Shame

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

  That was something I remember myself and other kids saying very often, "I'm starving." Especially if you weren't a teacher's pet. If you were one of their chums, brahmana initiated, or if you were having sex with the higher-ups, you would be okay. You would get all the food you wanted 4 Dylan Hickey was one of the people who brought the abuse out in the open. He and another former student published the V.O.I.C.E. website (Violations of ISKCON Children Exposed). The site included an analysis of the failure of the gurukula system, a collection of anonymous personal accounts of abuse, and an essay on the culpability of the group's founding guru, Srila Prabhupada, for failing to stop the abuse even though he was aware of it. The website was a searing indictment of ISKCON, made even more significant because Dylan Hickey was the son of Education Minister Jagadish. His mother was also involved in the gurukula. Dylan began writing after an accident at the Gita Nagari gurukula left him quadriplegic. Another former gurukula student, Raghunatha, started a print newsletter and published similar writings, including his own chilling essay, "Children of the Ash- ram."5 Raghunatha also helped to start annual gurukula reunions in Los Angeles. Progress in the Years 1996-1998The ISKCON hierarchy's main attempt at reconciliation happened in 1996 when the North American temple presidents and GBC members met at the ISKCON center in Alachua, Florida. Youth Minister and former gurukula student Manu Dasa led a panel discussion of ten former students to explain to the leaders what the schools were like for children. According to an editorial by ISKCON World Review publisher Kunti Devi, "Sannyasis [priests] cried. You could see the shame in some of the men's eyes. I believe it was even more than the awful threat of lawsuits that spurred these men, so committed to ISKCON, to go beyond passing resolutions."6 After hearing the,survivors' stories, the ISKCON officials acknowledged that they understood the full extent of abuse. They pledged money and resolved to form an entity to manage the funds. That marked the beginning of Children of Krishna, Inc., which was incorporated as a 5o1(c)3 nonprofit organization headquartered in Alachua. Children of Krishna helped some abuse survivors, in particular, several who spoke on the 1996 panel. However, grants could go to anyone raised in the organization, not just those who survived abuse. In addition, Children of Krishna set a limit of $2,000 per student. In my opinion, that sum is too little, considering what ISKCON took away from those children. In 1998, ISKCON formed the Office of Child Protection, headed by two ISKCON disciples who were charged with helping victims, investigating past abuse, and preventing future abuse.' In summer 1998, the two attended the Los Angeles gurukula reunion and gave out $500 to $2,000 checks to any survivor who would sign legal documents waiving additional claims against ISKCON. Many took this as an insult; some who signed off felt ashamed to take the money.

• From The Art of Memoir

  2 | The Truth Contract Twixt Writer and Reader The whole journey is toward the truth, or toward authenticity, agency, and freedom. How could it possibly help to plant a lie in the middle of it? Edward St Aubyn When I think of all the stiff pronouncements I’ve made demanding truth in memoir over the years, I’m inclined to hang my head. I sound like such a pious twit, the village vicar wagging her finger at writers pushing the limits of the form. Forgive me, I am not the art police. The wonderful thing about what comedian Stephen Colbert calls the “truthiness” of our era is that you can set any standard that blows up your coattail. Novelist Pam Houston claimed her novels are 82 percent true and ascribes that same percentage to her nonfiction —fair enough. I guess in today’s literary landscape, you can choose your own percentage. You can always hide behind the fiction label, as Truman Capote did (perhaps first) in 1966 with his “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood; or as Philip Roth did in 1993 with his roman à clef Operation Shylock, which he published as fiction, while claiming it was God’s own truth. (Ditto: my favorite parts of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are more memoir than fiction.) Or you can make a general disclaimer, as John Berendt did in 1994, confessing that in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil he took “certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the timing of events.” I took this to mean that he telescoped time to move the story along. In fact, the book’s murder—its central drama—occurred years before Berendt

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In fact we don’t always know who our biological parents are. Postpartum depression and other crises from the time we were conceived or from our early life are often covered up with romantic myths. When things go wrong, secrets are born. While the first year of a baby’s life has an enormous impact on their future, exploring a patient’s infancy is especially delicate, as we rely on the narratives of others and on what they let themselves tell, know, or even remember. The secrets of infancy are unformed events that leave traces in our minds but have no narrative attached to them. They are, therefore, the skeletons of our existence. They remain hidden inside us even as they give shape to our forms. Jon and I begin with the present moment and with the little that we know: he has a baby daughter, and trauma happened in his family when he was a baby. His sister, Jane, and his baby, Jenny, are connected in ways that we don’t yet fully understand. His childhood is clouded by his sister’s death. He never stopped to think about the past and instead marched forward, as far as possible away from his history. Until the day he fell apart. Jon takes me all the way back to the