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 226 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I know how hard it was for him to go against the father, and how painful it is to let himself remember his childhood and protect the abused child he once was. Guy had wanted to “bring” me with him to court because he never had a parent who would defend him, and therefore he was worried he wouldn’t be able to defend himself. Guy breaks the silence. “I feel embarrassed remembering how as a child, I used to hide in my room, trying not to make any noise, not even to breathe so my father wouldn’t notice me. I hated myself for being weak like my mother and not protecting myself, and for feeling angry, like my father. And I felt ashamed for hiding while my older brother, Ram, became my father’s main target.” Guy pauses and looks at his watch. “Ah—we have a little more time,” he notes. “You know, the other night, after I came back from court, I had a thought. I realized that Ram, my brother, was that girl, the daughter.” “In what way?” I ask. “Like her, he fought back; he wasn’t afraid. I watched him from the sidelines and I felt jealous that he was so brave; but I also felt guilty that he was the one my father attacked, while I was able to hide. And then one day, when Ram was maybe fifteen years old and almost as tall as my dad, he came home from school with a girl, and my father got angry and smacked him in front of her. Instead of apologizing, which is what I would have done, Ram slowly walked toward him. He put his finger on my father’s forehead and whispered angrily, ‘You. If you touch me one more time, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ My father stepped back and Ram walked away. I think it was the last time my father hit him. I remember my mother and I walked away too, as if nothing had happened. It was unbelievable, how they switched roles and my brother became the aggressor. I remember that I suddenly felt sorry for my father. I almost wanted to help him. How fucked up is that?” Guy’s voice becomes louder. “When I turned twenty, I left. I’m sorry. I had to leave. I just had to,” he says angrily. “What are you sorry for?” I ask. “What do you mean?” “You just said ‘I’m sorry’ again.” “Did I?” Guy looks at me, startled. “I guess I did. I guess I feel that I have something to apologize for, don’t I? Maybe I feel bad that I ran away and left them all behind. A family of sick people. I saved my life, but what about them?” The loyalty to the people we are attached to often keeps a part of us with them even when we leave.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

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

  “All of us, men and women, are brought up in these aberrations of feeling that we call love. I from childhood had prepared myself for this thing, and I loved, and I loved during all my youth, and I was joyous in loving. It had been put into my head that it was the noblest and highest occupation in the world. But when this expected feeling came at last, and I, a man, abandoned myself to it, the lie was pierced through and through. Theoretically a lofty love is conceivable; practically it is an ignoble and degrading thing, which it is equally disgusting to talk about and to remember. It is not in vain that nature has made ceremonies, but people pretend that the ignoble and the shameful is beautiful and lofty. “I will tell you brutally and briefly what were the first signs of my love. I abandoned myself to beastly excesses, not only not ashamed of them, but proud of them, giving no thought to the intellectual life of my wife. And not only did I not think of her intellectual life, I did not even consider her physical life. “I was astonished at the origin of our hostility, and yet how clear it was! This hostility is nothing but a protest of human nature against the beast that enslaves it. It could not be otherwise. This hatred was the hatred of accomplices in a crime. Was it not a crime that, this poor woman having become pregnant in the first month, our liaison should have continued just the same? “You imagine that I am wandering from my story. Not at all. I am always giving you an account of the events that led to the murder of my wife. The imbeciles! They think that I killed my wife on the 5th of October. It was long before that that I immolated her, just as they all kill now. Understand well that in our society there is an idea shared by all that woman procures man pleasure (and vice versa, probably, but I know nothing of that, I only know my own case). Wein, Weiber und Gesang. So say the poets in their verses: Wine, women, and song!

