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 Story of O (1954)

  She was wrong, Pierre did not appear. René had her put on the coat to her suit, and her long gloves which covered the bottom of her sleeves. She took her scarf, her bag, and carried her coat over her arm. The heels of her shoes made less noise on the hallway floor than had her mules, the doors were closed, the antechamber was empty. O was holding her lover by the hand. The stranger who was accompanying them opened the wrought-iron gates which Jeanne had said were the enclosure, which was now no longer guarded either by valets or dogs. He lifted one of the green velvet curtains and ushered them both through. The curtains fell back into place. They heard the gate closing. They were alone in another antechamber which looked onto the lawn. All there was left to do was descend the steps leading down from the stoop, before which O recognized the car. She sat down next to her lover, who took the wheel and started off. After they had left the grounds, through the porte-cochere which was wide open, he stopped a few hundred meters farther on and kissed her. It was on the outskirts of a small, peaceful town, which they crossed through as they continued on their route. O was able to read the name on the road sign: Roissy.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “No, go ahead now and study pharmacy, or medicine, if you prefer the latter.” Now that he was no longer paying for my studies, two extra years didn’t upset him at all. He offered me his hand, without rising from his chair. “If you ever need any advice, or a recommendation, don’t hesitate to come along to the store.” So I went down the passage again, and remembered only then that I had forgotten to explain to him the purpose of my visit, the Prize! But I was surely very late as it was, so I hurried along the bridgelike passage that led from the office to the store. Why should I go back and tell him now? How could it interest him at all? It no longer concerned anybody but me. My crowning success thus coincided with my achieving responsibility for my own decisions. He was leaving me to my own devices! Once my surprise was over, I tried to feel anger or indignation. I kept repeating to myself: “He’s giving me up, the skunk!” But I could feel no real anger, only a sensation of being at last free from my state of financial dependence, which, for the past seven years, had been like slavery. I tried to walk fast through the crowded streets of the central food markets: a huge conglomeration of trucks, horse-drawn carriages, wooden boxes, mountains of vegetables, bright fruit of all colors, thrown there on the ground, among all the rotting refuse. But no, his behavior was almost what I should have expected. I protested against everything that I saw all around me, against my parents, these tradesmen, this city that is torn apart in separate communities that hate each other, against all their ways of thinking. I wanted to study philosophy, perhaps a strange idea in the eyes of all these people, but I refused to be a money-earner, and even this was being refused me. Well, I would study all the same, and I found again, deep within myself, some violent emotion to confirm me in this decision. They would all see whether, yes or no, I would manage to study what I wanted, not what Monsieur Bismuth wanted! I would indeed study philosophy, instead of pharmacy or medicine. It never even occurred to me that any difficulties might arise in my path. I felt too much vigor in me, too much momentum carrying me ahead.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  His hands couldn’t do anything mine couldn’t, and the psychological cost of liking him more than he liked me was greater than the fleeting coziness I felt when he initiated a spoon or reacted [image file=image_rsrc1XY.jpg] on an Instagram Story. Why was I enduring this? I sat with the uneasy question until I landed on an answer: I wanted to be held. I didn’t want a relationship, but I was horny for companionship. That’s it. Seeking out sex that I knew would be lackluster had become an ineffectual coping mechanism that, while not actively destructive, concealed the truth of what I was feeling and what I needed, rendering it perpetually out of reach. And while there’s nothing wrong with seeking sex for reasons beyond the pursuit of sexual bliss, mindfulness of my actual pursuit was key: I realized that no sex with him would mean better sex for me, overall. I could free up space for other ways to feel held, touched, and cared for—by myself, by friends, even by weighted blankets. And so, I began sex-recessing, on a micro scale. I scaled back on dating out of boredom. I scaled back on texting people for the sole purpose of preserving this sense of sexual chaos I’d grown so accustomed to. Years later, I scaled back from sex entirely, for about a year. It was the best decision I’ve made for my mental health in recent memory (if we don’t include buying my dog little outfits). It also made sex more enjoyable when I started having it again. Of course, the decision to step back from sex was influenced by the global pandemic, which steepened emotional and physical barriers to dating—the one thing that could lead to sex for a homebound recluse like myself. I could barely coordinate seeing close friends in a way that felt safe, let alone organizing a meetup with a potential sex partner. I unwittingly slipped into the kind of sex hiatus that sex therapists often recommend to people experiencing sexual dissatisfaction. And you can, too. Sure, in a fantasy world where Stanley Tucci is all of our husbands, we could aspire to more and better sex, but for now, in a world where sex can go very wrong and Stanley Tucci doesn’t know we exist, our surest path is less but better sex. First and foremost: having less sex instantly ensures you are having less bad sex. That’s just mathematics. You’re freeing up time for other activities that offer a higher return on investment, like masturbating, reading, and cleaning that space between your bed and the wall. But the most powerful part of having less sex is that you’re more inclined to hold out for sex that you love.