beginning of his life, and I’m aware that those journeys are usually the most puzzling of all. After he leaves my office, I realize he has left a pacifier on his chair. A WEEK PASSES and I meet Jon again. “I felt good after our session,” he says. “I told Bella, my wife, that I was relieved you didn’t ask me about my breakdown. I’m ashamed that I fell apart the way I did, especially given the timing, right after we had a baby and when I needed to be strong. I wanted to be as strong as my father, who, even after my sister died, was the steady one. And here I am, instead of being a man, behaving like my mom. Or, even worse, I’m not an adult but a baby who falls apart. I felt so much shame and self-hate for that. So I guess I was happy that you let me talk about the beginning of my life instead of the...” Jon pauses. He looks troubled. “Instead of the end of your life? Is that what you were about to say?”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In the early 1950s there were more than 130,000 Iraqi refugees in those camps. The ma’abarot were a symbol of the discrimination against Sephardic Jews, as housing policies were weighted in favor of people of Ashkenazi European descent. Camps sometimes had only two faucets for a thousand people. The toilets had no roofs and were infested with fleas, and the ceilings often leaked when it rained. “Some people think my family was lucky,” Ben tells me, “because my grandfather found a job as the cleaning person in a local school, and they were able to move to Ramat Gan, a neighborhood on the periphery of Tel Aviv. They lived in poverty. You can imagine how bad a man felt, especially from that generation, when he couldn’t provide for his family.” Ben looks at me, searching for my understanding. After all, I’m not a man; do I know what he is talking about? Do I realize how painful it is to be a vulnerable man who has lost his power? I understand that Ben is telling me something about himself too, about his own vulnerability and tears and about the need to cover these in order to preserve not only his masculine identity but also his father’s and his grandfather’s pride. “It was humiliating for my grandfather, the head of the family, to become an immigrant with no language, no job, no status. It’s heartbreaking to think about my proud grandfather being so weak and powerless. In fact, he was never able to recover. He died with his shame, a shame about being inferior, having no respect, about speaking only Arabic, the wrong language.” At the end of each session Ben sends me a YouTube video of an Arabic song. He loves Farid El Atrash, Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, and Abdel Halim Hafez. “My parents never felt comfortable speaking Arabic,” he says. “They didn’t want to feel like immigrants. But I remember the music in my grandparents’ house, and my grandfather singing and shedding a tear. I used to look at him crying and knew that this music was filled with emotions, and I knew that it reminded him of the home he had left behind.” “Thank you for today, Doctor,” Ben writes in an email after a session. This time he shares a link to Moshe Eliyahu and his Syrian band. I am grateful for the songs Ben shares with me. He doesn’t know that, like him, I am pretty familiar with that music; that Moshe Eliyahu was my mother’s uncle, a famous singer in Syria.

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

  But then we feel guilty about only talking to God when we have a request. Like the rich uncle you never think about until you need someone to cosign on an apartment lease. The good news is that God does not shame us for our lack of prayer. Why would He? Prayer is for us, not for Him. If we don’t pray, God isn’t the one missing out. I think He misses us, of course, but it’s not like our lack of prayer can take anything away from an infinite God. So if you aren’t praying as much as you’d like to, remember that God is not mad at you, and you don’t need to shame yourself. Finding and eliminating obstacles to prayer is not about shame. When you ask yourself why you aren’t praying more, the goal is not to beat yourself over the head with a Bible, obsess over all the things you’re doing wrong, or tell yourself that you don’t measure up. The goal is to grow in understanding. Shame won’t fix anything. It is the absolute worst motivator. Shame promises to help you change, and for a brief period it seems like it’s working. The self-imposed punishment almost feels good, in a masochistic way, like you’re paying for your sins or something. It motivates you to do some things differently to avoid the shame. But ultimately shame only discourages you more. Why? Because as soon as you start to improve, the shame subsides—and with it, your motivation to keep going. So you fall back into old habits. And shame comes back around. And you change again, temporarily, just until you silence shame’s voice. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. My friend, get off the shame train. It’s not taking you where you want to go. Instead, ask yourself honestly: What obstacles could be getting in the way of a healthy prayer life? Let’s look at a few possibilities. 1. IGNORANCE: I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT. It’s hard to do things you don’t understand. Calculus, for example. Or braiding hair. Maybe one or both of those are easy for you, but they’re not for me. So I avoid them both. If you can’t figure out how to do something, you either learn, or you tend to avoid it. It’s human nature. Prayer is not hard, but it does have a bit of a learning curve because it’s a spiritual act, and some of us might not be used to engaging the spiritual side of our being. If you think back to when you learned to ride a bike or swim or read, though, you might remember how impossible that activity seemed—until you crossed a certain invisible threshold, and suddenly it started to click. Honestly, that’s the whole point behind this book. I want to demystify prayer.