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

  At ease now, and out of all fear of any doubt or suspicion on his side, I addressed myself in good earnest to my repose, but could obtain none; and in about half an hour’s time my gentleman waked again, and turning towards me, I feigned a sound sleep, which he did not long respect; but girding himself again to renew the onset, he began to kiss and caress me, when now making as if I just waked, I complained of the disturbance, and of the cruel pain that this little rest had stole my senses from. Eager, however, for the pleasure, as well of consummating an entire triumph over my virginity, he said every thing that could overcome my resistance, and bribe my patience to the end, which now I was ready to listen to, from being secure of the bloody proofs I had prepared of his victorious violence, though I still thought it good policy not to let him in yet a while. I answered then only to his importunities in sighs and moans, “that I was so hurt, I could not bear it... I was sure he had done me a mischief; that he had... he was such a bad man!” At this, turning down the clothes, and viewing the field of battle by the glimmer of a dying taper, he saw plainly my thighs, shift, and sheet, all stained with what he readily took for a virgin effusion, proceeding from his last half penetration: convinced, and transported at which, nothing could equal his joy and exultation. The illusion was complete, no other conception entered his head, but that of his having been at work upon an unopened mine; which idea, upon so strong an evidence, redoubled at once his tenderness for me, and his ardour for breaking it wholly up. Kissing me then with the utmost rapture, he comforted me, and begged my pardon for the pain he had put me to: observing withal, that it was only a thing in course; but the worst was certainly past, and that with a little courage and constancy, I should get it once well over, and never after experience any thing but the greatest pleasure. By little and little I suffered myself to be prevailed on, and giving, as it were, up to the point of him, I made my thighs, insensibly spreading them, yield him liberty of access, which improving, he got a little within me, when by a well managed reception I worked the female screw so nicely, that I kept him from the easy mid-channel direction, and by dexterous wreathing and contortions, creating an artificial difficulty of entrance, made him win it inch by inch, with the most laborious struggles, I all the while sorely complaining: till at length, with might and main, winding his way in, he got it completely home, and giving my virginity, as he thought, the coup le grace, furnished me with the cue of setting up a terrible outcry, whilst he, triumphant and like a cock clapping his wings over his down-trod mistress, pursued his pleasure: which presently rose, in virtue of this idea of a complete victory, to a pitch that made me soon sensible of his melting period; whilst I now lay acting the deep wounded, breathless, frightened, undone, no longer maid.

• From Wild (2012)

