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 Between Us

  Maybe so, unless physical threats are the only way to regain at least part of your dignity: if you didn’t vehemently respond to your teacher’s shouting, your peers around you would have witnessed you being a pushover. Similarly, anybody assuming that critical parents raise maladjusted children—that shaming a child is unhealthy—would miss the special meaning shame may have in a cultural context in which the relationship between parent and child is interdependent. When Didi feels shame, he likely feels good about himself, because everybody in the relationship feels good. Didi was raised as a perfectly adjusted little boy: adjusted to a cultural context in which the child’s shame helps prevent their mom from losing face. My point is: We cannot understand the emotions of others unless we try to adopt their frame of reference. We need to understand the emotions of the Ta-Nehisis, Didis, and Ahmets of this world, by considering them within their social and cultural environment, and the goals they have for their relationships. Stated differently, we can only understand their emotions when we understand them as OURS—following them OUtside, rather than INside. Understanding the emotions of others is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. Emotions make you part of your group or culture, and unfortunately, the opposite can be true, too. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz, following middle-class American emotion norms, smiled encouragingly at an Ifaluk girl who appeared happy. She was fiercely reprimanded by her Ifaluk hosts, because she should have been “justifiably angry”: happiness is wrong in the Ifaluk, as it leads people to neglect their obligations. Anthropologist Jean Briggs, by following her North American inclinations, “exploded” in anger when she perceived that kaplunas (white Canadians) were about to harm her Inuit hosts. The Inuit were mortified by her response, because to them anger is a dangerous emotion. By now, you’ll remember Briggs was ostracized for months as a result. Being emotionally out of sync may generally be a reason for alienation and exclusion. By following the emotion rules of the street, young Ta-Nehisi Coates got himself suspended from school. Ahmet’s teacher, mistaking his shame for penance rather than as a form of respect, wrongly assumed that he was up to no good, when in fact his shame was conciliatory. We can only imagine the consequences of such mistrust. It is hard to belong when you do not do emotions like the people around you. When your emotions are tied to a different OURS than the emotions of the people around you, you may not be well attuned to your emotional dance partners, and you may step on each other’s toes.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I tapped my finger on the window as we drove. It was cold out. It would be like this for another few months before the weather would crack, and the sun would start to warm Washington. I liked the feel of the cold glass on my fingertips, like tiny shocks of winter. Isaac carried my bag inside. When I got to my room my eyes found my nightstand. There was a clear rectangle cut in the dust. I felt a pang of something. Grief? I was feeling a lot of grief; I had just lost my breasts. It had nothing to do with Nick, I told myself. “I’m making lunch,” Isaac said, standing just outside my room. “Do you want me to bring it up here?” “I want to shower. I’ll come down after.” He saw me staring at the bathroom door and cleared his throat. “Let me take a look before you do that.” I nodded and sat down on the edge of my bed, unbuttoning my shirt. When I was finished, I leaned back, my fingers gripping the comforter. You’d think I’d be used to this by now—the constant gawking and touching of my chest. Now that there was nothing there I should feel less ashamed. I was just a little boy as far as what was underneath my shirt. He unwound the bandages from my torso. I felt the air hit my skin and my eyes closed automatically. I opened them, defying my shame, to watch his face. Blank When he touched the skin around my sutures I wanted to pull back. “The swelling is down,” he said. “You can shower since the drain is out, but use the antibacterial soap I put in your bag. Don’t use a sponge on the stitches. They can snag.” I nodded. All things I knew, but when a man was looking at your mangled breasts he needed something to say. Doctor or not. I pulled my shirt closed and held it together in a fist. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.” I couldn’t look at him. My breasts weren’t the only thing torn and ripped. Isaac was a stranger and he had seen more of my wounds than anyone else. Not because I chose him like I did Nick. He was just always there. That’s what scared me. It was one thing inviting someone into your life, choosing to put your head on the train tracks and wait for imminent death, but this—this I had no control over. What he knew, and what he’d seen about me brought so much shame I could barely look him in the eyes.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I married in my thirtieth year. But before talking to you of my marriage, I must tell you how I lived formerly, and what ideas I had of conjugal life. I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a débauché , I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality. “The idea that I had of my morality arose from the fact that in my family there was no knowledge of those special debaucheries, so common in the surroundings of land-owners, and also from the fact that my father and my mother did not deceive each other. In consequence of this, I had built from childhood a dream of high and poetical conjugal life. My wife was to be perfection itself, our mutual love was to be incomparable, the purity of our conjugal life stainless. I thought thus, and all the time I marvelled at the nobility of my projects. “At the same time, I passed ten years of my adult life without hurrying toward marriage, and I led what I called the well-regulated and reasonable life of a bachelor. I was proud of it before my friends, and before all men of my age who abandoned themselves to all sorts of special refinements. I was not a seducer, I had no unnatural tastes, I did not make debauchery the principal object of my life; but I found pleasure within the limits of society’s rules, and innocently believed myself a profoundly moral being. The women with whom I had relations did not belong to me alone, and I asked of them nothing but the pleasure of the moment. “In all this I saw nothing abnormal. On the contrary, from the fact that I did not engage my heart, but paid in cash, I supposed that I was honest. I avoided those women who, by attaching themselves to me, or presenting me with a child, could bind my future. Moreover, perhaps there may have been children or attachments; but I so arranged matters that I could not become aware of them. “And living thus, I considered myself a perfectly honest man. I did not understand that debauchery does not consist simply in physical acts, that no matter what physical ignominy does not yet constitute debauchery, and that real debauchery consists in freedom from the moral bonds toward a woman with whom one enters into carnal relations, and I regarded this freedom as a merit. I remember that I once tortured myself exceedingly for having forgotten to pay a woman who probably had given herself to me through love. I only became tranquil again when, having sent her the money, I had thus shown her that I did not consider myself as in any way bound to her.