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.

Page 130 of 267 · 20 per page

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

  Traditional Puritan-Protestant values continue to implicitly influence the judgments, behaviors, and moral cognition of contemporary Americans—not only among the devout, but also less religious Americans.14 This has seeped into classrooms: the emphasis on sex within marriage and condemnation of promiscuity are two primary characteristics of what is commonly referred to as “purity culture,” or the contemporary evangelical movement to promote abstinence prior to marriage, that has infiltrated society at large, most notably in sex education. Young women are taught that they are responsible not only for their purity, but for that of the men who want to have sex with them, because they cannot help it. Culture writer Char Adams, who is cis and straight, was raised in a conservative Christian household in Philadelphia. The first lessons she learned about sex were terrifying, she recalls, the main one being: if you have sex before marriage, you are bad and going to hell. When she had her first kiss at thirteen, she spiraled into a deep depression. “I shared a part of my body, and so now I’m bad and dirty and going to hell,” she remembered thinking. “That was the crux of my sex education: it’s for people who were married, adult, and not gay.” At the time, the consequences of the kiss felt permanent and devastating. “A teaching that is extremely popular among Black Christians is that when you have sex, a part of that person lives in your body forever,” she told me. “[So] later, if you ever experience anything like anxiety or depression, your mind quickly goes, ‘Oh, it’s because he’s still in me.’ That person’s soul is now tied to yours and you can’t ever get free of it.” Adams suspects that many of these teachings, even after she refuted them, lived on in her body, the way we now know that trauma does. She became sexually active at twenty, but stopped having sex when she was twenty-two, falling into a four-year celibacy. She had realized that even after intellectually unlearning some of the more toxic teachings of the church, she couldn’t fully shake its influence. She hadn’t been having sex that felt safe, fair, and pleasurable. “No matter how long you unlearn these things or make choices to live differently, the messages that we get around sex and pleasure from the moment we are born is that sex is for men and that it is their pleasure experience,” she said. “It is their wheelhouse, they are in control, and everything else is unimportant. We end up ignoring our desire for the sake of pleasing partners.”

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

  In fact, masturbation is such a powerful tool that many sex therapists hinge their work on it entirely. Amy Weissfeld, a certified sex educator, works as a masturbation coach, helping her clients reform their relationship to self-pleasure and see beyond the frenzied drive to orgasm. Part of her work, she says, is broadening the definition of masturbation to include self-pleasure of all kinds, even acts like the stroke of a cheek. She urges her clients to move away from an outcome-obsessed model that centers on orgasm, which gets us in our heads and out of our bodies. The matter is personal for Weissfeld, who had a sexual reawakening in her late thirties. “I needed to reclaim myself before I could bring myself into my relationship with my partner in a wholesome, full way,” she told me. “When we expand the definition of what masturbation is, it allows us to really feel embodied and to love ourselves. And when we start to love ourselves, we’re so much more powerful and radiant.” Weissfeld believes that masturbation will “heal the world,” one person at a time. You probably learned to be embarrassed by sex toys and masturbation long before you started watching The Bachelor, and if you never started watching The Bachelor, congratulations, you’re a fucking intellectual, but you learned somewhere else. When we are young, we are horny detectives patching together clues, little snippets from conversations or Snapchats or movies, to fill in the gaps of information we aren’t getting at school or anywhere else: a blurred vibrator on primetime; a serial killer on a crime procedural who ejaculates on his victims; a young Jason Biggs pleasuring himself with a pie to experience mortification so massive it titles a feature film. Many kids are scolded when they first start touching themselves. Yes, I forgive your mom for yelling “GO TO YOUR ROOM” when she caught seven-year-old you humping the one nice couch pillow; masturbation is private, unless shared with consenting parties. But the act of rubbing, pulling, stroking, and tapping your genitals could not be more natural. Alas, there comes a time in every masturbator’s life, usually during childhood, when we internalize that it is wrong. It could be when your mom yelled at you, which cemented a lifelong association between self-pleasure and humiliation. Or it could be a literal educator saying, “Masturbation can cause blindness,” which is still taught in some classrooms, I learned. Most people I spoke with figured out how to masturbate on their own, but couldn’t pinpoint when. Years after this initial discovery, these same masturbators told me they still never talk about it with friends, family, or even (especially!) significant others. In relationships, there’s a pervasive fear that if you’re masturbating too often or even at all, your partner might conclude that sex with them is not enough, or even consider it cheating.