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

  • What are the group's beliefs and values? How did they come to be your beliefs and values? It may be useful to review Lifton's eight criteria for thought reform (Chapter 3) and the discussion of why it's so difficult to leave a cult (end of Chapter 2), as well as Lalich's concept of bounded choice (Chapters i and 3). All are useful frameworks for analyzing and evaluating your involvement. Can you identify aspects of your cult experience that fit Lifton's themes or Lalich's four-part model? This exercise may help you see the complexity of the social system you were living in and help you better understand how you might now extricate yourself from its residual influences. Examining Your Doubts• What are your doubts about the group or leader now? • Do you still believe the group or leader has all or some of the answers? • Are you still afraid to encounter your leader or group members on the street? • Do you ever think of going back? What is going on in your mind when that happens? • Do you believe your group or leader has any supernatural or spiritual power to harm you in any way-physically or spiritually-now that you have left? • Do you believe God (or some higher being) curses you for having left the group? The answers to this last set of questions will help you assess to what extent the cult's influence may still be operating within you. [image file=img/img0012.jpg] The simple realization that you were in a cult is often a shock. No one knowingly joins a cult or believes that she is in one. Accepting this truth may take months or even years. It can be painful to acknowledge that you were betrayed, taken advantage of, duped, or abused. It can injure your mental and emotional integrity, causing fear and rage. Cult exploitation is an assault on your true sense of self. Because of this, many former cult members do not want to recognize that they were in such a group or relationship. Denial is common among former members who do not seek exit counseling or education about cults. Knowledge of cults gives you the language to explain to yourself what happened and a framework for understanding your involvement. Unless you accept the experience as a cultic one, you might not make time for education, introspection, and insight, possibly prolonging the unwanted aftereffects of your involvement. If you question whether or not you were in a cultic group or relationship, here are several things you might do to settle your mind: • Review "Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups." (See Appendix A.) • Make a list of Robert Lifton's eight thought-reform themes (see Chapter 3) and determine whether any of them apply to your situation. • Review Margaret Singer and Louis West's list of typical cult indoctrination techniques (see Chapter 3) and determine whether any of them were used.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  “No! Not like that, you idiot! What are you thinking? I can’t believe you’re kicking like that. You look like a drowning chicken. Are you kidding me? Swim like that and everyone will laugh at you.” You look, horrified. A coach is standing over a kid bobbing in the water. The kid starts to cry, tears slowly filling the inside of her goggles. “Don’t bother coming back next week,” snorts the coach. “These other kids don’t want you here, anyway.” You’re aghast. You look around to see if anyone else is witnessing this. Doesn’t this count as child abuse? You make a mental note not to let your kid within a mile of this guy. While you’re thinking about what to tell the front desk, another lesson starts in the pool, just a few feet from where you’re standing. The kids are working on kicking, just like the other group. While most of the kids happily kick away, the water churning behind them, one kid is struggling; his legs slap the water haphazardly. “Hey, buddy,” says the coach. “You’re working so hard—nice job. Tell you what—try keeping your legs straight; you want the kick to come from your hips, not your knee. Then your whole leg will help you kick and you’ll go superfast! Can I see you try?… Good, you’re almost there. Try it again.… Nice—keep practicing and you’ll be faster than a fish! High five.” Okay, let’s bring ourselves back to dry land, metaphorically. Which coach will make his kids better swimmers? Duh, the second one. But why? Why doesn’t the harsh approach work? What effect does the criticism have? Does it motivate? No, of course not. Have you ever been yelled at by a parent, teacher, or boss and thought, Wow, they really have a point. I’ll definitely try harder next time. Thanks for showing me the error of my ways!? No way, unless your sarcasm was so acidic it could eat through the floor. Instead, harsh criticism does two things to the first kid: first it shames, which is bad enough, but it also makes her not ever want to try again, which robs her of the opportunity to learn. That first kid’s parents will find her goggles in the trash tonight, I guarantee. She’ll tell them she hates swimming and doesn’t want to go back. She’ll dig in her heels and cry when they try to get her in the car next week. Not to mention she’ll lie in bed tonight imagining all the ways the coach could die a grisly, humiliating death.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Don’t get me wrong. Perfectionism confers some magical superpowers like high standards, strong work ethic, reliability, and deep care of others. But gone awry, it can subject us to a powerful riptide of I should do more, do better, be more, be better. We might look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out. For those of us who struggle with it, perfectionism is a misnomer: it’s not about striving to be perfect. Instead, it’s about never feeling good enough. * * * Interestingly, at the heart of perfectionism is something downright magical: conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is the least sexy superpower. Detail-oriented super vision! Single-handedly crush the marshmallow test! Clear the highest standards in a single bound! But it is the most potent trait for a good life. Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and three colleagues examined almost ten thousand American adults and identified conscientiousness as the most consistent predictor of both objective and subjective success—it plays a role in everything from income to happiness to life satisfaction. Conscientiousness is deeply rooted; the word dates from the 1600s and distills down to conscience, our inner sense of right and wrong. It means caring deeply—caring about doing things right, caring about doing a good job, caring about being a good person. We care deeply about, and for, those around us. But at some point, conscientiousness can tip over into unhelpful perfectionism. Trailblazing Oxford University colleagues Drs. Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn* posit that clinical levels of unhelpful perfectionism emerge when we keep pushing despite adverse consequences; we keep hammering away at the nail long after we’ve smashed our thumb. Two core elements lie at the heart of clinical perfectionism, both of which made my eyebrows shoot up in recognition. First is a hypercritical relationship with oneself. We are our own worst critics. We focus on flaws rather than what’s going well, what is lacking rather than what’s good. When we don’t fulfill those high expectations for ourselves, we are hard on ourselves, but when we do, we decide the expectations were insufficiently demanding in the first place.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “My mother told me that and started crying again. She thought it was the meanest thing one could do to a girl. She thought it was crazy. She told me that when she was about my age and got her period for the first time, my grandmother took her to the barber and without further explanation had her hair cut short. She remembered looking in the mirror and the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I look like a boy,’ she sobbed. “‘Why did she do that?’ I asked, but my mother didn’t answer. I asked again, ‘Mom, why did Grandma do that to you when you were my age?’ “‘Sometimes it’s hard to understand Grandma,’ my mother answered. ‘She brought strange traditions from her country, from her own childhood, who knows.’” Lara and I are silent. I wonder if she has the same thought I have. Does she realize that her grandmother was trying to protect her daughter by making her look like a boy and not a girl? Did she try to protect her daughter, and now her granddaughter, from sexual abuse? No one wanted to know. No one ever asked. I remain silent, asking myself if Lara is ready to question her family history. Our wish to know everything about our parents is a myth. Children are in fact often ambivalent about learning too much about their parents. They don’t want to know about their parents’ sexuality and often try to avoid knowing intimate things from their history. “I need to know what really happened,” Lara says decisively and points her finger at the girl in the picture. The girl in the picture smiles a fake smile. “My grandmother,” she says, touching her long straight hair, “was always so protective of me. She accused Ethan of abusing me, but then after my parents got divorced that was all forgotten. No one talked about it anymore. That was strange.” Lara looks severe. She suddenly seems much older than her twenty-nine years. She takes a brief glimpse at her watch, calculating how long we have until the end of the session. I know she needs time to think through her history. “When I lived with my grandmother she used to scare me,” she says. “She used to repeat that I had to be careful. She would tell me strange things, for instance, that I needed to wear underwear to bed, otherwise worms would get into my vagina. She would whisper it and I remember feeling nauseous. Every time she talked about my body she would start whispering. When it came to sex her boundaries were strange. She talked about inappropriate things as if they were normal and about normal things as if they were perverse. Her whispering made me feel dirty, as if she had dark secrets that came out at night, and then in the morning she would be my loving grandmother again.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  But the real reason, and I know this sounds awful, is that I would rather have a child who doesn’t carry my genes. It’s probably better for her.” I ask her to tell me more. “Why wouldn’t you want her to have your genes?” “I come from pain,” Alice says. “It’s in our DNA. Bad luck and trauma. My mother had the most painful childhood, like a bad movie. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was around eight years old, and her mother died on the way. They had to carry her mother’s body until they got to a place where they could bury her. My mother was probably sexually abused by her grandfather but no one in my family talks about that. You see, when I say trauma, I mean real trauma. I have never been in therapy before. My mother has never been in therapy either.” “So you are here for both of you,” I say. “Exactly,” Alice answers. “Maybe if she could have stopped this cycle of misery, I wouldn’t be so worried about raising another miserable woman-to-be. The last thing I want is to have a daughter who inherits the bad luck I inherited from my mother.” “Another miserable woman,” I repeat her words . “Exactly,” she says. “My mother would never admit she is miserable. That’s why she became a hippie, if you know what I mean. She always has a smile on her face. She believes that we should focus on our own healing and spiritual journeys. Meanwhile, she was never happy. She had a traumatic childhood, two failed marriages, a failed career. When I was a child, she was at home with me all day. She used to say how much she loved it, and that she brushed my hair so many times, she became an expert in brushing hair. I always had long curly hair that was hard to brush and I hated it when she said that. I sensed her resentment. I remember one day at a school gathering, the parents were asked to introduce themselves. My mother, with a sweet smile on her face, announced, ‘I’m Alice’s mom and I’m a professional hair brusher.’ I wanted to die.” Alice looks at me to make sure I recognize her mother’s hidden bitterness and especially the ways it was concealed behind a smile. “Meanwhile, every time she could disappear for a few days she would. She would leave my stepbrother and me with my stepdad and go on retreats. When she came back home, she’d sleep with my little brother. For years I believed that she was putting him to bed and falling asleep there because she was tired, but as I grew up I realized that she just didn’t want to sleep in bed with my stepdad,” Alice says. “My mother never admitted that she didn’t really love my stepdad, that he was a compromise.