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  For if I take the white world’s estimation of me as Black-woman-synonymous-with-garbage to heart, then deep down inside myself I will always believe that I am truly good for nothing. But it is very hard to look absorbed hatred in the face. It is easier to see you as good for nothing because you are like me. So when you support me because you are like me, that merely confirms that you are nothing too, just like me. It’s a no-win position, a case of nothing supporting nothing and someone’s gonna have to pay for that one, and it sure ain’t gonna be me! When I can recognize my worth, I can recognize yours. 3. That perfection is possible, a correct expectation from ourselves and each other, and the only terms of acceptance, humanness. (Note how very useful that makes us to the external institutions!) If you are like me, then you will have to be a lot better than I am in order to even be good enough. And you can’t be because no matter how good you are you’re still a Black woman, just like me. (Who does she think she is?) So any act or idea that I could accept or at least examine from anyone else is not even tolerable if it comes from you, my mirror image. If you are not THEIR image of perfection, and you can’t ever be because you are a Black woman, then you are a reflection upon me. We are never good enough for each other. All your faults become magnified reflections of my own threatening inadequacies. I must attack you first before our enemies confuse us with each other. But they will anyway. Oh mother, why were we armed to fight with cloud-wreathed swords and javelins of dust? “Just who do you think you are, anyway?” Who I am most afraid of (never) meeting. VI The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other. Too pretty — too ugly. Too Black — too white. Wrong. I already know that. Who says so. You’re too questionable for me to hear you. You speak THEIR language. You don’t speak THEIR language. Who do you think you are? You think you’re better than anybody else? Get out of my face. We refuse to give up the artificial distances between us, or to examine our real differences for creative exchange. I’m too different for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not-you. And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment. We have not been allowed to experience each other freely as Black women in america; we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own. “You are my reference group, but I have never worked with you.” How are you judging me?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Do we reenact these crucifixions upon each other, the avoidance, the cruelty, the judgments, because we have not been allowed Black goddesses, Black heroines; because we have not been allowed to see our mothers and our selves in their/our own magnificence until that magnificence became part of our blood and bone? One of the functions of hatred is certainly to mask and distort the beauty which is power in ourselves. I am hungry for Black women who will not turn from me in anger and contempt even before they know me or hear what I have to say. I am hungry for Black women who will not turn away from me even if they do not agree with what I say. We are, after all, talking about different combinations of the same borrowed sounds. Sometimes exploring our differences feels like marching out to war. I hurl myself with trepidation into the orbit of every Black woman I want to reach, advancing with the best of what I have to offer held out at arms length before me — myself. Does it feel different to her? At the same time as I am terrified, expecting betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of laughter, is she feeling judged by me? Most of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that I’m too public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one that’s paid most easily and most often. I fight nightmare images inside my own self, see them, own them, know they did not destroy me before and will not destroy me now if I speak them out, admit how they have scarred me, that my mother taught me to survive at the same time as she taught me to fear my own Blackness. “Don’t trust white people because they mean us no good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because their hearts are as Black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?) It is painful even now to write it down. How many messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many different voices, how many different ways? And how can we expunge these messages from our consciousness without first recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they were? IVWhat does it take to be tough? Learned cruelty? Now there is bound to be a voice saying that Black women have always helped one another, haven’t we? And that is the paradox of our inner conflict. We have a strong and ancient tradition of bonding and mutual support, and the memorized threads of that tradition exist within each of us, in opposition to the anger and suspicion engendered by self-hate.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Also, women are particularly prone to feeling uncomfortable with the lusty urges expressed, unvarnished, in their CETs. Especially if you’re a person who doesn’t masturbate very much, or doesn’t use fantasy to turn yourself on, you may have limited direct experience with the scenarios that produce strong genital responses. There’s no reason why you have to recognize your CET—unless you repeatedly gravitate toward sexual situations you don’t like or that harm you in some way. If your sex life is fine, just enjoy it. If, however, you’d like to understand your turn-ons better, make a conscious decision to pay more attention to the images that accompany your arousal. Whatever you do, don’t struggle with this process. Take your time and have some fun with it. You seem to be saying we’re slaves to our CETs. Do I have any choice about who or what turns me on? Your CET isn’t a prison. It’s merely a framework for the creation of arousing scripts based on dilemmas from your childhood and adolescence. As your CET has evolved over the years, you’ve already made a number of choices that have contributed to its form and texture. Even now you regularly choose whether to embrace your