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War had taught me to sense danger even before I could explain why I was afraid.
Why is today different from yesterday, or last week, or last year? Why is today different from tomorrow? Sometimes our pain pushes us, and sometimes our hope pulls us. Asking “Why now?” isn’t just asking a question—it’s asking everything.
suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood.
We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control.
Our childhood memories are often fragments, brief moments or encounters, which together form the scrapbook of our life. They are all we have left to understand the story we have come to tell ourselves about who we are.
Do these memories give me an image of my strength? Or of my damage? Maybe every childhood is the terrain on which we try to pinpoint how much we matter and how much we don’t, a map where we study the dimensions and the borders of our worth. Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t.
We use denial as protection. If we don’t pay attention, then we can continue our lives unnoticed. We can make the world safe in our minds. We can make ourselves invisible to harm.
“If someone spits at you, spit back,” my father has instructed me. “That’s what you do.”
When my mother said to me, “I’m glad you have brains because you have no looks,” those words stoked my fear that I was inadequate, worthless. But at Auschwitz, my mother’s voice rang in my ears with a different significance. I’ve got brains. I’m smart. I’m going to figure things out. The words I heard inside my head made a tremendous difference in my ability to maintain hope. This was true for other inmates as well. We were able to discover an inner strength we could draw on—a way to talk to ourselves that helped us feel free inside, that kept us grounded in our own morality, that gave us
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Does it matter, when you go, if you are aware that you are dying?
I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the flooded feeling in my chest, the dark throb in my forehead. It’s like grit smeared across my vision. Later, this feeling will have a name. Later, I will know to call it depression.
We will minimize the loss and horror, the terrible interruption of life, by living as though none of it happened. We will not be a lost generation.
We don’t talk about it. Denial is our shield. We don’t yet know the damage we perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock the past away, the safer and happier we will be. I
But where she sees pain, hell, deficit, damage, I see something else. I see her courage.
“Always use your beautiful things,” he tells me. “You never know when they’ll be gone.”
Nothing in the present is really wrong, nothing that can’t be easily fixed. A man is angry and frustrated because he has misunderstood me, because I can’t understand him. There is shouting and conflict. But my life is not in danger. And yet, that is how I read the present situation. Danger, danger, death.
Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse.
Either you’re sensitive, or you’re not. When you’re sensitive, you hurt more.”
In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching: 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,
No one heals in a straight line.
I am graduating with honors. Yet I can’t make myself walk in the ceremony. I am too ashamed. “I should have done this years ago,” I tell myself. What I really mean—the subtext of so many of my choices and beliefs—is, “I don’t deserve to have survived.” I am so obsessed with proving my worth, with earning my place in the world, that I don’t need Hitler anymore. I have become my own jailor, telling myself, “No matter what you do, you will never be good enough.”
I want to connect my students to their choices, to show them that the more choices they have, the less they’ll feel like victims. The most difficult part of my job is countering the negative voices in my students’ lives—sometimes even their own parents’ voices—that say they will never make it as students, that education for them isn’t a viable course. You’re so puny, you’re so ugly, you’ll never find a husband. I tell them about my crossed eyes, about my sisters’ silly chant, how the problem wasn’t that they sang these songs to me—the problem was that I believed them. But I don’t let my
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But I don’t let my students know how deeply I identify with them, how hate obliterated my childhood, how I know the darkness that eats you when you’ve been taught to believe that you don’t matter.
Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs.
To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.
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.
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.
When you have something to prove, you aren’t free.
When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened—we grieve for what didn’t happen. I housed a year of horror within me. And I housed a vacant, empty place, the vast dark of the life that would never be. I held the trauma and the absence, I couldn’t let go of either piece of my truth, nor could I hold either easily.
Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed
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.
When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves.
Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.
How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive
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
