by Edith Eger
When we say “I can’t,” what we’re really saying is “I won’t.” I won’t accept it. I won’t believe. I won’t escape the fear. I won’t stop policing and monitoring him. The language of fear is the language of resistance. And if we’re resisting, we’re working very hard to ensure that we go nowhere. We deny growth and curiosity. We’re revolving, not evolving, shutting down opportunities for change.
I asked Kathleen to eliminate I can’t from her vocabulary.
If you’re going to take away something, you’ll be more successful if you can replace it with something else. If you’re skipping a cocktail, replace it with another beverage you enjoy. If you want to stop withdrawing and hiding from a loved one, like Robin in an earlier chapter, replace the habit of leaving the room with staying, with regarding your partner with a smile and kind eyes.
I told Kathleen, “Anytime you start to say ‘I can’t,’ replace it with ‘I can.’ ” I can let go of the past. I can stay in the present. I can love and trust myself.
I pointed her to two more fear-based phrases she’d used back-to-back in the first minute of our conversation: I’m trying and I need to.
“You said you’re trying to live in the present,” I said. “But trying is lying. You’re either doing it or you’re not.” If you say, “I’m trying,” you don’t actually have to do it. You let yourself off the hook. “It’s time to stop trying and start doing.”
When we’re on the cusp of taking action, many of us use the phrase “I need to.” It sounds like we’re identifying goals and setting priorities. Kathleen wanted to change the relentless fear and vigilance in her marriage, and she said, “I know I need to learn to trust him again.”
“But that’s another lie,” I told her. “Needs are things without which we can’t survive. Breathing, sleeping, eating.”
We can stop burdening and pressuring ourselves, telling ourselves that something is necessary for our survival when it isn’t. And we can stop looking at our choices as obligations.
“You don’t need to trust your husband,” I said. “You want to. And if you want to, you can choose to.”
When we talk as though we’re forced or obligated or incapable, that’s how we’re going to think, which means that’s also how we’ll feel, and consequently, how we’ll behave. We become captives to fear: I need to do this, or else; I want to do that, but I can’t. To free yourself from the prison, pay attention to your language. Listen for the I can’t, the I’m trying, the I need to, and then see if you can replace these imprisoning phrases with something else: I can, I want, I’m willing, I choose. This is the language that empowers us to change.
Kathleen doesn’t have any guarantees that her husband won’t cheat again. If she leaves the marriage, she has no foolproof armor against being betrayed by someone else. But she has tools to free herself from paralysis.
Whose responsibility is it if your dreams and behaviors aren’t aligned? One patient said he felt he would be more on top of things at work and more patient with his family if he had better sleep habits—but he was still drinking five cups of coffee. Another patient longed for a stable, committed relationship, but she kept waking up in a different man’s bed. These patients’ goals and choices didn’t match. I’m all for positive thinking, but it goes nowhere unless it’s followed by positive action.
And we can stop working so hard to go nowhere.
One of the ways we resist change is by being hard on ourselves. A patient told me she wanted to lose weight, but when she came to see me she’d spend half the session berating herself. “I’m pigging out on ice cream,” she’d say. “I’m pigging out on chocolate cake.” The minute you put yourself down, you’re never going to change. But if you say, “Today I’m not going to put sugar in my cappuccino,” then you’re doing something about it. This is how growth and learning and healing happen—by what you do, little by little, on your own behalf.
Sometimes seemingly trivial changes can have a big impact. Michelle, who had struggled for years with anorexia, had always avoided doughnuts. She’d been afraid of them her whole life—afraid that if she ate one, she’d eat the whole box. Afraid that if she let herself indulge in even one small bite, she’d become fat in an instant. Afraid that she would lose control. Afraid that if she gave herself permission to experience pleasure, if she dared to let go, she’d fall apart.
But she knew that as long as she lived in fear of an old-fashioned glazed, she was still in prison. One morning she summoned her courage, walked into a bakery—even the jingly bell on the door and the smell of sugar made her sweat—and bought two doughnuts and brought them to her therapy session. In a supportive place, with the comfort of her therapist sharing the experience, Michelle let herself feel the fear, all those deep-seated anxieties about her self-image and self-worth, about losing control. And then she got curious about the experience. Together, she and her therapist took bites of doughnut. Michelle felt the crunch of the glazed icing on her tongue. The soft, cakey texture when she bit in. The rush of sugar flooding her body. She turned her anxiety into excitement!
We aren’t born with fear. Somewhere along the way, we learn it.
I’ll never forget the day when Audrey was ten. She had a friend over and they were playing in her room. Just as I walked past her open door with a basket of laundry, an ambulance screamed by, siren blaring, a sound that even now continues to startle me. I was amazed to see Audrey dive straight under her bed. Her friend stared at her, baffled by her reaction. Somehow, probably by seeing me jump at the sound of a siren, my daughter had learned to be afraid. She’d internalized my fear.