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Submission just isn’t me. It took me years to reconcile what arouses me with my political beliefs. Somewhere in the midst of marriage, kids, and career, I realized that it was time to stop hiding, to stop pretending, and most of all to stop apologizing for who I was and what I hungered for in the world. Getting older helps. I don’t feel as if I have to justify myself. Maybe that’s the meaning of sexual liberation.” A lot of women find their desire for sexual submission hard to accept. But stepping out of ourselves is exactly what eroticism allows us to do. In eros, we trample on cultural restrictions; the prohibitions we so vigorously uphold in the light are often the ones we enjoy transgressing in the dark. It’s an alternative space where we can safely experience our taboos. The erotic imagination has the force to override reason, convention, and social barriers. The more I point to the tensions in these epiphanies of pleasure, the more relieved Elizabeth seems. I continue, “Of course nothing is scarier than a true loss of control in ‘reality.’ But the point of fantasy is that it allows you to transcend the moral and psychological constraints of your everyday life.” In the liberating expression of sexuality we give in to our unruly impulses and the disavowed, lurid parts of ourselves. Mordechai Gafni, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, explains that fantasies are like mirrors. We hold them in front of us in order to see what is behind. We spot images of ourselves that are otherwise inaccessible. If commitment requires a trade-off of free dom for security, then eroticism is the gateway back to freedom. In the broad expansiveness of our imagination we uncover the freedom that allows us to tolerate the confines of reality. The very dynamics of power and control that can be challenging in an emotional relationship can, when eroticized, become highly desirable. In the crucible of the erotic mind, we bring the more vexing components of love—dependency, surrender, jealousy, aggression, even hostility—and transform them into powerful sources of excitement. My patient Oscar can’t stand being told what to do by his bossy wife, yet he enjoys being tossed around by her sexually. When she barks orders about the dishes, the experience takes him back to his mom’s kitchen. But he does not feel this regressive threat once the lights have been turned off. What he loathes in the domestic sphere becomes his choice in the erotic. Maxwell, who keeps a shrewd eye on his beautiful girlfriend’s many admirers, repeatedly brings them up when he makes love to her. What threatens in public becomes enchantment in private. He parlays his daily fears into nightly seductions. And Elizabeth, the take-charge woman, loves to get a break when Vito takes over sexually. She does not experience his control as oppressive. On the contrary, she feels taken care of.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather “Sin” together into one place, so that it could then be condemned. If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of “penal substitution,” this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a “works contract,” not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of “going to heaven,” but of God’s vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence: So, therefore, there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus! Why not? Because the law of the spirit of life in the Messiah, Jesus, released you from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh) was incapable of doing. God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sin-offering; and, right there in the flesh, he condemned Sin. This was in order that the right and proper verdict of the law could be fulfilled in us, as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. (8:1–4) This statement looks back at last to Romans 2:1–11, where Paul had warned about the “condemnation” that would fall on evildoers. He has already said that those “in the Messiah” have the verdict pronounced over them—the verdict, that is, of “righteous” or “in the right.” He has already promised that those who are thus “declared to be in the right by his blood” (5:9) will be rescued from the wrath that is still to come. Now we see what he means. “There is no condemnation for those in the Messiah . . . because God . . . condemned Sin right there in the flesh.” The punishment has been meted out. But the punishment is on Sin itself, the combined, accumulated, and personified force that has wreaked such havoc in the world and in human lives. Here is a point that must be noted most carefully. Paul does not say that God punished Jesus. He declares that God punished Sin in the flesh of Jesus. Now, to be sure, the crucifixion was no less terrible an event because, with theological hindsight, the apostle could see that what was being punished was Sin itself rather than Jesus himself. The physical, mental, and spiritual agony that Jesus went through on that terrible day was not alleviated in any way. But theologically speaking—and with regard to the implications that run through many aspects of church life, teaching, and practice—it makes all the difference. The death of Jesus, seen in this light, is certainly penal.