by Edith Eger
It was the same question I was still asking myself. I had begun working with my Jungian therapist again, and despite his admonition that degrees don’t replace inner work, inner growth, I had been toying with the idea of graduate school. I wanted to understand why people choose to do one thing and not another, how we meet everyday challenges and survive devastating experiences, how we live with our past and our mistakes, how people heal. What if my mother had had someone to talk to? Could she have had a happier marriage with my father, or chosen a different life? And what about my students—or my own son—the ones who said can’t instead of can. How could I help people to transcend self-limiting beliefs, to become who they were meant to be in the world? I told my principal I was considering getting my doctorate in psychology. But I couldn’t speak my dream without a caveat. “I don’t know,” I said, “by the time I finish school I’ll be fifty.” He smiled at me. “You’re going to be fifty anyhow,” he said.
In the next six years, I discovered that my principal and my Jungian therapist were both right. There was no reason to limit myself, to let my age restrict my choices. I listened to what my life was asking of me, and in 1974 I earned an MA in educational psychology from the University of Texas–El Paso, and in 1978 a PhD in clinical psychology from Saybrook University.
My academic journey introduced me to the work of Martin Seligman and Albert Ellis, and brought me inspiring teachers and mentors in Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, all of whom helped me to understand parts of myself and my own experience. Martin Seligman, who later founded a new branch of our field called Positive Psychology, did some research in the late 1960s that answered a question that had nagged at me since liberation day at Gunskirchen in May 1945: Why did so many inmates wander out of the gates of the camp only to return to the muddy, festering barracks? Frankl had noted the same phenomenon at Auschwitz. Psychologically, what was at work to make a liberated prisoner reject freedom?
Seligman’s experiments—which were done with dogs and unfortunately preceded current protections against cruelty to animals—taught him about the concept he called “learned helplessness.” When dogs who were given painful shocks were able to stop the shocks by pressing a lever, they learned quickly to stop the pain. And they were able, in subsequent experiments, to figure out how to escape painful shocks administered in a kennel cage by leaping over a small barrier. Dogs who hadn’t been given a means to stop the pain, however, had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it. When they were put in a kennel cage and administered shocks, they ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and whimpered. From this Seligman concluded that when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering or improve our lives, we stop taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is no point. This is what happened at the camps, when former inmates left through the gates only to return to prison, to sit vacantly, unsure what to do with their freedom now that it had finally come.
Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs. In my studies, I gravitated toward psychologists whose work revealed our power to effect change in ourselves. Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a precursor to cognitive behavior therapy, taught me the extent to which we teach ourselves negative feelings about ourselves—and the negative and self-defeating behaviors that follow from these feelings. He showed that underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviors is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of our self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a belief, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.
I watched Ellis conduct a therapy session onstage one day, working with a confident and articulate young woman who was frustrated by her dating experiences. She felt she wasn’t able to attract the kind of men she wanted to have a long-term relationship with, and she was seeking advice on how to meet and connect with eligible men. She said that she tended to feel shy and tense when she met a man she thought might be a good fit, and that she behaved in a guarded and defensive manner that masked her true self and her true interest in getting to know him. In just a few minutes, Dr. Ellis guided her to the core belief underlying her dating encounters—the irrational belief that, without realizing it, she kept repeating to herself, over and over, until she became convinced of its truth: I’m never going to be happy. After a lousy date she wasn’t only telling herself, Oops, I did it again, I was stiff and uninviting, she was also reverting to her core belief that she could never achieve happiness so there was no point trying. It was the fear produced by this core belief that made her so reluctant to risk showing her genuine self, which in turn made it more likely that her self-defeating belief might come true.
It was profound to see her self-image shift visibly right there on the stage. She seemed to slip out of the negative belief like she was shrugging off an old bathrobe. Suddenly her eyes were brighter, she sat taller, her chest and shoulders were more open and expansive, as if she were creating a greater surface area for happiness to land. Dr. Ellis cautioned her that she was unlikely to have an amazing date right out of the gate. He also said that accepting the discomfort of disappointing dates was part of the work of ridding herself of the negative belief.
The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem—and the foundation of our persistent suffering—is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve. Although my way of building rapport is different from Dr. Ellis’s, his skill at guiding patients to reframe and reform their damaging thoughts has influenced my practice profoundly.