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “They say that money isn’t important,” Alice continues, sounding upset again, “but have you noticed that the people who say this are usually the ones with money? Money is in fact very important when you need it and don’t have it.” I think about the open way Alice talks about money. Sex and money are two topics that people usually try to avoid, not only in their lives, but in therapy too. Those subjects are filled with hypocrisy and dishonesty, and therefore they’re a good place to hide other feelings and needs that people are uncomfortable expressing. Any unwelcome feeling can be expressed through sex or money: aggression, hostility, the need for domination and power, as well as fragility, narcissism, and trauma. Sex, for example, can be seen as lovemaking even in cases where it is a way to express hostility. Like money, sex can be used to control others, to compensate for emotional insecurities, and to express or hide pain. Avoiding talking about money and sex allows us to disguise any negative feelings. In therapy, for example, negative feelings toward the therapist could be expressed in delayed payments. When we are too embarrassed to talk about money, we might miss the opportunity to reveal and process feelings that the patient wants to hide. Alice talks about the cost of the reproductive process and explores her feelings about everything she might not be able to afford, financially but also emotionally. The enormous economic burden is part of a broader weight of self-doubt and shame that she carries. When reproduction involves such transactional or medicalized aspects—when it happens away from the couple’s bed—it often breaks the romantic fantasy of a baby born “out of love.” Difficulty getting pregnant can bring to life, in different ways, intense shame, and evoke the darkest fears and feelings about being damaged, cursed, rotten, broken, or bad. It is a profound injury that touches an essential insecurity about one’s body and existence. Like many people, Alice struggles with the feelings that her inability to get pregnant might be a sign that she is not supposed to have a baby, that she doesn’t deserve it, and that she won’t be a good mother. She tries to push those painful feelings aside. She sees herself as damaged with bad genes and defends against her disappointment. While disappointed in herself, she is preoccupied with the ways she disappoints others, especially, as I come to learn, the surrogate mother.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  My parents, as well as Ben’s parents, were part of the 1950s wave of Sephardic Jewish immigration. They came from a different culture; they spoke Arabic and were considered uneducated and even primitive. The traumatized white European hegemony discriminated against those immigrants and treated them as an inferior minority group. They lived in poverty and carried a great deal of shame not only in response to their lack of resources and their difficulty in adapting to the new culture, but also in being considered ill-mannered and culturally vile. They spoke the “wrong” language, listened to the “wrong” music, and brought with them a non-European culture and practices that were unacceptable and even threatening to the Zionist white privileged authority. In order to become assimilated into Israeli culture, all immigrants had to speak Hebrew; Yiddish and Arabic were not acceptable. The Sephardic immigrants were asked to change their names to Israeli names, which were often given by the clerk at the border. My mother Suzan was now Shoshi, my aunt Monira was now Hanna, and Tune became Mazal. This tradition carried on for many years. Even in the 1990s, Ethiopian Jews who immigrated to Israel were asked to change their names. It was a way to communicate to the immigrants that their previous identity was unwelcome and should be replaced by a new one. It was a promise of belonging, that abandoning the past would provide a new and a better future. In reality the immigrants belonged to neither the old nor the new world; they were trapped in a cultural limbo. My own family’s immigration, like Ben’s, always hovered over my childhood. I knew that both my parents had escaped to Israel as young children with their families. My mother used to tell us kids about that night in 1951 when they left Damascus. My mother was only four years old at the time. Her parents paid a Syrian man who owned a carriage to pick up them and their five young children in the middle of the night, hide them in the back of the wagon, and get them across the border. The man arrived at 2 a.m. They all silently rushed into the back of the wagon and started riding toward the border. About thirty minutes later, to their dismay, they noticed that my four-year-old mother was missing. They had forgotten her at home. They rushed back to find her asleep in her bed, picked her up, and started the ride to the border again. They arrived safely in Israel and settled in Haifa, a northern city on the Mediterranean Sea where Arabs and Jews lived together. They rented a one-bedroom apartment, where my mother and her siblings grew up.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  If I’m still a teenager, playing superhero, looking for revenge, then I’m not a real man.” “Then you act your feelings, instead of understanding them,” I say. “You relive your trauma instead of processing it. I don’t know that there is such a thing as a ‘real man,’” I add, “but I believe the main evidence for strength is the ability to look reality in the eye. When you are able to do that, you save yourself and the next generation from carrying your unprocessed trauma.” “I know exactly what you mean,” Ben says. “My father was a tank driver in the Six-Day War.” In June 1967, when Ben’s father was twenty years old, the Six-Day War broke out . Ben doesn’t know much about his father’s experience as a tank driver in that war. “My dad never talked about it. I only knew from my mom, who met him right after the war, that he was fighting in Jerusalem and that his best friend died there right before his eyes.” The Six-Day War was the third big war for Israel since 1948. It was that war that changed the old stereotype of the Jewish male. Israelis were proud of the young men who had won the war in only six days, and a new image of a Jewish man arose. Not only was that man seen as more masculine; he was like King David, able to defeat a greater enemy with his strength. Yitzhak Rabin, then Chief of the General Staff, announced after the war that it was the men who had won the war—not technology, not weapons, but the men who overcame enemies everywhere, despite their enemies’ superior numbers and fortifications. He declared that “only their personal stand against the greatest dangers would achieve victory for their country and for their families, and that if victory was not theirs the alternative was annihilation.” The young men’s job, then, was to prevent annihilation. This gave them a way to work through the trauma of the Holocaust and the Jews’ constant threat of persecution. The men carried the weight of history by adopting a hypermasculine role. At eighteen years of age they had to start presenting themselves as confident and fearless . “When I was a child I remember my father waking up in the middle of the night, screaming,” Ben says. “He was traumatized. Who knows what he had seen. I was born only a few years after the Six-Day War.” In Hebrew, the name Ben means “a boy.” When Ben gave me permission to write his story he also helped me choose this pseudonym, a name to disguise his real identity, one that would represent his father’s wish to have a first-born son. “On the day I was called to the army, my father was silent.