Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  Until I could face the truth, I had my secret, and my secret had me.

  My secret also had my children, in ways I’m still growing to understand. The childhood memories Marianne, Audrey, and John have shared—the fear and tension they sensed under the surface without knowing what it was about—are similar to what I’ve read in letters from readers around the world who are children of Holocaust survivors.

  Ruth, whose parents were Hungarian survivors, told me about the impact her parents’ silence had on her growing up. On the one hand, she had a wonderful childhood. Her father and mother were outwardly joyful and relieved to have immigrated to Australia, happy to be able to offer their children a good education, to send them to ballet and piano classes, to raise them in a peaceful environment, to celebrate their accomplishments and friendships. “We’re lucky,” they’d often say. “Thank goodness.” There was no obvious stamp of trauma.

  But there was a disconnect between Ruth’s inner and outer experience. Her parents’ positivity about the present in contrast with their silence about the past left her feeling anxious. A sense of foreboding threaded its way through many experiences, however pleasurable or mundane. Picking up on her parents’ unspoken trauma and fear, she, too, developed a belief that something was wrong, that something terrible was about to happen. She became a successful psychiatrist and a mother, but no matter how accomplished she was, she harbored a chronic sense of dread and asked, Why do I feel this way? Even her professional training in psychiatry didn’t give her the right lens to understand.

  When he turned nineteen, Ruth’s youngest son asked her to take him and his brother to Hungary. He wanted to learn more about his grandparents, who were no longer alive. And with the rise of right-wing extremism around the globe, and an understanding that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, he felt especially committed to knowing more about the past. But Ruth balked. She’d been to Hungary as a young woman, during the height of Communism, and it had not been a pleasant experience. She had no desire to return.

  Then a friend recommended a book to her—The Choice!—and reading it gave her new courage and a strong imperative to face her parents’ past. She agreed to the trip.

  It turned out that retracing her parents’ past with her sons was an intensely transformative and healing experience. They visited a synagogue that houses an exhibition on the Budapest ghetto. For the first time, she saw pictures that detailed what her mother had lived through. It was painful and difficult to take in the truth. But it was also helpful and empowering. She gained insight and a new sense of connection to her parents—she understood why they’d been so reluctant to talk about the past, appreciating that they were trying to protect her, and themselves. But hiding or minimizing our truth doesn’t protect our loved ones. Protecting them means working to heal the past so we don’t inadvertently pass the trauma on to them. As Ruth confronted her family’s legacy, she was able to feel congruence within herself. To come to terms with the root of her anxiety and begin to release it.

  My healing didn’t start until a fellow student at the University of Texas gave me a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and I finally worked up the courage to read it. I had so many excuses, so many reasons to resist: I don’t need to read someone else’s account of Auschwitz, I told myself. I was there! Why feel the pain all over again? Why open myself up to nightmares? Why revisit hell? But when I finally cracked the book open in the middle of the night while my family slept and the house was quiet, something unexpected happened: I felt seen. Frankl had been where I’d been. It felt like he was speaking directly to me. Our experiences weren’t identical. He was in his thirties when he was imprisoned, already an acclaimed psychiatrist; I was a sixteen-year-old gymnast and ballet student dreaming of my boyfriend. But the way he wrote about our shared past changed my life. I saw a new possibility for myself—a way to give up secrets and hiding, to stop fighting and running away from the past. His words—and later, his mentorship—gave me the courage and inspiration to face and express my truth, and in speaking my secret, reclaim my genuine self.

  Reckoning and release are impossible when we keep secrets—when we operate under a code of denial, delusion, or minimization.

  Sometimes the demand to keep a secret is unspoken or unconscious. Sometimes others buy our silence with threats or force. Either way, secrets are harmful because they create and sustain a climate for shame, and shame is the bottom line of any addiction. Freedom comes from facing and telling the truth—and, as I’ll explore in the next chapter, this is only possible when we create a climate of love and acceptance within ourselves.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM SECRETS

  If you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half-assed. Place two chairs side by side. Begin by sitting on one chair, legs uncrossed. Feel the way your feet rest against the floor. Feel your sit bones heavy on the chair. Feel your spine lengthen out of your pelvis, your head extend from your neck. Soften your shoulders away from your ears. Take a few deep, nourishing breaths, lengthening with the inhale, grounding with the exhale. Now move so you are sitting with one butt cheek on one chair, the other cheek on the other chair. Check in with your feet, your sit bones, your spine, neck, head, and shoulders. How do your body and breath feel when you straddle two chairs? Finally, return to one chair. Ground your feet and sit bones. Lengthen your spine and neck. You’re back home. Follow your breath as you realign and become congruent.

  Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself. Try the Vital Signs exercise that Robin used to heal her marriage. Several times a day, make a conscious effort to check in with your body and take your own emotional temperature. Ask yourself, “Do I feel soft and warm, or cold and stiff?”

  Tell the truth in the safe presence of others. Support groups and twelve-step programs can be a wonderful place to share your truth—and learn from others who are doing the same. Find a local or online meeting where you will be in the company of people who can relate to and empathize with your experience. Attend at least three meetings before you decide whether or not it’s for you.