Often the emotional responses that get ingrained in us aren’t even our own—they’re ones we’ve learned from watching others. So you can ask yourself, “Is this my fear? Or someone else’s?” If the fear really belongs to your mother or father or grandparent or spouse, you don’t have to carry it anymore. Just put it down. Release your hold. Leave it behind.
Then make a list of the fears that remain.
This is how you begin to face your fears, rather than fighting them, or running from them, or medicating them.
I did this fear exercise with my patient Alison, the professional singer. She was struggling in the wake of a divorce, and dealing with some physical ailments—a vocal tremor, back pain—that hindered her ability to perform. Her list of fears included:
Being alone.
Losing my income.
Being poor, possibly homeless.
Being sick and not having anyone there to help me.
Not being accepted by others.
I asked her to go over her list and decide how realistic each fear was. If it was realistic—a valid concern given the facts of her life—she circled it and put an R next to it. If the fear was unrealistic, she crossed it off her list. She discovered that two of her fears weren’t realistic. With income from royalties and retirement savings, she had a safety net. Even if she lost income, which was likely given the tours she’d had to cancel, it wasn’t likely that she’d lose her house and end up on the streets. She crossed off being poor, possibly homeless. She also crossed off not being accepted by others. Events in her life showed a different truth—that she was an admired performer, a cherished friend. More important, she realized that whether or not she was accepted by someone else wasn’t up to her. She was learning to love herself. What others thought about her was up to them.
The three remaining fears got Rs: being alone, losing my income, and being sick and not having anyone there to help me.
I asked her to generate a list of things she could do today on her own behalf to protect herself and build the life she wanted. If she was afraid of being alone and wanted to be in a relationship again, she could sign up on a dating app, spend a day making eye contact with strangers (you never know who you’ll meet!), go to a Codependents Anonymous meeting so she could enter a new relationship in a healthier place than she’d been when she married her ex. To face her fear of being sick with no one to take care
of her, she could research resources available should she be in need of care. What home health organizations were in the area? What did they cost? Were they covered by insurance? And so on. It’s not that we make our fears go away. We don’t let them dominate. We invite the other voices in the room to do some talking. And then we do something. We take charge. We ask for help.
Often when we’re stuck it’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we’re afraid we won’t do it well enough. We’re self-critical. We hold high standards. We want others’ approval—most of all, our own—and think we can earn it by being Superman or Superwoman. But if you’re perfectionistic, you’re going to procrastinate, because perfect means never.
Here’s another way to think about it. If you’re perfectionistic, you’re competing with God. And you’re human. You’re going to make mistakes. Don’t try to beat God, because God will always win.
It doesn’t take courage to strive for perfection. It takes courage to be average. To say, “I’m okay with me.” To say, “Good enough is good enough.”
Sometimes our fears are painfully realistic, our resources for meeting them limited.
This was the case for Lauren, the mother of two young children who, in her early forties, was diagnosed with cancer. Her disease was its own prison. Her fears about the future—about dying, about her children growing up without her—became a second set of bars. One day she told me what scared her most of all—that she would die without having really lived. She was trapped in an emotionally and physically abusive marriage. She longed to protect her children and live free from her husband’s control and violence. But it seemed impossible to leave. Cancer had rendered her physically and financially vulnerable, compounding an already dangerous situation. To leave seemed too big a risk.
We explored the fact that there’s a difference between stress and distress. Distress is constant threat and uncertainty, like we had in Auschwitz—when we took a shower, we never knew what was going to come out of the spigot, water or gas. Distress is toxic. It can mean never knowing when a bomb will drop on your house, never knowing where you will sleep each night. Stress, on the other hand, is actually a good thing. It requires us to face a challenge, to find creative solutions, to trust ourselves.
It is so challenging and dangerous to leave the cycle of abuse that most women return multiple times to their abuser before breaking free—if they ever do. It would no doubt be challenging for Lauren, too. She would likely struggle—to feed her children on a limited income, to manage a household and her treatment regimen as a single parent. But she would no longer be living every day under the threat of violence. She would no longer be in distress.
Yet leaving would require her to exchange a known reality for an unknown one. This is usually what stops us from taking risks. We’d rather stick with what we know, painful or untenable as it is, than face what we don’t know.
When you risk, you don’t know how it will turn out. It’s possible that you won’t get what you want, that things will be worse. But you’ll still be better off, because you’ll be living in the world as it is, not in an imaginary reality created by your fear.
Lauren decided to leave her husband. She said, “I don’t know how much time I have left. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life being told I’m worthless.”
When I witness patients going nowhere, spinning on a relentless merry-go-round of self-destructive behavior, I confront them.
“Why are you choosing a self-destructive life? Do you want to die?”
They say, “Yes, sometimes I do.”
It’s a profoundly human question: To be or not to be?
I hope you always choose to be. You’re going to be dead anyway someday, and you’ll be dead for a very long time. Why not become curious? Why not see what this life has to offer you?
Curiosity is vital. It’s what allows us to risk. When we’re full of fear, we’re living in a past that already happened, or a future that hasn’t arrived. When we’re curious, we’re here in the present, eager to discover what’s going to happen next. It’s better to risk and grow, and maybe fail, than to remain imprisoned, never knowing what could have been.
KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM PARALYZING FEAR
I can. I want. I’m willing. For one day, keep track of every time you say I can’t, I need, I should, and I’m trying. “I can’t” means I won’t. “I need” and “I should” mean I’m abdicating my freedom of choice. And “I’m trying” is lying. Eliminate this language from your vocabulary. You can’t let go of something unless you replace it with something else. Replace the language of fear with something else: I can, I want, I’m willing, I choose, I am.
Change is synonymous with growth. Do one thing differently today than you did yesterday. If you always drive the same way to work, take a different route—or ride your bike or take a bus. If you’re usually too rushed or preoccupied to chat with the checker at the grocery store, try making eye contact and conversation. If your family is usually too busy to eat together, try sitting down to a meal together without the TV on or cell phones at the table. These small steps might seem inconsequential, but they actually train your brain to know that you’re capable of change, that nothing is locked in stone, that your choices and possibilities are endless. And getting curious about your life helps turn your anxiety into excitement. You don’t have to stay where you are, how you are, doing what you’re doing. Mix things up. You’re not stuck.
Identify your fears. Make a list of your fears. For each fear, ask, “Is this my fear? Or someone else’s?” If it’s a fear you’ve inherited or taken on, cross it off your list. Let it go. It isn’t yours to carry. For each remaining fear, decide how realistic it is. If it is a valid concern given the facts of your life, circle it. For each realistic fear, decide if it causes you distress or stress. Distress is chronic danger and uncertainty. If you’re living in distress, your foremost responsibility is to tend to your safety and survival needs, to the degree that this is possible. Do whatever is in your power to protect yourself. If the fear is causing you stress, acknowledge that stress can be healthy. Notice how stress might be giving you an opportunity to grow. Finally, for each of the realistic fears, generate a list of things you could do today on your own behalf to strengthen yourself and build the life you want.
Chapter 10 THE NAZI IN YOU
The Prison of Judgment
When Audrey and I were in Lausanne, Switzerland, last year, I gave a keynote address to an inspiring group of global executives and leadership coaches at the International Institute of Management Development, one of Europe’s top business schools. At the dinner after my address the guests stunned me with their heartfelt toasts of thanks and appreciation. One man in particular struck me. He was tall, with wavy hair beginning to gray, his thin face dominated by sad, intellectual eyes. He said that my words about forgiveness, in particular, had felt like a gift. Then he began to cry. Tears streaming down his face, he said, “I have a story, too. It is so hard to tell it.”
Audrey caught my eye. Something passed between us, a silent recognition of trauma’s collateral damage, the pain that’s passed on when a secret is kept. When the formal meal concluded, she excused herself and threaded her way through the crowded room to the man’s table. When she returned, she said, “His name is Andreas and you definitely need to hear his story.”
Our schedule was packed, but Audrey arranged for me to have a private lunch with Andreas the next day, before we flew home. In a quiet, thoughtful way, he laid out the pieces of his personal history, jigsaw moments of realization that he had put together over time.
In the first puzzle piece, he’s nine years old and stands with his father at an exhibition in a small village outside Frankfurt. “Son, this is a list of all the mayors of this town,” his father intones, pointing with a heavy finger to one name: Hermann Neumann. Hermann is Andreas’s middle name. His father’s finger taps the name, his tone a peculiar mix of sorrow, anger, longing, and pride as he says, “This is your
grandfather.”
Andreas’s grandfather died a decade before he was born. He had no personal frame of reference, no idea what sort of man he’d been, what it felt like to sit on his knee or hear him tell a story. No one spoke of his grandfather. Instead there was a weighty silence in the place where the family patriarch should have been. Andreas sensed that his absent grandfather had something to do with the darkness that sometimes crept into his father’s and uncles’ eyes. He was too young to understand that there was only one way that someone would have been given a formal administrative post in Germany during the years 1933 to 1945.
It was another nine years before the next puzzle piece crystallized. Andreas had just returned to Germany after a year as an exchange student in Chile. His uncle, after years of struggling with alcoholism, had just passed away, and Andreas went to his apartment to clear out the basement storage space. He stood in the dim room, letting his eyes adjust, surveying the shelves packed with books and belongings, trying to predict how long it would take to empty them, when he saw it. An old wooden suitcase pasted with a sticker that was oddly familiar. He stepped closer, and realized it was a customs sticker from Arica, Chile, stamped with the year 1931. The leather tag on the suitcase bore his grandfather’s name. Why had no one in the family mentioned, when he left for Chile, that his grandfather had also traveled there? And why did finding the suitcase make him feel so unsettled?
He asked his parents about it. His father shrugged and left the room. His mother spoke in vague terms. “I think he was involved in something or other,” she said, “and left for a few months.” The early thirties had been a time of dire economic crisis in Germany. Maybe his grandfather had sought opportunity elsewhere, as other young Germans did during those lean years. Andreas convinced himself this was true, and did his best to ignore the nagging feeling that there was more to the story.