Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  In just a year and a half, she’s made a stunning recovery and is living and working as she did before the injury, with strength, brilliance, creativity, and passion.

  Though many aspects of her recovery are out of her control, not easily explained, a matter of sheer luck, she’s also made choices that I know have helped her heal. When you’re in a vulnerable position, with limited energy, it is especially crucial to choose how to spend your time. Marianne has chosen to think like a survivor, focusing on what she needs to do to keep improving, listening to her body to know when it’s time to rest, and feeling and expressing gratitude for her health and all the people who are supporting her recovery. When she wakes up in the morning, she asks herself, “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?”

  Attitude isn’t everything. We can’t erase hardships or make ourselves well with our outlook alone. But how we spend our time and mental energy does affect our health. If we resist and rail against what we’re experiencing, we take away from our growth and healing. Instead, we can acknowledge the awful thing that is happening and find the best way to live with it.

  This is especially true when we come up against setbacks or complications in our healing process. Brain injuries generally mean that patients are not as good at many of the things they used to do with ease or skill. Marianne is still working hard to reestablish all the neural networks that were damaged by the fall. She tires easily with too much standing or walking, and struggles with language retrieval. Except for the initial weeks of recovery, her memories are intact, but sometimes she can’t find the words for things—the name of a country she’s visited or a vegetable she wants to buy at the farmers market. She’s had to learn new methods for doing what she used to do effortlessly. When she prepares for a speech, she can’t just write down three points and trust her brain to remember the connections and fill in the gaps, as she did before her injury. Now she has to write down the entire speech—every word, every transition.

  But interestingly, there are other things she does with more flexibility and innovation. She’s always been an accomplished home chef, and once had a cooking column in a San Diego newspaper. After her fall, she has had to reteach herself how to cook. In the process, she has begun inventing new recipes and going about old processes in a new way. She and Rob live in Manhattan now, but they spend as much of the summer as they can in La Jolla, where I live. This past summer she wanted to make me a cold cherry soup she’d prepared once for a dinner party in New York. She bought a bunch of sour cherries and reread two old Hungarian cookbooks, only to abandon the cookbooks and go about it her own way—preparing the soup cold instead of heating it and then cooling it down, adding three different kinds of fruit. Without the constant adaptations she’s had to make since the injury, she probably would have made the soup the same way she had before. Instead, she embraced the practice of reinvention her injury has required and let it guide her to something new. And it was delicious!

  I can see in her eyes sometimes how tiring and frustrating it is to work so hard to do things she once took for granted. But she’s also attuned to the possibilities.

  “It’s funny,” she told me, “but I feel like I’m intellectually alive in a different way.” Her face lit up the way it had as a child when she’d learned to read. “To tell you the truth, it’s kind of fun and thrilling.”

  This isn’t an uncommon experience for people who’ve survived similar injuries. Marianne’s neurologist told her a number of his patients, never skilled artists, suddenly found after a major brain injury that they could draw or paint—and do it remarkably well. Something about the broken and reconfigured neural pathways allows many survivors to find they’re in possession of gifts they never had or knew about before.

  What a beautiful reminder that the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our tracks, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision.

  This is why I say that in every crisis there is a transition. Awful things happen, and they hurt like hell. And these devastating experiences are also opportunities to regroup and decide what we want for our lives. When we choose to respond to what’s happened by moving forward and discovering our freedom to, we release ourselves from the prison of victimhood.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM VICTIMHOOD

  That was then, this is now. Think of a moment in childhood or adolescence when you felt hurt by another’s actions, large or small. Try to think of a specific moment, not a generalized impression of that relationship or time of life. Imagine the moment as though you are reliving it. Pay attention to sensory details—sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations. Then picture yourself as you are now. See yourself enter the past moment and take your past self by the hand. Guide yourself out of the place where you were hurt, out of the past. Tell yourself, “Here I am. I’m going to take care of you.”

  In every crisis there is a transition. Write a letter to a person or situation that has caused you pain, recently or in the past. Be specific about what the person did, or about what happened that you didn’t like. Put it all on the table. Say how the actions, words, or events affected you. Then write another letter to the same person or situation—but this time write a thank-you letter, expressing gratitude for what the person has taught you about yourself or how the situation has prompted you to grow. The goal of the thank-you letter is not to pretend to like something you didn’t like, or to force yourself to be happy about something painful. Acknowledge that what happened wasn’t right and that it hurt. And also notice the healing power in shifting your point of view from a powerless victim to who you really are: a survivor, a person of strength.

  Harness your freedom to. Make a vision board—a visual representation of what you want to create or embrace in your life. Cut out pictures and words from magazines, old calendars, etc.—there are no rules, just see what attracts you. Paste the images and words to a sheet of poster board or a big piece of cardboard. Notice what patterns emerge. (This is a wonderful practice to do together with dear friends—and with plenty of good food!) Keep your vision board close by and look at it every day. Let this intuitive creation be an arrow to follow.