Carl Rogers, one of my most influential mentors, was a master of helping patients to fully accept themselves. Rogers theorized that when our need to self-actualize comes into conflict with our need for positive regard, or vice versa, we might choose to repress or hide or neglect our genuine personalities and desires. When we come to believe that there is no way to be loved and to be genuine, we are at risk of denying our true nature.
Self-acceptance was the hardest part of healing for me, something I still struggle with. Perfectionism emerged in my childhood as a behavior to satisfy my need for approval, and it became an even more embedded coping mechanism for dealing with my survivor’s guilt. Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken—you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing. In trying to combat my low self-esteem, I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness. In learning to offer my patients total love and acceptance, I fortunately learned the importance of offering the same to myself.
Rogers was brilliant at being able to validate patients’ feelings, to help them reframe their self-concept without denying their truth. He offered unconditional positive regard, and in the safety of that total acceptance, his patients were able to shed their masks and inhibitions and inhabit their own lives more authentically. From Dr. Rogers I learned two of my most important phrases in any therapeutic encounter: I hear you say … and Tell me more. I also learned how to read my patients’ body language and how to use my own body to communicate my unconditional love and acceptance. I don’t cross my arms or my legs—I open myself. I make eye contact, I lean forward, I create a bridge between myself and my patients, so that they know I am with them 100 percent. I mirror my patients’ states (if they want to sit quietly, I sit quietly too; if they want to rage and scream, I scream with them; I adap
t my language to my patients’ language) as a sign of total acceptance. And I model a way of being (breathing, opening, moving, listening) that can promote growth and healing.
Studying Seligman and Ellis, and working with Rogers, among others, helped me to become a good listener and synthesizer, and helped me to derive my eclectic and intuitive insight- and cognitive-oriented therapeutic approach. If I had to name my therapy I’d probably call it Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE—about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression. And to be free is to live in the present. If we are stuck in the past, saying, “If only I had gone there instead of here …” or “If only I had married someone else …,” we are living in a prison of our own making. Likewise if we spend our time in the future, saying, “I won’t be happy until I graduate …” or “I won’t be happy until I find the right person.” The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
These are the tools my patients use to liberate themselves from role expectations, to be kind and loving parents to themselves, to stop passing on imprisoning beliefs and behaviors, to discover that love comes out as the answer in the end. I guide patients to understand both what causes and what maintains their self-defeating behaviors. The self-defeating behaviors first emerged as useful behaviors, things they did to satisfy a need, usually a need for one of the As: approval, affection, attention. Once patients can see why they developed a certain behavior (belittling others, attaching oneself to angry people, eating too little, eating too much, etc.), they can take responsibility for whether or not they maintain the behavior. They can choose what to give up (the need for approval, the need to go shopping, the need to be perfect, etc.)—because even freedom doesn’t come for free! And they can learn to take better care of themselves and to discover self-acceptance: Only I can do what I can do the way I can do it.
For me, learning that only I can do what I can do the way I can do it meant overthrowing the compulsive achiever in me, who was always chasing more and more pieces of paper in the hopes of affirming my worth. And it meant learning to reframe my trauma, to see in my painful past evidence of my strength and gifts and opportunities for growth, rather than confirmation of my weakness or damage.
In 1975, I traveled to Israel to conduct interviews with Holocaust survivors for my dissertation. (Béla accompanied me; I thought that his facility with languages, including Yiddish, which he had picked up from his El Paso clients, would make him an invaluable translator.) I wanted to explore my professor Richard Farson’s calamity theory of growth, which says: Very often it is the crisis situation … that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result of such calamities the person often makes a major reassessment of his life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of his own capabilities, values, and goals. I planned to interview my fellow concentration camp survivors to discover how a person survives and even thrives in the wake of trauma. How do people create lives of joy, purpose, and passion, no matter what wounds they have suffered, no matter what sorrows they have experienced? And in what ways does the trauma itself give people an opportunity for positive growth and change? I wasn’t yet doing what my friend Arpad had advised me to do—grapple deeply with my own past—but I was getting one step closer in interviewing people with whom I shared a traumatic past, laying a foundation for my own healing to come.
