The Choice

by Edith Eger

didn’t ask in what way his wife was troubling him. I didn’t ask for the facts. I went straight for the feeling under his words. I wanted him to take me directly, deeply, to the truth in his heart. I wanted him to be the person I trusted he was capable of being—a person who could unfreeze and feel. 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. 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.

He would tell me about his father, a violent man who beat into Jason, sometimes with his words, sometimes with his fists, that this is what a man does: A man is invulnerable; a man doesn’t cry; a man is in control; a man calls the shots. He would tell me that he had always intended to be a better father than his father had been. But he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to teach and guide his children without intimidation.

I understand anything about that afternoon, about the whole of my life, it’s that 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 re-enact 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...

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.

“Close the door. Or go outside. Be by yourself. Breathe and breathe and breathe. The feelings will pass. Promise me you will call me if you start to feel out of control.

Our marriage has taught me that—all the times when my anger or frustration at Béla has taken my attention away from my own work and growth, the times when blaming him for my unhappiness was easier than taking responsibility for myself.

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.

I always have an excuse. That’s why I’m anxious. That’s why I’m sad. That’s why I can’t risk going to Germany. It’s not that I’m wrong to feel anxious and sad and afraid. It’s not that there isn’t real trauma at the core of my life. And it’s not that Hitler and Mengele and every other perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn’t be held accountable for the harm they cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past responsible for what I choose to do now.

the stakes were life and death, the choice was never mine to make. But even then, in my prison, in hell, I could choose how I responded, I could choose my actions and speech, I could choose what I held in my mind. I

because my panic isn’t the result of purely external triggers. It is an expression of the memories and fears that live inside.

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.

Intellectually, I understood the purpose of the satire. I knew that laughter can lift, that it can carry us over and through difficult times. I knew that laughter can heal.

The thick crust of silent snow has melted; dead quiet winter has yielded to the burst of new leaves and the jolting rush of fast water. Within the layers of the terrible sorrow I carry in me always, another feeling shoots through. It is the first melting trickle of long-frozen snow. Pulsing down the mountainside, the water speaks, the chambers of my heart speak. I am alive, the bubbling stream says. I made it. A song of triumph is filling me, pushing its way out of my heart, out through my mouth to the sky up above and the valley below. “I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”

Times are changing and we are changing with them. We are always in the process of becoming.”

That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.” Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and women I met in Israel, who looked pained when I mentioned forgiveness, who insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget. Why forgive? Doesn’t that let Hitler off the hook for what he did?

It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. 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.

If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?

I watched his body language as he took me into the past. I watched his energy, his level of agitation, so that I could be attuned to any distress that signaled we were going too far too fast. He had closed his eyes. He seemed to be sinking into a trance.

My goal was to help her reframe her experience—to reframe her problem as an opportunity, to put her in the position of helping her mother—and in helping her mother to be free, to help herself.

I see ditches running alongside roads, and I imagine them as I once saw them, spilling over with corpses, but I can also see them as they are now, filling up with summer grass. I can see that the past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium. Time is the track, we travel it.

Dr. Hans Selye—a fellow Hungarian—who said stress is the body’s response to any demand for change. Our automatic responses are to fight or to flee

So I learned to flow, I learned to stay in the situation, to develop the only thing I had left, to look within for the part of me that no Nazi could ever murder. To find and hold on to my truest self.

When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves.

To heal, we embrace the dark. We walk through the shadow of the valley on our way to the light.

The war had brought about his injury and altered his life, and yet he missed the war. He missed the sense of power he gained in fighting an enemy, in feeling himself to be in an invulnerable class, above another nationality, above another race.

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

She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard,

Now, on the eve of my return to prison, I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.

How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to—worship—the choices we think we could or should have made.

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 then let it go. I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.

I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken, that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.

I see the words spark with truth. Work has set me free. I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant—the hard labor of sacrifice and hunger, of exhaustion and enslavement. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. I am free.

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.

I taught him a mantra for managing his emotions: notice, accept, check, stay. When a feeling started to overwhelm him, the first action toward managing the feeling was to notice—to acknowledge—that he was having a feeling. He could say to himself, Aha! Here I go again. This is anger. This is jealousy. This is sadness.

although it feels like the palette of human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared.

one of the proving grounds for our freedom is in how we relate to our loved ones.

I call this the seesaw. One person’s up, and one person’s down. Lots of marriages and relationships are built this way. Two people agree to an unspoken contract: One of them will be good and one of them will be bad. The whole system relies on one person’s inadequacy. The “bad” partner gets a free pass to test all the limits; the “good” partner gets to say, Look how selfless I am! Look how patient I am! Look at everything I put up with!

blame is the pivot that keeps the two seats joined.

So often when we are unhappy it is because we are taking too much responsibility or we are taking too little. Instead of being assertive and choosing clearly for ourselves, we might become aggressive (choosing for others), or passive (letting others choose for us), or passive-aggressive (choosing for others by preventing them from achieving what they are choosing for themselves).

It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval.

Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns.

In Gone with the Wind, my mother’s favorite book, Scarlett O’Hara, when confronted with a difficulty, says, “I’ll think about it tomorrow … After all, tomorrow is another day.” If we are to evolve instead of revolve, it’s time to take action now.

Their story is a good reminder that it isn’t over till it’s over. As long as you live, there’s the risk that you might suffer more. There’s also the opportunity to find a way to suffer less, to choose happiness, which requires taking responsibility for yourself.

Trying to be the caretaker who sees to another person’s every need is as problematic as avoiding your responsibility to yourself.

but when your enabling allows others not to help themselves, then you’re crippling the people you want to help.

Now I say, “How can I be useful to you?” How can I support you as you take responsibility for yourself?

I should say this