CET—by trying out new variations, for example—or to fight or downplay it. You raise a crucial question about the sphere of free will, something philosophers and psychologists will never stop debating. On the one hand, if you’ve ever fallen head over heels in love or been overcome by lust, you’ve surely noticed that these experiences happened to you. Your choices are limited to surrendering to or running from your desires. The only people who can honestly claim to be completely free agents in matters of eros are those who have shielded themselves from its risks—at the cost of limiting their pleasures. In eroticism, as in life, free choice increases with consciousness. One of the major benefits of identifying your CET is that once you know what it is, how it formed, and what it’s trying to accomplish, you can begin to work with it and coax it in directions consistent with where you wish to go. Those who simply act out their impulses blindly are the least free of all. I’m turned on by all kinds of people and situations. Can a person have many different CETs? Some people clearly respond to more than one erotic scenario. It’s not unusual for someone to have a particular script for one type of partner, a completely differently kind for someone else, and still other scenarios reserved strictly for fantasy. As you know, CETs revolve around the challenges and wounds of early life. I’ve known people who appeared to have quite a collection of CETs, each addressing a different issue. Most of us, however, tend to zero in on one or two. One reason CETs have such power is that they are highly specific and focused.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Even after gays and lesbians accept themselves, many retain deep feelings that gayness is inherently bad, if not downright unnatural. The only advantage to feeling this way is the extra erotic kick it can provide. Consequently, gay men are particularly likely to think of their role within the dominant culture as that of sexual outlaws. They reject the very rules that exclude them and embrace an ethic that emphasizes sexual freedom. Quite a few straight and bisexual men have similar feelings about themselves. The role of outlaw, sexual or otherwise, is more easily adopted by males. Lesbians, like women in general, may enjoy breaking the rules, but usually do so less confrontationally—with, of course, many exceptions. SELF-ESTEEM AND THE NAUGHTINESS FACTORCommon sense suggests that regular sexual rule-breaking carries with it the risk of feeling guilt-ridden and ashamed. Especially if early sexual prohibitions are accompanied by threats of punishment or withdrawal of love, the result can be a deep sense of shame about even garden-variety sexual desires. What usually isn’t so obvious is that violating prohibitions can provide avenues for self-assertion and affirmation, which do contribute to self-esteem. The importance of establishing one’s own right to decide is clear among adolescents, even when decisions are dictated by the shared ideals of the peer group rather than the individual. Once we become adults we define ourselves less through our rebellions than through our accomplishments, values, and relationships. But most of us retain an urge to demonstrate our superiority over the rules that continue to restrict us. Perhaps this is why encounters and fantasies with a flavor of violation so often leave the violators with a sense of self-validation or even pride. Of course, positive reactions like this are easier if the limits and values being violated are somebody else’s rather than one’s own. CORNERSTONE 3: SEARCHING FOR POWERThe story of childhood is, to a large degree, the history of our attempts to move from the abject powerlessness of infancy toward a clear and strong sense of self, a self capable of standing its ground in an indifferent and sometimes hostile world. Without some success in our search for power, we would have to live—if we could survive at all—in a state of perpetual submissive dependency. Throughout your life two fundamental strategies have been available to help you cope with or overcome powerlessness. The first involves direct action. By the time you were two you had already discovered ways to assert your will, probably including stirring up a fuss to get your way, threatening or using retaliation when you didn’t, or staging a sit-down strike when all else failed. As you’ve grown you’ve added additional strategies, including, with luck, the ability to express your wishes plainly and assertively.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker. “Just as the victim of the morphine habit, the drunkard, the smoker, is no longer a normal man, so the man who has known several women for his pleasure is no longer normal? He is abnormal forever. He is a voluptuary. Just as the drunkard and the victim of the morphine habit may be recognized by their face and manner, so we may recognize a voluptuary. He may repress himself and struggle, but nevermore will he enjoy simple, pure, and fraternal relations toward woman. By his way of glancing at a young woman one may at once recognize a voluptuary; and I became a voluptuary, and I have remained one.” CHAPTER VI. “Yes, so it is; and that went farther and farther with all sorts of variations. My God! when I remember all my cowardly acts and bad deeds, I am frightened. And I remember that ‘me’ who, during that period, was still the butt of his comrades’ ridicule on account of his innocence. “And when I hear people talk of the gilded youth, of the officers, of the Parisians, and all these gentlemen, and myself, living wild lives at the age of thirty, and who have on our consciences hundreds of crimes toward women, terrible and varied, when we enter a parlor or a ball-room, washed, shaven, and perfumed, with very white linen, in dress coats or in uniform, as emblems of purity, oh, the disgust! There will surely come a time, an epoch, when all these lives and all this cowardice will be unveiled! “So, nevertheless, I lived, until the age of thirty, without abandoning for a minute my intention of marrying, and building an elevated conjugal life; and with this in view I watched all young girls who might suit me. I was buried in rottenness, and at the same time I looked for virgins, whose purity was worthy of me! Many of them were rejected: they did not seem to me pure enough! “Finally I found one that I considered on a level with myself. She was one of two daughters of a landed proprietor of Penza, formerly very rich and since ruined. To tell the truth, without false modesty, they pursued me and finally captured me. The mother (the father was away) laid all sorts of traps, and one of these, a trip in a boat, decided my future. “I made up my mind at the end of the aforesaid trip one night, by moonlight, on our way home, while I was sitting beside her. I admired her slender body, whose charming shape was moulded by a jersey, and her curling hair, and I suddenly concluded that this was she .