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I’ve told you when the meeting is. Bring your babies if you like - we’ll find someone to take care of ’em for an hour or two.’ We rose; I looked again at the table, at the pile of reels and garments. There was a waistcoat, a set of handkerchiefs, some gentlemen’s linen — I found myself drifting towards it all, with fingers that itched to pick the garments up and stroke them. I caught the woman’s eye, and nodded at the table-top. I said, ‘What is it you do exactly, Mrs Fryer? Some of these look very fine.’ ‘I’m an embroid’rer, miss,’ she answered. ‘I does the fancy letters.’ She lifted a shirt, and showed me its pocket: there was a flowery monogram upon it, sewn very neatly in ivory silk. ‘It looks a bit queer, don’t it,’ she went on sadly, ‘seeing all these scraps of handsomeness in this poor room...’ ‘It does,’ I said - but I could hardly get the words out. The pretty monogram had reminded me suddenly of Felicity Place, and all the lovely suits that I had worn there. I saw again those tailored jackets and waistcoats and shirts, those tiny, extravagant N.K.s that I had thought so thrilling. I had not known then that they were sewn in rooms like this, by women as sad as Mrs Fryer; but if I had, would I have cared? I knew that I would not, and felt now horribly uncomfortable and ashamed. Florence had stepped to the door, and stood there, waiting for me; Mrs Fryer had bent to pick up her youngest child, who had begun to cry. I reached into the pocket of my coat. There was a shilling there, and a penny, left over from a marketing trip: I took them out and placed them on the table amongst the fancy shirts and hankies, slyly as a thief. Mrs Fryer, however, saw, and shook her head. ‘Oh, now, miss...’ she said. ‘For the baby.’ I felt more self-conscious and ill than ever. ‘Just for the little one. Please.’ The woman ducked her head, and murmured her thanks; and I did not look at her, or Florence, until we were both of us out on the street again, and the dismal room was far behind. ‘That was kind of you,’ said Florence at last. It wasn’t kind at all; I felt as if I had slapped the woman, not given her a gift.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Some people go to great lengths to try to hide their symptoms. Once I had a client named Jocelyn for whom the cycle started with sweat. She was a big woman who happened to run hot, and she was convinced the beads of sweat on her brow and the spots under her arms would lead people to wonder, with barely concealed expressions of disgust, What’s wrong with her? She felt self-conscious in public, so she religiously applied prescription-strength antiperspirant, not just to her underarms but also to her forehead, every hour, which took away from her ability to commit to anything for more than sixty minutes. Once she even tried stitching sponges in the underarms of her work uniform, but they bunched and shifted and just made things worse. Managing her sweat had hijacked her attention, her time, and, with it, her life. Like Jake or Jocelyn, when we get stressed about our bodies our bodies react accordingly, which is the opposite of what we’re aiming for. For Jake, he went from blushing because he was stressed to being stressed because he was blushing. It was the fear of blushing—and worrying that others would notice and disapprove—that fueled the act of blushing itself. * * * This myth of inevitable judgment gains great momentum from the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is a phenomenon in which we overestimate the extent to which our actions and appearance are noticed by others. This phenomenon strengthens when we feel particularly exposed or vulnerable. Studies show that whether we’re having a bad hair day, wearing a conspicuous T-shirt, screwing up a volleyball game, or sucking at old-school Nintendo (how awesome are these studies?), we consistently overestimate the amount of attention paid to us. When we feel weird, odd, or stupid, our felt sense of others’ scrutiny shoots sky-high, but in no case is the social spotlight nearly as bright as we think. This idea isn’t new: way back in 1936, in his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote that the person you are talking to “is a hundred times more interested in himself and his wants and his problems than he is in you and your problems.” We’re each at the center of our own worlds, but we forget that every other person is in the same position. The process by which our brains process ambiguity provides the finishing touch for the people-will-judge-me myth. In order to keep ourselves safe, we fill in any ambiguity with the worst-case scenario so we can be prepared and not caught off guard. Consider the following sentences: Your boss calls you into his office. People laugh after something you said. A friend doesn’t text you back. An old friend comments on how you look different now.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I wonder if her mother was envious of her for being a child with a mother. Does her mother need to keep herself looking like a young girl with the hope that one day she, too, will have a mother who will take care of her and brush her hair? It is not unusual for mothers who didn’t have mothers themselves, or those who had abusive mothers, to resent their daughters for having the mother they never had. In therapy, the mother often explores feelings about her daughter having more than she had; she envies her daughter for having her as a mother. Trying to understand Alice’s mother’s psychology, I become aware of how, in our sessions, I switch from analyzing Alice to analyzing her mother, and I assume this is my unconscious collusion with Alice’s enmeshment with her mother. I’m enacting her wish to heal her mother and to make her stronger. In these moments, I become her mother’s therapist—her mother’s mother—as Alice fantasizes about being able to leave her mother with me to take care of while she goes off to start a family and become a mother herself. “I can’t afford to hurt her feelings,” she says. “Maybe she can have sessions with you too. Maybe she can work on her trauma, because if I try to talk to her, she immediately tears up and says, ‘I did my best to be a good person and a good mother.’ And you know what? I believe her. She is a good person and I love her. I know she did her best.” Alice’s mother needs to feel she is the victim and not the cause of the traumatic events that happened to her. To be a good person means not feeling angry. Alice, on the other hand, feels better when she is not a victim. She would rather be angry than sad. That disparity in their defenses is Alice’s attempt to be different from her mother, to be an active agent and control her life. “I’m trying so hard to be different but I am too similar to my mother. That’s exactly the problem,” she says. “The breast milk I drank was hers and it shaped my body and my mind. I didn’t belong to anyone but her. I didn’t have a father. My stepfather was an outsider and it was only my mother and me in the inner circle. Yes, I hate to be a victim but I, too, had a really sad childhood. I, too, got divorced. My luck is so bad that I can’t even get pregnant from having sex, like everyone else. I need to go through hell. And I want everyone to leave me alone, just as my mother wanted. She wanted to leave us and go on her retreats. I want to protect my baby from the same future.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Nothing. That brings me to my next dilemma,” she continues, and then she presents one of the questions many women in her situation struggle with. “Should I take hormones so I can breastfeed the baby? What do you think?” I follow the connections Alice makes between being an outsider and being a father. She said that she and her mother were the inner circle. Her father was an outsider. I recognize that her current conflict is related to the historical fact that, for her, the only way to love is to be a mother, not a father. She struggles with the fear that not being able to give birth to or breastfeed her child implies that she is a father rather than a mother. The problem of gender binary doesn’t allow fluidity in her perception of herself. It activates the shame of not being a “real woman” and, hence, the fear of becoming her father instead, whose love she couldn’t trust. “Are you worried that you won’t be able to love your baby?” I ask, making the explicit link between gender and love. “Absolutely.” Alice nods. “How do I know that I will be able to love her if I don’t give birth to her and breastfeed her? I’m not so sure a parent can love a baby without those love hormones. I mean, nature has arranged it so that women immediately produce oxytocin.” “It’s as if you believe that love hormones are what make a parent love their child,” I say. “How upsetting,” Alice whispers. “I thought I got over that. What’s wrong with me? Like my mother, I’m stuck being a little girl, still thinking that her father didn’t love her, even though I know it’s more complicated than that.” Alice sighs. “I see what you are saying: that underneath my wish to breastfeed my baby, I worry that I won’t love her the way ‘real’ mothers do, which was the only love I trusted.” “Exactly.” I hear myself using her words. Alice looks at me and I notice her holding back tears. “My father left me and he never came back. The angrier I was, the more he withdrew, until he gave up on me. He didn’t call anymore. He just sent me a birthday gift once a year with a card that read, ‘Happy Birthday, my girl. I love you forever.’ I thought he wrote that because he had to, and that deep inside he didn’t really care. He had a new life with the woman he left us for, new children, and a new house. I’m not sure why I’m crying. I didn’t care about him anyway.” Alice is sobbing.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  His nine-year-old son, Jim, knocked on the door and then ran crying to his mother, who found his father after it was too late. “For years this was our family secret,” Leonardo says. “My grandmother never told people the truth. She would say that he died suddenly. If someone pushed her, she would lie and say that he had died from a heart attack that he’d had in the bathroom and drowned. They were so ashamed of it, as if it meant something terrible about us.” “What a secret to carry,” I say, and Leonardo nods. “What do you think this dream means?” he asks me. “In your dream, it is Milo who knocks on the bathroom door,” I say. Leonardo looks a bit puzzled. “Yes, he begs me to open the door, exactly the way I imagine my father, as a child, had. How strange. What do you think it is? How is my breakup from Milo related to my grandfather’s suicide?” I don’t know the answer yet, but like Leonardo, I, too, recognize that in this dream his father is replaced by Milo knocking on the bathroom door. I ask him to tell me more. “I think my father knew deep inside that his father was unhappy and didn’t want to live,” Leonardo says. “I’m not saying he thought he would kill himself, but the truth is that for years my father felt very guilty, as if he could have saved him. He told me that story many times; even in the last years of his life he still talked about it. Unlike my grandmother, or maybe in reaction to her hiding it, my dad refused to keep it a secret. I think I was maybe five years old when I asked him how his father died, and he told me the truth. I guess he didn’t want me to grow up with secrets.” “Can you tell me that story again?” I ask. “Tell me what your dad remembered about that day your grandfather died.” “My dad told us this story so many times that I visualize it in my mind as if it is a movie I’m watching,” he says. “I imagine him pounding on the door, calling his father’s name, begging him to open the door. And I see him crying into his pillow at night, blaming himself for not saving his father’s life: if only he had been stronger he could have broken down that door, or if only his father loved him enough he would not have left him.” Leonardo’s eyes fill with tears. “It is a pretty extreme thing to do,” he says, “killing yourself when you have three young children at home. I don’t know. I want to feel bad for my grandfather, but then I mostly get so angry with him.” Suicide, and especially a suicide of a parent, has serious implications for the surviving family members.