  As we spoke, I felt both elated to be in his company and flattened by my growing awareness that he was an entirely different breed: as thoroughly prepared as I was not; versed in trail matters I didn’t even know existed. He’d been planning his hike for years, gathering information by corresponding with others who’d hiked the PCT in summers before, and attending what he referred to as “long-trail” hiking conferences. He rattled off distances and elevations and talked in great detail about the pros and cons of internal versus external pack frames. He repeatedly mentioned a man I’d never heard of named Ray Jardine—a legendary long-distance hiker, Greg told me in a reverent tone. Jardine was an expert and indisputable guru on all things PCT, especially on how to hike it without carrying a heavy load. He asked me about my water purifier, my daily protein intake, and the brand of the socks I was wearing. He wanted to know how I treated my blisters and how many miles I was averaging a day. Greg was averaging twenty-two. That very morning he’d hiked the seven miles I had agonized over the entire previous day. “It’s been harder than I thought it would be,” I confessed, my heart heavy with the knowledge that I was even more of a big fat idiot than I’d initially reckoned. “It’s all I can do to cover eleven or twelve,” I lied, as if I’d even done that. “Oh, sure,” Greg said, unsurprised. “That’s how it was for me at the beginning too, Cheryl. Don’t worry about it. I’d go fourteen or fifteen miles if I was lucky and then I’d be beat. And that was with me training ahead of time, taking weekend trips with my pack fully loaded and so on. Being out here is different. It takes your body a couple of weeks to get conditioned enough to do the big miles.” I nodded, feeling enormously consoled, less by his answer than by his very presence. Despite his clear superiority, he was my kin. I wasn’t sure if he felt the same way about me. “What have you been doing with your food at night?” I asked meekly, afraid of his answer. “Usually I sleep with it.” “Me too,” I gushed with relief. Before my trip I’d had notions of diligently hanging my food from trees each night, as every good backpacker is advised to do. So far I’d been too exhausted to even consider it. Instead, I’d kept my food bag inside my tent with me—the very place one is warned not to put it—using it as a pillow upon which to prop my swollen feet.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Homer is lucky to be a cartoon character: He need not experience the physical wear and tear that inevitably trails this trademarked emotional habit. Nearly everyone hears voices, in the form of inner self-talk. What do you say—either out loud or silently to yourself—when things go wrong? Do you berate yourself, speaking to yourself in a harsh, scolding tone? Does your own inner critic, like Homer, have its own particular catchphrase? Being your own worst critic is only one form of negative self-talk. Other forms abound. Maybe your own self-talk is decidedly more anxious. Maybe you worry too much, second-guessing your every action, expecting the worst at every turn. Or perhaps the voices you hear keep your mind running in circles, questioning over and again why things have happened to you as they have, ruminating over every unpleasant episode. How many times each day do you saddle yourself with needless negativity in one form or another? You might find the answer to this question especially illuminating. To discover it, get one of those old-school handheld counters and keep it in your pocket for a day. Tick it off every time your inner critic, inner worrywart, or inner ruminator speaks up. Your total for the day counts up the number of times your body and mind have tightened into a defensive, closed-off stance. True, some of this inner negativity is inevitable. There is no such thing as a negativity-free life. Yet just like your number of reps in weightlifting, the number of times that you speak negatively to yourself each day builds up a hardness in you. Maybe speaking harshly or pessimistically to yourself is not your problem. Perhaps instead, your own particular modus operandi is to praise yourself excessively, giving yourself inner high fives and pats on the back for any accomplishment, while at the same time turning a blind eye to your shortcomings. Whereas other people can’t seem to shake the habit of self-denigration and self-flagellation, focusing too much as they do on the negative, maybe your love-limiting habit comes in the form of excessive self-praise and self-aggrandizement, focusing too exclusively on the positive. Sound surprising? If so, it may be helpful to remind yourself that knowing a little bit about virtually any topic can sometimes be a dangerous thing. This is certainly true for positive psychology. This fact often takes people by surprise because, as a scientific specialty, positive psychology seems utterly innocuous. What could be dangerous about trying to be happy? Yet if positive psychology is absorbed solely at a surface level, it can sometimes morph into a way of being in the world that is as thwarting to love as is persistent self-criticism or self-doubt. Appreciating this danger requires absorbing the subtle differences between what I call eyes-open positivity and eyes-closed positivity. True positivity springs from your full embodiment of positive emotions. It comes from a deeply felt sense of safety. By nature’s design, it expands you. Your body relaxes into it.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Like all forms of positivity resonance, self-love requires both safety and connection. Either of two obstacles may stand in the way. For some people, both obstacles are fused together into one mammoth and seemingly insurmountable boulder. The first is self-diminishment, or not believing yourself to be worthy of love or acceptance. At an implicit, unspoken level, you may dismiss your good qualities as insignificant and stay locked in on your shortcomings. You may feel it necessary to fill those gaps in your character before you can fully accept and love yourself. You may think, “If only I were _______.” You can fill in the blank with any of your usual suspects, those ideals against which you judge yourself: “thinner, kinder, wealthier, smarter, more energetic, more productive, more organized, more successful, more thoughtful . . .” Then you wait. You withhold love from yourself until you meet those unspoken preconditions. But the waiting never ends, and the self-love never flows. The second obstacle to self-love presents as self-aggrandizement, or believing oneself to be more special or more deserving than others. Or perhaps you’re not so busy comparing yourself favorably to others, but rather you see yourself as especially capable or triumphant. Your self-esteem is high. This is a devious obstacle to circumnavigate because it masquerades as self-love. Sure as day it’s positive. Even so, a telltale sign that these positive self-descriptions fall short of true self-love is that they are guarded very tightly. As you shield your positive self-views from the light of contradictory evidence, a brittle narcissism emerges. Although narcissism like this is often taken as excessive self-love, in truth it’s something else altogether. In believing yourself to be especially deserving and discerning, or especially wonderful—even at a deep, unspoken or unrecognized level—the slights and shortcomings that all people face as they navigate the social world become magnified out of proportion, viewed as threats or insults to your character. If this is your obstacle, your happiness hinges on whether others treat you in just the right way, or show you the proper form of respect by turning a blind eye to your shortcomings. In truth, self-aggrandizement is often a defense—a protective armor donned to cover up a more negative view of self. It can be self-diminishment in disguise. Both obstacles to the safety and connection necessary for self-love—self-diminishment and self-aggrandizement—deny the wisdom of sameness and oneness. At a core, spiritual level, there is no social topography, no hierarchy that ranks people from more to less deserving. The truth is you are neither beneath nor above others. Brain disorders aside, all people are fundamentally the same when it comes to their ability to think, to feel, and to yearn for love. All are equally deserving of acceptance, respect, and love, even with their many shortcomings. You are no exception. Just like everyone else, you deserve your own love.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘I proposed something so different’ he said, replacing the cheque in his wallet. ‘I am rather staggered by your lack of understanding. Of course we can sleep together if you wish to make it a condition. Let us take a room at the hotel here, now, this minute.’ He looked really splendid when he was wounded like this, and suddenly there stirred inside her the realization that his quietness was not weakness, and than an uncommon sort of sensibility underlay these confusing thoughts and deliberate words, perhaps not altogether good, either. ‘What could we prove to each other’ he went on more gently ‘by it or by its opposite: never making love?’ She saw now how hopelessly out of context her words had been. ‘I’m bitterly ashamed of my vulgarity.’ She said this without really meaning the words, as a concession to his world as much as to himself — a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions posées by taste. A world which could only be knocked off its feet when you were skin to skin with it, so to speak! No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded, she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man’s being; the knowledge, not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but of the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another. She bitterly regretted his unwisdom in denying her a concrete chance to see for herself what underlay his beauty and persuasion. Yet how could one insist? ‘Good’ he said, ‘for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until—’ ‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I really did not know how to treat honourably with you and avoid disappointing you.’ He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up. ‘I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother. I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.’ They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’ ‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.