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I hurl myself with trepidation into the orbit of every Black woman I want to reach, advancing with the best of what I have to offer held out at arms length before me — myself. Does it feel different to her? At the same time as I am terrified, expecting betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of laughter, is she feeling judged by me? Most of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that I’m too public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one that’s paid most easily and most often. I fight nightmare images inside my own self, see them, own them, know they did not destroy me before and will not destroy me now if I speak them out, admit how they have scarred me, that my mother taught me to survive at the same time as she taught me to fear my own Blackness. “Don’t trust white people because they mean us no good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because their hearts are as Black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?) It is painful even now to write it down. How many messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many different voices, how many different ways? And how can we expunge these messages from our consciousness without first recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they were? IV What does it take to be tough? Learned cruelty? Now there is bound to be a voice saying that Black women have always helped one another, haven’t we? And that is the paradox of our inner conflict. We have a strong and ancient tradition of bonding and mutual support, and the memorized threads of that tradition exist within each of us, in opposition to the anger and suspicion engendered by self-hate. When the world moved against me with a disapproving frown / It was sister put the ground back under my feet. * Hearing those words sung has always provoked the most profound and poignant sense of loss within me for something I wanted to feel and could not because it had never happened for me.

• From Between Us

  It was then that she realized that her own emotions were cultured, and unfit to the Utku social relationships. The Utku Inuit valued equanimity and generosity, and considered anger to be dangerous. “Satan . . . takes people who get angry easily and puts them in a fiery place . . . We do not get angry here,” her Inuit foster father informed Briggs. Getting angry was considered offensive, immoral even. It was hard for Briggs to suppress her everyday irritations. She writes: “I was acutely aware of the high level of control valued, and to a large extent achieved, by the Utku, and with secret discomfort I contrasted that control with my own tempery reactions to minor misfortunes. Though my reactions were well within the boundaries set by my own culture, in a Utku setting they did not seem harmless.” Briggs certainly tried to fit in, but to little avail: “The [Utku emotional] control was much greater than that to which I was accustomed to discipline myself. . . . Discouragingly often after hours, or even days, of calm, when I was congratulating myself on having finally achieved a semblance of proper equanimity, the suddenness or intensity of the feelings betrayed me.” The final blow to Briggs’s position came when a group of kaplunas (white men visiting the Inuit territory) broke one of the two boats that Utku owned and asked to borrow the remaining one. Briggs describes this episode in her book: “I exploded. Unsmilingly and in a cold voice I told the kapluna leader a variety of things I thought he should know: that if they borrowed the second canoe we would be without a fishing boat; that if this boat was also damaged we would be in a very difficult position. . . .” Her litany was longer, but she ended claiming that the owner of the boat did not wish to lend it. The Inuit owner of the boat looked dismayed all along, but when Briggs asked him to confirm, he responded in a voice that was “unusually loud”: “Let him have his will!” The incident had dire consequences, as Briggs was ostracized for three months during the second year of her field trip. Although nobody had entered her tent for a few days, Briggs did not realize that she was ostracized until she read a letter by one of her hosts to an Utku liaison at the mainland that read: Jean “is a liar. She lied to the kaplunas. She gets angry very easily. She ought not to be studying Eskimo’s. She is very annoying, because she scolds and one is tempted to scold her.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Extreme forms of voyeurism and exhibitionism (peeping Toms and flashers) are the best-known paraphilias because they’re common characters in comedy routines. But paraphilias are no joke. When these rituals are directed at nonconsenting participants, they are crimes with serious consequences, and anyone who suffers from a paraphilia is caught in an unbearable bind. For them the only escape from shame and self-hate is to redirect these feelings into episodes of white-hot intensity, often lasting for hours, and frequently with multiple orgasms. Afterward any satiation is remarkably short-lived, and before long the same torturous sequence demands repetition. When they try to fight their urges, which they inevitably will, the intensity only grows. No erotic predicament is more exciting—or painful.6 Carlos: Thief of thrills By the time I met Carlos he was at his wits’ end. For the second time in as many months, college classmates had complained to the authorities about his loitering at the gym, spying on them as they undressed and showered. More than once he had been observed furtively masturbating. Several of the guys were getting very angry, some even threatening violence. With his college career in jeopardy and under the threat of legal sanctions, he was awash in shame and self-reproach. Carlos had struggled with negative beliefs about himself for as long as he could remember. Ironically, prior to the brouhaha at the gym, he had been feeling much better about himself. In fact, what upset him most—other than the humiliation of being “found out as a pervert”—was that his growing self-esteem, painstakingly cultivated with the help of a previous therapist, seemed suddenly to have vanished. Carlos was aware that his sexual troubles were linked to his unhappy childhood, although he wasn’t sure exactly how. As his story unfolded, the links grew clearer. His