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  15) is literally, “I do not know what I am doing”; this is unwitting sin, the sin of ignorance. “I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do” (v. 20); this is the unwilling sin. The remedy is suited exactly to the problem. The forgiveness of sins, the major return-from-exile theme in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, is now available. The exile is over. The slave master’s power is broken. The covenant is renewed in and through Israel’s Messiah. With that there is the assurance that the powers themselves are defeated, because Sin, the very foundation of their power, has been condemned. That is why, second, the result is not that sinners are free to “go to heaven,” but that they are free for the true human vocation, the royal priesthood in all its variations. It is when humans take up their proper vocation, redeemed by the Messiah and indwelt by the Spirit, that the “powers” find they are starved of their oxygen. That is what much of the rest of Romans 8 is about, starting with the end of v. 4: “as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.” This points ahead to the resurrection itself (8:9–11), to the life of taking responsibility for one’s own body and its actions (8:12– 16), and to the vocation to suffer and so to share the “glory” of the Messiah (8:17–25), that is, his strange, suffering, but powerful rule over the world. This leads to the ultimate new creation, when the present creation, groaning in travail, will be set free from its slavery to corruption and decay, “to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified” (8:23). That is the ultimate “glory,” the “royal” role for which humans were made and for which, as in 5:17, they are redeemed. They are “justified” in order to be “justice bringers.” This is the result of the revolution accomplished on the cross. The work of the cross is not designed to rescue humans from creation, but to rescue them for creation. If we told the story that way, all kinds of problems would either be solved or at least appear in a new light. The point then extends also to the “priestly” work of intercession.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  By deferring to Ray in all matters sexual, by looking to him for expertise and ignoring her own, Joni had fulfilled the age-old feminine mission of preserving her man’s ego and shoring up his masculinity. Or so she thought. But her assumptions proved wrong—because Ray gets turned on by her appetite, and even by her demands. For him, having a woman meet him as a sexual equal takes away the burden of guesswork and the persistent insecurity of never being sure he’s doing it right. When she is more forthcoming, he doesn’t have to worry about her, and he no longer feels diminished by her placating, lukewarm response. Her exuberance gives him permission to make some demands of his own, and to experience unrestrained abandon with the woman he loves. Joni never did tell Ray the specific content of her fantasies, but unearthing their meaning nonetheless brought about significant changes in their sexual and emotional relationship. Once Joni knew what she was seeking in sex, and once she understood the personal and social barriers that stood in the way of her pleasure, she was able to approach and respond to Ray very differently. To me she said, “Now that I’m clearer about what sex means to me, and how I want to feel in sex, I can talk to Ray about it without having to spell out the fantasy. Although even doing that doesn’t seem as scary to me now—there’s nothing in there I’m ashamed of or afraid to face.” To Tell or Not to Tell Some couples get an erotic charge from sharing their fantasies in words or in enactments. Catherine and her husband scheme in naughty complicity when they plan out the details of their lascivious one-acts. This is fun, it’s novel, and it allows them to be (and be with) someone new without having to go somewhere else. It creates multiplicity out of monogamy. But not everyone wants a ticket to this theater of seduction. Disclosure is not a necessary part of working with fantasy. I don’t advocate a tell-all approach; not everyone would choose to live in an atmosphere of True Confessions. We may like to keep our imaginings to ourselves, not out of shame but out of an inchoate awareness that exposure to bright light will cause them to wither on the vine. Alternatively, we may be wise to dream alone, for we may not be on the same erotic wavelength as our beloved.