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

  I promise this will all make sense shortly. Sometimes we do show visible symptoms of anxiety. We do actually blush, sweat, or shake. But in this next myth, we think that everyone will not only see us, but also criticize us harshly. In other words: people will judge me. For Jake, he knew he flushed when he exercised, when he had more than one beer, when he felt embarrassed, and, most important, when he got anxious. He could see it in the mirror, in photos, and sometimes people would comment. In the summer he could blame his blushing on the heat, but in cold weather his story didn’t hold up. “Sometimes I turn red, and then I turn redder because I’m embarrassed about turning red, and then I turn even redder because I think people notice me turning red,” he said. “It’s a disaster.” When he feels the heat start to rise, this is what flashes through Jake’s head: If I blush, I look like I’m hiding something. And then people will think something’s wrong with me—that I have a disease or that I’m a pervert. He was convinced that people would see his blushing and think, Wow, Jake has problems. Has that ever happened? Jake reports: “The worst was once when there were these two teenage girls I was helping at the store and one of them was like, ‘What’s your problem?’ That time I turned purple.” For weeks afterwards, Jake hid out in the appliances section, where most customers—especially teenage girls—never ventured. Here’s how the vicious cycle works: first, have a bodily reaction (that part’s easy—anyone with a body qualifies), but then, and this is the crucial part, identify the body reaction as shameful. People will think something’s wrong with me if they see my hands shake. It would be horrible if I got dizzy and fainted in public. People will notice my eye twitch and bad stuff will ensue. For Jake, it was, If I turn red, everyone will think I have problems. For the final step, anticipate situations where your body might betray you and try to hide it, like Jake hiding among the vacuum cleaners and toaster ovens to avoid The Reveal. Voila: a perfect recipe for a torturous result.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It’s him.’” We sit in silence. I know how hard it was for him to go against the father, and how painful it is to let himself remember his childhood and protect the abused child he once was. Guy had wanted to “bring” me with him to court because he never had a parent who would defend him, and therefore he was worried he wouldn’t be able to defend himself. Guy breaks the silence. “I feel embarrassed remembering how as a child, I used to hide in my room, trying not to make any noise, not even to breathe so my father wouldn’t notice me. I hated myself for being weak like my mother and not protecting myself, and for feeling angry, like my father. And I felt ashamed for hiding while my older brother, Ram, became my father’s main target.” Guy pauses and looks at his watch. “Ah—we have a little more time,” he notes. “You know, the other night, after I came back from court, I had a thought. I realized that Ram, my brother, was that girl, the daughter.” “In what way?” I ask. “Like her, he fought back; he wasn’t afraid. I watched him from the sidelines and I felt jealous that he was so brave; but I also felt guilty that he was the one my father attacked, while I was able to hide. And then one day, when Ram was maybe fifteen years old and almost as tall as my dad, he came home from school with a girl, and my father got angry and smacked him in front of her. Instead of apologizing, which is what I would have done, Ram slowly walked toward him. He put his finger on my father’s forehead and whispered angrily, ‘You. If you touch me one more time, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ My father stepped back and Ram walked away. I think it was the last time my father hit him. I remember my mother and I walked away too, as if nothing had happened. It was unbelievable, how they switched roles and my brother became the aggressor. I remember that I suddenly felt sorry for my father. I almost wanted to help him. How fucked up is that?” Guy’s voice becomes louder. “When I turned twenty, I left. I’m sorry. I had to leave. I just had to,” he says angrily. “What are you sorry for?” I ask. “What do you mean?” “You just said ‘I’m sorry’ again.” “Did I?” Guy looks at me, startled. “I guess I did. I guess I feel that I have something to apologize for, don’t I? Maybe I feel bad that I ran away and left them all behind. A family of sick people. I saved my life, but what about them?”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