family emigrated from Central America to a small town in the southwestern United States when he was an infant. At home a chronically negative, embittered mother invariably focused on what was wrong with everyone, expressing her disapproval with hostile sarcasm. His father, who struggled to eke out a living at low-paying jobs, was a prime target of his wife’s demeaning jabs. Carlos remembered him as stoic, silent, usually absent, and unwilling or unable to counter his wife’s attacks. Carlos and his two siblings were left to fend for themselves. Things weren’t much better in the neighborhood. The white majority, mostly poor themselves, vented their frustrations on anyone different, especially Hispanic immigrants. Carlos regularly retreated into a world of comic book heroes and dreams of being a celebrity. When he discovered masturbation at age twelve, his fantasies and the orgasms they produced forced him to confront what he had always tried to ignore—he was undeniably attracted to other males.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  The trail is bumpy and precipitous. It borders the cookie cutter Glen, which I find ironic. The whole thing has been rutted by time and rain, woven with rogue tree roots and sharp flints. It took concentration just to make it through in the daylight without a sprained ankle, which was precisely the reason it had few joggers. I don’t know what I was thinking running it while it was still dark. I realized that I should have stuck to the plan of jogging around the lake. I should have stayed home. I should have done anything but jog that trail, on that morning, at that time. At 6:47 he raped me. I know this because seconds before I felt arms wrapping around my upper body, crushing the breath from my lungs, I glanced at my watch and saw 6:46. I figure it took him thirty seconds to drag me backward off the trail, my legs kicking the air uselessly. Another thirty seconds to throw me down at the base of a tree and rip off my clothes. Two seconds to hit me hard across the face. A minute to turn the sum of my life into a violent stained memory. He took what he wanted and I didn’t scream. Not when he grabbed me, not when he hit me, not when he raped me. Not even after, when my life was irrevocably soiled. After, I stumbled out of the woods, my pants half pulled up and blood trickling into my eyes from a cut on my forehead. I ran looking over my shoulder, and right into another jogger who had just gotten out of his car. He caught me as I fell. I didn’t need to say anything, because he immediately pulled out his phone and called the police. He opened his passenger side door and helped me sit, then turned the heat on full blast. He had an old blanket in the trunk that he said he used for camping. He said lots of things in the ten minutes we waited for the police. He was trying to set me at ease. I didn’t really hear him, though the sound of his voice was a soothing constant. He wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and asked if I wanted water. I didn’t but I nodded. He announced that he was opening the back door to get it. He told me everything he did before he did it. I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Once there I was wheeled to a private room and handed a hospital gown by an orderly. A nurse came in a few minutes later. She looked harried and distracted, the hair above her ears sticking out in tufts. “We’re going to administer an SOEC kit, Ms. Richards,” she said, without looking at me. When I asked what that was, she told me it was Sexual Offense Evidence Collection.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unless it is imperative that you stop what you’re doing right away because of life-threatening consequences (risking arrest, injury to another person, or exposure to AIDS, for example), it’s pointless to attempt such a moratorium until an internal consensus is reached. Until then, the most effective approach is to decide to continue doing whatever you feel compelled to do, and to do it mindfully. Sometimes even a modest increase in consciousness brings people face to face with how their behavior actually makes them feel. For instance, those who are sexually driven often become so “spaced out” that they have little or no awareness of what they’re feeling before and during a compulsive episode. Consciousness typically reveals a host of unpleasant emotions wrapped up in the turn-on, most commonly fear, hatred, sadness, and shame. As these unpleasant feelings are recognized, they serve as push motivators, prompting the person to pause and consider a new path. TAPPING THE POWER OF IMAGINATIONYour journey through the gray zone will yield maximum rewards if you use your mind’s eye to perceive possibilities that don’t yet fully exist. This may be difficult if you’ve learned to trust only what you can verify through reason or the senses. Great discoveries—whether in science, the arts, or personal life—require imaginative leaps in which the discoverer moves beyond typical modes of thought and perception. With a little practice and patience almost anyone can learn to apply the gifts of imagination to erotic transitions. There are two requirements. First, clear some time to imagine. Second, resist the urge to criticize the products of your imagination prematurely. And remember, when judged by normal standards of productivity, imaginative pursuits look suspiciously like play. Those who think they must always be accomplishing something are often reluctant to let their imaginations roam freely. Try this experiment. When you’re not preoccupied or in a hurry (is there such a time?) find a quiet, private place to sit or recline. Allow your breathing to slow as it deepens. With your eyes closed, scan your body from head to toe, allowing each group of muscles to relax. As you inhale, notice sensations of calm and warmth flowing through your nostrils, filling your lungs, and radiating throughout your entire body. Each time you exhale, let tension and worry melt away. Don’t be concerned if you’re easily distracted. Each time your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the soothing rhythm of your breath. Now recall an especially positive and fulfilling sexual experience. Maybe you’ll revisit one of the peaks you’ve remembered before, or perhaps a different memory will surface. Remind yourself that the most satisfying experiences are not necessarily the wildest. Savor the feeling of actually being fulfilled. Linger over the simple details that brought you pleasure. Reexperience how you felt about yourself during and afterward. Vividly reliving experiences of sexual satisfaction helps clarify your goals and strengthens your motivations.