I have spoken to many of you about a book called, “The Choice” by Dr. Edith Eger. For those who are in the process of reading it or plan to read it, you may want to skip this newsletter. This is for all the people who requested the “Cliff Notes” version of the book! It’s amazing how Dr. Eger can offer so much hope while describing such darkness and horror, yet she does just that. This seemed fitting as we are coming out of a dark winter, and finding the gems of spring and hope around us.
In the excerpts below, I share some of the hopeful gems from Dr. Eger’s book. There are many, so I encourage you to read a few, reflect, and then come back and read a few more, rather than plow through the whole thing in one sitting. There are valuable and sage words which I think many people can find helpful in their own work.
Excerpts by Edith Eger:
Even the dullest moments of our lives are opportunities to experience hope, buoyancy, happiness. Mundane life is life too. As is painful life, and stressful life. Why do we so often struggle to feel alive, or distance ourselves from feeling life fully? Why is it such a challenge to bring life to life?
Suffering is universal, but victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from the outside. It’s the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital. In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.
There is no hierarchy of suffering. By saying, “things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain—it’s not Auschwitz.” This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. Being a survivor, being a “thriver” requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims. We’re not seeing our choices. We’re judging ourselves.
Often, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.
Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?
We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.
If this moment, this very one, is my last on Earth, do I have to waste it in resignation and defeat? Must I spend it as if I’m already dead?
There is power in our laughter.
I now object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one. I wasn’t a damaged person, that I was suffering the fallout of an interrupted life.
Running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse.
My daughter is also living two lives—the one she lives for herself and the one she lives for me because I wasn’t allowed to live it.
At the very heart of Victor Frankl’s teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.
Now that I have faced myself a little more fully, I can see that the emptiness I felt in our marriage wasn’t a sign of something wrong in our relationship, it was the void I carry with me, even now, the void that no man or achievement will ever fill. Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.
The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem—and the foundation of our persistent suffering—is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.
Perfectionism emerged in my childhood as a behavior to satisfy my need for approval, and it became an even more embedded coping mechanism for dealing with my survivor’s guilt. Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken—you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing. In trying to combat my low self-esteem, I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness. In learning to offer my patients total love and acceptance, I fortunately learned the importance of offering the same to myself.
Once patients can see why they developed a certain behavior (belittling others, attaching oneself to angry people, eating too little, eating too much, etc.), they can take responsibility for whether or not they maintain the behavior. They can choose what to give up (the need for approval, the need to go shopping, the need to be perfect, etc.)—because even freedom doesn’t come for free! And they can learn to take better care of themselves and to discover self-acceptance: Only I can do what I can do the way I can do it.
Richard Farson’s calamity theory of growth, which says: Very often it is the crisis situation … that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result of such calamities the person often makes a major reassessment of his life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of his own capabilities, values, and goals.
You can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.
Despite—and, really, because of—the struggles and the tragedies in our lives, each of us has the capacity to gain the perspective that transforms us from victim to thriver. We can choose to take responsibility for our hardships and our healing.
Feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.
Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time.
This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.
Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.
To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past.
The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.
But to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.
I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.
Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
The biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.
I used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me?
I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.
Eger believes that we are not dishonoring the dead by living our lives to the fullest. Indeed, what better way to honor them by growing and thriving? We cannot change what happened to us but we can decide how we want to live the rest of our lives.
Edith Eva (Edie) Eger (Kosice, September 29, 1927) is an American psychologist. She is a Holocaust survivor and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her memoirs entitled The Choice-Embrace the Possible became an international bestseller.
Wishing you a zen week ahead.
Warmly, Claudine
