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Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

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by Edith Eger


  “Okay, I won’t rape you,” he finally said. His voice was so offhand and casual, as though he were saying, “I don’t think I’ll have any coffee after all.”

  But he kept the gun pressed to her head. She couldn’t see his face. Was he high? What did he want? He seemed to have planned this out, to know he would find her home alone. Was he going to rob her?

  “Take anything you want,” she said. “You know where to find everything. Just take it, all of it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m gonna do.”

  She felt him move, as though ready to step away. Then he stood still again, gun hard against her skull.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said.

  A noise filled the room. Her head throbbed and burned in pain.

  The next thing she knew, she was gaining consciousness. She didn’t know how long she’d been passed out on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t see anything. She tried to get up, but there was so much blood she kept slipping, falling back down on the floor. She heard footsteps on the basement stairs.

  “Michael?” she called out. “Help me!”

  It didn’t make any sense to ask the person who’d just shot her for help, but it was a reflex. He was family. And there wasn’t anyone else there to ask.

  “Michael?” she called again.

  Another shot rang out. A second bullet blast into the back of her head.

  This time, she didn’t pass out. This time, she played dead. She lay on the floor, trying not to breathe. She could hear Michael walking around the house. She waited, waited, holding perfectly still. Then the back door closed. Still, she lay on the floor. Maybe he was testing her, tricking her, waiting for her to get up so he could shoot her again. More than pain, more than terror, what she felt was rage. How dare he do this to her? How dare he leave her for dead, leave her for the boys to find when they came home from school? She was damned if she’d let herself die before she could tell someone who’d done this to her, get Michael into custody before he could hurt anyone else.

  Finally, the house was completely quiet. She opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything. The bullets had damaged something in her brain or optic nerve. She crawled unsteadily across the room and pulled herself up to the kitchen counter, feeling around for the phone. She found the receiver, but when she tried to pick it up, it kept slipping from her hands. When she managed to grasp it, she remembered that she couldn’t see to dial. She banged randomly at the buttons, dropped the phone, picked it up, tried again. But she couldn’t get it to work.

  She gave up and crawled slowly, unable to see where she was going or think what to do. Every once in a while, she’d catch a glimpse of light through the fog of blindness, and eventually she managed to follow the light to the front door, and then outside. They lived on a five-acre lot, the nearest neighbor too far away to hear her if she screamed. She’d have to crawl for help. She made it down the driveway and started up the road of her subdivision, screaming and screaming. She knew someone had finally seen her when she heard a woman let out a bloodcurdling wail, like in a horror film. Soon people came running. Someone shouted to call an ambulance. She could recognize some of her neighbors’ voices, but they didn’t seem to know who she was. She realized her face was so disfigured and blown apart that they didn’t recognize her. She spoke fast, spitting out details: Michael’s name, the color of his car, the approximate time when he’d shown up at the house, every detail she could remember. She might not have another chance.

  “Call my in-laws,” she gasped. “Tell them to make sure the boys are safe at school. Tell Tom and the boys I love them.”

  Caroline knows her parents and in-laws and stepsons were brought to the hospital to say goodbye, that her father-in-law asked a Catholic priest to come, and her mother brought her Anglican minister. The Catholic priest gave her last rites.

  Weeks later, the priest visited her at her in-laws’ house, where she was recuperating, and told her, “I’ve never met anybody who’s come back.”

  “Come back from where?” she asked.

  “My darling,” he said, “you were cold on the table.”

  It’s truly a miracle that precious Caroline survived.

  But if you’ve lived through a trauma and come out the other side, you know that surviving is only the first battle.

  Violence leaves a long and terrible wake. When Caroline reached out to me a few months before Michael was due to be released on parole, almost sixteen years had passed since the shooting, but the psychological wounds were still fresh.

  “We see stories on TV,” she said, “about a person who suffered a trauma and is coming home. People say, ‘We’re going to take them home now and make them safe so their lives can go on.’ I look at my husband and say, ‘If they only knew.’ Just because you lived, just because you’re going home, life is not magically better. Any person who’s been traumatized has a long road to travel.”

  For Caroline—as for me—some of the residual effects of the trauma are physical. When the swelling on her brain went down, Caroline’s vision slowly returned, but she still has upper, lower, and peripheral blindness. She can’t hear well. She has nerve deprivation in her hands and arms. When she gets nervous, her brain and body seem disconnected. She has trouble feeling and moving her limbs.

  The crime has also taken a toll on her family and community. It’s forced everyone to face an evil committed by a loved one, a neighbor, a friend—to suffer a terrible breach of trust. For a long time, Caroline’s youngest stepson, who was only eight when this happened, wouldn’t leave her alone in a room. She’d try to coax him to join his brothers or the rest of the family, but he’d say, “No, I’ll stay here with you. I know you don’t like to be alone.” When she was able to walk and drive and regain some independence, her oldest stepson became the protective parent, following her around, hovering to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. And for a long time, her middle stepson was afraid to hug her or touch her. He was afraid he’d hurt her.

  Caroline told me that while some friends and loved ones have coped with the trauma by becoming overprotective, others have dealt with it by minimizing what happened.

