Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  Without the physical scars of abuse, it was difficult for Joy to leave the relationship. (This is another common experience for people trapped in an abusive dynamic—the fear, and too often the reality, that we won’t be believed.) Eventually, realizing it was only a matter of time before her husband acted on his threats, Joy divorced him, and he slowly drank himself to death.

  After he died, anger boiled through her. She had been clinging to the hope that one day he might apologize for the years of unkindness—recognize his mistakes, admit she was right to have left him. When he died, she had to accept that she’d never get an apology. She’d never get to win the fight. In an effort to make peace with the past, she went back to the journals she’d kept. What she read shocked her—not how cruel her husband had been, but how cruel she had been to him.

  “I bullied my husband,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘He’s abusing me,’ but I was doing it right back to him. Keeping the kids from him, denying him things, using the kids as tools to get to him, just because I wanted to hurt him. I was so desperate. I thought there was no other way out. I couldn’t see beyond the terrible situation. But he wasn’t the only one making trouble in our marriage. I was, too.”

  Many volatile relationships are complicated. While nothing excuses domestic violence or abuse, there often isn’t a right person and a wrong person, a good spouse and a bad spouse. Both partners are contaminating the relationship.

  When I met Alison, she’d been divorced for twelve years. Sean, her ex, had entered her life shortly after the end of a tumultuous relationship with a guy who split her lip open during a fight, and then, when she left him, broke into her house and slashed her mattress apart with a knife. Sean swooped in like a savior—a caretaker and cheerleader who helped her feel safe and also helped launch her singing career, managing her tours and recording contracts, setting her up with master classes and performances with legendary musicians.

  Though generous and caring, Sean could also be controlling. Alison relied on him, yet resented him for being in charge of her life, and she began to retaliate, vying for control by starving herself. She was hospitalized three times for an eating disorder, but the self-harm only escalated. When she began burning herself on the arm and leg, Sean lost hope. He had an affair, and then another, and eventually ended their eighteen-year marriage.

  More than a decade later, Alison was still fighting with him. Over intellectual property rights to the songs they’d written together. Over his unfortunate attempt to seduce the student she’d sent to him for professional advice. Their marriage had ended long ago, but they were still locked in a power struggle, both making harmful choices.

  I told Alison if she wanted to bring an end to the hostilities, she needed to look not at the causes of the conflict, but at the maintainers.

  “How are you maintaining a point of view that isn’t serving you anymore?” I asked.

  Alison was preoccupied by the desire to prove Sean’s guilt and her innocence. She essentially had him on trial in her mind, her inner life an ongoing courtroom drama. But it was an unwinnable fight.

  “Honey,” I told her, “you can be dead right—and you’re still dead. So do you want to be happy, or do you want to be right?”

  The best way to let go of the need for control is to become powerful. Power has nothing to do with brawn or domination. It means you have the strength to respond instead of react, to take charge of your life, to have total ownership of your choices. You are powerful because you’re not giving your power away.

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

  Limbering up our thinking can not only alter our relationship, but change our perceptions, the way we see and feel in the world.

  As Alison began to free herself from the prison of rigidity, she was able to draw clearer boundaries with her ex and find renewed agency in her career, and she began planning an international tour. But then two physical challenges emerged suddenly and disturbed her hard-won peace. She developed a severe vocal tremor that made singing a challenge and threatened her career; and she injured her back. It hurt to go about her daily activities, and the things she did for fun and self-care—gardening, yoga—were unavailable until she healed. Her face was drawn into a stiff grimace, and I could hear her pain in the jagged way she spoke.

  “I was doing so well,” she said. “And now I’ll probably have to cancel my tour.”

  Life isn’t fair. And when we’re hurting, our anger, worry, and frustration are completely legitimate. But we can face any circumstance, however unpleasant or unjust, with rigidity or flexibility.

  “When your body hurts,” I told her, “don’t punish it, or resent it, or demand things of it. Say, ‘I’m listening.’ ”

  Alison developed a practice to move from rigidity to flexibility. She started with a statement of the problem, not minimizing or denying her pain or frustration.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “It hurts. It’s inconvenient.”

  Then she stopped resisting and resenting her body, and started listening. She became curious.

  “What do you want to tell me?” she asked. “What’s in my best interest? What serves and empowers me now?”

  For a while, her body told her the same thing: slow down. Rest. So she listened, and eventually her back began to improve. She was able to try a restorative yoga class. Back on the mat, she found that she was able to move more gently and mindfully now that she was less preoccupied with pushing herself and more attuned to her inner experience. Her definition of “getting it right” had changed. Before she hurt her back, she had something to prove—how long she could hold a difficult arm balance, how deeply she could twist. Now she was less imprisoned by expectations.

  We don’t have to like the difficult or painful things that happen to us. But when we stop fighting and resisting, we have more energy and imagination to move forward, instead of nowhere.

