Personal Reflection: Eger, E. (2020). The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life.
Favorite Words
These are phrases I personally like from the book:
- That was then, this is now: reminds us that we did survive what happened before and now curious to welcome the now, and telling yourself, âHere I am. Iâm going to take care of you.â
- The opposite of depression is expression.
- Weâre all victims of victims.
- Theyâd lost their freedom. I still had mine.
- Weâre born to love; we learn to hate. Itâs up to us what we reach for.
1. What Now? (Victimhood)
Page 40
    âŚwhile some friends and loved ones have coped with the trauma by becoming overprotective, others have dealt with it by minimizing what happened.
    âŚher father-in-law would tell people, âSheâs back to normal, one hundred percentâ. It [just] made him feel better.
2. No Prozac at Auschwitz (Avoidance)
Page 43
    âThe fear was learned. Yo had no idea what fear was when you were born. Donât let it take over your life. Love and fear donât go together. Enough. You donât have time to live in fear.â
Page 45-46
    When weâre in the habit of denying our feelings, it cna be hard even to identify what weâre feeling, much less face it, express and finally release it. One way we get stuck is by confusing thoughts with feelings.
    âI feel I should head downtown this afternoon and run a few errands,â or, âI feel like highlights would really brighten your eyes.â These arenât feelings! They are thoughts. Ideas. Plans. Feelings are energy. With feelings thereâs no way ouyt but through. We have to be with them. It takes so much courage to be, without having to do anything about anything â to just simply be.
3. All Other Relationships Will End (Self-Neglect)
Page 51
    ⌠we learn early how to get the Aâs: attention, affection, approval. We figure out what to do and whom to become to get our needs met. The problem is not that we do these things â itâs that we keep doing them. We think we must in order to be loved.
    So how can you be the best loving, unconditional, no-nonsense caregiver to yourself?
Page 67
    Remember: you have something no one else will ever have. You have you. For a lifetime.
Page 68
    Honey, find you and keep filling it up with more you. You donât have to work to be loved.. You just have to be you. May you be more and more every day.
4. One Butt, Two Chairs (Secrets)
Page 74
    I just wanted to fit in, to be accepted. I didnât want people to feel sorry for me. I didnât want my scars to show.
    It wasnât until decades later ⌠that I realized the cost of my double life. I was trying to heal others without healing myself.
    Until I could face the truth, I had my secret, and my secret had me.
Page 77-78
    ⌠something unexpected happened: I felt seen. ⌠It felt like [Frankl] was speaking directly to me. Our experiences werenât identical. ⌠But the way he wrote about our shared past changed my life. I saw a new possibility for myself â a way to give up secrets and hiding, to stop fighting and running away from the past. His words â and later, his mentorship â gave me the courage and inspiration to face and express my truth, and in speaking my secret, reclaim my genuine self.
5. No One Rejects You But You (Guilt and Shame)
Page 83-84
    My heart sank. I was trying to be helpful, to make my family happy, and there she was, showing me that I wasnât doing it right. That I wasnât good enough. It took me a while to realize that the message of my failure wasnât coming from Marianne â it was coming from me. To counteract my belief that I was damaged, I strove for perfection, believing I could achieve and perform my way out of shame. But weâre human, no more, no less, and human means fallible. Freedom lies in accepting our whole, imperfect selves and giving up the need for perfection.
Page 85
    Pay attention to what youâre paying attention to â thatâs what you reinforce. These thoughts will influence how you feel. And how you feel is going to dictate how you act. But you donât have to live by these standards and messages.You werenât born with shame. Your genuine self is already beautiful. You were born with love and joy and passion, and you can rewrite your internal script and reclaim your innocence. You can become a whole person.
6. What Didnât Happen (Unresolved Grief)
Page 91-92
    ⌠one of the most fundamental principles of my work: how it is a universal experience for lfie not to turn out as we want or expect. Most of us suffer because we have something we donât want, or we want something we donât have.
    All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.