  Chapter 5 NO ONE REJECTS YOU BUT YOU

  The Prison of Guilt and Shame

  It took me decades to forgive myself for surviving.

  I graduated from college in 1969. I was forty-two years old, a mother of three, an immigrant. It had required significant courage and resources to learn English and return to school. And I was graduating with honors!

  But I didn’t go to my graduation ceremony. I was too ashamed.

  Like many survivors, in the years after the war I’d grappled with crippling guilt. It had been twenty-four years since my sister Magda and I were liberated. But I still couldn’t understand why I had lived when my parents and grandparents and six million others had perished. Even an occasion of celebration and accomplishment was tainted by my certainty that I was damaged goods, unworthy of joy, that every bad thing was somehow my fault, that it was only a matter of time before everyone discovered how broken I was.

  Guilt is when you blame yourself, when you believe something is your fault. It’s important to separate guilt from remorse. Remorse is an appropriate response to a harmful mistake we’ve made or a wrong we’ve committed. It’s more akin to grief. It means accepting that the past is the past, that it can’t be undone, and allowing yourself to feel sad about it. I can feel remorse and recognize that all I’ve lived through, all the choices I’ve made, have brought me to today. Remorse is in the present. And it can coexist with forgiveness and freedom.

  But guilt keeps you stuck. It’s rooted in shame—when you believe “I’m not worthy”; when you think that you’re not enough, that nothing is enough, no matter what you do. Guilt and shame can be extremely debilitating. But they’re not real assessments of who we are. They’re a pattern of thought that we choose and get stuck in.

  You always have a choice about what to do with the information life hands you. I once gave a lecture at a conference, and midway throug
h my presentation, a dignified-looking man walked out. I almost froze on the stage, caught up in a barrage of negative self-talk: “I’m no good. I don’t deserve to have been invited to present at this conference. I’m out of my league.” A few minutes later, the auditorium door opened, and the same man came back in and sat down. He’d probably just gotten up to have some water or use the restroom, but by that time I’d already put myself under the guillotine.

  No one is born with shame. But for many of us, the shame message starts early. When Lindsey, my oldest grandchild, was in elementary school, she was placed in a class for “talented and gifted” children (the very notion of this label frustrates me—all children are talented and gifted, one-of-a-kind diamonds!). She sometimes had trouble keeping up, and her teacher began to call her “my little caboose.” Precious Lindsey took her teacher’s words to heart. She became convinced that she wasn’t capable enough to be in the class, that she didn’t belong, that she wasn’t worthy. She was ready to drop out. But I talked to her about the importance of not letting her teacher define her. So she stayed in the class. And years later, when she wrote her college admittance essay, she titled it, “When the Caboose Became the Engine.” She graduated with honors from Princeton.

  My shame messages began early, too, at age three, when I became cross-eyed. Before I had surgery to correct my eye, my sisters would sing cruel songs: you’re so ugly and puny you’ll never find a husband. Even my mother would say, “It’s a good thing you’re smart, because you have no looks.” These were difficult messages, and hard to unlearn. But ultimately the trouble wasn’t what my family told me. The trouble was that I believed it.

  And kept believing it.

  When Marianne and Rob and their kids lived in La Jolla, I used to go to their house every Monday to cook dinner. Sometimes I made American food, sometimes Hungarian. It was the highlight of my week, nourishing my grandchildren, feeling a part of their daily lives. One evening I was in the kitchen with pots bubbling and pans sizzling on the stove. Marianne came home from work in her beautiful silk suit and immediately began pulling lids out of the cupboard, matching each one to the correct pot. My heart sank. I was trying to be helpful, to make my family happy, and there she was, showing me that I wasn’t doing it right. That I wasn’t good enough. It took me a while to realize that the message of my failure wasn’t coming from Marianne—it was coming from me. To counteract my belief that I was damaged, I strove for perfection, believing I could achieve and perform my way out of shame. But we’re human, no more, no less, and human means fallible. Freedom lies in accepting our whole, imperfect selves and giving up the need for perfection.

  Ultimately, guilt and shame don’t come from the outside. They come from the inside. Many of my patients seek out therapy when they’re going through a painful divorce or breakup. They’re grieving the death of a relationship, and the disappearance of all the hopes, dreams, and expectations it represented. But usually they don’t talk about the grief—they talk about the feeling of rejection. “He rejected me.” “She rejected me.” But rejection is just a word we make up to express the feeling we have when we don’t get what we want. Who said everyone should love us? Which god said that we should get what we want, when we want it, how we want it, the way we want it? And who said that having it all is any guarantee? No one rejects you but you.

  So choose the meaning you make. When I give a speech and receive a standing ovation and embrace a hundred people afterward who greet me with tears and say, “You changed my life,” and then one person shakes my hand and says, “Your talk was very good, but…,” I can choose how I respond. I can fall into a pit of insecurity, thinking, “Oh my god, what did I do wrong?” Or I can recognize that the critique might have more to do with the people offering it than with me—with the expectations they brought to the lecture, or with the way they feel strong and intelligent by finding something to criticize. Or I can ask myself, “Is there anything helpful here that can support my growth and creativity?” Whether I plan to integrate the feedback, or release it, I can say, “Thank you for your opinion” and move on.