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

  For most of my decade-long sex writing career, and all of my life, I’ve worked tirelessly to showcase the versions of myself I deemed most attractive. This is standard human stuff—performing—but I suspect I took it further than most. My work to shape a public sexual self that was confident, hot, and self-aware left little space for the authentic sexual self I’m always second-guessing. In my writing, and with romantic partners, I’ve often felt I had two options, both driven by existential anguish: if I couldn’t be pretty, I could be funny, and if I couldn’t be funny, I could keep it to myself. I’d resigned myself to a lifetime of bad sex under the condition that I produced goofy anecdotes, or at least hit the dual goals of rehabilitating my self-esteem (“That guy who broke my heart is a loser, ha-ha, he follows NASCAR drivers on Instagram”) and entertaining people with events that were not entertaining to me (“He ejaculated onto my eyeballs without asking, ahah?”). Projecting confident fuckability to mask quiet discontent has been a decade-long grift, one that fits neatly into what Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad call “confidence culture,” a contemporary feminism that requires confidence as a prerequisite to empowerment. As a young sex columnist at Yale, I took an assertive stance, writing an article about the ubiquity of bad sex on college campuses that went viral; its opening line, “Guys at Yale are bad in bed.” The morning after it was published, I woke to hundreds of Facebook friend requests from men around the country, either asking to fuck me or telling me to die, slut. In the column, I’d positioned myself, and the many women I’d interviewed, as fully formed sexual agents who were being punished by soft dicks at every turn because they didn’t ask for “what they wanted”—as if that were something every self-respecting feminist knows from birth. (In reality, women are still punished for expressing sexual desire; rape cases are often dismissed if the victim expresses interest at some point.) A campus celeb who was mentioned in our gossip paper for “sleeping with a sushi waiter for free sushi,” a claim only half true, I got a gross little thrill when men recognized me at parties, an increasingly common occurrence; some would approach me to smirk in my vicinity, others to flirt. “You haven’t had good sex because you haven’t had sex with me,” a beefy lacrosse player once told me at a frat house I was quite literally stuck at, my heels tacked to the Natural Light–stained floor.

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

  “I fully thought cis men could pee out of their butts during sex so that they didn’t accidentally pee in a vagina and I didn’t realize how stupid that is until I was like eighteen.” “Boys’ sex drives are like a high-speed train: hard to stop once they get going. Girls’ sex drives are like a cute little bicycle: not that hard to stop and not very fast. It’s the girl’s job to make sure the sex drives don’t take them all the way to sex.” “That ‘homosexuals’ had short, disease-ridden lives, marked by shame, pain, loneliness, and mental illness.” “First-time sex should be painful and female orgasms are somehow elusive, rare, or difficult to achieve.” “You’re supposed to put the dental dam at the back of your mouth before performing fellatio.” “If I masturbate I’ll go blind.” CULPRIT 3: PURITY CULTUREI was a beautiful child but an ugly adolescent. Acne ravaged my body years before my friends’ armpits smelled, and my dry-yet-somehow-greasy curls landed in an equilateral triangle above my shoulders, something I was quick to point out, lest somebody else beat me to it. I was well-liked but not desired; socially fine but not popular. Constant, exacting performances carried me well through middle school, a chaotic home life, and beyond. At the end of school lunch, for attention, I’d goad my friends into betting their pocket change that I couldn’t eat the leftover tuna salad sandwich in the middle of the table, pushed away by someone who’d deemed it inedible. I would perform eating it, theatrically, relishing the visibility. It got laughs. Did I mention I wasn’t beautiful?

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

  The messages we glean from pop culture, peers, church, and our families—that masturbation is humiliating, gross—hold extra weight because we aren’t learning about our bodies elsewhere. One of the biggest shortcomings of American sex education, with its laser-focus on the absolute worst things that could happen to you, is its failure to acknowledge that genital stimulation is pleasurable. That sex is pleasurable, that touching your genitals feels good. While boys at least get the message that they are insatiable little sex hounds, at formative ages, girls and gender-expansive adolescents don’t learn that sex should feel good, cementing a standard for years (or a lifetime) of sexual experiences that don’t feel good. Many adults experience guilt before, during, and after masturbation well into adulthood.1 With few other resources, our sex education is porn, where masturbation is usually an erotic performance for others. Gen Z and millennials are the first generations whose sexual educations are largely internet-driven. While past generations faced similar or worse educational shortcomings, young people today have new opportunities to fill those gaps with online miscellany—but often without the critical media literacy skills to navigate messaging, or to parse out: In porn, when women masturbate, they scream in a sexy, breathy way, and they squirt everywhere. It’s normal and okay, however, that when I masturbate, I not only don’t squirt, but need lube for moisture, and I not only don’t scream in a sexy, breathy way, but squeal like a raccoon stuck in a trash can. If porn is your first and only consistent exposure to other people’s labias, how will you come to feel about your own large, not smooth, and uneven labia? Will you feel comfortable when you play with it? Will you turn off the negative self-chatter long enough to find sexual satisfaction, alone or with a partner? Big Mouth, an animated Netflix series, chronicles the indignities of pubescence. In an episode about masturbation, Andrew Glouberman, a hyper-horny middle schooler voiced by John Mulaney, demonstrates to his friend what he calls “the Glouberman method” for jerking off—“a delicate dance in just seventeen steps.” The obsessive ritual involves locking his bedroom door, dimming the lights, putting on music, lowering the shades, flipping over bedside photos of his parents and the Mets, readying a Lululemon maternity catalogue, double-checking the lock, pulling out tissues, pumping three squirts of lotion, taking off his pants, triple-checking the lock. When his friend interrupts him, Glouberman has to start over from the beginning. Everything must be just so.