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

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I ask. Jon smiles. “That I’m a baby?” I smile back and he continues. “I feel like such a baby. Maybe what I wanted was to forget the pacifier here and go home like a grown-up.” “That makes sense,” I say. “But is it possible that you wanted to both forget and also remember?” He is intrigued, and I continue. “Maybe you wanted to forget the baby part of yourself here, but also to come back in order to dig and discover it. Maybe you want those lost parts to be found, to uncover your own life story.” Jon nods. “And what if it’s not so interesting?” I pause. I hear how afraid he is to remember how uninteresting and rejected he felt as a child. He doesn’t want to feel the injury of his childhood and to get in touch with how much he needed his mother. I think about the word “pacifier,” recognizing that as a child Jon tried to pacify himself rather than cry for his mother. As an adult, he presents as an easygoing guy who doesn’t need anyone to take care of him or even understand him. He doesn’t get upset or express feelings of frustration, but instead tries to manage his feelings on his own and push down any emotions. Jon feels that he shouldn’t depend on anyone. In his sessions, he makes sure to not feel too dependent on me, too. Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote that one of the most meaningful maternal functions is “emotional holding.” He related that function, in parents of any sex, to the significance of the physical aspect of holding a baby. Emotional holding is the steady emotional arms and available presence of the parents that allow the baby to feel safe and protected. The parent holds the baby in his or her mind, available to tolerate the baby’s emotions, tuned in to her signals. When a baby feels safe both physically and emotionally, she develops a sense of a safe world, where she can rely on the parent and trust that her needs will be met. But when emotional holding collapses, the baby usually stops turning to others and instead turns inward. When the baby feels dropped she might experience what Winnicott called “falling forever.” It is the feeling of emotional collapse, an endless downfall with no bottom. Jon learned not to reach out to his parents for soothing and to hold himself emotionally. I sense that he protected himself by giving up on his parents’ comforting and responsiveness. He became a boy and later on a man who didn’t ask for much. He was able to manage his feelings until one day it all broke and he fell apart. Jon leaves my office, and I am aware that we haven’t yet talked about his breakdown.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Aren’t drugs, after all, how everyone else tolerates monogamy? I hated being the object of a desperate, controlling passion but felt that it was somehow the morally dutiful stance when the man “loved” me. I was finally cured when I found myself in a fetal position on the floor of my bedroom while the Boyfriend put me on hold for a business call. I had humiliated myself beyond recognition. What is wrong with me? The wretched question always beckoning my shame, the shame of the little girl who was deemed “overly sensitive.” But with the Boyfriend I made progress. I stayed long enough to allow the pain to slice right through my mental masochism and discovered the relief on the other side: my sadism. I considered the radical possibility that there might be nothing “wrong” with me. Except perhaps choosing guys who adored me, seduced me, and then couldn’t control their dicks, and therefore had to control me. I’d protest, get upset, and the discussion would be successfully diverted from their penis to my hysteria. Oh, the myriad insecurities, baffling behaviors, addictions, and possessive outbursts that inhabit the man in search of control. There is only one kind of control that really matters. My nice-girl martyrdom over, I turned to its heady antidote, the liberation of tyranny. I would no longer accommodate penis problems—whether they were insecurities about length or width, or issues of control lost and not found. If a damaged dick and his owner threatened to raise their heads in my direction, I would simply move out of their reach, and be on my way. I told the Boyfriend that either we were finished or he could retain me as his mistress—meaning my own mistress. I even wrote down the rules—a parody of a best-selling treatise by a couple of housewives on how to lead a man to the altar. My rules led to slavery instead. THE REAL RULES 1. See each other a maximum of once a week, except in special circumstances and when it’s a mutual decision to do so. A week is defined as Monday through Sunday—hence there can be a Saturday encounter and then a Tuesday encounter but then not until the following Monday, when a new week begins. 2. One encounter is defined as any time spent together with no specific limits on hours, etc.—a late-night horny rendezvous and a weekend away both count equally as one encounter. 3. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on nonmonogamy issue. But when together, completely together—no procurements, flirtations, etc. 4. Outside issues to be carefully avoided: work, friends, and family. 5. Phone calls are for only two purposes: to plan an encounter, or, if desired, a thank-you follow-up call, postencounter. No long, in-depth discussions of any nature on the phone—not about others, not about our relationship, not about current sports events. 6.