    Iâm a prisoner and a victim when I minimize or deny my pain â and Iâm a prisoner and a victim when I hold on to regret. Regret is the wish to change the past. itâs waht we experience when we acknowledge that weâre powerless, that something already happened, that we canât change a single thing.
7. Nothing to Prove (Rigidity)
Page 110-111
    Many of us live as though we have something to prove. We can become addicted to having the last word. But if youâre trying to prove that youâre right or youâre good, youâre trying to make yourself into something that doesnât exist. Every human is fallible. Every human makes mistakes. Youâre not helpless â and youâre not a saint, either. You donât have to prove your worth. You can just embrace it, celebrate that youâre imperfect and whole, that there will never be another you. Drop the agenda. If you have something to prove, youâre still a prisoner.
Page 111-112
    I was surrounded every moment by dehumanizing words â youâre worthless, youâre dirty, the only way youââll leave this place is as a corpse. But I didnât let the words penetrate my spirit. Somehow I was blessed with the insight that the Nazis were more imprisoned that I was. ⌠The Nazisâ power came from systematic dehumanization and extermination. My strength and freedom were within.
8. Would You Like to be Married to You? (Resentment)
Page 129-130
    âAnd just ignore what happened? Leave out what they did?â
    âMake peace with it.â
    Many of us didnât have the loving and caring parents we desired and deserved. Maybe they were preoccupied, angry, worried, depressed. Maybe we were born at the wrong time, in a season of friction or loss or financial strain. Maybe our caregivers were dealing with their own trauma, and they werenât always responsive to our needs for attention and affection. Maybe they didnât pick us up and say, âWe always wanted a child just like you.â
    Grief helps us face and ultimately release what happened or didnât happen. And it opens up space to see what is and choose where we go from here..
    You canât know the truth ⌠until you deal with your own wounds, until you bury and leave behind all the things form the past youâre still dragging around.
Page 130
    My decision to divorce ⌠was unkind and unncessary, but it was useful in one way: it created more silence and space for me to start to face my past and my grief. It didnât liberate me form my emotions and trauma, from flashbacks, from feeling numb, anxious, isolated, and afraid. Only I could do that.
9. Are You Evolving or Revolving (Paralyzing Fear)
Page 135
    We should never stp seeking safety and justice, doing everything in our power to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, our fellow humans. But we have a choice how much of our lives we give over to fear.
Page 139-140
    And we can stop looking at our choices as obligations.
    âYou donât need to âŚ,â I said. âYou want to. And if you want to, you can choose to.â
    Listen for the I canât, the Iâm trying, the I need to, and then see if you can replace these imprisoning phrases with something else: I can, I want, Iâm willing, I choose. This is the language that empowers us to change.
Page 142
    ⌠arenât even our own â theyâre ones weâve learned from watching others.
    Then make a list of the fears that remain.
    This is how you begin to face your fears, rather than fighting them, or running from them, or medicating them.
Page 146
    Itâs a profoundly human question: To be or not to be?
    I hope someday you always choose to be. Youâre going to be dead anyway someday, and youâll be dead for a very long time. Why not become curious? Why not see what this life has to offer you?
    Curiosity is vital. Itâs what allows us to risk. When weâre full of fear, weâre living in a passt that already happened, or a future that hasnât arrived. When weâre curious, weâre here in the present, eager to discover whatâs going to happen next. Itâs better to risk and grow, and maybe fail, than to remain imprisoned, never knowing what could have been.
10. The Nazi in You (Judgment)
Page 153-154
    If you are ⌠a descendant of those who enforced apartheid or genocide or another instance of systemic violence and injustice, I am telling you: it wasnât you. Assign the blame to perpetrators, and then decide.
    âHow long are you going to keep picking this up and carrying it around?â I asked Andreas. âWhatâs the legacy you want to pass on?â
    Do you want to say beholden of the past? Or can you find a way to release your loved ones â and yourself?
Page 155-156
    I took a deep breath, leaned in, gazed at him with as much kindness as I could muster, and said, âTell me more.â And it was enough [to hear his story] that he hadnât joined an extremist group because he was born with hate. He was seeking what we all want: acceptance, attention, affection. Itâs not an excuse. But attacking him would only nourish the seeds of worthlessness his upbringing had sown. It has the choice to alienate him further, or give him another version of refuge and belonging.