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  There are three sections in this document, each of which seems to have a different purpose. The first section is called “Course I.” This is what I have termed the secret memoir, as it contains reflections on the most embarrassing or troubling features of Hubbard’s biography. “The purpose of this experiment is to re-establish the ambition, willpower, desire to survive, the talent and confidence of myself,” Hubbard declares straightforwardly at the start. “I was always anxious about people’s opinion of me and was afraid I would bore them. This injected anxiety and careless speed into my work. I must be convinced that I can write skillfully and well.” Those who criticize his work are fools, he writes. “I must be convinced I have succeeded in writing and with ease will regain my popularity, which actually was not small.” “My service record was none too glorious,” he admits. He also confesses his shame about his frequent affairs. But he is intent on succeeding in his relationship with Sara, whom he describes as “young, beautiful, desirable.” Unfortunately, he is handicapped by bouts of impotence. “I want her always. But I am 13 years older than she. She is heavily sexed. My libido is so low I hardly admire her naked.” Sex preoccupies him. He’s worried about his “very bad masturbatory history,” his sexual diseases, and his impotence, which he had been treating with testosterone supplements. “By eliminating certain fears of hypnosis, curing my rheumatism and laying off hormones, I hope to restore my former libido. I must!” Through self-hypnosis, he hopes to convince himself of certain prescriptive mantras, including: I can write. My mind is still brilliant. That masturbation was no sin or crime. That I do not need to have ulcers anymore. That I am fortunate in losing Polly and my parents, for they never meant well by me. That I believe in my gods and spiritual things. That my magical work is powerful and effective. That the numbers 7, 25, and 16 are not unlucky or evil for me. That I am not bad to look upon. That I am not susceptible to colds. That Sara is always beautiful to me. That these words and commands are like fire and will sear themselves into every corner of my being, making me happy and well and confident forever! The second part of the document, labeled “Course II,” included the statements that have come to be called Affirmations, although Hubbard refers to them as incantations. He had recently gotten a new recorder for dictation, called a Sound-Scriber. It may be that he recorded this portion and played it back to himself as a means of self-hypnosis. This section begins with the command “You are asleep.” In this lesson, Hubbard tells himself, he will learn several important things: You have no urge to talk about your navy life.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I’m too different for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not-you. And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment. We have not been allowed to experience each other freely as Black women in america; we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own. “You are my reference group, but I have never worked with you.” How are you judging me? As Black as you? Blacker than you? Not Black enough? Whichever, I am going to be found wanting in some way ... We are Black women, defined as never-good-enough. I must overcome that by becoming better than you. If I expect enough from myself, then maybe I can become different from what they say we are, different from you. If I become different enough, then maybe I won’t be a “nigger bitch” anymore. If I make you different enough from me, then I won’t need you so much. I will become strong, the best, excel in everything, become the very best because I don’t dare to be anything else. It is my only chance to become good enough to become human. If I am myself, then you cannot accept me. But if you can accept me, that means I am what you would like to be, and then I’m not “the real thing.” But then neither are you. WILL THE REAL BLACK WOMAN PLEASE STAND UP? We cherish our guilty secret, buried under exquisite clothing and expensive makeup and bleaching creams (yes, still!) and hair straighteners masquerading as permanent waves. The killer instinct toward any one of us who deviates from the proscribed cover is precise and deadly. Acting like an insider and feeling like the outsider, preserving our self-rejection as Black women at the same time as we’re getting over — we think. And political work will not save our souls, no matter how correct and necessary that work is. Yet it is true that without political work we cannot hope to survive long enough to effect any change. And self-empowerment is the most deeply political work there is, and the most difficult. When we do not attempt to name the confusion of feelings which exist between sisters, we act them out in hundreds of hurtful and unproductive ways. Never speaking from the old pain, to beyond. As if we have made a secret pact between ourselves not to speak, for the expression of that unexamined pain might be accompanied by other ancient and unexpressed hurtings embedded in the stored-up anger we have not expressed. And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of too-early battles for survival. “You can’t take it, huh!” The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name- calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Extreme forms of voyeurism and exhibitionism (peeping Toms and flashers) are the best-known paraphilias because they’re common characters in comedy routines. But paraphilias are no joke. When these rituals are directed at nonconsenting participants, they are crimes with serious consequences, and anyone who suffers from a paraphilia is caught in an unbearable bind. For them the only escape from shame and self-hate is to redirect these feelings into episodes of white-hot intensity, often lasting for hours, and frequently with multiple orgasms. Afterward any satiation is remarkably short-lived, and before long the same torturous sequence demands repetition. When they