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “Someone gave it to me,” I finally said to Rena. “So?” Rena looked up from her hangers. “You’re lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out.” I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts. “You want car?” Rena said. “Artist college? You think I don’t know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is…” She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. “Money. You want remember, so just remember.” So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn’t sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. As the sun got warm, the hard bargainers left and the couples came, lazily, arm in arm, old people out for a stroll, young people. The T-shirts, the pants, the jackets went. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was still unsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars. “What she say,” Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness. “It’s a Jessica McClintock,” I said defensively. “Never been worn.” My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on. I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody’s daughter, somebody’s real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn’t a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn’t a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I. All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. After the fifth woman had tried it on, I started not caring so much. At about three, a group of girls came around, and one of them kept looking at the red dress, holding it up to herself. “Can I try this on?” I took the plastic off, slid the dress down her arms, over the pale downy hair, pulled it along her body, zipped the back as she held up her dark ponytail. It looked just right on her. As it had never looked on me. I’d never seen the girl before. She didn’t go to Marshall. She probably went to Immaculate Heart or the French School. A cared-for girl, someone’s daughter.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In our Passage, the children were playing on the sidewalk as they waited for lunch. On the stairs, I met my mother, who kissed me joyfully, as usual. I was surprised to find her all made up at this hour, her eyelids black with kohl and her lips blood-red. She was also wearing a new apron. Did I want something to eat? No, I would rather sleep. Not even an egg? No, not even an egg. I was very tired. She asked if I would mind sleeping at Uncle Aroun’s; it had all been arranged with him. Before I could inquire into these new arrangements, she excitedly told me she was serving meals to soldiers, in partnership with the second-floor neighbors who had a large flat. The neighbors had put all their beds in one room, and since our own flat was smaller it was used as a pantry and kitchen. Proudly, she announced that in this way she earned more than my father and the shop. She seemed so happy and so sure that she deserved my admiration that I dared say nothing. My legs were giving way and, in spite of myself, I could not hear her chattering away. I left her and knocked at the door on the first floor. Kalla opened it and blurted out that she had been expecting me. I noticed now that she had our mother’s thin lips, bloodless and tight when she was sad or angry. She was angry and ashamed of Mother’s commercial enterprise and was now living with our uncle: “And you don’t know the latest invention of the neighbors’ son? He mixes wine and bitter almond syrup and sells it at a huge price as a special local beverage.” A month earlier, I would have joined forces with my sister in disapproving of these scandalous goings on. Now, I only saw in her my own ridiculous and irritating simple-mindedness. I vaguely promised Kalla I would look into this business and, without taking further notice of her disappointment, went to bed.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The cymbals and the bagpipes were suddenly silent and gave precedence to the tom-tom drum that began, at first in a solo, to send forth grave, slow, evenly spaced sounds that seemed to be muffled, as if rising from the ground. The dancer followed this rhythm and became more calm; she allowed her arms to fall to her sides, relaxed her legs, seized by an occasional tremor that followed the drum’s play as it urged her to leap in a single mass from the ground to the sky. The silence of the other instruments, subjected to the strenuous authority of the drum, seemed to crush the crowded women, who were silent now and gathered together in a single moody mass. I could distinguish them more clearly. There were women everywhere, clustered together, seated, standing, on the floor, literally lining the whole room. Their anxious motionlessness, repeated everywhere, disarmed me, in spite of my ironical nature, and prevented me from flying into a rage. Suddenly, as the cymbals clashed again, together with all the other instruments now released in a frenzy of revolt, the confusion became general. The tom-tom seemed to go insane, beating ever faster, struggling against time; the flock of women was seized by nervous spasms, and the dancer was again overcome by her seizures that seemed to tear her apart. Her arms and legs and head, each one moving in a different direction, appeared to respond to contradictory impulses, going off madly at cross purposes, as if trying to tear themselves away from the body. I could almost hear and feel the flesh torn in its dreadful struggle against rhythm, against the demons, when suddenly the crazy dancer turned toward me — my mother, she was my own mother! My contempt and disgust and shame now became clearer, more concentrated. Instead of running away, I stayed there, crushed by the crowd of women pressing against my back. Was this really my mother’s face, this primitive mask, glazed with sweat, with its disheveled hair, eyes tightly closed, lips all bloodless? I recognized the tawdry finery that she had unpacked from her wooden boxes, the orange-colored djebbah gown strewn with red and green sequins, the artificial silk fouta veil, brilliantly colored and gaudy, orange, yellow, green, and red, and the green and yellow scarf decorated with Fatma’s hand and a fish. To myself, I kept on saying: “She’s my mother, my mother,” as if these mere words could re-establish the lost contact and express all the affection that they should contain. But the words refused to adapt themselves to the barbaric apparition in its strange costume. And this woman who was dancing before me, with her breasts barely covered, abandoning herself unconsciously to magical contortions, suggested to me nothing that was familiar or that I could understand. In the books that I had read, the mother was always somebody more soft and human than all others, a symbol of devotion and of intuitive intelligence. How her children must be grateful and happy, proud of having such a mother! As for my own mother, here she was: this wretched moron, with a spell cast on her by the dreadful music, by these savage musicians, themselves under the spell of their dark and obscure beliefs. My mother? Well, here she was...

