Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life by Edith Eger (book club recommendations txt) 📕

Maybe I went to Auschwitz and survived so I could talk to you now, so I could live as an example of how to be a survivor instead of a victim. When I ask “What now?” instead of “Why me?” I stop focusing on why this bad thing happened—or is happening—and start paying attention to what I can do with my experience. I’m not looking for a savior or a scapegoat. Instead, I begin to look at choices and at possibilities.

My parents didn’t have a choice in how their lives ended. But I have many choices. I can feel guilty that I survived when so many millions, including my mother and father, perished. Or I can choose to live and work and heal in a way that releases the hold of the past. I can embrace my strength and freedom.

Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It’s stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits: what I can’t do and what I don’t have.

This is the first tool for moving out of victimhood: approach whatever is happening with a gentle embrace. It doesn’t mean you have to like what’s happening. But when you stop fighting and resisting, you have more energy and imagination at the ready to figure out “What now?” To move forward instead of nowhere. To discover what you want and need in this moment, and where you want to go from here.

Every behavior satisfies a need. Many of us choose to stay victims because it gives us license to do zero on our own behalf. Freedom comes with a price. We’re called to be accountable for our own behavior—and to take responsibility even in situations we didn’t cause or choose.

Life is full of surprises.

A few weeks before Christmas, Emily—forty-five, mother of two, happily married for eleven years—sat down with her husband after the children had gone to bed. She was about to suggest they watch a movie when he looked at her and calmly said the words that would upend her life.

“I met someone,” he said. “We’re in love. I don’t think you and I should be married anymore.”

Emily was completely floored. She couldn’t see a way forward. And then the next surprise came. She had breast cancer; a large tumor that required immediate, aggressive chemotherapy. During the first weeks of treatment, she felt paralyzed. Her husband postponed discussion about the state of their marriage to see her through the months of chemo, but Emily was in a daze.

“I thought my whole life had come to an end,” she said. “I thought I was a dying woman.”

But when I spoke to her eight months after her diagnosis, she’d just had surgery and received more unexpected news: she’d achieved complete remission.

“The doctors never would have predicted it,” she said. “It’s really a miracle.”

Her cancer is gone. But so is her husband. After her chemo ended, he told her he’d made his decision. He’d rented an apartment. He wanted a divorce.

“I was so frightened to die,” Emily told me. “Now I have to learn to live.”

She’s consumed by worry for her children, by the hurt of betrayal, concerns over finances, and loneliness, so vast it’s like she’s fallen off the edge of a cliff.

“I’m still finding it so hard to say yes to my life,” she said.

The divorce has thrown her into her worst fear made real, a deep-seated terror of abandonment she’s harbored since she was four, when her mother became clinically depressed. Her dad turned silent about her mom’s illness, escaping into work, leaving Emily to make it on her own. When her mother later died by suicide, it confirmed the reality she knew yet sought to avoid: that the people you love disappear.

“I’ve always been in a relationship, since I was fifteen,” she said. “I never learned to be happy on my own, with myself, to love myself.” Her voice breaks when she says those words: love myself.

I often say that we need to give our children roots, and give them wings. We need to do the same for ourselves. The only one you have is you. You’re born alone. You die alone. So start by getting up in the morning and going to the mirror. Look yourself in the eye and say, “I love you.” Say, “I’m never going to leave you.” Hug yourself. Kiss yourself. Try it!

And then keep showing up for yourself all day, every day.

“But how do I deal with my husband?” Emily asked. “When we meet, he seems totally calm and relaxed. He’s happy with his decision. But all my emotions come out. I start crying. I can’t control myself when I see him.”

“You can if you want to,” I told her. “But you have to want to, and I can’t make you want to. I don’t have that power. You do. Make a decision. You may feel like screaming and crying. But don’t act on it unless it’s in your best interest.”

Sometimes it just takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?

Is it good for me to sleep with a married man? Is it good for me to eat a piece of chocolate cake? Is it good for me to beat my cheating husband on the chest with my fist? Is it good for me to go dancing? To help a friend? Does it deplete me or empower me?

Another tool for moving out of victimhood is to learn to cope with loneliness. It’s what most of us fear more than anything else. But when you’re in love with yourself, alone doesn’t mean lonely.

“Loving yourself is good for your kids, too,” I told Emily. “When you show them that you’ll never lose you, you show them that they’re not losing you, either. That you’re here now. Then they can live their lives, rather than you worrying about them, and them worrying about you, and everybody worrying, worrying. To your children, and to yourself, you say,