  “People are often uncomfortable when they know,” she said. “They don’t want to talk about it. They think if they don’t talk about it, that makes it go away. That it’s over and done with and we’ll just move on. Or they call it my ‘accident.’ I didn’t accidentally back into a gun! But people don’t want to use words like ‘crime’ or ‘shooting.’ ”

  Even her father-in-law, Michael’s uncle—who was present in the aftermath of the shooting, who took Caroline and her family in for three or four months when she couldn’t function on her own—would tell people, “She’s back to normal, one hundred percent.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Caroline said with a rueful laugh. “But it made him feel better.”

  Now, in many ways, stability has returned. The boys are adults, married, a couple with kids of their own. Caroline and her husband live in the US, thousands of miles away from Michael, across an international border, where the chances that he would track them down seeking revenge for her testifying are slim, nearly impossible. But the fear hasn’t dissolved.

  “He was family,” Caroline said. “He lived in our home. We trusted him. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this.’ If he didn’t know why he tried to kill me—and he’s family—who else out there is going to try to hurt me just because?”

  Caroline told me she’s scared all the time, always expecting somebody to come and finish what Michael started. She doesn’t go outside and garden, something she used to enjoy, because someone could walk up behind her and she wouldn’t know they were there. Even indoors she’s on constant alert. She doesn’t move around her house without an alarm button she can press if someone breaks in. If she misplaces the alarm, she can’t breathe until she finds it.

  “For a while, I went back and lived in the home where he shot me,�
�� she said. “I wasn’t going to let him take my home away from me. I was going to take it back.”

  But it was too terrifying and painful to live in the place where she’d nearly died. They moved far away, to a safe and friendly community in the southern United States, near a beautiful lake where they take their boat on the weekends. Even so, she lives in fear.

  “Sixteen years of living like this isn’t living,” she said.

  She felt imprisoned by the past, and she desperately wanted to be free.

  As we spoke, I heard so much love and strength and determination in Caroline. I also recognized four behaviors she was practicing that were keeping her stuck in the past and stuck in fear.

  For one thing, she was exerting a lot of energy trying to change her feelings, to convince herself to feel differently from the way she actually felt.

  “I’m blessed,” she said. “I know I’m blessed! I’m alive. I have all these people who love me.”

  “Yes!” I said. “It’s true. But don’t try to cheer yourself up when you feel sad. It’s not going to help. You’re just going to feel guilty, that you should be feeling better than you’re feeling. Try this instead. Acknowledge the feeling. It’s grief. It’s fear. It’s sadness. Just acknowledge it. And then give up the need for others’ approval. They can’t live your life. They can’t feel your feelings.”

  In addition to trying to reason herself out of her very reasonable sadness and fear, Caroline lived in the prison of trying to protect others from her feelings. The people who love us want the best for us. They don’t want us to hurt. And so it’s tempting to show them the version of ourselves they long to see. But when we deny or minimize what we’re feeling, it backfires.

  Caroline told me that since the shooting, she and her husband had always had dogs, but when their dog died recently, her husband, not understanding how much a dog improved her sense of safety, said he needed time before they brought a new one into their family.

  “I was really angry,” she said. “But I couldn’t tell him that. The logical thing would’ve been to say, ‘I’m afraid to be alone without a dog.’ But I wouldn’t say it. I think he would understand—but I didn’t want him to know I still have that level of fear. I don’t know why.”

  I told her she was protecting him from worry. From guilt. But she was also depriving him, not letting him in. Denying him the opportunity to try to protect her.

  Caroline said she was doing the same thing with her sons. “I don’t think they know how imprisoned I am. I try not to let them know.”

  “But you’re lying. You’re not being the whole you to your family. You’re depriving yourself of freedom. And you’re depriving them, too. Your strategy for dealing with your difficult emotions has become another problem.”

  In protecting others from her feelings, Caroline was avoiding taking responsibility for them.

  And in remaining consumed by fear, she was giving too much power to Michael and the past.

  “My husband and I were just three years married,” she said. “We were joining together as a new family, the boys embracing me as their mother, starting a beautiful life. And Michael took it.” Her chin stiffened. She clenched her hands into fists.

  “He took it?”

  “He targeted me. He came to my house with a gun. He put two bullets in my head and left me for dead.”

  “Yes, he held a gun. Yes, you did what you had to do to stay alive. But nobody can take your inner life or responses from you. Why do you give him more power?”

  She’d been victimized in a horrifically cruel and violent way. She had every right to every feeling about it—rage, sorrow, fear, grief. Michael had almost robbed her of her life. But that was sixteen years ago. Even when he was released on parole, he was only a distant threat—far away, with no permission to travel, and no way to find her. Yet she was giving her power away to him, allowing him to live on in her body. She had to get clear of that. To express and release the rage so it didn’t continue to pollute her inner life.

  I told her to mentally put Michael in a chair, tie him up, beat him. Shout at him. “How could you do this to me?” Get her anger going. Scream it out.

  She said she was too afraid to do that.

