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But if there is one small piece of hell I miss, it is the part that made me understand that survival is a matter of interdependence, that survival isn’t possible alone. In choosing different directions, my sisters and I, are we in danger of breaking the spell?
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.
In the twenty months since Marianne’s birth, besides nursing, this has been my success as a mother: I tell my daughter everything. I narrate what we are doing throughout the day. I name the streets and the trees. Words are treasures that I offer her again and again.
smile. I will treat him not as he is, but as I trust he can be.
America is the hardest country to get into.
You have to love what you are doing. Otherwise you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t worth it.”
And if I can keep the noise and the urgency around me at all times, I will not have to be alone for even a moment with my own thoughts.
This is why I now object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one.
past. I thought it was a matter of survival. Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain.
I am only twenty-three, but it feels as though the best parts of my life are over.
The release of worry leaves me with a gaping cavity that I don’t know how to fill.
I don’t know that fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don’t know that my habits of providing
In the midst of physical pain and dehumanizing injustice, Frankl flashes on his wife’s face. He sees her eyes, and his heart blooms with love in the depth of winter. He understands how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
No one heals in a straight line.
This stage of my life had been cut short. Individuation and independence from my family.
analysis: It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost.
A clue my body sends as a reminder of the feelings that I have blocked from conscious life.
A storm that assaults me when I deny myself permission to feel.
There’s more I have to offer—I know this, although I don’t yet know what it is I am meant to do.
Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.
despite his admonition that degrees don’t replace inner work, inner growth, I had been toying with the idea of graduate school.
Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs.
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
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We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free.
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.”
I hadn’t let myself feel the feelings, afraid that if I started to let them out, I might never stop, I’d become a monster.
But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal.
Expression is the opposite of depression.
I realized, as I had when I met Tom, the paraplegic veteran, that my professional success had to come from a deeper place within me—not from the little girl trying to please others and win approval but from my whole and authentic self, the one who was vulnerable and curious, who was accepting of herself and ready to grow.
With any new patient, it’s important to be sensitive to his or her psychological boundaries from the very first moments of our initial encounter.
I have to remember that I’m communicating with a person who likely has distorted cognitive functioning.
When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened—we grieve for what didn’t happen.
“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.”
You can’t heal what you can’t feel.
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.
“What do you want?” I said it quietly. It was a question that can be terrifying to answer, a question that can change your life.
Most of us want a dictator—albeit a benevolent one—so we can pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.” But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet.
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.
This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.
To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past.
If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?
most of the members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old.
These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.
Only the empty spaces where the crematories and gas chambers, hastily destroyed by the Nazis before liberation, stood.
I miss you, I say to my parents. I love you I’ll always love you.
Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.
It’s okay to help people—and it’s okay to need help—but when your enabling allows others not to help themselves, then you’re crippling the people you want to help.
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life. … This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life.