  Chapter 2 NO PROZAC AT AUSCHWITZ

  The Prison of Avoidance

  One day when Marianne was five and we were living in a tiny apartment in Baltimore, she came home from school crying. She hadn’t been invited to a birthday party, and her heart was crushed, her face red with emotion, her cheeks covered in tears. I didn’t know anything about how to be present with feelings. I didn’t know how to let her have her own feelings. In those days, I was in complete denial about my past. I never spoke of Auschwitz. Even my own children wouldn’t know I was a survivor until Marianne was in middle school and found a book about the Holocaust. When she showed her father the pictures of starving, skeletal people in Auschwitz and demanded to know what terrible calamity had people dying behind barbed wire, it broke my heart to listen as he told her I’d been a prisoner there. I hid in the bathroom, unsure how to meet my daughter’s eyes.

  When Marianne came home from kindergarten in tears, her sadness made me sad and uncomfortable. So I led her by the hand into the kitchen and made her a chocolate milkshake. I served her a big piece of Hungarian seven-layer chocolate cake. That was my remedy—eat something sweet. Cure your discomfort with food. Food was my answer to everything. (Especially chocolate. And especially Hungarian chocolate, with unsalted butter. Don’t ever put salt in the butter and make a Hungarian anything!)

  I didn’t know it then, but we disable our children when we take away their suffering. We teach them that feelings are wrong or scary. But a feeling is only a feeling. There’s no right or wrong. There’s just my feeling and yours. We are wiser not to try to reason others out of their feelings, or try to cheer them up. It’s better to allow their feelings and keep them company, to say, “Tell m
e more.” To resist saying what I used to tell my children when they were upset because someone had teased or excluded them: “I know how you feel.” It’s a lie. You can’t ever know how someone else feels. It’s not happening to you. To be empathetic and supportive, don’t take on other people’s inner life as if it is your own. That’s just another way of robbing others of their experience—and of keeping them stuck.

  I like to remind my patients: the opposite of depression is expression.

  What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does.

  I recently talked with a beautiful man who counsels children in the Canadian foster care system. He helps young people grieve the loss of family, security, and safety that many never had in the first place. I asked what motivates his work, and he told me about a conversation he had with his father, who was dying of cancer. “Why do you think you got cancer?” he asked. His father replied, “Because I never learned to cry.”

  Of course, many factors account for each person’s potential for health and disease, and we do great damage to ourselves when we believe we’re to blame for our illnesses or injuries. But I can say with certainty that the emotions we don’t allow ourselves to express or release stay bottled inside, and whatever we’re holding on to affects our body chemistry and finds expression in our cells and neural circuitry. In Hungary we say, “Don’t inhale your anger to your breast.” It can be harmful to hold on to feelings and keep them locked inside.

  Trying to shield others or ourselves from our feelings doesn’t work in the long run. But many of us are trained from a young age to disown our inner responses—in other words, to give up our genuine selves. A child says, “I hate school!” and a parent replies, “Hate is a strong word,” or “Don’t say hate,” or “It can’t be that bad.” A child falls down and skins her knee, and a grown-up says, “You’re okay!” In trying to help children regroup or bounce back from hurt or difficulty, caring adults can minimize what the child is going through, or inadvertently teach that some things are permissible to feel and others aren’t. Sometimes the cues to change or deny a feeling are less subtle: Calm down! Get over it. Don’t be such a crybaby.

  More than by what we say, children learn by watching what we do. If adults create a home environment where anger isn’t allowed to be expressed, or where anger is vented in harmful ways, children learn that strong feelings aren’t permissible or safe.

  Many of us are in the habit of reacting instead of responding to what’s going on. We’ve often learned to hide from our emotions—suppress them, medicate them, run away.

  One of my patients, a physician addicted to prescription drugs, called me early one morning. “Dr. Eger,” he said, “I realized last night there was no Prozac at Auschwitz.” It took me a moment to digest what he’d said. There’s a huge difference between selfmedicating, as he was doing, and taking necessary medications that have the potential to save lives. But he made a good point. He’d begun reaching outside himself for an escape from his feelings, and he’d become hooked on drugs he didn’t need.

  At Auschwitz, nothing came from without. There was no way to numb ourselves, to take the edge off, to check out for a while, to forget the reality of torture and hunger and imminent death. We had to learn to be good observers of ourselves and our circumstances. We had to learn to just be.

  Yet I don’t remember ever crying in the camps. I was too occupied with survival. The feelings came later. And when they came, for many, many years I managed to avoid them, to keep running away.

  But you can’t heal what you don’t feel.

