The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

Rather, she found a way to exercise the only agency she had, which lay in her own point of view and emotional attitude toward the unchangeable past. Here she explains how, decades later, she forgave Hitler himself. This happened at Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, the location of the Führer’s residence from 1933 onward. “It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of our past,” she writes. “So 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 that part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting mental and emotional 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.”[2] We could say that she came to “choose” her past, not in the sense of liking or condoning it, but by simply letting it be. “I do not of course mean,” Edith adds, “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 had clung to and fought for against all odds.” When Bessel advised I could let go of Auschwitz, he meant precisely that I didn’t need to keep clutching the pain and resentment of the past, nor the beliefs I developed at a time when I could not have...