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  I asked her whether she was now “in the memory,” and when she said yes, I asked her how real it felt on a scale of one to ten. About a nine, she said. Then I asked her to follow my moving finger with her eyes. From time to time, after completing a set of about twenty-five eye movements, I might say: “Take a deep breath,” followed by: “What do you get now?” or “What comes to mind now?” Kathy would then tell me what she was thinking. Whenever her tone of voice, facial expression, body movements, or breathing patterns indicated that this was an emotionally significant theme, I would say, “Notice that,” and start another set of eye movements, during which she did not speak. Other than uttering those few words, I remained silent for the next forty-five minutes. Here is the association Kathy reported after the first eye-movement sequence: “I realize that I have scars—from when he tied my hands behind my back. The other scar is when he marked me to claim me as his, and there [she points] are bite marks.” She looked stunned but surprisingly calm as she recalled, “I remember being doused in gasoline—he took Polaroid pictures of me—and then I was submerged in water. I was gang raped by my father and two of his friends; I was tied to a table; I remember them raping me with Budweiser bottles.” My stomach was clenching, but I didn’t comment beyond asking Kathy to keep those memories in mind. After about thirty more back-and-forth movements I stopped when I saw that she was smiling. When I asked what she was thinking, she said, “I was in a karate class; it was great! I really kicked butt! I saw them backing off. I yelled, ‘Don’t you see you are hurting me? I am not your girlfriend.’” I said, “Stay there,” and began the next sequence. When it ended, Kathy said: “I have an image of two me’s—this smart, pretty little girl…and that little slut. All these women who could not take care of themselves or me or their men—leaving it up to me to service all these men.” She started to sob during the next sequence, and when we stopped, she said: “I saw how little I was—the brutalization of the little girl. It was not my fault.” I nodded and said, “That’s right—stay there.” The next round ended with Kathy reporting: “I’m picturing my life now—my big me holding my little me—saying, ‘You are safe now.’” I nodded encouragingly and continued.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Unfortunately, I spoke like no one on earth. I tried desperately to speak this language which wasn’t mine, which perhaps will never be entirely mine, but without which I would never be able to achieve self-realization. Our local dialect was only just able to satisfy the daily needs of eating and drinking. Could I tell my schoolmates that my mother not only spoke no European language at all, but barely managed to carry on in her own dialect? I never told them, or anyone, anything; I hated them, pretended to despise them, made a show of all my own failings, and rolled my r’s even louder than before. All the same, I envied them. I’m not trying to give a flattering picture of myself, nor to justify my behavior; I’m trying here to get rid of what’s on my stomach and to vomit what I cannot digest and forget. I was jealous, envious, even spiteful, and soon unbearable to all those who were ready to like me. I had every fault that’s generally condemned. But could I have been otherwise? Each morning, my classmates smiled, were confident, smelled of eau de Cologne and of good toilet soaps. I supposed, not without astonishment, that they washed from top to toe every morning. It was only much later that I understood why some people have an unpleasant odor and others no odor at all. Most frustrating of all, I was completely excluded from their community. Both inside and outside the school, they continued to live as a group, sitting near one another in class, telling stories I couldn’t really follow; their tongues glided too rapidly over their words and I often failed to understand them at all. They all belonged to one and the same civilization which remained merely theoretical in my eyes as long as I myself had no share in it. At the school gates, they shook hands cordially and politely, and then began to exchange news about an unknown planet: “Did you hear Duke Ellington on Monte Carlo at eight-thirty?” I guessed that this had something to do with the radio, but I would have allowed myself to be killed rather than ask a question. Who was Duke Ellington? “Did you see the forty-cent Washington? Terrific!” This had some connection with postage stamps. “I’m backing Bagheera on Sunday.” Bagheera: yes, race-track talk. Generally, however, their chatter escaped me completely. Social distinctions are as profound as religious differences, and I was not a member of their class. They enjoyed means and luxuries that were far beyond me and of which I had not even heard. “I’ll phone you at four and you can tell me if our homework is tough.” They dictated whole assignments to each other over the phone and were able to work together while each remained at home. Even the phone, to me, was a princely luxury, and I admired the casual way they said: “I’ll call you.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My father had long since come to regret having accepted the proposals of Monsieur Louzel, the principal of the Alliance School. The pleasures of vanity he derived from saying that his son went to the lycée did not compensate his sense of disappointment. My material success seemed too far away to permit him to hope for financial compensation for his loss. All his colleagues had put their eldest sons to work and my father was sorry he hadn’t taken me into his store. He would then have been able to lean on me and be assured of his family’s fate. It is impossible to deny that I was an outrageous luxury, considering our position. I was no longer dependent on my family as I had been, but I didn’t help my father provide for our large family budget. Now, though I had ceased to believe in my parents, I hadn’t yet shaken off the values of my community. I hadn’t yet realized that I might also refuse to be responsible for my brothers and sisters, for their state of malnutrition, their shabby clothes, the haste with which, one after another, they had to leave school. I