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  would somehow pull myself up again so I could stay in this place that I secretly and deeply loved. The school was patient, but not inexhaustibly patient. In my last year I broke the bank and was asked to leave. My mother met my train and took me to a piano bar full of men in Nehru jackets where she let me drink myself under the table. She wanted me to know that she wasn’t mad about anything, that I’d lasted longer than she ever thought I would. She was in a mood to celebrate, having just landed a good job in the church across the street from the White House. “I’ve got a better view than Kennedy,” she told me. My best friend got kicked out of school a few weeks after me, and the two of us proceeded to rage. I wore myself out with raging. Then I went into the army. I did so with a sense of relief and homecoming. It was good to find myself back in the clear life of uniforms and ranks and weapons. It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. Careful what you pray for. WHEN WE ARE green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever. That assurance burns very bright at certain moments. It was burning bright for me when Chuck and I left Seattle and started the long drive home. I had just dumped a load of stolen goods. My wallet was thick with bills which I would lose at cards in one night, but which I then believed would keep me going for months. In a couple of weeks I was leaving for California to be with my father and my brother. Soon after I got there, my mother would join us. We would all be together again, as we were meant to be. And when the summer was over I would go East to a noble school where I would earn good marks, captain the swimming team, and be welcomed into the great world that was my desire and my right. In this world nothing was impossible that I could imagine for myself. In this world the only task was to pick and choose.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This “justification” takes place in the present time, as Paul says up front (“but now,” 3:21) and then spells out (in v. 26). The verdict of the future, as in 2:1–16 and 8:31–39, has already been announced in the present. This provides the particular dynamic of Paul’s famous justification theology and is the direct result of what has happened in the Messiah. When God raised Jesus from the dead, he not only declared that Jesus really was his “son” (1:3–4), the one he had “sent” into the world to undertake his purpose (8:3–4); he also vindicated him against the charges of being a false Messiah, declaring him to be in the right. This could then be seen as a legal verdict, with the same two meanings (covenantal and forensic) as before: Jesus really was Israel’s representative, the Messiah, fulfilling God’s covenant purposes; and Jesus was “in the right,” despite the verdict of the court that had sent him to his death. And with that verdict, announced in Jesus’s resurrection, God also declared the same verdict over those who would be “in the Messiah”: “They are freely declared to be in the right, to be members of the covenant, through the redemption which is found in the Messiah, Jesus” (3:24). Justification takes place “in the Messiah.” What God said of Jesus in his resurrection God says of all who are “in him.” People sometimes play the language of “justification” off against the language of “incorporation,” but this is clearly a mistake. We see the same point (being justified in the Messiah) in Galatians 2:17, or for that matter Philippians 3:9. This is why, summing up the argument in 4:24–25, he says that Jesus was “handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.” It isn’t that the resurrection of Jesus causes that “justification.” Rather, it is the sign that this justification has in principle taken place on the cross. As Paul says in Romans 5:9, we are justified “by his blood”; and, as he declares in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “If the Messiah wasn’t raised, . . . you are still in your sins”—a throwaway remark, and all the more important because of it. Here we are near the heart of Paul’s theology, and indeed of this present book: on the cross the real revolution took place, and the resurrection is the first sign that it has happened. Among many results of this revolution, justification takes its vital place, partly because of the assurance of sins forgiven, but also because of the assurance of membership in Abraham’s family (again, as in Gal. 3). Behind both of these, there is for Paul the sense that with the victory of the cross the powers that have ruled the world, the idols that have kept the human race in their grip, have been overthrown. As in John 12:30–32, this is the necessary step before the peoples of the world can be set free from their present “rulers” and drawn to Israel’s Messiah.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The first part of his criticism gave me pleasure. Well, I would work at the form, I would rewrite my story sentence by sentence, a word at a time. My admiration for Marrou gave me some reassurance concerning my own future. He had made a go of it, I felt, and I was his double. It was only later, too late, that I understood that he had never managed to solve his own problems and that mine would probably break me too. For the time being, however, I was no longer entirely alone, since others seemed to live in the same kind of loneliness. Marrou helped me understand what kind of an individual I am and gave me reason to hope, but Poinsot taught me self-confidence and the joys of knowledge. He was my philosophy instructor, as I have already said, and taught me how to think. I wanted him, besides, to be my confessor and my ideal as a human being. Nearly every day I used to wait for him at the gate of the lycée and, as I walked him all the way to his home on the hill to the east, beyond the city limits, I would express all my ideas and hesitations and test on him the effect of the impulsive decisions I had taken. Only in his presence did I drop my uncompromisingly dogmatic attitudes, for I knew that he was extremely well intentioned. Whenever I called on Marrou, I listened to him because he spoke both of himself and of me. With Poinsot, however, I generally did more of the talking, though he was my instructor. And he would listen to me, smoking his pipe and smiling. Through his teeth, stained yellow from tobacco, that tightly gripped the stem of his pipe, he would mumble: “Yes, of course, of course, I guess that’s reasonable...”