Earlier last month I read a book by Dr. Edith Eva Eger and
it referred to another book that she wrote, The Choice – Embrace the
Possible. During the latter part of July, I read The Choice. It is a
intense book with vivid details about what it was like for Dr. Eger to live
through the Holocaust at multiple concentration camps.
What was done to the people there was even more horrific
than what I knew. Her stories will be forever etched in my mind. Yet, despite
such a brutal and unspeakable experience, Dr. Eger was able to survive and
thrive in her life, and help others who have and are experiencing PTSD,
especially veterans. She turned her experience into a gift that has transformed
so many people’s lives by showing how to escape the prison of one’s mind.
Some of the parts of her book that resonate with me and/or I
found the most inspiring follow:
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When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our
losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them.
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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, causes by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have
little or no control. IT comes from the outside. It’s the neighborhood bully,
the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, 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 use 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.
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Often, the little upsets in our lives are
emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative
of greater pain.
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People struggle and hurt because something was
not what they wanted or expected it to be; and they were trying to reconcile
what was with what ought to have been.
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No one can take away from you what you’ve put in
your mind.
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We have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve
lost or to pay attention to what we still have.
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Dr. Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this
morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind,
which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he’s done. He is
more a prison than I am.
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To survive is to transcend your own needs and
commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.
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The words I heard inside my head made a
tremendous difference in my ability to maintain hope.
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Home isn’t a place anymore, not a country. It’s
a feeling, as universal as it is specific.
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The death March, from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen,
is the shortest distance we have been forced to walk, but we are so weakened by
then that only one hundred out of the two thousand of us will survive.
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Out of more than 15,000 deportees from our
hometown, we are among the only 70 who have survived the war.
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We marry our unfinished business. For Bela and
me, our unfinished business is grief.
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Survival is a matter of interdependence that
survival isn’t possible alone.
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I wanted to name her Anna-Marie, a romantic
name, a French-sounding name, but the Communists keep a roster of the permissible
names, and Anna-Marie isn’t allowed.
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To be aggressive is to decide for others. TO be
assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that
you are enough.
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Fears kept hidden only grow more fierce.
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Moving forward also meant circling back.
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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.
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The more
choices you have, the less you’ll feel like a victim.
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Practice not pushing your feelings away, no
matter how painful.
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Martin Seligman founded Positive Psychology. He said
that when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering or improve
our lives, we stop taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is
no point.
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Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how
we respond to suffering differs.
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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, disappoint signal something about our worth.
The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.
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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.
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Eger’s therapy is Choice Therapy, as freedom is
about CHOICE – about choosing Compassion Humor, Optimism, Intuition,
Curiosity, and Self-Expression. And to be free is to live in the
present. If we are stuck in the past, saying, “If only I had gone there instead
of here…” or “If only I had married someone else…” we are living in a prison of
our own making. Likewise if we spend our time in the future, saying, “I won’t
be happy until I graduate…” or “I won’t be happy until I find the right person.”
The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
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Learn to reframe your trauma, to see in your
painful past evidence of your strength and gifts and opportunities for growth,
rather than confirmation of your weakness or damage.
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We are overwhelmed by loss and think we will never
receive a sense of self and purpose, that we will never mend. But 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. We can choose to be free.
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It still isn’t easy for me to talk about the
past. IT is deeply painful to confront the fear and the loss all over again
each time I remember or recount it. But from this moment on, I understood that
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.
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A good definition of being a victim is when you
keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to
blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or
worth.
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What legacy do I want to pass on? What will I
leave in the world when I am gone?
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It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain,
out of the past.
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I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and
forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me.
I was letting go, releasing the part of myself that had spent most of my life
exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I
was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging
past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve – for what happened, for what
didn’t happen – and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as
it was and as it is.
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At Auschwitz: And then I notice it again, the
thing that haunted me those hellish months when this was my home: I can’t see
or hear a single bird. NO birds live here. Not even now. The sky is bar of
their wings, the silence deeper because of the absence of their song.
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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.
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My first step…was to take responsibility for my
feelings. To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on…other
people, to accept them as my own.
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Take responsibility for experiencing – and eventually
expressing – [feelings] safely, and then for letting them go.
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So often when we are unhappy it is because we
are taking too much responsibility or we are taking too little.
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In blaming others for their unhappiness, they
were avoiding the responsibility of making their own joy.
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There’s also the opportunity to find a way to
suffer less, to choose happiness, which requires taking responsibility for
yourself.
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Are you becoming the best you can be? Are you
making yourself happy?
When you stop doing what’s best for you and start doing what you think someone
else needs, you are making a choice that has consequences for you.
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Viktor Frankl writes, “Man’s search for meaning
is the primary motivation in his life…This meaning is unique and specific in
that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a
significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning."
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Time doesn’t
heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to
take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose
to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.
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We want so much to understand the truth. We want
to be accountable for our mistakes, honest about our lives. We want reasons,
explanations. We want our lives to make sense. But to ask why? Is to
stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can’t control
other people, and we can’t control the past.
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Mourning is important, but when it goes on and
one, it can be a way of avoiding grief.
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Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. You
get to choose a way forward [after a loved one’s death]. You get to discover
that living a full life is the best way to honor him or her.
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To run away from the past or to fight against
our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and
forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist
now.
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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.
You can choose to be free.