needed other ways of breaking with the past and achieving freedom. It was difficult enough for me to find money for my food, the suit I bought at a discount from Uncle Aroun, and a little pocket money. Fortunately, my tuition and school supplies were assured through Monsieur Bismuth. Ever since the fourth year, I had been fortunate enough to have students sent to me for tutoring. A friend’s little sister had broken her leg, and I was called upon to keep her Latin from getting rusty. As my schoolmates found it extraordinary that I was willing to have any truck with Latin and French after school hours, I soon acquired a reputation. From that time on, I never stopped tutoring; and I prepared for each hour of it with great care. None too sure of my own knowledge, I would go over my Latin grammar or my literature textbook before visiting my students. So I soon acquired a reputation for competence, confirmed by my own success in school, and was often consulted after discussions. Wealthy students in my grade, or even in the grade above me, sometimes entrusted me with writing whole essays when they were preoccupied with the organization of their leisure, particularly with days at the races. They paid me, of course, my hourly tutoring fee. Once a middle-class boy asked me to do a whole report which had been assigned to him despite his stupidity. I worked ten hours and I was embarrassed to ask for the large sum due me. But my client did not seem to find the price of his freedom at all excessive. Still, I didn’t care for that kind of work and I never took it on without feeling ill at ease. I felt we were cheating our teachers. Contrary to school ethics, I refused, without being a sneak, to join my classmates in their solid opposition to the faculty; I somehow failed to feel a community of interests with them. I knew what my pupils thought of me: they despised me. Of course, I despised them, too, for being dumb and for needing me, but my feeling wasn’t pure because it was mixed with resentment and envy. They could treat me with indifference, as the fees they paid me helped them to re-establish a balance between us. My tutoring brought me into a number of middle-class homes where badly raised and shamefully spoiled children would be begged by their mothers, with a great display of hypocritical tears, to submit themselves to education. I was almost always treated, if not actually in words, like a kind of intellectual servant; and the worst of it was, despite my revolts or perhaps because of them, that I felt as if I were actually wearing livery. Half smiling, I waited patiently for the poor little rich kid to reach the end of his tantrum.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  As Myrna paused to catch her breath, he reflected on her uncanny intuition, her chilling burst of words. Amazing that she had grasped so much of him! How had she known? Only one possibility: unconscious empathy. Just as Dr. Werner had said. So Werner was right all the time, he thought. Why didn’t I allow myself to learn from him? What a jerk, a twerp, I’ve been. How did Werner put it? That I’m an iconoclastic Katzenjammer Kid? Well, maybe it’s time to let go of some of my juvenile questioning and debunking of elders—not everything they say is bullshit. Never again will I doubt the power of unconscious empathy. Perhaps it was this type of experience that prompted Freud to take seriously the idea of telepathic communication. “Where are your thoughts going, Myrna?” he finally said. “So much to say. Not sure where to start. Here’s a dream I had last night.” She held up a spiral tablet. “See, I wrote it down—that’s a first.” “You are taking our work more seriously.” “Gotta get my one-fifty’s worth. Oops!” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Didn’t mean that—sorry—please press delete key.” “Delete key pressed. You caught yourself—that’s great. Perhaps you were flustered by my paying you a compliment.” Myrna nodded but hurried on and read her dream from her notepad: I go to have my nose reconstructed. They remove the bandages. My nose is okay, but the skin has puckered or pulled up and my mouth is locked open and is a huge gaping hole taking half my face. My tonsils are visible—huge, swollen, inflamed. Crimson. Then a doctor with a nimbus comes by. I am suddenly able to close my mouth. He asks me questions, but I won’t answer. I don’t want to open my mouth and show him the big gaping hole. “Nimbus?” Ernest asked when she stopped. “You know, uh—radiance, holy light, halo.” “Oh, right. Yes, nimbus. So, Myrna, what are your thoughts about the dream?” “I think I know what you’ll say about it.” “Stay with your experience. Try to free-associate. What comes to you immediately as you think about the dream?” “The big hole in my face.” “What comes to mind as you think of it?” “Cavernous, abyssal, abysmal, inky black. More?” “Keep going.” “Gigantic, vast, stupendous, monstrous, Tartarean.” “Tartarean?” “You know, hell—or the abyss below Hades where the Titans were confined.” “Oh, right. Interesting word. Hmm—but back to the dream. You’re saying there’s something you don’t want doctors to see, and I guess I’m the doctor?” “Hard to quarrel with that. Don’t want you to see the big gaping hole, that emptiness.” “And if you open your mouth I’ll see it. So you guard yourself, guard your words. You still see the dream, Myrna? Still vivid?” She nodded. “Keep looking at it—what part of it draws your attention now?” “The tonsils—lot of energy there.” “Look at them. What do you see? What comes to mind?” “They’re hot, scalding.” “Keep going.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  My nose is different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. My eyes aren’t ice blue, tinted with your peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they never smile. You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command. You used to say I had no imagination. If by that you meant I could feel shame, and remorse, you were right. I can’t remake the world just by willing it so. I don’t know how to believe my own lies. It takes a certain kind of genius. I went out on the front porch, the splintered boards under my bare feet. The wind carried the steady noise of traffic on the 5 and barking dogs, the pop of gunfire a block or two off in a night tinged red from the sodium vapor streetlights, it was bleeding. We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said on that long-ago night on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are . How could I ever forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words. The smell of vanilla wafers saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you didn’t know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the schoolroom, drawing in notebooks. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the States? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words. I thought of Yvonne in our room, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. “I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  road rage, 85 role-playing, in psychomotor therapy, 300–301 Rorschach test, 15–17, 35 Roy, Alec, 156 Rozelle, Deborah, 216 Rumi, 279 Rwanda genocide, 246 Ssafety: a fundamental to mental health, 353, 354 as lacking in childhood trauma survivors, 143, 215, 298, 303, 353 in trauma recovery, 206, 214, 272, 277, 302, 303, 351, 355 trauma survivors’ distorted perception of, 81–82, 87, 98–99, 166, 272 Salpêtrière, La, 179–80, 180, 196 Saul, Noam, 51–53, 52, 58, 263 Saxe, Glenn, 121 Scentific American, 151 Schacter, Dan, 95 Schilder, Paul, 102 schizophrenia, 15, 22–23, 27, 29 genetics and, 153–54 schools, see education system Schwartz, Richard, 283, 284, 285, 291, 292, 293, 420n Science, 96–97 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 35, 36 see also Prozac (fluoxetine) Self: disorganized attachment and, 122 in IFS therapy, 226, 285–87, 290, 291, 307 in infants, 115 multiple aspects of, 282–97; see also internal family systems (IFS) therapy reestablishing ownership of, 205–6, 320 in trauma survivors, 168, 235, 249 self-awareness: autobiographical self in, 238 sensory, 89–104, 208, 208, 210–11, 238, 239–40, 249, 275, 356, 378n, 384n, 410n, 420n self-blame, in childhood sexual abuse survivors, 133, 134 self-compassion, 294 self-confidence, 207, 352 self-deceit, as source of suffering, 11, 26–27 self-discovery, language and, 236–37 self-harming, 20, 25, 89, 140, 143, 160, 164, 174, 266, 268, 290–91, 318, 319 self-hatred, 136, 145, 160, 165, 281 self-leadership, 205, 282–97 self-nurture, 115 self-recognition, absence of, 107 self-regulation, 115, 160, 163, 209, 226, 302, 349–50, 356, 403 neurofeedback and, 315 yoga and, 273–74, 276, 277 Seligman, Martin, 29–30 Semrad, Elvin, 11, 26, 239 sensation seeking, 268, 274 sensorimotor therapy, 98, 216–17, 219–20 sensory self-awareness, 89–104, 208, 208, 210–11, 238, 239–40, 249, 275, 349, 356, 378n, 384n, 410n, 420n September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 51–53, 52 children as witnesses to, 120 therapies for trauma from, 232–33 Seroquel, 37, 103, 217, 228, 229 serotonin, 33, 155, 156, 264 serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 217, 227 Servan-Schreiber, David, 306 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 234 sexual promiscuity, 122, 287, 288 Shadick, Nancy, 293 Shakespeare, William, 43, 232, 345–48, 357 Shakespeare & Company, 337, 345–48 Shakespeare in the Courts, 337, 338, 344–46 Shalev, Arieh, 30 shame, 13–14, 104, 134, 140, 176, 213, 302 Shanley, Paul, 173–76, 185, 193 Shapiro, Francine, 253 Shatan, Chaim, 19 shavasana, 273 shell-shock, 11, 186–87 Shell Shock in France (Myers), 189 singing and chanting, in trauma recovery, 88, 216 “Singing Revolution,” 336 Sketches of War, 333 Sky, Licia, 218–19 sleep disorders, 46, 97 EMDR and, 261–63 in PTSD, 411n REM sleep and, 262–63, 411n see also nightmares SMART (sensory motor arousal regulation treatment), 217 smoking, surgeon general’s report on, 150 Social Brain, The (Gazzaniga), 282–83 social engagement: as basic human trait, 112, 168 PTSD and, 104 as response to threat, 82–83, 84, 90 in rhesus monkeys, 155–56 in trauma recovery, 206 trauma survivors and, 3, 62, 80–82, 86, 88, 163, 351 social support, for childhood trauma survivors, 169–70, 352 socioeconomic stress, disorganized attachment and, 119–20 Solomon, Richard, 32 Solomon, Roger, 262 somatic experiencing, 219–20

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I could tell nobody of my difficult struggle with myself for fear of his making a fool of me. So I hesitated between an awareness of ridicule and a heroic satisfaction, between the temptation to deceive myself at small cost and the impossibility of not condemning my failures. You can fool the whole world, but not yourself. To drop the sacred phylacteries that we bind around our foreheads was a horrible sin, to be punished by death. The Law said it, it seems; the rabbis gravely affirmed it; the faithful repeated it with terror. I decided I could; I must cast them aside calmly, I would certainly not die because of it. Still, I didn’t do it. And I rationalized beautifully: I had no need of childish demonstrations, it was enough to affirm my own freedom. A free man doesn’t have to spend his time being blasphemous to deny God. But I felt my attitude was the least costly; I was ashamed to risk so little. At other times, I went to the point of blasphemy in committing less serious offenses. Bread must not be thrown away or left where it can be stepped on by passers-by; all crumbs must therefore be carefully gathered and left on the windowsill or stuffed into cracks in the wall. So I took whatever bread I didn’t eat and made a show of throwing it where it could be stepped on. Of course, I felt ridiculous while doing it, but my very embarrassment seemed a hesitation, a trick of my superstitious fear, and I continued to throw my bread away, in spite of myself. How mixed up I was! At home, however, my revolt had been completely expressed, and I no longer wisecracked or attacked but merely tried to live apart. Instead of peace, there was only more unpleasantness. When my father put on his cap and picked up his prayerbook to officiate, he seemed to become cramped as if a stranger were staring at him in mockery; and if I too put on a cap and stood up whenever required, I felt that I was watched by him and the rest of the family, as if they unmasked me in spite of my play-acting. It was an intolerable situation. As luck would have it, the younger children began having difficulties similar to mine. Frightened at their own audacity, they would look to me for support; but I refused to give it to them. When they began a destructive argument, they sought my eyes, but I looked away guiltily. My father answered quickly and brutally, not wanting to reopen the burning debates, ashamed before an adversary who was voluntarily silent. We ended by avoiding the ceremonies of minor importance and observed only the most solemn ones. And, I must admit, as I had nothing to offer in its stead, I was sometimes sorry to have shaken the world of their traditions. ~ 6. THE DANCE ~

