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 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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  What saved me from developing these symptoms was the ability to bring down my fight-or-flight activation by discharging the immense survival energy through spontaneous trembling. This contained discharge, along with my awareness of the self-protective impulse to move my arms and shield my head, helped return my organism to equilibrium. I was able to surrender to these powerful sensations while remaining fully aware of my spontaneous bodily reactions, and with the pediatrician’s steady presence and “holding of the space,” I could restore my nervous system to equilibrium. By staying aware while “tracking” my spontaneous bodily reactions and feelings,‡ I was able to begin the process of moving through and out of the biological shock reaction. It is this innate capacity for self-regulation that let me regain my vital balance and restored me to sanity. This capacity for self-regulation holds the key for our modern survival—survival beyond the brutal grip of anxiety, panic, night terrors, depression, physical symptoms and helplessness that are the earmarks of prolonged stress and trauma. However, in order to experience this restorative faculty, we must develop the capacity to face certain uncomfortable and frightening physical sensations and feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them. This book is about how we develop that capacity. Shake, Rattle and Roll … Shiver, Quiver and QuakeThe shaking and trembling I experienced while lying on the ground and in the ambulance are a core part of the innate process that reset my nervous system and helped restore my psyche to wholeness. Without it I would have surely suffered dearly. Had I not been aware of the vital purpose of my body’s strange and strong sensations and gyrations, I might have been frightened by these powerful reactions and braced against them. Fortunately, I knew better. I once described, to Andrew Bwanali, park biologist of the Mzuzu Environmental Center in Malawi, Central Africa, the spontaneous shaking, trembling and breathing that I and thousands of my therapy clients have exhibited in sessions as they recover from trauma. He nodded excitedly, then burst out, “Yes … yes … yes! This is true. Before we release captured animals back into the wild, we try to be sure that they have done just what you have described.” He looked down at the ground and then added softly, “If they have not trembled and breathed that way [deep spontaneous breaths] before they are released, they will likely not survive in the wild … they will die.” His comment reinforces the importance of the ambulance paramedic’s questioning the routine suppression of these reactions in medical settings.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Thus, it soothed and helped to stabilize my organism just enough so that I could experience the difficult sensations and take steps toward restoring my balance and equanimity. What Goes Up … Can Come Down In 1998, Arieh Shalev carried out a simple and important study in Israel, a country where trauma is all too common. 2 Dr. Shalev noted the heart rates of patients seen in the emergency room (ER) of a Jerusalem hospital. These data were easy to collect, as charting the vital signs of anyone admitted to the ER is standard procedure. Of course, most patients are upset and have a high heart rate when they are first admitted to the ER, since they are most likely there as victims of some terrifying incident such as a bus bombing or motor vehicle accident. What Shalev discovered was that a patient whose heart rate had returned to near normal by the time of discharge from the ER was unlikely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, one whose heart rate was still elevated upon leaving was highly likely to develop PTSD in the following weeks or months. † Thus, in my accident, I felt profound relief when the paramedic in the ambulance gave me the vital signs that indicated my heart rate had returned to normal. Briefly, heart rate is a direct window into the autonomic (involuntary) branch of our nervous system. A racing heart is part of body and mind readying for the survival actions of fight-or-flight mediated by the sympathetic-adrenal nervous system (please see Diagram A after this page for a detailed depiction of the physiological pathways underlying the classic fight or flight response). Simply, when you perceive threat, your nervous system and body prepare you to kill or to take evasive countermeasures to escape, usually by running away. This preparation for action was absolutely essential on the ancient savannahs, and it is “discharged” or “used up” by all-out, meaningful action. In my case, however, lying injured on the road and then in the confines of the ambulance and the ER—where action was simply not an option—could have entrapped me. My global activation was “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” If, rather than fulfilling its motoric mission in effective action, the preparation for action was interfered with or had lain dormant, it would have posed a great potential to trigger a later expression as the debilitating symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. What saved me from developing these symptoms was the ability to bring down my fight-or-flight activation by discharging the immense survival energy through spontaneous trembling.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The other direction is harder to take, but it is the only path that leads to true power and the formation of a superior character. It works in the following manner: You examine yourself as thoroughly as possible. You look at the deepest layers of your character, determining whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you tend to be governed by high levels of anxiety and sensitivity, or hostility and anger, or a profound need to engage with people. You look at your primal inclinations—those subjects and activities you are naturally drawn to. You examine the quality of attachments you formed with your parents, looking at your current relationships as the best sign of this. You look with rigorous honesty at your own mistakes and the patterns that continually hold you back. You know your limitations—those situations in which you do not do your best. You also become aware of the natural strengths in your character that have survived past adolescence. Now, with this awareness, you are no longer the captive of your character, compelled to endlessly repeat the same strategies and mistakes. As you see yourself falling into one of your usual patterns, you can catch yourself in time and step back. You may not be able to completely eliminate such patterns, but with practice you can mitigate their effects. Knowing your limitations, you will not try your hand at things for which you have no capacity or inclination. Instead, you will choose career paths that suit you and mesh with your character. In general, you accept and embrace your character. Your desire is not to become someone else but to be more thoroughly yourself, realizing your true potential. You see your character as the clay that you will work with, slowly transforming your very weaknesses into strengths. You do not run away from your flaws but rather see them as a true source of power. Look at the career of the actress Joan Crawford (1908–1977). Her earliest years would seem to mark her as someone extremely unlikely to make it in life. She never knew her father, who abandoned the family shortly after her birth. She grew up in poverty. Her mother actively disliked Joan and constantly beat her. As a child she learned that the stepfather she adored was not really her father, and shortly thereafter he too abandoned the family. Her childhood was an endless series of punishments, betrayals, and abandonments, which scarred her for life.