  “The fear was learned. You had no idea what fear was when you were born. Don’t let it take over your life. Love and fear don’t go together. Enough. You don’t have time to live in fear.”

  “If I get mad at him and beat him—there’s going to be nothing left of the chair.”

  “He was a sick person. 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.”

  “I don’t want to be so scared and sad anymore,” she said. “I’m lonely. I’ve hidden myself away from making new friends and doing new things. I’ve shut myself in. My face looks tight and worried. I’m always tense and pursed in my mouth. I think my husband would like to have the happy woman back that he married. I’d like to have the happy woman back that he married.”

  Sometimes the feelings we run from aren’t the uncomfortable or painful ones. Sometimes we avoid the good feelings. We shut ourselves off from passion and pleasure and happiness. When we’ve been victimized, there’s a part of our psyche that identifies with the victimizer, and sometimes we adopt that punitive, victimizer stance toward ourselves, denying ourselves the permission to feel good, depriving ourselves of our birthright: joy. That’s why I often say that yesterday’s victims can easily become today’s victimizers.

  Whatever you practice, you become better at. If you practice tension, you’re going to have more tension. If you practice fear, you’ll have more fear. Denial will lead to denying more and more of your truth. Caroline had developed a practice of paranoia. Don’t drive too fast. Don’t go too fast in the boat. Don’t go there. Don’t do that.

  “No more don’t, don’t, don’t,” I told her. “I want to give you lots of dos. I do have a choice. I do have a life to live. I do have a role. I do live in the present. I do pay attention to what I’m focusing on, and it’s definitely in alignment with the goals I’m choosing: what gives me pleasure, what gives me joy.”

  I told Caroline, “I want you to practice engaging and observing your senses—seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. It’s time to smile. It’s time to laugh. It’s time to be lighthearted.”

  “I’m alive,” Caroline said. “I’m so happy I’m alive.”

  “Yes! Now make sure you practice that happiness every day, every minute, in how you love and talk to yourself.”

  I gave her one more freedom exercise. I told her to write down what happened, and then go in the backyard with a shovel and start digging a hole. “It’s hot,” I said, “and you’re perspiring. Keep going till you have a hole three feet deep. And bury that piece of paper. Put the soil back over it and go back inside, ready to be born again and have a new beginning because you’ve put that part to rest.”

  A month after we spoke, Caroline wrote to tell me she’d been back to Canada to meet her newborn grandson, and she and her husband had driven past their old home, where she had been shot. The oak and maple trees, just slender saplings when they lived there, had grown tall. The new owners had added a front deck. Somehow, it doesn’t hurt my heart as much as it used to, she wrote. The sadness she harbored for all they left behind had lessened.

  This is what it means to face and release the past. We drive on by. We’re not living there anymore.

  When we’re in the habit of denying our feelings, it can be hard even to identify what we’re feeling, much less face it, express it, and finally release it. One way we get stuck is by confusing thoughts with feelings. I’m surprised how often I hear people say things like, “I feel I should head downtown this afternoon and run a few errands,” or, “I feel like highlights would really brighten your eyes.” These aren’t feelings! They’re thoughts. Ideas. Plans. Feelings are energy. With feelings there’s no way out but through. We have to be with them. It takes so much courage t
o be, without having to do anything about anything—to just simply be.

  The other day I got a call from a man whose father was struggling with a terminal disease. He asked if I could please visit his father and their family. I’ve seen many difficult things in my life, but this family’s suffering really hit me. The father was confined to a wheelchair and couldn’t speak, eat, or move his own body, and his wife and son were so scared, jumping up and down to reposition his arms or legs or blankets, doing what they could to mitigate his discomfort—but powerless to halt the progress of his illness.

  I didn’t know what would be useful for him or the family. I was quiet. I asked his wife to hold his hand, to give him a kiss, and just be. I held the father’s other hand. Our eyes met, and I could see all his feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. By simply being present, we gave him permission for it all to come to the surface, without judgment. Together, we did our best to become comfortable with discomfort. We sat together for a long time.

  The son called four days later to say that his father had passed. I shared that I felt I had done little to support them, and yet, the son was insistent I had helped them immensely. Perhaps what they found useful was the opportunity to practice presence. To sit with each other and with the disease and with our mortality, without succumbing to the need to fix or change any part of it.

  Inspired by this family, I managed to do something I’ve never been able to do before. I hate to be confined or tied down, because it sends me careening into panic. For procedures like MRIs, I’ve always asked to be sedated. But last week I decided to try my next routine MRI—I must have them to check my back—without any medication to relax me.

  An MRI machine is dark and confining—and extremely loud. I was put inside and the noise started up. Lying there in my thin hospital gown in the tube, my crooked spine pressed against the cold plastic pad, I felt fear slice through me. The banging was so loud it sounded like bombers were coming to deliver a blast, like the whole building might collapse in a heap of rubble. I thought I was going to scream and kick and have to be pulled out. But I said to myself, “The more noise I hear, the more relaxed I become.” And I did it. I made it for forty minutes in that machine without a pill. The ability to be still with my discomfort didn’t happen overnight. But as the years pass, I keep practicing.

 

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