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One day I asked for permission to give a report on the poet Alfred de Vigny and it was granted to me. I admired Vigny’s disillusioned but haughty manliness, his noncompliance. And, of course, I had a weakness for the somber, for his grandiose sadness. Above all, I was violent in my will to show and affirm what I was. I took possession of the chair with aggressive satisfaction. Then, fixing my eyes on my audience, I began to speak, half-ironically but deeply moved, without any notes, without any aid, in fact, but from the poems I quoted. I was sure enough of myself to speak without a written text, but I wanted above all to prove that one could do an excellent job while speaking the language of the street. Unfortunately, my irreverence carried me away, as always, so that I soon slipped into slang. The teacher suspected an intention to provoke but was held back by my brutal sincerity; in spite of the outraged class, he allowed me to talk twenty minutes longer than the allotted time. I could indeed see his wrinkled brow, the start of a gesture of anger, and the agitation of the whole class; but I couldn’t stop, could only continue my role in the inarticulate tragedy I had begun. The other kids were burning with impatience, waiting for the climax, and approving in advance the inevitable punishment to be meted out to me by the all-powerful teacher. When I was at last silent, the teacher was still completely perplexed. He hesitated in the utter silence of the class and, wishing to be just, not to hurt me excessively but still to sanction my impertinence and avenge his own irritation, he said: “Your report has been most odd. I can add very little to what you’ve said about Vigny. But, in order to speak without notes, which in itself should merit approval, you’ve allowed yourself to slip into the language of a street urchin.” I could take it as I pleased. But I saw that the class was satisfied with the insult; they looked at one another, sneered, and repeated: “the language of a street urchin.” So I chose to be deeply hurt and, besides, the teacher’s reproach had cut deeper than I myself realized. Despite my efforts and my superior airs, I knew that what he said was true and, far worse, that I couldn’t expect to speak anything but the language of an urchin. So, because he had hit my sorest point, I could only hate him. Returning to my seat, I looked down into my notebook and did not raise my eyes again in that room until the end of the hour.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The younger kids were singing, with their shrill voices, in tones of respect, but quite calmly and without being exaggeratedly abject. The chant offered to the Lord Jehovah the new sacrificial offering that we bore, and reminded him, on this occasion, of the Covenant and of His own duties towards His people. They all smiled with a certain dignity, raising their heads whenever this was required, lowering their gaze whenever the text ordered it. This was exactly as our fathers did it, and we were all rehearsing our own future parts. But I was both ashamed and scared, as I have said, and even today I’m to a great extent disgusted and horrified, but I still cannot manage to feel entirely alien to this procession, not in any way accessory to this sacrifice that is constantly repeated. Slowly, the procession passed twice along the walls of the synagogue, then went up to the high chair of the priest on the dais. The crowd was silent while our supervisor, still conscious of his responsibilities, climbed onto the heavy wooden chair that was carved with sacred texts. His aides then placed the boy on the High Priest’s knees, lying face upwards, after which, sharing in the traditional honor, they climbed onto the steps at the back of the throne. In the middle of the watchful group of his torturers, the victim waited, not daring to move or to say a word. His skinny little legs were folded, drawn up over his body, stiff as the legs of a cataleptic chicken. One could hear the breathing of the crowd watchful in its suspense, and the dry sputtering of the flames in the little lamps. The High Priest then drew out his blade and solemnly, with broad gestures, reached out toward the child’s crotch. I felt that I could not bear the sight of what was about to happen. All my groin ached as if the knife were about to wound me too. But why, in spite of this, was I unable to look away, why did my eyes remain glued to the boy’s tiny white penis that I could discern from afar in the light that came down from the air vents which had become green with all the mold of the years? An intolerable fear kept me close to the wall, a feeling of shame before this nakedness; all this was mingled with a feeling too that I shall never forget, a pleasure at being accessory to the ceremony, accepting it all.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  And the reason that death can be defeated—and was defeated in principle when Jesus rose again—is that on the cross Jesus dealt with sins. The substance of the chapter is about the final victory, but the start of the chapter, repeating the early gospel summary, explains how that comes about: “The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” Thus, in a verse we have had occasion to quote before: “If the Messiah wasn’t raised, your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins” (15:17). The Corinthians would be “still in their sins” not because they were not really converted, not because their faith was not strong enough, not because they showed no evidence of a changed life, but because that would be the case if the Messiah had not been raised. When the Messiah was raised, death was conquered, which meant that sin had been dealt with . That is the link. That is why, in accordance with the Bible, the message of freedom