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

  And I had done a lot of convincing of people to come work on this project, to leave whatever they were working on before, quit their job, get poorly paid in exchange for equity. . . .” Despite all this, he knew quitting was the right decision. He told his investors, “I think I knew this six weeks ago and I mistook denial for prudence (in the sense of making sure that we didn’t give up too early). But there are just too many things in the ‘against’ column.” To everybody else, it felt like he was quitting too soon. But to Stewart Butterfield, peeking into the future, he recognized that maybe he hadn’t quit soon enough. After he explained his reasoning to the others, it is unclear whether or not he persuaded them to see what he saw. But it didn’t much matter. If he was no longer on board, there was no point in continuing. Most people in that position would not do what Butterfield did. Despite everything that makes sticking the easier choice—his years of commitment to the project, the encouraging recent results, his cofounders and investors wanting to continue, the pain he felt at having to follow through on this decision and what that meant for his employees—he was able to quit. This may seem like an unhappy ending. Butterfield was so passionate about his concept of a collaborative multiplayer game that he devoted a decade to trying to make it happen. Now he had fallen short for a second time. But quitting effectively, when the context warrants it, ought to be the definition of a happy ending. It is just hard for us to see it that way because we process quitting as failure. Stewart Butterfield saw that he had a losing hand and he decided to fold before he had burned through Tiny Speck’s remaining capital. He stopped the company from throwing $6 million at a bad investment, freeing that money up to invest in other things that would be more likely to win. He also spared Tiny Speck’s employees from being trapped in a failing business, working for little money and the promise of equity, by promptly acting when he determined that equity wouldn’t be worth their effort. These things were good for Butterfield, good for his investors and cofounders, and good for his employees. Shouldn’t we view that as a happy ending on its own? This raises another valuable lesson about quitting. When you quit, you live to fight another day, sometimes literally. Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke, by turning around, lived to continue with the rest of their lives. When poker players fold a hand, they are cutting their losses so they have chips to invest in another, better hand. If they walk away from the table when they’re not playing well, they don’t go broke and leave themselves without a bankroll to play in another game where they have a better chance to win.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  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.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  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. Sixth, the Laws will transform you into a more empathetic individual, creating deeper and more satisfying bonds with the people around you. We humans are born with a tremendous potential for understanding people on a level that is not merely intellectual. It is a power developed by our earliest ancestors, in which they learned how to intuit the moods and feelings of others by placing themselves in their perspective. The Laws will instruct you in how to bring out this latent power to the highest degree possible. You will learn to slowly cut off your incessant interior monologue and listen more closely. You will train yourself to assume the other’s viewpoint as best you can.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Well before his conflict with Neusner, Sanders challenged age-old Christian readings of Judaism, but he did so by exploring how its “members” understood their place in this “religion.” 37 Against long-standing Protestant imaginings, he compellingly argued, Jews were not worried about earning their God’s favor, or membership in Judaism. As he famously put it: “A pattern of religion … is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function … of how getting in and staying in are understood: the way in which a religion is understood to admit and retain members is considered to be the way it ‘functions.’ ” Jews were in by free divine election or choice, not by their efforts to gain entry. They kept the laws (covenant obligations) as a function of membership in this religious system, failure being remedied by repentance and atonement. Whereas Sanders was concerned to clarify how one got in and stayed in, it was only a matter of time before others would take up the corresponding phenomenon of leaving the religion of Judaism.38 Such questions would not arise, however, if one did not impose “Judaism” on first-century texts and real-life conditions. We could then breathe fresher air and spare ourselves the stress of having to fit real people in a fictional category. Let us try a thought experiment. What would happen if we took a leaf from Martin Goodman’s magisterial Rome and Jerusalem, which methodical y compares these two “ancient civilizations, ”39 and applied our linguistic habit for speaking of Judaea to Rome? Could we ask: “How did one get in and stay in Romism?” Or, “How did one leave Romism?” Such questions would seem absurd, and no one asks them. Why, then, should we not study Judaeans, their mother- polis, lawgiver, laws, customs, and individual characters such as Paul in the way we study other contemporary cultures, using the categories familiar to ancient writers? The lexical categories known to Paul and his contemporaries, which had been around for centuries, permitted practical y infinite individual variation. One belonged to a birth group ( genos, ethnos) that had its peculiar laws and customs but humanity was gloriously diverse, a point that many writers from Herodotus to Julian celebrated. How individual Persians, Romans, or Spartans behaved in relation to their ancestral 35 See Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 48, 106–8, 137, 145–7. 36 E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM, 1992). 37 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977), 17. 38 Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004). 39 Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007). 22 22 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles