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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For Dylan, a retail manager in his twenties, emotional security feels altogether impossible, with or without sexual excitement. His mother, who died when he was twelve, was the emotional linchpin of their family. When his eyes filled with tears at her funeral, his father said to him, “I hope you’re not going to fall apart on me.” In order to stay close to his father he had to excise his entire emotional life. He explains, “All feelings were a sign of weakness in our house.” The minute Dylan has feelings for someone he lashes out at himself with self-loathing, hoping to control his unbearable vulnerability. His solution? Twice a week he goes to the clubs to pick up men he will never know and who—more important—will never know him. In anonymous sex there are no feelings, and Dylan is protected from repeating the humiliations of his childhood. At the same time he gets to experience the delicious thrill of being wanted, being chosen by many at once. One aspect of the erotic blueprint that illustrates the irrationality of our desire is that what excites us most often arises from our childhood hurts and frustrations. The sex therapist Jack Morin explains that the erotic imagination is ingenious in undoing, transforming, and redressing the traumas of the past. In other words, the experiences that caused us the most pain in childhood sometimes become the greatest sources of pleasure and excitement later on. Let’s take a look at Melinda. Her father is a philanderer. And while she empathizes with her mother’s despair, she also doesn’t want to be like her mother: broken, miserable, bereft. Instead she has become the seductress, the opposite of the abandoned wife. Melinda sets out to best men at their own game. Desire is stoked by unavailability in Melinda’s mind, and once she’s seduced a man he is instantly less attractive. In order to reconfirm her own power she must set her sights on the next man, and the next, and the next. If there is no obstacle to clear, she has no way to gauge her value. Almost nothing is more exciting than conquering a powerful, aloof man; but the ultimate thrill is in dumping him—sure proof that she has avenged the past. In heartlessly dismissing these men, Melinda seeks to confirm that, unlike her mother, she is strong and independent, the one calling the shots, making the choices, picking up or discarding lovers as suits her fancy. Of course, by ruthlessly purging vulnerability from her life, she perversely ends up just as lonely and unloved as her mother.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Without explaining why, he asked her to leave the office and reenter. She seemed annoyed but complied, and he studied her walk closely, as well as her posture as she settled into the chair. He then asked her to explain her problem. “My husband is taking me a-broad in September and I have a deathly fear of being on an airplane.” “Madam,” Erickson said, “when a patient comes to a psychiatrist there can be no withholding of information. I know something about you. I am going to ask you an unpleasant question. . . . Does your husband know about your love affair?” “No,” she said with astonishment, “but how did you?” “Your body language told me.” He explained how her legs were crossed in a very tight position, with one foot completely tucked around the ankle. In his experience, every married woman having an affair locks her body up in a similar way. And she had clearly said “a- broad” instead of “abroad,” in a hesitant tone, as if she were ashamed of herself. And her walk indicated a woman who felt trapped in complicated relationships. In subsequent sessions she brought in her lover, who was also married. Erickson asked to see the wife of the lover, and when she came, she sat in the exact same locked position, with the foot under the ankle. “So you’re having an affair,” he told her. “Yes, did my husband tell you?” “No, I got it from your body language. Now I know why your husband suffers from chronic headaches.” Soon he was treating them all and helping them out of their locked and painful positions. Over the years, his observation powers extended to elements of nonverbal communication that were nearly imperceptible. He could determine people’s states of mind by their breathing patterns, and by mirroring these patterns himself he could lead the patient into a hypnotic trance and create a feeling of deep rapport. He could read subliminal and subvocal speech as people would mouth a word or name in a barely visible manner. This was how fortune-tellers, psychics, and some magicians would make a living. He could tell when his secretary was menstruating by the heaviness of her typing. He could guess the career backgrounds of people by the quality of their hands, the heaviness of their step, the way they tilted their heads, and their vocal inflections. To patients and friends it seemed as if Erickson possessed psychic powers, but they were simply unaware of how long and hard he had studied this, gaining mastery of the second language. • • • Interpretation: For Milton Erickson, his sudden paralysis opened his eyes to not only a different form of communication but also a completely different way of relating to people. When he listened to his sisters and picked up new information from their faces and voices, he not only registered this with his senses but also felt himself experiencing some of what was going on in their minds. He

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all. You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it. To sleep, go to this page . To dream about the past, go to this page . To dream about the present, go to this page . To dream about the future, go to this page . The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe. Go to this page . It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to. Go to this page . You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t— Go to this page .

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I can’t decide whether to argue or not. The only light is coming from the living room, and she has her glasses off. Her eyes look weak and vulnerable, but her lips look like blades. “He embarrassed me to death tonight,” she says. Uh-oh. Why did I come out here; what was I thinking? “In front of everyone,” she continues. “Embarrassed. To death .” She looks pretty alive to me, but if the truth be known, I’ve been embarrassed by him myself. Slumped and staggering, or sleeping all night in the passenger seat of the car, parked in the driveway, because he can’t manage the back steps. Disappearing into the garage at odd times during the day, sipping from a sack and staring at the back of the house through the dark doorway, thinking no one can see him. We see him. “There we all are,” she says in a low voice. “Playing cards, trying to have fun , drinking a few cocktails, and he sits there for two hours drinking orange juice . Holier than thou; won’t even have a drink on a Saturday night when we’re at a tavern.” I think about this, standing on one foot. The dark kitchen, her cigarette going, the bitten-off words. It’s hard to know what expression to put on my face. From the living room comes the sound of a fuse burning and then a theme song starts up. “Mission Impossible is on,” I tell her. She turns back to her ashtray and I return to the sofa. Linda is explaining the gist of the show to my dad. “They all have different identities, and they have impossible missions,” she tells him. “I see,” he says agreeably. “All different identities and missions.” “Impossible ones,” she stresses. “They aren’t impossible , the people just think they are,” I explain. “They seem impossible, until the different-identity guys take over,” he clarifies. “Is that it?” We nod. He’s drinking a glass of milk. “Want me to get you a bottle of beer?” I ask him. Linda swivels her head around to stare at me but my dad keeps watching the television. After a minute he shakes his head no. I want to go back to my book and leave them to their show, my mother to her dark kitchen, but I can’t. My words are still hanging in the air of the living room, drowning out the TV. My dad is staring at Mission Impossible but he’s no longer watching it. Eventually, he shifts his weight and Yimmer stands up on his lap. She turns around and stares him in the face with her ears folded back and her tail going. He kisses her on the forehead, sets her on the floor, and stands up. Out to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opens, closes. Yimmer’s ears go up as she listens. Linda looks at me and I look at my book. Then the familiar, inevitable sound of a bottle being opened.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Inner Sanctum I often think about how special it is for children to have their own rooms; the necessary sacredness of private space (of the body, of the mind). I am, my friends tell me, a traditional Cancer in this way: I love to nest, to make areas mine. I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room , it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim. Once, wanting space from my parents after a fight, I closed and locked my bedroom door. My mother made my father take the doorknob out. And while I’m sure they remember this horrifying moment very differently, all I remember is the cold sensation in my body as the doorknob—a perfect little machine that did its job with unbiased faithfulness—shifted from its home as the screws fell away. The corona of daylight as the knob listed to one side. How, when it fell, I realized that it was two pieces, such a small thing keeping my bedroom door closed. I was lucky in that moment that the deconstruction of my door was a violation of privacy and autonomy but not a risk to my safety. When the door was opened, nothing happened. It was just a reminder: nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine. Dream House as Lost in Translation How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  close friends behind their backs, indulged in wild bouts of paranoia and revenge fantasies, waffled over the simplest decisions. He was a man who greatly feared the slightest internal leak and suspected betrayal in almost anyone around him, and yet he entrusted his fate to tapes that he believed would never be made public in an unedited form. Even when it seemed that they could become public and he was advised to destroy them, he held on to them, mesmerized by this other Nixon that had emerged. It was as if he secretly desired his own punishment, the child and the dark side taking revenge for being so deeply denied. Understand: The story of Nixon is closer to you and your reality than you might like to imagine. Like Nixon, you have crafted a public persona that accentuates your strengths and conceals your weaknesses. Like him, you have repressed the less socially acceptable traits you naturally possessed as a child. You have become terribly nice and pleasant. And like him, you have a dark side, one that you are loath to admit or examine. It contains your deepest insecurities, your secret desires to hurt people, even those close to you, your fantasies of revenge, your suspicions about others, your hunger for more attention and power. This dark side haunts your dreams. It leaks out in moments of inexplicable depression, unusual anxiety, touchy moods, sudden neediness, and suspicious thoughts. It comes out in offhand comments you later regret. And sometimes, as with Nixon, it even leads to destructive behavior. You will tend to blame circumstances or other people for these moods and behavior, but they keep recurring because you are unaware of their source. Depression and anxiety come from not being your complete self, from always playing a role. It requires great energy to keep this dark side at bay, but at times unpleasant behavior leaks out as a way to release the inner tension. Your task as a student of human nature is to recognize and examine the dark side of your character. Once subjected to conscious scrutiny, it loses its destructive power. If you can learn to detect the signs of it in yourself (see the following sections for help on this), you can channel this darker energy into productive activity. You can turn your neediness and vulnerability into empathy. You can channel your aggressive impulses into worthwhile causes and into your work. You can admit your ambitions, your desires for power, and not act so guiltily and stealthily. You can monitor your suspicious tendencies and the projection of your own negative emotions onto others. You can see that selfish and harmful impulses dwell within you as well, that you are not as angelic or strong as you imagine. With this awareness will come balance and greater tolerance for others. It might seem that only those who project continual strength and saintliness can become successful, but that is not at all the case. By

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  196 Lecture 45: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Lecture 45 In this lecture, we’re going to consider another non-Western writer [Chinua Achebe] who [in his novel Things Fall Apart] uses Realism … to record another collision between Europe and a traditional culture and some of its consequences for his people. R ealism in literature has almost always implied a social agenda. Flaubert, Ibsen, and (to a lesser extent) Chekhov criticized the middle classes; Dostoevsky attacked Utilitarian Utopianism and Romantic sentimentality; and Mahfouz implicitly endorsed the need to work for social justice. Achebe has a social agenda as well, based on his shock at discovering how Africans were depicted in novels about Africa by white authors—as savages with the undeveloped minds of children. His ¿ rst novel, Things Fall Apart, was written to refute this notion and to show what colonialism feels like from the inside. He demonstrates that Africans had a rich and complex culture before the coming of Westerners, one which— along with their dignity—was mostly lost in the colonial period. His hope was to restore some of that dignity by reminding his people of their own pre-colonial culture; it is part of the complexity of the situation that the book should be written in English, with its title taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats. The ¿ rst two-thirds of the novel gives a picture of life among the Igbo people before the coming of the missionaries, and its focus is on one of the most powerful and important men in the village: Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a man driven to achieve at everything. Because his father was a failure, Okonkwo lives his life proving that he is not his father. He worries about his son, Nwoye, who seems to take after his grandfather too much. In a raid he captures another boy, Ikemefuna, who comes to live with Okonkwo and who turns out to be a nearly perfect son, even stimulating Nwoye into behavior that pleases his father. The village oracle decrees that Ikemefuna must be killed; the village elders caution Okonkwo that since the boy calls him “father,” he should not take part in the ritual killing. Okonkwo, not wishing to appear weak, kills the boy with his own hands, and Nwoye is devastated.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  All right, she said, rising slowly from the desk, as if loath to leave her coffee; have you had any symptoms, she asked, any sores, using the word rani , wounds, and when I said that I hadn’t, or none I had noticed, I knew they could be painless and small, she asked why I had gotten tested in the first place, whether I had any reason to think I might be infected. I hadn’t anticipated the question, and I paused before responding. A friend came to see me, I said finally, he told me that he had this sickness, he said that I should be tested. She raised her eyebrows just slightly at this, and then she said So you had contact with this person, using that word, which is the same in the two languages, kontakt ; and I repeated it back to her, looking her directly in the eyes, Yes, I had contact with him. I wouldn’t accept the shame she seemed to want me to feel, and she acknowledged this, I thought, dropping her gaze as she reached past me to open the door. Dobre , she said, all right, follow me. She made quick work of me in a room across the hall, not speaking as she swabbed and drew blood, and once again I was surprised by the lack of gloves. Then she ushered me out with the promise that someone would see me when I returned that afternoon for my results. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending hours in that long hallway with its bare benches, still occupied by the same patients, or would-be patients, who hadn’t moved and seemed resigned to a long wait. I needed to walk, even if it was hard going in the snow, so I exited through the door next to the registration office and descended a long ramp leading to the street. The air had warmed, it looked to be a beautiful day, sunny and clear as few had been that season, and already the snow and ice had softened, the surface giving way just slightly, slick and wet. I thought of Mitko and his new shoes, the old ones would already have been soaked through.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  If, he said, staying just a moment longer the sentence he would pronounce, if what you say about yourself is true, you’re not welcome in my house. It was my turn to be silent now, at first because I didn’t understand what he meant, and then because I did. I had a sense of something beginning, of a great weight dislodged and moving in the single direction it could. What are you talking about, I said finally, and my father answered, he told me that they had found, my stepmother and he, a notebook in my room. I knew the notebook he meant, a journal I had started keeping not long before, in which I had written about K. and what I had felt in his room, what I had learned about myself there. I had been careful to hide the journal; if they had come across it it was because they had searched, though my father gave no account or explanation of this. They had found it and seen what I had written, he said simply, they had read it weeks ago. What they learned about me had brought the two of them together, I realized, they were a united front, and I imagined they had spent weeks plotting how best to use what they knew. I was sure it was my stepmother who had searched my room, my father would never have bothered, and as he spoke I realized how entirely I had played into her hand. Is it true, he asked when he had finished speaking, giving me a choice, or the semblance of a choice. He presented it to me as if it were something that might be spoken away and made right, but I couldn’t speak it away, I realized; to speak it away would have been to speak myself away, what else could it have meant, and so Yes, I said, laying claim to myself, it is true, yes. My father exhaled again, sharply this time, so that even before he spoke I flinched, and I could see my mother stiffen as she watched me, standing at the sink with a cigarette in her hand.

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

  This would be less of an issue if our erotic imagination were better behaved, more in line with our public persona. In our internal erotic geography, we all have places that are dear to us. Chances are that at least some of them are places we must sneak into, eluding the watchdog of our conscience. The man who relishes making tender love to his wife has no need for concealment—ditto the woman who fantasizes about a dozen roses from her lover strewn over her bed. Nothing about their romantic aspirations is cause for discomfort or guilt. We should all be so lucky. An imagination peopled with little ladies and gentlemen, so considerate and polite, would easily slip by our internal board of ethics. But the erotic mind is rarely so docile. What turns us on often collides with our preferred self-image, or with our moral and ideological convictions. Ergo the feminist who longs to be dominated; the survivor of sexual abuse who infuses her personal erotics with her traumatic experiences; the husband who fantasizes about the au pair (the stripper, the masseuse, the porn star) in order to boost his enjoyment with his wife; the mother who finds the skin-to-skin contact with her baby sensuous and, yes, erotic; the wife who masturbates to images of hot sex with the psychopathic boyfriend she knew she was never going to marry; the lover who needs to think about the hunk he spotted at the gym in order to get off with his boyfriend. We think that there must be something wrong with us for having such prurient thoughts—that this kind of fantasy doesn’t belong in the erotic life of the happily married woman, that domination and objectification have no legitimate place in the mind of an upstanding husband and father. The greater our discomfort with the content of our erotic imagination, the greater the guilt and shame we feel, and the more powerful our internal censors. Ralph has been living with Sharon for fifteen years. By all accounts they are a very happy pair. But soon after they got together, Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater. For Ralph, his inner life is like a tribal war: the tender lover on one side and the lecherous groper on the other. He confessed one day, “This doesn’t sit right with me. I would never touch a seventeen-year-old. I see myself as a decent person, and I can’t connect the dots. There’s no way I can admit this to Sharon. I can hardly admit it to myself.”

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

  Whether the priest ought to deny the body of Christ to the sinner seeking it?Objection 1: It seems that the priest should deny the body of Christ to the sinner seeking it. For Christ’s precept is not to be set aside for the sake of avoiding scandal or on account of infamy to anyone. But (Mat. 7:6) our Lord gave this command: “Give not that which is holy to dogs.” Now it is especially casting holy things to dogs to give this sacrament to sinners. Therefore, neither on account of avoiding scandal or infamy should this sacrament be administered to the sinner who asks for it. Objection 2: Further, one must choose the lesser of two evils. But it seems to be the lesser evil if the sinner incur infamy; or if an unconsecrated host be given to him; than for him to sin mortally by receiving the body of Christ. Consequently, it seems that the course to be adopted is either that the sinner seeking the body of Christ be exposed to infamy, or that an unconsecrated host be given to him. Objection 3: Further, the body of Christ is sometimes given to those suspected of crime in order to put them to proof. Because we read in the Decretals: “It often happens that thefts are perpetrated in monasteries of monks; wherefore we command that when the brethren have to exonerate themselves of such acts, that the abbot shall celebrate Mass, or someone else deputed by him, in the presence of the community; and so, when the Mass is over, all shall communicate under these words: ‘May the body of Christ prove thee today.’” And further on: “If any evil deed be imputed to a bishop or priest, for each charge he must say Mass and communicate, and show that he is innocent of each act imputed.” But secret sinners must not be disclosed, for, once the blush of shame is set aside, they will indulge the more in sin, as Augustine says (De Verbis. Dom.; cf. Serm. lxxxii). Consequently, Christ’s body is not to be given to occult sinners, even if they ask for it. On the contrary, on Ps. 21:30: “All the fat ones of the earth have eaten and have adored,” Augustine says: “Let not the dispenser hinder the fat ones of the earth,” i.e. sinners, “from eating at the table of the Lord.”

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

  The competition was held outside, and it started to rain while we sat declaiming in The Great Circle. We wore Indian costumes made from burlap sacks that had once held onions. When the burlap got wet it started to stink. We were not the only ones to notice. Miss Houlihan wouldn’t let us quit. She walked around behind the circle, whispering, “Reach down, reach down.” In the end we were disqualified for keeping time on a tom-tom. Horseface Greeley taught shop. At the introductory class for each group of freshmen it was his custom to drop a fifty-pound block of iron on his foot. He did this as an attention-getter and to show off his Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers. He thought we should all wear Tuff-Tops. We couldn’t buy them in the stores but we could order them through him. When I was in my second year at Concrete an impetuous freshman tried to catch the block of iron as it fell toward Horseface’s foot, and got his fingers crushed. I BROUGHT HOME good grades at first. They were a fraud—I copied other kids’ homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn’t bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C’s instead of A’s, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself. All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much. I had fallen in with some notorious older boys from Concrete who took me on as a curiosity when they discovered that I’d never been drunk and still had my cherry. I was grateful for their interest. I wanted distinction, and the respectable forms of it seemed to be eluding me. If I couldn’t have it as a citizen I would have it as an outlaw. We smoked cigarettes every morning in a shallow gully behind the school, and we often stayed there when the bell rang for class, then cut downhill through a field of ferns—ferns so tall we seemed to be swimming through them—to the side road where Chuck Bolger kept his car. Chuck’s father owned a big auto parts store near Van Horn and was also the minister of a Pentecostal church. Chuck himself talked dark religion when he was drinking. He was haunted and wild, but his manner was gentle; even, at least with me, brotherly. For that reason I felt easier with him than with the others. I believed that there were at least some things he would not do. I did not have that feeling about the rest. One of them had already spent time in jail, first for stealing a chain saw and then for kidnapping a cat. He was big and stupid and peculiar.

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

  “Nothing happened, but something did change when I got that ring. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but now I see it pretty clearly. Entering a family shut me down fast. I didn’t tell her about it. In fact, I even tried to deny to myself that anything was different. But pretty soon, I couldn’t get turned on by her. Eventually, every time she left town, or even if she was just out for the night, I was logging on or trolling the bars.” Eight years of transgressions followed, some discovered, some disclosed, some mercifully kept secret. The sequence became repetitive, the resolution of one episode led to the next wave of transgression. Philip’s shame at cheating was always followed by remorse and repentance. He felt terrible about hurting Jackie, and vowed to change. He would make a big show of being an upstanding man and a good husband, and she would forgive him and take him back. Then he would become restless, and a lecherous escalation would always follow. During these years they also had two sons, Jackie finished her first novel, Philip got tenure at a university, and they moved to New York. All these developments helped them put off dealing with the problem. But the latest round was, for Jackie, one too many. To understand Philip’s sexuality, I followed the link to his parents, whose marriage strikingly represented the cultural division between “safe” domesticity and “dangerous” eroticism. While his mother raised five kids, his father engaged in a continuous series of affairs, none of which he made great efforts to hide. Philip’s grandfather, as it turns out, had done the same. “My father, who was actually a very likable man, went about it without much regard for how it made the rest of us feel—least of all my mom,” Philip told me. His mother, whose suffering was severe, was nonetheless a practical woman who never forgot that she had five kids to feed. “She never spoke about it, but we all knew she needed us as much as we needed her.”

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

  Maria moved away, went to college, became a casting agent, and today lives in a world vastly different from that of her childhood. But all this intellectual broadening has not succeeded in dismantling the prohibitions: carnal lust is sinful, and especially for women. Despite twenty years of brief encounters, seasonal relationships, and steady boyfriends, the vestigial messages cling obstinately to the sinews of her body with a subcutaneous tenacity. Acting liberated doesn’t necessarily mean being liberated. When she was still single, Maria could circumvent her latent sexual uneasiness. It was easier to be uninhibited when she had less invested emotionally. But once she chose to live within the geographic limitations of a family, the murmurs of her past began to echo. “Once every six months or so I’ll bring it up with Nico. I’ll say, ‘Nico, our sex life sucks. We need to do something about it. I want you to read this book.’ But he doesn’t want to read a book. He hates those books. He’ll say, ‘It’s not my thing. Let’s just make some time to be together. The more sex you have, the more sex you have, right?’ That’s his stock answer.” “I’ve recommended books to you before, but in this instance it sounds like you’re using them to hide behind. Why is it so hard for you to talk about yourself? To be your own advocate? What would happen if you said, ‘Nico, I want to tell you about myself—what I think and feel about sex, about myself sexually?’” “The whole subject is so emotionally overwhelming it makes me sleepy.” Maria was taught that nothing is free; everything must be earned. Privilege is for those who’ve never had to work hard, and it’s morally suspect. The credo was: you sacrifice for the good of the family. Her reluctance to put herself forward is particularly strong in the sexual realm. “It seems OK to ask for what you really need,” I explain, “but to ask for something just because you want it or like it is selfish. Pleasure itself, unless you’ve earned it, is dubious. It also raises the question of how much you feel you deserve and are worthy of receiving—just because you’re you. But eroticism is precisely that: it’s pleasure for pleasure’s sake, offered to you gratuitously by Nico.” Together, Maria and I work on cultivating a healthy sense of deserving that spans sitting down in the morning when she drinks her coffee, reading the paper while the kitchen is still dirty, and going out with her friends even if it means Nico has to spend two nights in a row taking care of the baby. She is to take a break from the idea that pleasure must be paid for, in advance, by the performance of duty. We chisel away at this complex system of fairness and merit, where everything has to be perfectly equitable in order to neutralize selfishness.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Well, perhaps not,” you say soothingly. “Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish you could meet my cat; I think you’d take a fancy to it if you could only see her. She is such a dear thing,” you go on, half to yourself, as you swim lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she’s such a capital one for catching mi—oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry again, for the Mouse is swimming away from you as hard as it can and is making quite a commotion. You call softly after it, “Mouse, dear! Do come back, and we won’t talk about cats!” When the Mouse hears this, it turns around and swims slowly back to you: its face is quite pale (with passion, you think), and it says in a low, trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why I am afraid of cats.” It is high time to go anyway, for the pool is getting crowded with the birds and animals that have fallen into it: there is a Duck and a Dodo (Amy Parker’s “trusting, extinguished bird”), a Lory and an Eaglet. And among them, every stranger who has ever seen you cry in public is doing the breaststroke. You turn from their pity and lead the way; the whole party swims to the shore. At the water’s edge, the creatures and the strangers disperse into the streets of Chicago. When you arrive home, there’s a message in your inbox: “I’ve made a mistake.” Dream House as SodomLike Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt,44 but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 44. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.Dream House as Hotel Room in Iowa CityShe emails you to tell you that she is staying in a hotel room in Iowa City, and will you come see her? You say no, no, but then you go anyway.

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

  Quit Thinking about Waste When we think about the friction that makes it hard for us to quit, we can see how goal-setting piles onto the katamari. We loathe closing mental accounts in the losses. But as soon as we set a goal, we start ourselves in the losses. This adds to the ruckus caused by all those other biases that gaff the scale against quitting. We are endowed to our goals, and they can easily become part of our identity. They become the status quo. Once we start toward a finish line, we accumulate the sunk costs of time and effort and money spent trying to get there. What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about in this book, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. We need to redefine what “failed” and “wasted” mean. When we worry that quitting means we’ve failed, what exactly are we failing at? If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success. The way we naturally think about failure is to have stopped something short of the goal, as in failing to make it to the finish line. But if you’re continuing to pursue something that’s no longer worth pursuing, isn’t that a failure? How do we start to redefine that and think about failure as failing to follow a good decision process? Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we’ve made along the way counts for a lot. We also need to redefine what waste is. What does it mean to waste your time or money or effort? Our problem is that we tend to think about these things in a backward-looking way. We feel like if we walk away from something, that means we’ve wasted everything that we put into it. But those are resources that are already spent. You can’t get them back. We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste.

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

  And for Christ’s sake get these bottles out of here.” He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles. “There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!” He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. “You’re an athlete,” he said. “It’s written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what’s your game?” “Baseball,” I said. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of truth. In Florida I’d played nearly every day, and gotten good at it. But I hadn’t played much since. I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t look like one, but I was glad he thought so. “Baseball!” he cried. “Judd, what did I tell you?” Judd had taken a chair on the other side of the room, apart from the rest of us. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the other man’s perspicacity. My mother laughed and said something teasing. She called the man Gil. “Wait a minute!” he said. “You think I’m just shooting the bull? Judd, what did I say about Jack here? What did I say he played?” Judd crossed his dark legs. “Baseball,” he said. “All right,” Gil said. “All right, I hope we’ve got that straightened out. Jack. Back to you. What other activities do you enjoy?” “I like to ride bikes,” I said, “but I don’t have one.” I saw the good humor leave my mother’s face, just as I knew it would. She looked at me coldly and I looked coldly back at her. The subject of bicycles turned us into enemies. Our problem was that I wanted a bike and she didn’t have enough money to buy me one. She had no money at all. She had explained this to me many times. I understood perfectly, but not having a bike seemed too hard a thing to bear in silence. Gil mugged disbelief. He looked from me to my mother and back to me. “No bike? A boy with no bike?” “We’ll discuss this later,” my mother told me. “I just said—” “I know what you said.” She frowned and looked away. “Hold on!” Gil said. “Just hold on. Now what’s the story here, Mom? Are you seriously telling me that this boy does not have a bicycle?” My mother said, “He’s going to have to wait a little longer, that’s all.” “Boys can’t wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!” My mother shrugged and smiled tightly, as she usually did when she was cornered. “I don’t have the money,” she said quietly. The word money left a heavy silence in its wake. Then Gil said, “Judd, let’s have another round.

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

  Both men and women face these changes, but not in the same way and certainly not equally. The liberation that so bolstered women’s sexuality has yet to cross the threshold of motherhood, which has not lost the aura of morality and even sanctity that it always had. Desexualization of the mother is a mainstay of traditionally patriarchal cultures, which makes the sexual invisibility of modern western mothers seem particularly acute. Perhaps it’s our Puritan legacy that strips motherhood of its sexual components; perhaps we are convinced that lustfulness conflicts with maternal duty. Of course, there is more than one America, and cultural differences abound within this vast country. My friend June is quick to remind me that not all Americans came here on the Mayflower. “Black people are certainly not spared our share of sex problems, but we’re definitely a lot less hung up than you white folks,” she says. “Sex is a natural part of life, not some big dirty secret. My kids know I have sex; I knew my parents had sex. They’d put on Marvin Gaye, shut the bedroom door, and tell us we’d better not knock.” My Argentinean girlfriend jokes about how her husband calls her “mamita” in bed—what better way to co-opt the taboo? My Spanish colleague Susanna tells me that, in Madrid, her greatest sexual asset is her beautiful three-year-old son. “In New York it’s my accent, my hair, my legs, but definitely not my son.” My American patient Stacey, a white woman who lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, knows her demographics. “The only men who flirt with me are the West Indian pediatrician, the Russian dentist, the Italian baker, and the Puerto Rican grocer. The white guys? Forget it. If I’m with my kid, they look right past me.” A man with a baby in tow gets a very different response. It’s not just power that is an aphrodisiac. A guy walking down the street with a toddler on his shoulders projects stability, commitment, and nurturing. For most women (and some gay men), that’s sexy. In his book Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik contrasts America’s asexual model of reproduction with the more voluptuous French view, “All American What-to-Expect books begin with the Test, not the Act.” He goes on, “In Paris, [pregnancy] is something that has happened because of sex, which with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York, pregnancy is a ward in the house of Medicine. In Paris, it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.”