  Joy discovered this, too. Like Alison, she’d been stuck in the prison of rigid thinking for years after her divorce, trapped in the mind-set of dichotomies: good/bad, right/wrong, victim/victimizer. Because she saw things in such stark and absolute terms, the stakes were always high—all or nothing, life or death, with nothing in between. This made any conflict, even a minor dispute, feel treacherous. Because there was no room in her mind-set for nuance or complexity, Joy couldn’t bear for anyone to disagree with her.

  “They might as well be pointing at me and saying, ‘You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re worthless,’ ” she said.

  When she discovered a more complex truth—that she had also been culpable in her marriage, that she wasn’t always right—something remarkable happened. Her vision seemed to change. She could perceive colors more intensely. Freed from her black-and-white thinking and rigid interpretation of the past, the world appeared more vivid and vibrant. She drove her children crazy, pointing at flowers—yellow, red, purple, blue—saying, “Look at that! Look! Look!”

  Flexibility is strength. I learned it when I was training as a gymnast, and it’s why I go swing dancing as often as my body can handle, why I end each speech with a high kick.

  And it’s true for the psyche as well as for the body. You’re strong when you’re supple and limber. So get up each morning and stretch. Develop the mental range of motion that keeps you free.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM RIGIDITY

  Give a gentle embrace. Choose a current challenge in your life—an injury or physical ailment, an ongoing tension or conflict, or any circumstance that has you feeling restricted, limited, or confined. Start by speaking your truth. What don’t you like about it? How does it make you feel? Then get curious. Ask, “What is this situation telling me? What’s in my best interest? What serves and empowers me now?”

  Meet others as they are. Write down the name of a person with whom you’re in conflict. Then write all your complaints about this person. For example: My daughter is rude and ungrateful. She ca
lls me names and uses toxic language. She has no respect for me. She flat-out ignores me and breaks curfew. Now, rewrite the list; this time, state what you observe, without any editorializing, interpretation, judgment, or assumptions. Eliminate rigid words like “always” and “never.” Simply state the facts: Sometimes my daughter raises her voice and uses swear words. Once or twice a week, she comes home later than 11:00 p.m.

  Cooperation, not domination. Choose one thing from your list of observations that you’d like to address with the other person. Find a neutral time to talk—not in the heat of conflict. First, say what you notice: “I’ve noticed that a couple of times a week you come home later than 11:00 p.m.” Then, get curious about the other person’s point of view. A simple question works best: “What’s up?” Next, without blaming or shaming the other person, say what you want: “It’s important to me that you get enough sleep during the week. And I’d like to know that you’re home safe before I go to bed.” Finally, invite the person to collaborate on a plan: “What ideas do you have for a solution that works for both of us?” It’s okay if the conflict isn’t resolved right away. The important thing is to shift into a cooperative way of addressing conflict—to privilege the relationship over either person’s need for power and control.

  Treat others as they are capable of becoming. Visualize a person with whom you’re experiencing conflict. Now envision this person’s highest self. It might help to close your eyes and picture the person surrounded by light. Put your hand over your heart. Say, “I see you.”

  Chapter 8 WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MARRIED TO YOU?

  The Prison of Resentment

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

  My resentment toward Béla—for his impatience and temper, for the ways he remained stuck in the past, for the disappointment that sometimes showed in his face when he looked at our son—festered for so many years that I thought the only way to be free was to divorce him. It was only after we’d split, and completely disrupted our children’s lives, not to mention our own, that I realized my disappointment and anger had little to do with Béla—and everything to do with me, with my own unfinished emotional business and unresolved grief.

  The suffocation I felt in our marriage wasn’t Béla’s fault; it was the price of all the years I’d spent disowning my feelings: sorrow for my mother, who gave up an independent, cosmopolitan life working for a consulate in Budapest, and gave up a man she loved but was forbidden to marry because he wasn’t Jewish, to do what others expected her to do. Fear of repeating the loneliness of my parents’ marriage. Grief over my first love, Eric, who died in Auschwitz. And grief for my parents. I got married and became a mother before I’d come to terms with my losses. And suddenly I was forty, the age my mother had been when she died. It felt like I was running out of time to live how I wanted to live: free. But instead of finding freedom by discovering my own genuine purpose and direction, I decided that freedom meant being away from Béla’s yelling, cynicism, irritation, and disappointment—from the things I imagined limited me.

  When we’re angry, it’s often because there’s a gap between our expectations and reality. We think it’s the other person who’s trapping and aggravating us—but the real prison is our unrealistic expectations. Often, we marry like Romeo and Juliet, without really knowing each other. We fall in love with love, or with an image of a person to whom we’ve assigned all the traits and characteristics we crave, or with someone with whom we can repeat the familiar patterns we learned in our families of origin. Or we present a false self, seeking love and a secure relationship by giving up who we really are. Falling in love is a chemical high. It feels amazing—and it’s temporary. When the feeling fades, we’re left with a lost dream, with a sense of loss over the partner or relationship we never had in the first place. So many salvageable relationships are abandoned in despair.

