Compassionate curiosity directed toward the self leads to the truth of things. Once I see my anxiety and recognize it for what it is, the need to escape dwindles. It is clear to me that the sense of threat and fear of abandonment that make up anxiety were, in my case, programmed in the Budapest ghetto in 1944. Why attempt to escape some old brain pattern laid down when I was a frightened infant during a terrible time in history? It’s there and the circuits in which its wordless stories are embedded are indelibly a part of my brain. It doesn’t need to go away—indeed, it won’t go away, not
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