The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  This theme prevails: that my deepest and most important work, professionally and personally, is still to come, and still blurry, undefined. My friends Lili and Arpad are the first people to name for me what this work will entail, though I am not yet ready to acknowledge it, much less take it on. One weekend they invite me to visit them in Mexico. For years, Béla and I have vacationed with them together; this time, I go alone. The Sunday I am to return home, we linger over breakfast—coffee, fruit, the eggs I’ve cooked with Hungarian peppers and onions.

  “We’re worried about you,” Lili says, her voice easy, gentle.

  I know she and Arpad were surprised by the divorce, I know they think I made a mistake. It’s hard not to read her concern as judgment. I tell them about Béla’s girlfriend, she’s a writer or a musician, I can never remember which, she isn’t a person to me, she is an idea: Béla has moved on and left me behind. My friends listen, they are sympathetic. Then they share a glance, and Arpad clears his throat.

  “Edie,” he says, “forgive me if I’m getting too personal, and you can tell me to mind my own business. But I wonder, have you ever considered that it might be beneficial for you to work through your past?”

  Work through it? I lived it, what other work is there to do? I want to say. I’ve broken the conspiracy of silence. And talking hasn’t made the fear or flashbacks go away. In fact, talking seems to have made my symptoms worse. I haven’t broken my silence with my children or friends in a formal way, but I no longer live in fear that they will ask me about the past. And I have tried to embrace opportunities to share my story. Recently, when a friend from my undergraduate days who went on to pursue a master’s in history asked to interview me for a paper she was writing about the Holocaust, I accepted. I thought it might be a relief to tell my whole story. But when I left her house, I was shaking. I came home and vomited, just as I had a decade before when Marianne showed us the book with pictures of concentration camp inmates. “The past is past,” I tell Lili and Arpad now. I’m not ready to heed or even understand Arpad’s advice to “work through” the past. But, like Viktor Frankl’s letter, it plants a seed within me, something that will sprout and take root with time.

  * * *

  One Saturday I am sitting at the table in the kitchen, grading my students’ psychology exams, when Béla calls. It’s his day with Audrey and John. My mind leaps to fear.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing’s wrong. They’re watching TV.” He goes quiet, he waits for his voice to catch up. “Come to dinner,” he finally says.

  “With you?”

  “With me.”

  “I’m busy,” I say. I am. I have a date with a sociology professor. I have already called Marianne, asking for advice. What should I wear? What should I say? What should I do if he invites me to go home with him? Do not sleep with him, she has warned me. Especially not on a first date.

  “Edith Eva Eger,” my ex-husband pleads, “please, please let the kids spend the night with friends and agree to come to dinner with me.”

  “Whatever it is, we can discuss it on the phone, or when you drop the kids off.”

  “No,” he says. “No. This is not a conversation for the phone or the front door.”

  I assume it has to do with the children, and I agree to meet him at our favorite prime rib restaurant, our old date spot.

  “I’m picking you up,” he says.

  He arrives exactly on time, dressed for a date in a dark suit and silk tie. He leans in to kiss my cheek and I don’t want to move away, I want to stay near his cologne, his cleanly shaved chin.

  In the restaurant, at our old table, he takes my hands. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that we have more to build together?”

  His question sends my mind spinning, as though we are already on the dance floor. Try again? Reunite? “What about her?” I ask.

  “She’s a lovely person. She’s fun. She’s a very good companion.”

  “So?”

  “Let me finish.” Tears begin to well in his eyes and fall down his face. “She’s not the mother of my children. She didn’t spring me out of jail in Prešov. She’s never heard of the Tatra Mountains. She can’t pronounce chicken paprikash, much less make it for dinner. Edie, she isn’t the woman I love. She isn’t you.”

  The compliments feel good, the embrace of our shared past, but what strikes me most deeply is Béla’s readiness for risk. This has always been true of him, as far as I can tell. He chose to fight Nazis in the forest. He risked death by disease and bullets to stop what was unconscionable. I was conscripted into risk. Béla chose risk knowingly, and he chooses it again at this table, allowing himself to be vulnerable to the possibility of my rejecting him. I have become so used to measuring all the ways he falls short that I have stopped counting who he is, what he offers. I have to leave this marriage or I’m going to die, I had thought. And perhaps the months and years I’ve spent apart from him have helped me come of age, have helped me discover that there is no we until there is an I. Now that I have faced myself a little more fully, I can see that the emptiness I felt in our marriage wasn’t a sign of something wrong in our relationship, it was the void I carry with me, even now, the void that no man or achievement will ever fill. Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.

