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When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments,
we are doomed to keep reliving them.
suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional.
victimization. It comes from the outside.
victimhood comes from the inside.
being a “thriver” requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is.
choices in attitude and action
Survivors don’t have time to ask, “Why me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?”
embrace the possible.
make the choice to be free.
“all your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.”
What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?
have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.
to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.
To survive, we conjure an inner world, a haven, even when our eyes are open.
We can choose what the horror teaches us.
Magda’s civil disobedience makes her feel like the author of choice, not the victim of fate.
She talks so that we don’t have to. She talks so that she doesn’t have to hear.
If I survive today, tomorrow I will
be free. The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose. Now I must come to terms with the fact that anyone I marry won’t know my parents. If I ever have children, they won’t know their grandparents. It isn’t just my own loss that hurts. It’s the way it ripples out into the future. The way it perpetuates.
To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself.
freedom is about CHOICE—about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression.
live in the present.
useful behaviors, things they did to satisfy a need, usually a need for one of the As: approval, affection, attention.
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.
feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal.
temporary.
Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the...
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When you have something to prove, you aren’t free.
They were partners in making control—not empathic connection, not unconditional love—the language of the family.
anorexia—a disease that is all about control, about relentless rules for what and when you eat or don’t eat, for what you reveal or conceal—these first moments are critical.
disarm her need for control by offering freedom.
You can’t heal what you can’t feel. I
free to accept who we are and what has been done to us, and move on.
A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.
I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”
To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is.
If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?
self-blame hurts others, too, not just ourselves.
to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”
“mothers can’t rest in peace unless they know the people they have left behind are fully embracing life?”
When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves.
Release begins with acceptance.
To heal, we embrace the dark.
Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.
Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are.
The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And
the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place. And to finally, finally stop running from the past. To do everything possible to redeem it, and
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Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
take responsibility for my feelings. To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on Béla or other people, to accept them as my own.