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

  Though realizing her husband had a mistress, Marie-Thérèse remained extremely naïve. The king’s cousin Anne-Marie de Montpensier wrote, “One day at table she told me that the King had not come to bed until four o’clock in the morning. In answer to her questions, he had told her that he had been busy till then reading letters and writing his replies. When the Queen asked him whether he could not find another hour for that work, he turned his head away from her, lest she see him laugh. Lest she see me doing likewise, I kept my eyes down, fastened on my plate.”25 Marie-Thérèse was always the last to know that her husband had taken a new mistress. She had thought Louis was still in love with his sister-in-law Henrietta when he had, in fact, become involved with Louise de La Vallière. Now, seven years later, still spewing her poison at Louise, the queen did not notice that the tornado had changed course and was heading in an entirely different direction. For Louis, now a dashing thirty, no longer wanted a sweet and modest mistress. He was ready for the hard, glittering Athénaïs de Montespan, Louise’s best friend and the queen’s lady-in-waiting. Madame de Montespan had frequently raged to the queen against the effrontery of Louise de La Vallière, swearing she would rather die than play such a role. Suddenly it was Madame de Montespan who was the king’s new favorite, while Louise retained an uncomfortable place on the sidelines, neither in nor out of the game. The queen’s ignorance of this momentous shift became a court joke, but someone eventually informed her of it. Madame de Caylus wrote, “She had loved Madame de Montespan because she had believed her to be a respectable woman, loyal to her duties and her husband. Thus Her Majesty’s surprise equaled her sorrow when she later found her to be unlike what she had imagined. The Queen’s distress was made no easier by Madame de Montespan’s lack of consideration…. Of all the King’s mistresses, Madame de Montespan is the one who caused Her Majesty the greatest anguish; not only because that particular passion between Madame de Montespan and the King raged for so long, not only because she took such few pains to spare pain to the Queen but, above all, because it was pain inflicted by a woman whom the Queen had trusted and vouchsafed a special friendship.”26 While Louise de La Vallière had always treated the queen with deference, Madame de Montespan tried to upstage and insult her at every turn. As lady-in-waiting to the queen, instead of meekly assisting her, the king’s mistress often chastised her for taking too long getting dressed. Marie-Thérèse, rarely complaining to her husband, often lamented to her friends, “That whore will be the death of me!”27 and “That slut will kill me yet!”28

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

  The actual experiences and the degree or type of harm suffered may vary considerably. Some people may leave cults with minimum distress, and adjust rather rapidly to the larger society, while others may suffer severe emotional trauma that requires psychiatric care. Still others may need medical attention or other care. The dilemmas can be overwhelming and may require thoughtful attention. Many have likened this period to being on an emotional roller coaster. First of all, self-blame (for joining the cult or participating in it, or both) is a common reaction that tends to overshadow all positive feelings. Added to this is a feeling of identity loss and confusion over various aspects of daily life. If you were recruited at any time after your teens, you already had a distinct personality, which we call the "precult personality." While you were in the cult, you most likely developed a so-called new personality in order to adapt to the demands and ambiance of cult life. We call this the "cult personality." Most cults engage in an array of social-psychological pressures aimed at indoctrinating and changing you. You may have been led to believe that your precult personality was all bad and your adaptive cult personality all good. After you leave a cult, you don't automatically switch back to your precult self; in fact, you may often feel as if you have two personalities or two selves. Evaluating these emotions and confronting this dilemma-integrating the good and discarding the bad-is a primary task for most former cult members, and is a core focus of this book. As you seek to redefine and reshape your identity, you will want to address the psychological, emotional, and physical consequences of living in or around a constrained, controlled, and possibly abusive environment. And as if all that weren't enough, many basic life necessities and challenges will need to be met and overcome. These may include finding employment and a place to live, making friends, repairing old relationships, confronting belief issues, deciding on a career or going back to school, and most likely catching up with a social and cultural gap. If you feel like "a stranger in a strange land," it may be consoling to know that you are not the first person to have felt this way. In fact, the pervasive and awkward sense of alienation that both of us felt when we left our cults motivated us to write this book. We hope that the information here will not only help you get rid of any shame or embarrassment you might feel, but also ease your integration into a positive and productive life. We were compelled to write this book because more often than not, people coming out of cults have tremendous difficulty finding practical information. We, too, experienced that obstacle. Both of us faced one roadblock after another as we searched for useful information and helping professionals who were knowledgeable about cults and postcult trauma.