  * * *

  In 1971, two years after our divorce, when I am forty-four years old, Béla kneels and presents me with an engagement ring. We have a Jewish ceremony instead of the city hall union we decided on more than twenty years before. Our friends Gloria and John Lavis are our witnesses. “This is your real wedding,” the rabbi says. He means because it is a Jewish wedding this time, but I think he also means that this time we are really choosing each other, we aren’t in flight, we aren’t running away. We buy a new house in Coronado Heights, decorate it in bright colors, red, orange, put in solar panels and a swimming pool. For our honeymoon we travel to Switzerland, to the Alps, and stay at a hotel with hot springs. The air is cold. The water is warm. I sit in Béla’s lap. Jagged mountains stretch out against the sky, colors shifting over them as over water. Our love feels as stable as the mountain range, as enveloping and fluid as a sea, adapting, shifting to fill the shape we give it. It isn’t that the substance of our marriage has changed. We have.

  CHAPTER 15

  What Life Expected

  It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us, Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning. In 1972, a year after Béla and I remarried, I was named Teacher of the Year in El Paso, and while I was honored by the award and felt privileged to serve my students, I couldn’t let go of the conviction that I still hadn’t discovered what life expected from me. “You’ve won top recognition at the beginning of your career, not the end,” the principal of my school said. “We’ll expect to see great things from you. What’s next?”

  It was the same question I was still asking myself. I had begun working with my Jungian therapist again, and despite his admonition that degrees don’t replace inner work, inner growth, I had been toying with the idea of graduate school. I wanted to understand why people choose to do one thing and not another, how we meet everyday challenges and survive devastating experiences, how we live with our past and our mistakes, how people heal. What if my mother had had someone to talk to? Could she have had a happier marriage with my father, or chosen a different life? And what about my students—or my own son—the ones who said can’t instead of can. How could I help people to transcend self-limiting beliefs, to become who they were meant to be in the world? I told my principal I was considering getting my doctorate in psychology. But I couldn’t speak my dream without a caveat. “I don’t know,” I said, “by the time I finish school I’ll be fifty.” He smiled at me. “You’re going to be fifty anyhow,” he said.

  In the next six years, I discovered that my principal and my Jungian therapist were both right. There was n
o reason to limit myself, to let my age restrict my choices. I listened to what my life was asking of me, and in 1974 I earned an MA in educational psychology from the University of Texas–El Paso, and in 1978 a PhD in clinical psychology from Saybrook University.

  * * *

  My academic journey introduced me to the work of Martin Seligman and Albert Ellis, and brought me inspiring teachers and mentors in Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, all of whom helped me to understand parts of myself and my own experience. Martin Seligman, who later founded a new branch of our field called Positive Psychology, did some research in the late 1960s that answered a question that had nagged at me since liberation day at Gunskirchen in May 1945: Why did so many inmates wander out of the gates of the camp only to return to the muddy, festering barracks? Frankl had noted the same phenomenon at Auschwitz. Psychologically, what was at work to make a liberated prisoner reject freedom?

  Seligman’s experiments—which were done with dogs and unfortunately preceded current protections against cruelty to animals—taught him about the concept he called “learned helplessness.” When dogs who were given painful shocks were able to stop the shocks by pressing a lever, they learned quickly to stop the pain. And they were able, in subsequent experiments, to figure out how to escape painful shocks administered in a kennel cage by leaping over a small barrier. Dogs who hadn’t been given a means to stop the pain, however, had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it. When they were put in a kennel cage and administered shocks, they ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and whimpered. From this Seligman concluded that when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering or improve our lives, we stop taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is no point. This is what happened at the camps, when former inmates left through the gates only to return to prison, to sit vacantly, unsure what to do with their freedom now that it had finally come.