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Let’s leave it at that.” The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn’t heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. “I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.” I knew I had heard her but I didn’t believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true. My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything,” she said into my ear. Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars. 32 [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] THE YEAR my mother’s new trial was held, February was bitter cold. I was living in Berlin with Paul Trout, in a fourth-story flat in the old Eastern sector, a sublet of a sublet some friends found for us. It was crumbling and coal-heated, but we could afford it most of the time. Ever since Paul’s graphic novels had become the codebook of a new secret society among European art students, we’d made friends in every city. They passed us along from squat to sublet to spare couch like torches in a relay race. I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas. I had begun turning to sculpture, an outgrowth of my time with Rena Grushenka. I’d developed an obsessive fondness for scavenged materials, for flea markets and curbside treasures and haggling in six different languages. Over time, this flotsam worked its way into my art, along with bits of German and worship of the Real and twenty-four kinds of animal scat. At the Hochschule der Künste, our art student friends had a professor, Oskar Schein, who liked my work. He smuggled me into classes there as sort of a shadow student, and was lobbying for my acceptance as a bona fide scholar working toward a degree, but in a perverse way, my current status suited me. I was still a foster child. The Hochschule der Künste was Cal Arts in German, students with funny haircuts making ugly art, but I was developing a context, as my mother would have said.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  whilst in India to take more than five articles in twenty-four hours, and never to eat after dark. I gave the fullest thought to the difficulties I might have to face. But I wanted to leave no loophole. I rehearsed to myself what would happen during an illness, if I counted medicine among the five articles, and made no exception in favour of special articles of diet. I finally decided that there should be no exception on any account whatsoever. I have been under these vows for now thirteen years. They have subjected me to a severe test, but I am able to testify that they have also served as my shield. I am of opinion that they have added a few years to my life and saved me from many an illness. 134. LAKSHMANJHULA It was a positive relief to reach the Gurukul and meet Mahatma Munshiramji with his giant frame. I at once felt the wonderful contrast between the peace of the Gurukul and the din and noise of Hardvar. The Mahatma overwhelmed me with affection. The Brahmacharis were all attention. It was here that I was first introduced to Acharya Ramadevji, and I could immediately see what a force and a power he must be. We had different viewpoints in several matters, nevertheless our acquaintance soon ripened into friendship. I had long discussions with Acharya Ramadevji and other professors about the necessity of introducing industrial training into the Gurukul. When the time came for going away it was a wrench to leave the place. I had heard much in praise of the Lakshman Jhula (a hanging bridge over the Ganges) some distance from Hrishikesh, and many friends pressed me not to leave Hardvar without having gone as far as the bridge. I wanted to do this pilgrimage on foot and so I did it in two stages. Many #sannyasis# called on me at Hrishikesh. One of them was particularly attracted towards me. The Phoenix party was there and their presence drew from the Swami many questions. We had discussions about religion and he realized that I felt deeply about matters of religion. He saw me bareheaded and shirtless as I had returned from my bath in the Ganges. He was pained to miss the shikha (tuft of hair) on my head and the sacred thread about my neck and said:

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Your nerves were raw with fear (hair standing on end) and rage, and your heart was pounding wildly, ready to explode in your chest. Then a wave of relief reminded you that you haven’t been catapulted into the horror of an accident. 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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  This process is an example of expanding the “aperture” of an image to its pretraumatic state (as described in Chapter 7). Up to the moment before the impact of the jet, it had been a perfect day, infused with vibrant colors and gentle scents. These sense impressions still exist somewhere in the catacombs of consciousness, but they have been overridden by the traumatic fixation. Gradually restoring the full spectrum of the disparate parts of an image is an integral component of resolving trauma.c Sharon’s body and images are beginning to tell a story that contrasts markedly with the one her words are relaying, almost as though narrated by two entirely different persons. As she holds the images of the Hudson River, along with the associated body sensations, she becomes aware of a tentative sense of relief. She now innocently recalls how she had been excited to come to work that day. Her gesture is stronger and more definite. Continued attention to the physical feeling of the gesture deepens her sense of relaxation, stimulating an almost playful curiosity. As she looks quizzically at her hands, first one then the other, I breathe a sigh of relief. Such a seemingly insignificant shift has profound implications—playful curiosity being one of the prima facie “antidotes” for trauma. Curious exploration, pleasure and trauma cannot coexist in the nervous system; neurologically, they contradict one another.d This capacity to experience the positive bodily feelings (of interest and curiosity), while remaining in contact with her feelings of terror and helplessness, allows Sharon to do something she would not have been able to do a few minutes before. She can now begin to stand back and “simply” observe these difficult, uncomfortable, physical sensations and images without becoming overwhelmed by them.e They are, in other words, kept at bay. This dual consciousness induces a shift that allows sensations to be felt as they are: intrinsically energetic, vital and in present time, rather than as fragments, triggers and harbingers of fear and helplessness from the past. This felt distinction makes it possible for Sharon to review and assimilate many details of the horrific event without reliving it. This new “dexterity” for revisiting, without reliving, a traumatic experience is essential in the process of recovery and reengagement that I call renegotiation. People need to disengage the emotional and mental associations from the raw physical sensations they have come to experience as precursors of disaster but that are, ultimately, sensations of vitality. Reestablishing these enlivening affects is a central core of effective trauma treatment. Interestingly, it is also found in ancient healing practices, such as meditation, shamanism and yoga.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  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. (39. I am relieved at the restoration of my intellectual faculty and my “reserve capacity” when the going got rough.) And I leave you, dear reader, once again with the wise counsel of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes: When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences. —I Ching , Hexagram #51 (circa 2000 BC ) CHAPTER 14 Trauma and Spirituality If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. —The Gnostic Gospels I n a lifetime of working with traumatized individuals, I have been struck by the intrinsic and wedded relationship between trauma and spirituality. From my earliest experiences with clients suffering from a daunting array of crippling symptoms, I have been privileged to witness profound and authentic transformations. Seemingly out of nowhere, as with Nancy from Chapter 2 , who was “held in warm tingling waves,” such unexpected “side effects” appeared as these individuals mastered the monstrous trauma symptoms that had haunted them—emotionally, physically and psychologically. These surprises included ecstatic joy, exquisite clarity, effortless focus and an all-embracing sense of oneness. In addition, many of my clients described deep and abiding experiences of compassion, peace and wholeness. In fact, it was not unusual after that profound internal shift of feeling the “goodness of self,” perhaps for the first time, to refer to their therapeutic work as “a holy experience.” While these individuals realized the classic goals of enduring personality and behavioral changes, these transcendent side effects were simply too potent and robust to overlook. I have been compelled to follow these exciting and elusive enigmas with wonder and curiosity for many decades. Because the formal diagnosis of trauma, as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III , was still over a decade away when my newfound odyssey was in its infancy, I didn’t have a formulated set of pathological criteria to unduly distract me.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Miriam continues to talk about her difficulties at work and with her husband, Henry. Although these are the same problems she was struggling with a few minutes ago, this time there is more animation in her voice. She gestures with her arms, extending them slightly outward in front of herself. Her hands are nearly at right angles to her wrists, almost as though she were pushing something away. I make a similar movement with my arms so as to “mirror” her movements and help her to feel and trust her own (disowned) movements.* I bring Miriam’s attention to her extending her arms and bending her wrists and suggest that she repeat the movements slowly. I ask her to try to focus on how her arms feel when she makes the movement, so that she gets a sense of how the movement feels physically from the inside. At first, she seems puzzled. After a few times, she pauses, smiles and says, “It feels like I’m pushing something away … no, more like holding something away … I need more space, that’s what it’s really like.” She sweeps her arms from in front of herself and then off to both sides, creating a 180-degree range of free motion. She lets out a deep and spontaneous breath: “I don’t feel as suffocated, and my belly isn’t hurting like it was when we started.” She extends her arms, flexing her wrists again. This time she holds them out for several seconds, almost at arm’s length. “It’s the same problem … at work and with my husband, too.” She now places her hands gently on her thighs. “It’s so hard for me, I don’t know why but … I don’t feel like I have a right to do this … like I don’t have a right to my own space.” I ask her if it’s more of a feeling or a thought. She pauses, giggles and replies, “Hah, I guess it’s really a thought.” Now there’s a deeper laughter. By contacting her nonverbal bodily expression, Miriam is able to go beneath the veneer of her ruminative thoughts about Henry and her work, to explore freely the story her body is beginning to tell. With this emergent kinesthetic and proprioceptive awareness, she has begun to sense into the neuromuscular attitude that underlies her internal conflicts. After settling into her bodily experience, Miriam starts to get wound up again. I observe her carotid pulse and notice an increase in her heart rate, along with pressured, rapid, shallow breathing. I ask her to put her questionings aside for a moment and place her focus back on her body. Relieved by this suggestion, she closes her eyes. “I feel more solid now … like there’s more of me.” When I ask her to try and identify where in her body she feels the solidity, she says, “I don’t know; I just feel that way.”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I refuse to accept the sex recession as another depressing facet of our generation. In fact, I celebrate it—we’ve been given an unprecedented opportunity to reevaluate our relationship with sex, which, for some, looks like abandoning it entirely. The actual depressing thing is not how little sex we’re having; it’s how much bad sex we’re having. Plenty of young people have found relief in sex-recessing. One twenty-seven-year-old cis straight woman I spoke with told me that her recent hiatus from sex and dating—a realm that has been consistently disappointing for her—has dramatically improved her mental health. “I deleted all my apps, and wanted a break from dating in general. I didn’t want to go out of my way to go on dates for the sake of dates, but wanted it to feel more intentional and focus on myself, my friends, my work,” she said. “Now I’m still doing all those same things, and while I miss physical contact, it does feel liberating to not be defined by my dating life, but my own interests. My head feels clear, and it’s nice to focus my energy on other things. It was interesting and a little frightening to see how much brain space dating took up.” Unplanned ebbs in sex and dating, however, can be distressing to some, especially those who’ve internalized norms about how much sex is “healthy” or “enough.” The conversation surrounding the sex recession, which suggests that there is a normal amount of sex people should have (there’s not), feeds these anxieties. One of the many barriers people face to sexual satisfaction is the heavy, shameful feeling that their sex lives aren’t as orgasmic or spontaneous or jam-packed as their peers’. “We are filled with expectations that are unrealistic,” sex therapist Jessa Zimmerman told me. “We think we must be broken; there must be something wrong with us. It’s very isolating.” A major part of therapy for Lindsay, a thirty-one-year-old cis queer woman, has been rethinking her relationship with sex and her body, and a major part of that has been rethinking sexual frequency. A lifelong source of relationship anxiety for her has been: Am I having enough sex? And if not, is it because I am undesirable? When we spoke, Lindsay had been dating a woman for a year and a half, and the drop-off in sex once the pandemic started triggered her anxieties about hitting the correct number of fucks per week to feel confident in the relationship. In recovery for an eating disorder, she is working to unlearn this intense scrutiny of her physical state, including her sex life. “I still really put sex on a pedestal so that I can feel okay with my physical body,” she said. “I definitely felt bummed when the frequency dropped.” She recalled a conversation from early in her relationship when her partner said that in past dating experiences, she’d have sex two or three times a week. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I a terrible partner?’”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I did get better, in order to get away from the howls of the madman, whose alternating bouts of screaming anger and of silence gave a rhythm to my suspense until I could leave the place. When I returned to the summer camp, I no longer felt like writing to my parents and began to reckon the weeks that still kept me away from them. I kept but one envelope for each week, to write to them. All my other envelopes I swapped against candy and, in my weekly letter, I now limited myself to a few set phrases, avoiding the tragic tone of my earlier letters home and asking my parents nothing, so that they even congratulated me on my having become reasonable. When I returned home, my mother found that I had lost so much weight that she was too surprised to weep with emotion. I too was unable to weep. ~ 6. BAR MITZVAH ~ We moved away from Tarfoune Alley the year of my bar mitzvah. For some time my father had been thinking of renting a larger room if my mother became pregnant again. The situation was beginning to be critical, in this respect, when my Uncle Aroun, my mother’s eldest brother, built a tenement house, where we managed to get a small apartment. My parents then decided to anticipate the traditional date for my bar mitzvah in order to make its celebration coincide with those of the expected event and of our housewarming. Uncle Aroun, in building a tenement house, was indeed achieving the ambition of all little men who have made good. In this form, the money he had managed to earn acquired a material shape, seemed to strike root, and