  If we’re to live free of shame, we don’t let others’ evaluations define us.

  And most of all, we choose how we talk to ourselves.

  Spend a day listening to your self-talk. Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to—that’s what you reinforce. These thoughts will influence how you feel. And how you feel is going to dictate how you act. But you don’t have to live by these standards and messages. You weren’t born with shame. Your genuine self is already beautiful. You were born with love and joy and passion, and you can rewrite your internal script and reclaim your innocence. You can become a whole person.

  For as long as Michelle can remember, when people met her on the street they’d say, “I would give anything to be you.” Tall, thin, beautiful, professionally successful, with a lovely, soft energy that people wanted to be near, she was picture-perfect on the outside—and dying inside.

  Countless times I’ve seen this devastating dynamic in my practice: driven husband, wife who is a very good actress—the “hostess with the mostest.” She’s faultlessly kind and generous to others, but not a very good caretaker to herself. He’s an actor, too, very loving and romantic when company is there, but in private, becoming more like her boss or parent, telling her what she should and shouldn’t do, how she should spend her time and money. By pleasing, placating, and accommodating in reaction to the husband’s dominance, the wife abdicates her adult power, lets him make all the decisions. And then gets even by depriving herself of food because it’s the one thing she can control. She detaches from and minimizes her feelings of powerlessness by literally minimizing herself—making her body smaller and smaller. In the direst cases, even when she wants to start eating again, she can’t. Her body rejects the nutrients.

  Michelle had a very entrenched eating disorder by the time she began therapy (not with me—with a wonderful practitioner in her city). But it wasn’t anorexia that drove her to seek help—it was problems in her marriage. Her husband was often dismissive and unkind, leaving her feeling like a scared kid with an angry dad. She knew rationally that she was a strong, successful, middle-aged woman, not a powerless child. But inside, she was terrified to stand up to him. When his outbursts of anger began to worry and frighten their children, she knew she needed new tools.

  But learning to stand up for herself meant opening up her intense shame—all the pain she was trying to hold down by starving. When she started eating again—a process I always recommend doing under supervision of a medical doctor or in a specialized in- or outpatient program—all the trauma and feelings she’d tried to keep at bay rose up like a tidal wave. Childhood sexual abuse, a mother who was dismissive and emotionally cut off, parents who punished her with beatings, or worse, turned her invisible, not speaking to her at all, treating her as if she wasn’t there. It was overwhelming to feel the terror and pain, to let the past in. She could only do it in small doses. She’d allow herself to feel, and then starve herself, allow herself to feel, then starve again.

  The process brought up an excruciating fear of abandonment.

  “I’ve always clung to the people I feel care about me, that see me, hear me, accept the real me,” Michelle said. “When I was a kid, it was a teacher I felt safe with. As I got older, it was a professor, then my therapist. There’s always a person I’m anxiously attached to. Logically, as an adult in my forties, I know I’m safe and cared for. Yet often I feel like that eight-year-old girl again, terrified that I’m going to lose love, terrified that I’m going to do something that’ll make others not care about me.”

  Remember, you’re the only one you’ll never lose. You can look outside yourself to feel cherished—or you can learn to cherish yourself.

  Three years since beginning therapy, Michelle has made tremendous progress. She’s eating healthy foods in healthy portions. She’s no longer exercising in excess. She’s able to tell her husband when his critici
sm is hurtful, and use mindfulness techniques to ease the fear responses in her body. And she continues to work on releasing the shame she carries, shame that emerges in three harmful thought patterns: it’s my fault, I don’t deserve it, and it could have been worse.

  She told me, “I keep thinking, ‘Why didn’t I do things differently?’ Logically, I know it wasn’t my fault, the things that happened to me, but there’s a part of me that’s still struggling with really believing it.”

  If you want to take charge of your thinking, first examine what you’re practicing, and then decide: is it empowering or depleting me? Before you say anything, especially to yourself, ask, “Is it kind and loving?”

  Michelle’s childhood ended when the sexual and physical abuse began when she was eight, just at the age when our frontal lobes begin to develop, and we start to think logically. We want to understand things. But certain things we’ll never understand. Sometimes we develop guilt in order to gain a sense of control over things that are completely out of our control, that we didn’t cause or choose.

  “Stop trying to find a reason for the abuse,” I said, “and start practicing kindness. Pick an arrow that you follow.”

  “Ah, kindness,” she said, letting out a low laugh. “Being kind to others has always come naturally. But being kind to myself is a struggle. At some level, I think I don’t deserve the goodness in my life. I don’t fully believe it’s okay for me to be happy.”

  “You can say, ‘That used to be me.’ And regain power over your thinking. One word is all you need: permission. I give myself permission for pleasure.’ ”

  She began to cry.

  “Honey, take back your power.”

  But she was using minimization instead, telling herself things could be so much worse. Even though she got hit with a paddle, at least her parents didn’t put cigarettes out on her arm, she’d tell herself.