are frequently liberated through micro-movements. These are almost imperceptible and are sometimes referred to as “premovements”). In this way, Steps 4 through 7 link together.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  What is today’s date?” But I can’t connect with my mouth and make words. I don’t have the energy to answer his questions. His manner of asking them makes me feel more disoriented and utterly confused. Finally, I manage to shape my words and speak. My voice is strained and tight. (11. Voiceless terror is part of the immobility response and is seen in all species that normally vocalize.) I ask him, both with my hands and words, “Please back off.” (12. This is the first time I am able to mobilize an effective defense against intrusion by beginning to establish a protective boundary.) He complies. As though a neutral observer, speaking about the person sprawled out on the blacktop, I assure him that I understand I am not to move my head, and that I will answer his questions later. (13. As the shock is reduced by making an effective boundary, the communication centers in my brain—Broca’s area—are coming online to further delineate and articulate my boundary.) The Power of Kindness After a few minutes, a woman unobtrusively inserts herself and quietly sits by my side. “I’m a doctor, a pediatrician,” she says. “Can I be of help?” “Please just stay with me,” I reply. Her simple, kind face seems supportive and calmly concerned. She takes my hand in hers, and I squeeze it. (14. Her outreach and physical touch provide a source of orientation and help to enlist my diminished capacity for social engagement. The activation of the ventral vagal system—see Chapter 6—is helping to buffer me against being sucked down into the black hole of trauma.) She gently returns the gesture. As my eyes reach for hers, I feel a tear form. (15. The eye-to-eye contact is integral to the social engagement system, as is touch. This physiological exchange, in which we are participating in each other’s nervous systems, leads to stabilization and relief.) The delicate and strangely familiar scent of her perfume tells me that I am not alone. I feel emotionally held by her encouraging presence. (16. Through smell we have direct access to the limbic system—formerly called the olfactory-smell-brain—for this very reason.) A trembling wave of release moves through me, and I take my first deep breath. (17. This powerful moment is the first instance of physiological discharge and self-regulation.) Then a jagged shudder of terror passes though my body. Tears are now streaming from my eyes. In my mind, I hear the words, I can’t believe this has happened to me; it’s not possible; this is not what I planned for Butch’s birthday tonight. (18. This is recognition of my own denial.) I am sucked down by a deep undertow of unfathomable regret. (19. In this moment I am contacting the deep emotional truth by acknowledging the loss. In therapy this frequently happens, gradually, over time.) My body continues to shudder. Reality sets in. In a little while, a softer trembling begins to replace the abrupt shudders.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As the shrill siren blasts away, the ambulance paramedic takes my blood pressure and records my EKG. When I ask her to tell me my vital signs, she informs me in a gentle professional manner that she cannot give me that information. I feel a subtle urge to extend our contact, to engage with her as a person. Calmly, I tell her that I’m a doctor (a half-truth). There is the light quality of a shared joke. (38. This kind of playful social engagement is possible only when the ventral vagal system, discussed in Chapter 6, is online.) She fiddles with the equipment and then indicates that it might be a false reading. A minute or two later she tells me that my heart rate is 74 and my blood pressure is 125/70. “What were my readings when you first hooked me up?” I ask. “Well, your heart rate was 150. The guy who took it before we came said it was about 170.” I breathe a deep sigh of relief. “Thank you,” I say, then add: “Thank God, I won’t be getting PTSD.” “What do you mean?” she asks with genuine curiosity. “Well, I mean that I probably won’t be getting posttraumatic stress disorder.” When she still looks perplexed, I explain how my shaking and following my self-protective responses had helped me to “reset” my nervous system and brought me back into my body. “This way,” I go on, “I am no longer in fight-or-flight mode.” “Hmm,” she comments, “is that why accident victims sometimes struggle with us—are they still in fight-or-flight?” “Yes, that’s right.” “You know,” she adds, “I’ve noticed that they often purposely stop people from shaking when we get them to the hospital. Sometimes they strap them down tight or give them a shot of Valium. Maybe that’s not so good?” “No, it’s not,” the teacher in me confirms. “It may give them temporary relief, but it just keeps them frozen and stuck.” She tells me that she recently took a course in “trauma first-aid” called Critical Incident Debriefing. “They tried it with us at the hospital. We had to talk about how we felt after an accident. But talking made me and the other paramedics feel worse. I couldn’t sleep after we did it—but you weren’t talking about what happened. You were, it seemed to me, just shaking. Is that what brought your heart rate and blood pressure down?” “Yes,” I told her and added that it was also the small protective spontaneous movements my arms were making. “I’ll bet,” she mused, “that if the shaking that often occurs after surgery were allowed rather than suppressed, recovery would be quicker and maybe even postoperative pain would be reduced.” “That’s right,” I say, smiling in agreement.