  More than thirty years after the war, as part of my ongoing work as a trauma specialist with the US military, I was asked to serve on a prisoner-of-war advisory committee. Every time I visited Washington, DC, to meet with the committee, someone would ask if I’d been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I’d already returned to Auschwitz, I’d stood on the ground where I was separated from my parents, under the sky that had received their bodies as they became smoke. Why would I go to a museum about Auschwitz and other concentration camps? Been there, done that, I thought. For six years I served on the committee, and for six years I avoided setting foot in the museum. And then one morning I was sitting at the mahogany table in our meeting room, my name etched on a little plaque in front of me. And I realized that was then, this is now. I’m Dr. Eger. I made it out.

  And as long as I avoided the museum, as long as I convinced myself I’d already overcome the past and had no need to face it again, a part of me was still stuck there. A part of me wasn’t free.

  So I gathered all my courage and visited the museum. It was every bit as excruciating as I’d feared. I got so flooded with emotion when I saw the photographs of the arrival platform at Auschwitz in May 1944 that I almost couldn’t breathe. And then I came to the cattle car. It was a replica of an old German train car built to transport livestock. Visitors could climb inside and feel how dark and small a space it was; feel what it was like to be packed in so tight you were sitting on top of other people; imagine sharing one bucket of water and one bucket for waste with hundreds of people; imagine riding all day and all night without stopping, the only food a stale loaf of bread shared among eight or ten other prisoners. I stood outside the cattle car, completely paralyzed. Frozen. People crowded behind me, waiting quietly, respectfully, for me to step inside. For many minutes I couldn’t do it—and then it took every ounce of strength I could muster to coax one foot and then the other through the narrow door.

  Inside, a wave of terror came over me and I thought I might vomit. I curled up in a heap, reliving the final days I saw my parents alive. The relentless churn of the wheels on the track. When I was sixteen, I didn’t know we were going to Auschwitz. I didn’t know that soon my parents would be dead. I had to survive the discomfort and uncertainty. But somehow, that was easier than reliving it now. This time I had to feel it. This time I cried. I lost track of time sitting there in the dark with my pain, barely noticing as other visitors entered, shared the dark, moved on. I sat for an hour, maybe two.

  When I finally got out, I felt different. A little lighter. Emptied out. All my grief and fear weren’t gone. Every swastika in every photograph, every hardened eye of an SS officer standing guard made me flinch. But I’d allowed myself to revisit the past and face the feelings I’d been running from for so many years.

  There are many good reasons why we avoid our feelings: they’re uncomfortable, or they’re not the feelings we think we should be having, or we’re afraid of how they might hurt others, or afraid of what they could mean—what they might reveal about the choices we’ve made or the ones we will make going forward.

  But as long as you’re avoiding your feelings, you’re denying reality. And if you try to shut something out and say, “I don’t want to think about it,” I guarantee that you’re going to think about it. So invite the feeling in, sit down with it, keep it company. And then decide how long you’re going to hold on to it. Because you’re not a fragile little somebody. It’s good to face every reality. To stop fighting and hiding. To remember that a feeling is just a feeling—it’s not your identity.

  One September morning sixteen years ago, Caroline was just starting a load of laundry, enjoying a quiet day alone in her house in rural Canada, when there was a knock at the door. She could see through the front window that it was Michael, her husband’s cousin. Michael was her age—in his early forties. He had been in trouble much of his life—theft, petty crime, drug abuse—and was finally ready for a second chance. Though he’d recently moved in with his girlfriend, Caroline and her husband had been the family members who’d taken him in to help him turn his life around, setting him up with a job and a stable environment. He’d become a fixture in their lives, another trusted adult who often joined Caroline, her husband, and her three stepsons for dinner.

  As much as she cared for Michael and felt good about helping him, for a second Caroline considered pretending she wasn’t home. Her husband was out of t
own, the boys were finally back in school after summer break, and she didn’t want Michael’s visit to interrupt all the things she’d planned to accomplish on her first morning alone in three months. But it was Michael—a relative she loved, who loved her in return, who relied on her family. She opened the door and invited him in for coffee.

  “Boys are back at school already,” she said, making small talk as she put the mugs and cream on the table.

  “I know.”

  “Tom’s gone, too, for a couple of days.”

  That’s when he pulled out a handgun. He put it to her head, told her to get on the floor. She knelt by the refrigerator.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “Michael, what are you doing?”

  She could hear him undoing his belt, unzipping his jeans.

  Her throat was dry. Her heart pounded. She’d taken a self-defense class in college, and words formed in her mouth, the things she’d been taught to say if someone assaulted you. Use his name. Talk about family. She kept the words coming, her voice somehow sure and steady, talking about Michael’s parents, the boys, family holidays, favorite fishing spots.