  But love isn’t what you feel. It’s what you do.

  There’s no going back to the early days of a relationship, to the time before you became angry and disappointed and cut off. There’s something better: a renaissance. A new beginning.

  Marina, a dancer and performance artist, was trying to figure out if such a rebirth was possible in her marriage—whether she and her husband could move forward together in a healthy way, or if the way to freedom meant finally letting go of the relationship.

  “We’ve been fighting every day for eighteen years,” she told me, twisting her long hair into a loose bun. Sometimes the fights were violent. Her husband didn’t hit her, but he acted out—shoved chairs, threw his phone against the wall, overturned the bed she was sitting on.

  “I try to avoid being at home,” she said, “because every conversation turns into him telling me what I did wrong.” Afraid to stand up to him, afraid to walk out of the room when he was raging, she tried to maintain her dignity and keep the peace. But she was losing self-respect, feeling more and more disempowered. And she was worried about how the constant fighting was affecting their teenage daughter. She didn’t want to continue as things were, yet was unsure how to chart a path forward—unclear about her options.

  Every choice has a price, something you gain, and something you lose. One choice we can always make is to do nothing. To decide not to decide. To keep on going the way we are. At the other extreme, Marina could decide to leave the relationship and file for divorce.

  “You don’t have to be stuck,” I told her. “You don’t have to sit there in a bad situation.” However, I cautioned, a divorce can be an extreme way of continuing to do nothing. “What do you gain from a divorce? It gives you a piece of paper that says you’re now free to marry someone else.”

  Divorce doesn’t resolve the emotional business of the relationship. It just gives you legal permission to repeat the same pattern with someone else! It doesn’t make you free. Whether Marina decided to leave her husband or stay in the marriage, her work was the same: to uncover the needs and expectations she brought to the marriage, and to heal the wounds she had brought with her, that she would keep carrying for the rest of her life until she dealt with them.

  We examined her expectations first. “Did you know about your husband’s anger when you married him?” I asked.

  She shook her head vehemently. “He wins hearts,” she said. An accomplished actor, he knows how to make his audience fall in love with him. Before they were married, she only saw this side of him—the charmer, the philosopher, the romantic. “Now the shoes fly.”

  “So what keeps you there?” I asked. As I’ve said, every behavior satisfies a need. Even an imprisoning and terrifying situation can serve us in some way. “Do you need the financial security? Or maybe you need the fighting?”

  “I’m scared to be alone.”

  We all carry a fear of abandonment from infancy. But as she described her childhood in Western Europe, it was clear that her fear of abandonment had been compounded by outright neglect. When she was fourteen, her father said he could no longer stand to live with her mother, and left. He never once came back to visit his children—he didn’t even call to check in. Marina’s mother was too distraught to cope with the needs of the family, so Marina stepped in to fill the role, putting the younger children to bed, staying up late to bake bread and prepare food for the next day.

  A year later, when the Berlin Wall came down, her mother made her own devastating announcement. She’d met an East German man through a newspaper ad. She was moving to former East Germany to be with him, taking the younger children with her. Marina would stay behind. She’d have to fend for herself. She handed Marina the rental agreement for a room in a house and left the next day. She didn’t so much as call for more than a year.

  The fact that Marina survived at all is a huge testament to her inner strength and resiliency. She stayed in the rental house for a few months until new tenants moved in, including a father who tried to seduce her, coming to her room at night with a glass of wine. She broke her lease, left school, and move
d from town to town throughout Western Europe, working multiple jobs, house-sitting for people away on vacation, at one point living on an artists’ commune, another time staying at a rehabilitation farm where people in recovery came to take care of horses. She developed a dangerous eating disorder, convinced that she must be a terrible person to have been left by both her parents, thinking that if she could make herself disappear, maybe her parents would finally notice she was missing. When Marina was sixteen, the owner of the rehab farm, herself an active alcoholic, turned Marina out. She stood on the street with a suitcase in each hand, homeless and alone. In despair, she called her mom and begged for help. But her mother was still steeped in her own struggle and refused.

  “From that moment on, I knew I was completely alone in the world,” Marina said.

  In her early twenties, she moved to Berlin in search of better work opportunities, and through connections began to train with a performance group, living in an old trailer in the backyard of her school. It wasn’t an easy life. The trailer was unheated. She froze her way through the fierce Berlin winters, endured rigorous training. But the new life suited her. While dancing, she felt strong and free. She couldn’t starve herself and detach from her body anymore, and for the first time, she no longer wanted to. She had discovered passion and purpose: the joy of moving her body, the power of movement and expression.

  She fell in love with another performer, who’d grown up in East Germany during the Cold War. It was difficult for him to communicate his emotions, to show love.

  “Like my parents, I guess,” Marina said ruefully.

  Two years after they broke up, he died by suicide. Intellectually she knew his death wasn’t her fault, that even if they’d stayed together, she couldn’t have saved him. But the loss hit her hard.