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

  Maria has taken hold of this idea. “I think my ‘low desire’ is, more than anything else, related to my lack of ownership around sex and my conflict with pleasure, especially pleasure with my husband. I can’t explain why I’m so uncomfortable opening myself up to Nico erotically. What I do know is that family is never where I’ve gone to get anything extra.” “Right. For you, family is about self-sacrifice, not enjoyment. But a healthy sense of entitlement is a prerequisite for erotic intimacy.” Only when Maria starts to look at what she brings to the erotic stalemate does Nico’s contribution become apparent. She asks him some of the same questions we have hashed out in our sessions. “What does sex mean for you?” “How was sex treated in your family?” “What are the important events that shaped your sexuality?” “What would you like to experience most with me sexually, and what are you most afraid of?” They spark conversations that are provocative and inspiring, that focus on possibilities rather than on problems. Maria learns that, for Nico, sex is both liberating and connecting, an eloquent mark of love. When she rebuffs him, he feels unloved. Nico is not a talker. Instead, he expresses caring by doing things: washing the dishes, shining her shoes, always keeping chocolate in the refrigerator. He makes sure that they get out of the house on the weekend, guilt-free (which Maria finds difficult), and don’t get bogged down with interminable housekeeping. He is generous with his affection, both with Maria and with their daughter. But the caresses stop when the sex starts. While he likes sex, he’s less in his element with seduction. “He’s so eager to get to the sex part of sex, where he knows what he’s doing, that he tends to gloss over the pursuit and the romance. The games, you know. I wind up feeling rushed. It takes Nico about two minutes to go from watching TV to being completely physically and emotionally ready to have intercourse. I need a slower buildup. And in my typical way of trying to take care of him, I don’t want him to feel bad, so I try to get turned on really fast. It’s a total fiasco.” For Nico, sex is a play in one act. For Maria it is a continuum of pleasures, a successive unfolding. The problem arises when they become trapped in a linear, goal-oriented focus on intercourse and orgasm that bypasses eroticism. In this setup she struggles with the idea that lingering is implicitly selfish and shamelessly greedy. Her lack of prerogative and lack of self-affirmation are met with Nico’s hurriedness, which further reinforces her notion that she is not worthy of attention. Of course she wouldn’t worry that she was taking too long if she thought he was into it. But for Nico slowness inspires a different kind of anxiety, a fear of inadequacy that he won’t perform well enough.

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

  “You want some cookies?” she asked. “That’s all right, Sister.” “Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?” “Yes, Sister.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “I know.” “Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said. I stared at my hands on the tabletop. “I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.” She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space of this gleaming table—I saw her differently. I saw an anxious woman of about my mother’s age who wanted to help me without knowing what kind of help I needed. Her good will worked strongly on me. My eyes burned and my throat swelled up. I would have surrendered to her if only I’d known how. “It probably isn’t as bad as you think it is,” Sister James said. “Whatever it is, someday you’ll look back and you’ll see that it was natural. But you’ve got to bring it to the light. Keeping it in the dark is what makes it feel so bad.” She added, “I’m not asking you to tell me, understand. That’s not my place. I’m just saying that we all go through these things.” Sister James leaned forward over the table. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe even a little older, I used to go through my father’s wallet while he was taking his bath at night. I didn’t take bills, just pennies and nickels, maybe a dime. Nothing he’d miss. My father would’ve given me the money if I’d asked for it. But I preferred to steal it. Stealing from him made me feel awful, but I did it all the same.” She looked down at the tabletop. “I was a backbiter, too. Whenever I was with one friend I would say terrible things about my other friends, and then turn around and do the same thing to the one I had just been with. I knew what I was doing, too. I hated myself for it, I really did, but that didn’t stop me. I used to wish that my mother and my brothers would die in a car crash so I could grow up with just my father and have everyone feel sorry for me.” Sister James shook her head. “I had all these bad thoughts I didn’t want to let go of.