try to fight their urges, which they inevitably will, the intensity only grows. No erotic predicament is more exciting—or painful.6 Carlos: Thief of thrills By the time I met Carlos he was at his wits’ end. For the second time in as many months, college classmates had complained to the authorities about his loitering at the gym, spying on them as they undressed and showered. More than once he had been observed furtively masturbating. Several of the guys were getting very angry, some even threatening violence. With his college career in jeopardy and under the threat of legal sanctions, he was awash in shame and self-reproach. Carlos had struggled with negative beliefs about himself for as long as he could remember. Ironically, prior to the brouhaha at the gym, he had been feeling much better about himself. In fact, what upset him most—other than the humiliation of being “found out as a pervert”—was that his growing self-esteem, painstakingly cultivated with the help of a previous therapist, seemed suddenly to have vanished. Carlos was aware that his sexual troubles were linked to his unhappy childhood, although he wasn’t sure exactly how. As his story unfolded, the links grew clearer. His family emigrated from Central America to a small town in the southwestern United States when he was an infant. At home a chronically negative, embittered mother invariably focused on what was wrong with everyone, expressing her disapproval with hostile sarcasm. His father, who struggled to eke out a living at low-paying jobs, was a prime target of his wife’s demeaning jabs. Carlos remembered him as stoic, silent, usually absent, and unwilling or unable to counter his wife’s attacks. Carlos and his two siblings were left to fend for themselves. Things weren’t much better in the neighborhood. The white majority, mostly poor themselves, vented their frustrations on anyone different, especially Hispanic immigrants. Carlos regularly retreated into a world of comic book heroes and dreams of being a celebrity. When he discovered masturbation at age twelve, his fantasies and the orgasms they produced forced him to confront what he had always tried to ignore—he was undeniably attracted to other males.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  At 2.0, sex becomes revolting and children provoke anxiety. Rape and child abuse characterize 1.5. Then Hubbard arrives at a level that preoccupies him, 1.1 on the Tone Scale. “Here is the harlot, the pervert, the unfaithful wife, Free Love, easy marriage and quick divorce and general sexual disaster,” he writes. “A society which reaches this level is on its way out of history.” A mother who is at 1.1 on the Tone Scale will attempt to abort her child. However, once the child is born, “we get general neglect and thoughtlessness about the child and no feeling whatsoever about the child’s future or any effort to build one for it. We get careless familial actions, such as promiscuity, which will tear to pieces the family security upon which this child’s future depends. Along this band, the child is considered a thing, a possession.” Hubbard finished the book and wrote this dedication: To Alexis Valerie Hubbard For Whose Tomorrow May Be Hoped a World That Is Fit To Be Free Hubbard eventually wrote a note to Sara to explain his whereabouts, saying that he was in a Cuban military hospital, about to be transferred to the States “as a classified scientist immune from interference of all kinds.” He adds, “I will be hospitalized probably a long time. Alexis is getting excellent care. I see her every day. She is all I have to live for. My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do but my body didn’t stand up. My right side is paralyzed.... I hope my heart lasts.... Dianetics will last 10,000 years—for the Army and Navy have it now.” He concludes by warning that in the event of his death, Alexis will inherit a fortune, but if Sara gains custody, the child will get nothing. Hubbard did return to the United States and hunkered down in Wichita, Kansas, where a wealthy supporter, Don Purcell, provided him sanctuary. Hubbard’s old friend Russell Hays was there, consulting for the Cessna Aircraft Corporation. Hubbard arrived with “a Cadillac so damn long he couldn’t hardly park it anywhere, and two concubines,” Hays marveled. When Sara discovered where her husband was, she sought to enjoin his assets. Hubbard retaliated by writing a letter to the US attorney general, explaining the peril he was in. “I am, basically, a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena,” he said by way of introduction. He said that his own investigation showed that Sara was tied to Communists who had infiltrated the Dianetics Foundation. This was at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. “I did not realize my wife was one until this spring,” Hubbard wrote.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Me, darker than my two sisters. My father, darkest of all. I was always jealous of my sisters because my mother thought they were such good girls, whereas I was bad, always in trouble. “Full of the devil,” she used to say. They were neat, I was untidy. They were quiet, I was noisy. They were well-behaved, I was rowdy. They took piano lessons and won prizes in deportment. I stole money from my father’s pockets and broke my ankle sledding downhill. They were good-looking, I was dark. Bad, mischievous, a born troublemaker if ever there was one. Did bad mean Black ? The endless scrubbing with lemon juice in the cracks and crevices of my ripening, darkening, body. And oh, the sins of my dark elbows and knees, my gums and nipples, the folds of my neck and the cave of my armpits! The hands that grab at me from behind the stairwell are Black hands. Boys’ hands, punching, rubbing, pinching, pulling at my dress. I hurl the garbage bag I’m carrying into the ashcan and jerk away, fleeing back upstairs. Hoots follow me. “That’s right, you better run, you ugly yaller bitch, just wait!” Obviously, color was relative. My mother taught me to survive from a very early age by her own example. Her silences also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, self-rejection, and sadness. My survival lay in learning how to use the weapons she gave me, also, to fight against those things within myself, unnamed. And survival is the greatest gift of love. Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost. My mother bore me into life as if etching an angry message into marble. Yet I survived the hatred around me because my mother made me know, by oblique reference, that no matter what went on at home, outside shouldn’t oughta be the way it was. But since it was that way outside, I moved in a fen of unexplained anger that encircled me and spilled out against whomever was closest that shared those hated selves. Of course I did not realize it at the time. That anger lay like a pool of acid deep inside me, and whenever I felt deeply, I felt it, attaching itself in the strangest places. Upon those as powerless as I. My first friend asking, “Why do you go around hitting all the time? Is that the only way you know how to be friends? What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going? It is shortly after the Civil War. In a grey stone hospital on 110th Street in New York City a woman is screaming. She is Black, and healthy, and has been brought here from the South. I do not know her name.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  My humiliation was high as she pried my legs open. The SOEC kit was on a metal table that she’d wheeled next to the bed. I watched her unpack it, laying each item out on a tray. There were several small boxes, microscope slides and plastic bags, and two large white envelopes, which she slipped my clothes into. I started shaking when she took out a small blue comb, a nail pick and cotton swabs. That’s when I averted my eyes to the ceiling, squeezing them shut so tight I saw gold stars on the inside of my eyelids. Please no, God. Please no. I wondered if the words sexual assault made women feel less victimized. I hated it. I hated all the words people were using. The cop who had brought me in whispered the word raped to the nurse. But to me it had been sexual assault. They were off brands of the real deal. The kit took two hours. When she was finished, I was told to sit up. She handed me two white pills in a little paper cup. “For the discomfort,” she said. Discomfort. I repeated the word in my head as I dropped the pills on my tongue and took the paper cup of water she was now extending. I was too shocked to be offended. A female officer came in when the nurse was finished to talk to me about what happened. I gave her a description of the man: heavyset, mid-thirties, taller than me, but shorter than the officer, a skull cap pulled over his hair, which might have been brown. No tattoos that I could see … no scars. When the nurse was finished, she asked if there was anyone they could call. I said, No. An officer would give me a ride home. I stopped short when I saw the man at the nurses’ station. The jogger—the one who’d helped me—was wearing a white doctor’s coat over his sweatpants and t-shirt, and flipping through what I presumed was my chart. It’s not like he didn’t already know what happened to me, but I still didn’t want him to read it on my chart. “Ms. Richards,” he said. “I’m Doctor Asterholder. I was there when—” “I remember,” I said, cutting him off. He nodded. “I’m not on duty today,” he confessed. “I came in to check on you.” To check on me? I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. A woman? A soiled woman? Sorrow? A face to pin pity on? “I understand you need a ride home. The police can take you,” he glanced at the uniformed officer who was standing off to the side. “But I’d like to drive you if that’s okay.”

• From Between Us

  Why not give children the tools to understand these differences and cope with them? Rather than teaching students the “right” emotions and their “proper” causes and consequences, why not teach children that different ways of doing emotions may be “right,” depending on the goals valued and the kind of person you want to be? In other words, it may be productive if emotional literacy programs teach children that emotions are OURS—tied to our social cultural contexts. This could mean that our school curricula teach children cultural humility and the tools for unpacking emotional episodes. Teachers could provide their students with the tools to follow their own and other people’s emotions to the outside. Teachers and students alike would learn to unpack emotional episodes, in a way similar to what anthropologists and culturally humble clinicians do. Children would learn to pose, as well as answer, the kinds of questions presented in the Toolkit (figure 8.1), above. By learning to unpack emotional episodes, students would be up to the task of bridging the gap between their school and home cultures. Unpacking emotions, and recognizing their diversity, would fit the growing call for “equity” in emotional literacy programs, not just by generally respecting others, but also by specifically allowing for cultural diversity in emotional and social competence itself. What is more, it will provide an opportunity to value the students (and increasingly, teachers) who have become facile in unpacking different ways of doing emotions, because they belong to more than one culture; we can recognize cultural fluency with a second culture as a desirable relationship skill itself. After all ways of doing emotions are made to count, we can be sure that schools and classrooms will find common ground. Are Emotions the Same Deep Down? Here I return to the question I asked at the beginning of this book: Is it true that we are all the same when it comes to feelings? Was the young Ta-Nehisi Coates simply angry, but in a situation that would not have prompted anger to those of us who are more privileged? What would be lost if we described Ahmet as simply ashamed in response to a situation that might have elicited indignation in his Belgian classmates—the teacher’s reprimand? Did Ramla really feel the same as her therapist Kaat Van Acker would have, had she been crying, but did her culture emphasize moral failure rather than a loss of abilities? Did the Simbo women feel love like Dureau, but simultaneously feel sadness? These are good, legitimate questions to ask, as their answers allow us to resonate with the feelings of people growing up in different sociocultural contexts. These questions are where the unpacking of emotions should start, because this is where we can resonate. Yet, there is no reason to assume primacy of the ways emotions are done in Western middle-class contexts, and no reason to think that those ways are any more authentic or natural than other ways of doing emotions.