The Gift - 12 Lessons to Save Your Life - Book Notes

 I was going through my "Books I Want to Read" file and saw that I had noted The Gift - 12 Lessons to Save Your Life by Edith Eger in it. I'm not sure where I heard about this book, but am so grateful I ordered it from the library. 

Edith Eger has written two books - The Choice (which is the story of her survival in the concentration camps, her escape, healing, and journey to freedom) and The Gift. In this book, she explains that the most persistent prison she experienced was not the prison the Nazis put her in but the one she created for herself - the prison within her own mind. Below are notes from the book.

- Many of us experience feeling trapped in our minds. Our thoughts and beliefs determine, and often limit, how we feel, what we do, and what we think is possible.

- The foundation of freedom is the power to choose.

- All I could do was decide how to respond to terror and hopelessness. Somehow, I found it within myself to choose hope.

- For many decades, I remained a prisoner of the past. 

- "Learned helplessness" - we suffer most when we believe that we have no efficacy in our lives, that nothing we do can improve the outcome. We flourish when we harness "learned optimism" - the strength, resilience, and ability to create the meaning and direction of our lives.

- Freedom requires hope: the awareness that suffering, however horrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next. 

- Remembering and honoring are very different from remaining stuck in guilt, shame, anger, resentment, or fear about the past. 

- It's not what happens to us that matters most, it's what we do with our experiences.

- We do not change until we're ready. SOmetimes it's a a tough circumstance - perhaps a divorce, accident, illness, or death - that forces us to face up to what isn't working and try something else.

- Change is about interrupting the habits and patters that no longer serve us.

- When you change your life, it's to become the real you.

THE PRISON OF VICTIMHOOD

- Victims ask, "Why me?" Survivors ask, "What now?"

- Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is no way to escape being hurt or oppressed by other people or circumstances. The only guarantee is that no matter how kind we are or how hard we work, we're going to have pain....but we each get to choose whether or not we stay a victim.

- Many of us stay in a prison of victimhood because, subconsciously, it feels safer.

- Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It's stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits - what I can't do and what I don't have.

- Every behavior satisfies a need. Many of us choose to stay victims because it gives us license to do zero on our own behalf. 

- The only one you have is you. YOu're born alone. You die alone.

 - Sometimes it takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?

- Another tool for moving out of victimhood is to learn to cope with loneliness. It's what most of us fear more than anything else. But when you're in love with yourself, alone doesn't mean lonely.

- The whole reason to step out of victimhood is  so we can step into the rest of our lives.

- When you wake up in the morning ask yourself: What am I going to do today? When will I do my therapy exercises? What projects do I want to work on? What do I need to do to take care of myself?

THE PRISON OF AVOIDANCE

- Sick people have sick minds. And you get to choose how long you let a sick person's choices keep you from the life you want. 

- Let the feelings come. Let them move through us. And then we let them go.

- The opposite of depression is expression. 

THE PRISON OF SELF-NEGLECT

- One of our first fears is of abandonment. Thus we learn early how to get the A's: attention, affection, approval. We figure out what to do and whom tobecome to get our needs met. The problem is not that we do these things - it's that we keep doing them. We think we must in order to be loved.

- It's very dangerous to put your whole life into someone else's hands. You are the only one you're going to have for a lifetime. All other relationships will end. So how can you be the best loving, unconditional, no-nonsense caregiver to yourself?

- Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else's image of who we are.

- Generosity isnt' generous if we chronically give at the expense of ourselves, if our giving makes us a martyr or fuels our resentement.

- Love means that we practice self-love, that we strive to be generous and compassionate toward others - and to ourselves. 

- In trying nto to be a burden on anyone else, he neglected himself. 

- Learn to develop inner self-regard because no amount of pampering on the outside can change the way you feel about yourself. 

- Let your appearnance be an avenue for self-expression.

THE PRISON OF SECRETS

- Secrets are harmful because they create and sustain a climate for shame, and shame is the bottom line of any addiction.

THE PRISON OF GUILT AND SHAME

- Freedom lies in accepting our whole, imperfect selves and giving up the need for perfection.

- Rejection is just a word we make up to express the feeling we have when we don't get what we want.

- Is there anything helpful here that can support my growth and creativity? Whether you paln to integrate the feedback you receive, or release it, say, "Thank you for your opinion" and move on.

- You're the only one you'll never lose. You can look outside yourself to feel cherished - or you can learn to cherish yourself.

- What you pay attention to grows stronger. Spend a day listening to your self-talk. Replace negative messages with a practice of kind and love self-talk.

THE PRISON OF UNRESOLVED GRIEF

- All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.

- Grief is often not about what happened. It's about what didn't happen. 

- When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.

- What if I'd known she was dying? What if I'd known I was about to lose her? But what-ifs don't empower us. They deplete us.

- GUilt stops us from enjoying our memories. And it prevents us from living fully now.

- Time doesn't heal. It's what you do with the time.

THE PRISON OF RIGIDITY

- When we're aggressive, we decide for others. When we're passive, we let others decide for us. And when we're passive-aggressive, we prevent others from deciding for themselves.

 - Don't let negative words from others penetrate your spirit.

- How (or why) are you maintaining a point of view that isn't serving you anymore?

- If you take back your power and still want to be right, then choose to be kind, because kindness is always right.

THE PRISON OF RESENTMENT

- The biggest disruptor of intimacy is low-level, chronic anger and irritation.

THE PRISON OF PARALYZING FEAR

- Take a risk. Do something you've never done before. Change is synonymous with growth. To grow, you've got to evolve instead of revolve.

- We have a choice of how much of our lives we give over to fear.

- When we've been hurt or betrayed, it isn't easy to let go of the fear that we'll be hurt again.

- Curiosity is vital. It's what allows us to risk. When we're full of fear, we're living in a past that already happened, or a future that hasn't arrived. When we're curious, we're here in the present, eager to discover what's going to happen next. It's better to risk and grow, and maybe fail, than to remain imprisoned, never knowing what could have been.

THE PRISON OF JUDGMENT

- The most toxic, obnoxious people in our lives can be our best teacher. Ask yourself, "What are you here to teach me?"

- What legacy do you want to pass on?

THE PRISON OF HOPELESSNESS

- Choose to fill your day with passion and things that are meaningful to you. Spend time with people who are kind and have integrity. Remember that loss and trauma doesn't mean you have to stop living fully.

- Hope is a confrontation with darkness.

- It takes courage not to be discouraged.

THE PRISON OF NOT FORGIVING

- Forgiveness isn't something we do for the person who's hurt us. It's something we do for ourselves, so we're no longer victims or prisoners of the past, so we can stop carrying a burden that harbors nothing but pain.

- As long as you can say you can't forgive someone, you're spending energy being against rather than being for yourself and the life you deserve. To forgive isn't to give someone permission to keep hurting you. It's not okay that you were harmed. But it's already done. No one but you can heal the wound. 

- What stays in your body makes you ill. Forgiveness is release. 

- Silent rage is self-destructive.

CONCLUSION

- We can't take away suffering, we can't change what happened- but we can choose to find the gift in our lives. 

- Life is a gift. A gift we sabotage when we imprison ourselves in our fears of punishment, failure, and abandonment, in our need for approval, in shame and blame, in superiority and inferiority, in our need for power and control.