from all “powers” (the Passover message) is directly connected to the message of “forgiveness of sins” (the message of the end of exile). The Second Letter to the Corinthians is utterly different from the first not only in mood, but also in literary style. This appears to be because, as he says in the first chapter, Paul had been utterly crushed by events in Ephesus. He doesn’t say what had happened, but it seems to have been a major threat to life and limb and equally important to the balance of his mind and heart. On top of it all—whatever it was—he has clearly received a message or messages from the church in Corinth of which the tone as well as the content has disturbed him greatly. There seems to be a rival group of teachers there now, and they have poured scorn on Paul and his ministry, his style, his methods, and particularly his suffering. If only he were a real apostle, as they are, none of this would have happened to him! We only see this, of course, through Paul’s response, but it seems from what he says and from how he says it that they were undermining him in particular because he was bringing shame on the church. How could they look up to someone who had been ill-treated in the way he had been? Paul’s answer is to explain to them the way in which his own ministry is shaped by the message of the Messiah and his cross.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Fortunately, my tuition and school supplies were assured through Monsieur Bismuth. Ever since the fourth year, I had been fortunate enough to have students sent to me for tutoring. A friend’s little sister had broken her leg, and I was called upon to keep her Latin from getting rusty. As my schoolmates found it extraordinary that I was willing to have any truck with Latin and French after school hours, I soon acquired a reputation. From that time on, I never stopped tutoring; and I prepared for each hour of it with great care. None too sure of my own knowledge, I would go over my Latin grammar or my literature textbook before visiting my students. So I soon acquired a reputation for competence, confirmed by my own success in school, and was often consulted after discussions. Wealthy students in my grade, or even in the grade above me, sometimes entrusted me with writing whole essays when they were preoccupied with the organization of their leisure, particularly with days at the races. They paid me, of course, my hourly tutoring fee. Once a middle-class boy asked me to do a whole report which had been assigned to him despite his stupidity. I worked ten hours and I was embarrassed to ask for the large sum due me. But my client did not seem to find the price of his freedom at all excessive. Still, I didn’t care for that kind of work and I never took it on without feeling ill at ease. I felt we were cheating our teachers. Contrary to school ethics, I refused, without being a sneak, to join my classmates in their solid opposition to the faculty; I somehow failed to feel a community of interests with them. I knew what my pupils thought of me: they despised me. Of course, I despised them, too, for being dumb and for needing me, but my feeling wasn’t pure because it was mixed with resentment and envy. They could treat me with indifference, as the fees they paid me helped them to re-establish a balance between us. My tutoring brought me into a number of middle-class homes where badly raised and shamefully spoiled children would be begged by their mothers, with a great display of hypocritical tears, to submit themselves to education. I was almost always treated, if not actually in words, like a kind of intellectual servant; and the worst of it was, despite my revolts or perhaps because of them, that I felt as if I were actually wearing livery.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She stared at me, surprised by the madam, by the thanks, so unusual in that part of town, and by the muffled emotion in my voice. I saw her hesitation and decided to surprise her even more, to overcome her indifference, to discover even the smallest spark of communion so that this meeting would really put an end to my loneliness. “You know... you’re the first woman...” For the first time, she smiled faintly. Then, as she had to open the door, she turned her back on me and let in the violent daylight Bissor was waiting for me with his back to the wall as he eyed a little blonde in pink rayon panties. She was smiling broadly at him, and all her teeth that were mounted on a metal setting turned her mouth into an inhuman machine. “Well, how was it?” asked Bissor. “O.K.,” I answered sadly. It was getting late, and the first wave of customers, all white-collar workers, was closed behind the doors of the more presentable girls. Those that we saw now seemed to be the ugliest. As the narrow alleys had been heated by the sun all through the afternoon, I now began to discover the smell that dominated the reserved quarter. The water streamed from under the closed doors in little spurts and wet our shoes, flowing into a gutter in the middle of the street and forming there a kind of blackish mud which smelled penetratingly of sperm, piss, and sweat. I had noticed none of this when we had arrived. To keep up an artificial enthusiasm, I kept repeating to myself: “It’s the first time I’ve seen a woman naked; it’s a historic moment.” I wanted to feel enriched and more manly. But, I was ashamed; I felt dirty and cheap, as though I had been an accomplice in all this wretchedness and collective scorn. I was disappointed, unsatisfied, and disgusted; all this stuck in my throat and made me want to cry. Fortunately, Bissor was silent. The poor girls without customers sat on their doorsteps and invited us in, with forced smiles and languid looks. I was not even afraid any more. The last ones we saw, the women I had not even dared look at earlier, were hideous and fat, with withered skin and flabby jowls, with oily hair and thick makeup, like eczema scabs. Most of them were collapsed on the stone steps of their doorways to rest their thick, varicose legs. “They’re for the old guys,” Bissor explained. Before we left the district, he made me piss in a corner against a leaning buttressed wall, all damp and sticky with a yellow pool that stank of ammonia at its base. It was necessary, he said, to avoid catching clap.