How did the experience of calamitous events contribute to my subjects’ everyday functioning? I met survivors who had gone back to school, who had opened businesses (as Béla and I had planned to do), who had built tremendous close friendships, who faced daily life with a sense of discovery. Israel wasn’t an easy place for survivors; it’s not easy to live amid prejudice and not become an aggressor yourself. I met people who faced the political and cultural conflicts with courage and peacefulness, who took turns standing guard at a school all night so bombs wouldn’t greet their children in the morning. I admired them for whatever it was that allowed them not to give up or give in, I admired their strength for living through another war and for not allowing horrific experiences in the past to destroy what came after. Having endured imprisonment, dehumanization, torture, starvation, and devastating loss did not dictate the kind of life that was possible for them.
Of course, not everyone I interviewed was thriving. I saw a lot of silent parents, a lot of children who didn’t know how to feel about their parents’ silence and numbness, who blamed themselves. And I met a lot of survivors who remained in the past. “Never, ever will I forgive,” many told me. To them forgiveness meant forgetting or condoning. Many of the people I interviewed harbored revenge fantasies. I had never fantasized about revenge, but especially during those first challenging years in Baltimore, I had fantasized about confronting my oppressors—I wanted to find Mengele in Paraguay, where he had fled to escape prosecution under the Nuremberg Trials. I imagined posing as an American journalist to gain entry to his house. Then I would reveal my identity. “I’m the girl who danced for you,” I would say. “You murdered my parents. You murdered so many children’s parents. How could you be so cruel? You were a medical doctor. You took the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. You’re a cold-blooded killer. Do you have no conscience?” I would rage and rage at his withered, retreating body, I would make him face his shame. It’s important to assign blame to the perpetrators. Nothing is gained if we close our eyes to wrong, if we give someone a pass, if we dismiss accountability. But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.
All of the survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn to thrive. In my dissertation research, I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free.
Before we leave Israel, Béla and I visit Bandi and Marta Vadasz, the friends Béla had left waiting at the train station in Vienna. They live in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. It is a poignant encounter, a meeting with our unlived life, the life we almost had. Bandi is still very political, still a Zionist, eager to discuss the anticipated peaceful agreement between Israel and Egypt over Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. He can recite with precision details of Arab bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He and Béla keep us at the table long after we’ve finished eating, enthusiastically debating Israel’s military strategy. The men talk about war. Marta turns to me, she takes my hand. Her face is plumper than it was in her youth, her red hair duller now, going gray.
“Editke, the years have been kinder to you,” she says with a sigh.
“It’s my mother’s good genes,” I say. And then the selection line flashes through my mind, the smoothness of my mother’s face. This moment is a ghost that trails me through the years.
Marta must notice that my mind has traveled someplace else, that a darkness holds me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to say you’ve had it easy.”
“You gave me a compliment,” I reassure her. “You’re how I have always remembered you. So kind.” When her baby was born dead, she didn’t let my healthy baby sour our friendship, she was never jealous or bitter. I took Marianne with me every afternoon to visit her, every afternoon of her year of mourning.
She seems to read my mind. “You know,” she says, “nothing in my life was harder than losing my baby after the war. That grief was so terrible.” She pauses. We sit together in silence, in our shared and separate pain. “I don’t think I ever thanked you,” she finally says. “When we buried my child, you told me two things that I’
ve never forgotten. You said, ‘Life will be good again.’ And you said, ‘If you can survive this, you can survive anything.’ I’ve said those phrases to myself over and over.” She reaches into her purse for photographs of her children, two daughters born in Israel in the early 1950s. “I was too afraid to try again right away. But life has a way of working out, I guess. I grieved and grieved. And then I took all the love I had for my baby, and I decided I wasn’t going to plant that love in my loss. I was going to plant it in my marriage, and then in the children who lived.”
I hold her fingers in my hand. I hold the beautiful image of the seed. The seed of my life and love has been forced into difficult soil, but it has taken root and grown. I look at Béla across the table, I think of our children, of the news Marianne has recently told me, that she and her husband, Rob, are going to try to start a family. The next generation. This is where my love for my parents will live.
“Next year in El Paso,” we promise as we part.
At home, I wrote my dissertation and completed my final clinical internship at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss, Texas. I had been fortunate to secure both master’s- and doctoral-level internships at William Beaumont. It was a competitive and desirable placement, a prestigious post, where the best of the best speakers and teachers cycled through. I didn’t realize that the true benefit of the position would be that it would require me to look more deeply within.
One day I arrive at work and slip on my white coat and my name tag, DR. EGER, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY. During my time at William Beaumont, I have developed a reputation as a person willing to go above and beyond the technical requirements of my position—to stay up all night on suicide watch, to take the most discouraging cases, the ones that others have given up on.