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  The first hurdle was the prohibitive cost of building pipes in the ocean. They thought they found a solution by partnering with existing desalination infrastructure. But they quickly realized that the worldwide capacity of those existing plants would barely make a dent in their production needs. Plummeting costs of traditional fuels at the time didn’t help matters. They realized they couldn’t tackle the monkey. Because it was too unlikely they would become price competitive in the next three years, they shut down Foghorn. Sometimes, applying monkeys and pedestals means you shut down something after two years, or five years, or, as was the case with Loon (the project to connect remote areas with internet access), nine years. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s two or five or nine years, as long as you’re shutting it down sooner than you otherwise would have. If you are able to cut your losses earlier, that’s a huge win. An added bonus is that it frees you up so you can turn your limited attention and resources to more fruitful endeavors that have a higher expected value, reducing opportunity costs. “If we find the Achilles’ heel,” Teller told me, “thank God we found the Achilles’ heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.” Astro Teller clearly understands that quitting gets you where you want to go faster. The sooner you figure out that you should walk away, the sooner you can switch to something better. And the sooner that happens, the more resources you’re saving, which you can then devote to more fruitful endeavors. One of the beautiful things about the monkeys-and-pedestals mental model is that sometimes it helps you quit before you start. Years ago, X looked into developing what’s now known as a hyperloop, an experimental high-speed rail system. The concept was fine. Building the physical infrastructure wouldn’t be very hard from an engineering standpoint. The monkeys for the hyperloop to be viable were things like whether you could safely load and unload passengers or cargo, and whether you could get the system up to speed and get it to brake without incident. A couple hundred yards of track wouldn’t tell you anything about whether you could conquer those challenges. In fact, Teller and the team at X figured out that you would have to build practically the whole thing before you knew whether it worked. You would have to build a bunch of pedestals before you could find out if the monkeys were intractable. They quickly decided not to pursue it. One of Teller’s valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself. When you are doing something that you already know you can accomplish, you’re not learning anything important about whether the endeavor is worth pursuing. You already know you can build the pedestal. The problem is whether you can train the monkey.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  This moment of relief is usually followed by a second “flashback” of the near miss, which provokes another round of lessened startle, followed by yet another wave of restorative relief. This reparative rhythm occurs involuntarily, usually in the shadow of awareness, thankfully allowing one to focus on the task at hand. Thus, pendulation allows you to recover your balance and return to life’s moment-to-moment engagement. When this natural resilience process has been shut down, it must be gently and gradually awakened. The mechanisms that regulate a person’s mood, vitality and health are dependent upon pendulation. When this rhythm is experienced, there is, at least, a tolerable balance between the pleasant and the unpleasant. People learn that whatever they are feeling (no matter how horrible it seems), it will last only seconds to minutes. And no matter how bad a particular sensation or feeling may be, knowing that it will change releases us from a sense of doom. The brain registers this new experience by tuning down its alarm/defeat bias. Where before, there was overwhelming immobility and collapse, the nervous system now finds its way back toward equilibrium. We cease to perceive everything as dangerous, and gradually, step by step, the doors of perception open to new possibilities. We become ready for the next steps. Step 4. Titration Steps 3 and 4 —pendulation and titration—together form a tightly-knit dyad that allows individuals to safely access and integrate critical survival-based, highly energetic states. Together, they allow trauma to be processed without overwhelm, and hence the individual is not retraumatized. In Steps 5 , 6 and 7 , the gradual restoration of active defensive and protective responses—along with the carefully calibrated termination of the immobility reaction is accomplished. This, along with the discharge of bound energy, reduces the hyperarousal. Together these steps lie at the heart of transforming trauma. In particular, the egress from immobility is associated with intense arousal-based sensations, along with the powerful emotions of rage and frantic, fearful flight. This is the reason the process of trauma release must be worked in tiny increments. I use the term titration to denote the gradual, stepwise process of trauma renegotiation. This process operates like certain chemical reactions. Consider two glass beakers, one filled with hydrochloric acid (HCl) and the other with lye (NaOH). These extremely corrosive substances (the acid and the base, respectively) would cause severe burning if you were to place your finger in either beaker; indeed, if you were to leave that finger there for a few moments, it would simply dissolve since both of these chemicals are so caustic.