Page 155-156
    Weâre not all descendants of Nazis. But we each have a Nazi within.
    Freedom means choosing, every moment, whether we reach for our inner Nazi or our inner Gandhi. For the love we were born with or the hate we learned.
    The inner Nazi is the part of you that has the capacity to judge and withhold compassion, that denies you the permission to be free and victimizes others when things donât go your way.
Page 157
    ⌠But then I realized I was reacting to [a fellow survivorâs] agitation by trying to defend my choices [of not rebelling] in the past. Perhaps this was the one opportunity Iâd have in my life to offer this man compassion. âThank you so much for being here,â I said. âThank you for sharing your experience.â
    When we live in the prison of judgment, we donât just victimize others. We victimize ourselves.
Page 159
    Weâre all victims of victims.
Page 159-160
    So I turned my hatred into pity. I chose to feel sorry for the guards. Theyâd been brainwashed. Theyâd had their innocence stolen. They came to Auschwitz to throw children into a gas chamber, thinking they were ridding the world from a cancer. Theyâd lost their freedom. I still had mine.
Page 162
    Weâre born to love; we learn to hate. Itâs up to us what we reach for.
11. If I Survive Today, Tomorrow I Will Be Free (Hopelessness)
Page 171-172
    âIt takes courage not to be discouraged,â [Ben Ferencz] said. But never give up, he reminds us. Thereâs progress and change all around us â and nothing new ever happened before.
    If we decide somethingâs hopeless or impossible, it will be. If we take action, who knows what we might manifest? Hope is curiosity writ large. A willingness to cultivate within yourself whatever kindles light, and to shine that light into darkest places.
    Hope is the boldest act of imagination I know.
Page 174
    You could have died, too, somehow. Perhaps thereâve been times when you wanted to. But you didnât. Hope is the conviction that you survived all that you survived so that you can be a good role model. An ambassador for freedom. A person who focuses not on what youâve lost, bu on whatâs still here for you, on the work youâre called to do.
Page 174
    Hope doesnât obscure or whitewash reality. Hope tells us that life is full of darkness and suffering â and yet if we really survive today, tomorrow weâll be free.
12. Thereâs No Forgiveness Without Rage (Not Forgiving)
Page 178
    As long as you say you canât forgive someone, youâre spending energy being against rather than being for yourself and the life you deserve. To forgive isnât to give someone permission to keep hurting you. Itâs not okay that you were harmed. But itâs already done. No one but you can heal the wound.
Page 179
    Itâs easier to release the past when others see your truth, tell the truth. When thereâs a collective process â restorative justice, war crimes tribunals, truth and reconciliationn committees â through perpetrators are accountable for the harm they inflicted and the court of the world holds the truth to the light.
    But your life doesnât depend on what you fet or donât get from someone else. Your life is your own.
Page 181
    You have a right to feel rage. Itâs a human emotion. You are human.
    When we canât release anger, weâre either denying that we were victimized, or denying that weâre human. (Thatâs how a perfectionist suffers. Silently!) Either way, weâre denying reality. Making ourselves numb, pretending to be fine.
    This doesnât set you free.
    We burn through anger so we can get to whatâs underneath: fear or grief.
    Only then can we begin the hardest work of all.
    Forgivig ourselves.
Page 183
    I hated the version of me that I saw. Vulnerable. Frail. Gullible.
    But the only one putting those labels on me was me.
    What Iâm saying is that life keeps giving me opportunities to choose freedom â to love myself as I am: human, imperfect, and whole. So I forgave myself, releaseing them so I can release me.
Page 185
    ⌠that while Mengele had all the power, while day after day he chose with his grotesquely wagging finger who would live and who would die, he was morea prisoner than I was.
    I was innocent.
    And free.
Conclusion
Page 191
    Honey, may you also choose to give up the prison and do the work to be free. To find in your suffering your own life lessons. To choose with legacy the world inherits. To hand down the pain â or to pass on the gift.