The Choice: Embrace the Possible

by Edith Eger

Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.

My own search for freedom and my years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist have taught me that suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.

I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another.

suffering. Being a survivor, being a “thriver” requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims. We’re not seeing our choices. We’re judging ourselves.

Often, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.

Survivors don’t have time to ask, “Why me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?”

“all your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.”

It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?

It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.

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. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.

Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn to thrive.

Don’t inhale your anger to your chest. I had given an example of the self-imprisoning beliefs and feelings I had held on to in my life: my anger and my belief that I had to earn others’ approval, that nothing I did would be good enough to make me worthy of love. I’d invited the women in the audience to ask themselves, What feeling or belief am I holding on to? Am I willing to let it go? Agnes

“Anger isn’t a value,” I told Agnes. “It’s a feeling. It doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means you’re alive.”

I asked her to picture herself getting very small, so tiny that she could climb inside her own ear. I told her to crawl down the canal, and down her throat and esophagus, all the way to her stomach. As she journeyed within, I asked her to put her tiny loving hands on each part of her body that she passed. On her lungs, her heart. On her spine, along the inside of each leg and arm. I coached her to lay her compassionate hands on each organ, muscle, bone, vein. “Bring love everywhere. Be your own unique, one-of-a-kind nurturer,” I said. It took awhile for her to settle in, to let her attention move away from the surface experience. She kept shifting in her chair, brushing a stray hair away from her forehead, clearing her throat. But then her breathing deepened and slowed, her body became still. She grew deeply relaxed as she ventured within, her face looked untroubled. Before I guided her back out through her ear canal, I asked if there was anything she wanted to tell me about what she had felt or discovered inside. “I thought it would be so dark in here,” she said. “But there’s so much light.”

Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time. If I could appeal to Jason’s heart, if I could get him to feel love for even a second, it might be long enough to interrupt the signal of fear that was about to become violence.

sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can choose—or choose not—to perpetuate. It’s like vertigo, thrilling and terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but traversable canyon.

Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

I would always be what every person is, someone who will bear suffering. We can’t erase the pain. But we are 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.

The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”

As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. 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. I do not of course mean that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.

I don’t know that forgiving Hitler isn’t the hardest thing I’ll ever do. The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.

Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.

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.

“It’s you forgiving the part of yourself that was victimized and letting go of all blame.

“What if blaming yourself is just a way of maintaining the fantasy that the world is in your control?”

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.

“Mourning is important,” I said. “But when it goes on and on, it can be a way of avoiding grief.” Mourning rites and rituals can be an extremely important component of grief work. I think that’s why religious and cultural practices include clear mourning rituals—there’s a protected space and structure within which to begin to experience the feelings of loss. But the mourning period also has a clear end. From that point on, the loss isn’t a separate dimension of life—the loss is integrated into life. If we stay in a state of perpetual mourning, we are choosing a victim’s mentality, believing I’m never going to get over it. If we stay stuck in mourning, it is as though our lives are over too.

“I used to think that if I let grief in, I would drown,” I told Renée. “But it’s like Moses and the Red Sea. Somehow the waters part. You walk through them.”

the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.

‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ”

Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now.

You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.