bore fruit. But all his brothers and sisters asked for permission to move into the house, which upset his plans considerably, though we all lived, as I soon had occasion to observe, in a truly tribal manner. That is why he was unable to reject these applications. My father, however, was too proud and postponed applying. When he finally made up his mind to let Mother speak about the matter to her brother, there were no longer any small apartments free in the house. My father immediately took it as an offense. With my Aunt Abbou, who was obviously too poor to afford such a home, we were the only members of all my mother’s family not to be living in the new building. Through my mother as his go-between, my father then offered to invest his own meager savings in altering two small laundry-rooms that were on the flat roof terrace so as to make an apartment where we froze in winter and roasted in summer. It is quite probable that my father’s asthma became considerably worse as a result of this removal, and that the new premises were also responsible for my mother’s rheumatism. But we did at least have a toilet to ourselves, and electric light.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  1:3–4); but if he really was and is God’s Messiah, then his death was not simply a shameful tragedy, but rather a saving triumph, or rather the ultimate saving triumph. And if, with that death, exile was over, “forgiveness of sins” was a new reality etched into the cosmos itself, and the ancient enslaving “powers” had been defeated once and for all in the “new Passover”—why, then, the important thing was to live within and celebrate that new world, not go rushing back to the old one where sin and death still held sway and where Jews and Gentiles ate at separate tables. Here we see, in particular, how for Paul the Messiah’s death was intimately linked to the main thrust of the letter, namely, the inclusion of non-Jews in the family promised to Abraham without their needing to get circumcised. We can note the three main points once more. First, the event has occurred by which God has declared the “present evil age” null and void and has launched the “age to come,” so that the powers of the “present evil age,” which are the powers that had previously held people captive, have no longer any right to keep them prisoner. The new Passover means that all slaves are now offered freedom. Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the “forgiveness of sins.” If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are “Gentile sinners,” then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah “gave himself for our sins.” Anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who is “in the Messiah” cannot therefore any longer be categorized as a “sinner,” and objections to their inclusion in the family on such grounds must be overruled. Third, for a Jew (and Paul himself is the archetypal devout and zealous Jew, as he says in 1:13–14) to recognize Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and come into the Messiah’s family is to declare that “the son of God loved me and gave himself for me”: and with that the Jew too is given a radically new identity, the ultimate Israel identity, the messianic identity: “It isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.” Thus at every point the Messiah’s crucifixion, interpreted through the Messiah’s representative position vis-à-vis Israel and the divine purposes for Abraham’s family, means the creation and maintenance of a single covenantal family, the one sin-forgiven people of God, the people already celebrating the life of the “age to come.” That is the main argument of Galatians.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Here then was a most evident sign that He whom they now see was none other but the same whom they had seen dead on the cross, and lain in the sepulchre, who knew every thing that was in man. AMBROSE. Let us then consider how it happens that the Apostles according to John believed and rejoiced, according to Luke are reproved as unbelieving. John indeed seems to me, as being an Apostle, to have treated of greater and higher things; Luke of those which relate and are close akin to human. The one follows an historic course, the other is content with an abridgment, because it could not be doubted of him, who gives his testimony concerning those things at which he was himself present. And therefore we deem both true. For although at first Luke says that they did not believe, yet he explains that they afterwards did believe. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now our Lord testifying that death was overcome, and human nature had now in Christ put on incorruption, first shews them His hands and His feet, and the print of the nails; as it follows, Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. THEOPHYLACT. But He adds also another proof, namely, the handling of His hands and feet, when He says, Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have. As if to say, Ye think me a spirit, that is to say, a ghost, as many of the dead are wont to be seen about their graves. But know ye that a spirit hath neither flesh nor bones, but I have flesh and bones. AMBROSE. Our Lord said this in order to afford us an image of our resurrection. For that which is handled is the body. But in our bodies we shall rise again. But the former is more subtle, the latter more carnal, as being still mixed up with the qualities of earthly corruption. Not then by His incorporeal nature, but by the quality of His bodily resurrection, Christ passed through the shut doors.