  Suffering is inevitable and universal. But how we respond to suffering differs. In my studies, I gravitated toward psychologists whose work revealed our power to effect change in ourselves. Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a precursor to cognitive behavior therapy, taught me the extent to which we teach ourselves negative feelings about ourselves—and the negative and self-defeating behaviors that follow from these feelings. He showed that underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviors is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of our self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a belief, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.

  I watched Ellis conduct a therapy session onstage one day, working with a confident and articulate young woman who was frustrated by her dating experiences. She felt she wasn’t able to attract the kind of men she wanted to have a long-term relationship with, and she was seeking advice on how to meet and connect with eligible men. She said that she tended to feel shy and tense when she met a man she thought might be a good fit, and that she behaved in a guarded and defensive manner that masked her true self and her true interest in getting to know him. In just a few minutes, Dr. Ellis guided her to the core belief underlying her dating encounters—the irrational belief that, without realizing it, she kept repeating to herself, over and over, until she became convinced of its truth: I’m never going to be happy. After a lousy date she wasn’t only telling herself, Oops, I did it again, I was stiff and uninviting, she was also reverting to her core belief that she could never achieve happiness so there was no point trying. It was the fear produced by this core belief that made her so reluctant to risk showing her genuine self, which in turn made it more likely that her self-defeating belief might come true.

  It was profound to see her self-image shift visibly right there on the stage. She seemed to slip out of the negative belief like she was shrugging off an old bathrobe. Suddenly her eyes were brighter, she sat taller, her chest and shoulders were more open and expansive, as if she were creating a greater surface area for happiness to land. Dr. Ellis cautioned her that she was unlikely to have an amazing date right out of the gate. He also said that accepting the discomfort of disappointing dates was part of the work of ridding herself of the negative belief.

  The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem—and the foundation of our persistent suffering—is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve. Although my way of building rapport is different from Dr. Ellis’s, his skill at guiding patients to reframe and reform their damaging thoughts has influenced my practice profoundly.

  Carl Rogers, one of my most influential mentors, was a master of helping patients to fully accept themselves. Rogers theorized that when our need to self-actualize comes into conflict with our need for positive regard, or vice versa, we might choose to repress or hide or neglect our genuine personalities and desires. When we come to believe that there is no way to be loved and to be genuine, we are at risk of denying our true nature.

  Self-acceptance was the hardest part of healing for me, something I still struggle with. Perfectionism emerged in my childhood as a behavior to satisfy my need for approval, and it became an even more embedded coping mechanism for dealing with my survivor’s guilt. Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken—you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing. In trying to combat my low self-esteem, I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness. In learning to offer my patients total love and acceptance, I fortunately learned the importance of offering the same to myself.

  Rogers was brilliant at being able to validate patients’ feelings, to help them reframe their self-concept without denying their truth. He offered unconditional positive regard, and in the safety of that total acceptance, his patients were able to shed their masks and inhibitions and inhabit their own lives more authentically. From Dr. Rogers I learned two of my most important phrases in any therapeutic encounter: I hear you say … and Tell me more. I also learned how to read my patients’ body language and how to use my own body to communicate my unconditional love and acceptance. I don’t cross my arms or my legs—I open myself. I make eye contact, I lean forward, I create a bridge between myself and my patients, so that they know I am with them 100 percent. I mirror my patients’ states (if they want to sit quietly, I sit quietly too; if they want to rage and scream, I scream with them; I adapt my language to my patients’ language) as a sign of total acceptance. And I model a way of being (breathing, opening, moving, listening) that can promote growth and healing.

  Studying Seligman and Ellis, and working with Rogers, among others, helped me to become a good listener and synthesizer, and helped me to derive my eclectic and intuitive insight- and cognitive-oriented therapeutic approach. If I had to name my therapy I’d probably call it Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE—about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression. And to be free is to live in the present. If we are stuck in the past, saying, “If only I had gone there instead of here . . .” or “If only I had married someone else . . . ,” we are living in a prison of our own making. Likewise if we spend our time in the future, saying, “I won’t be happy until I graduate . . .” or “I won’t be happy until I find the right person.” The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.

  These are the tools my patients use to liberate themselves from role ex
pectations, to be kind and loving parents to themselves, to stop passing on imprisoning beliefs and behaviors, to discover that love comes out as the answer in the end. I guide patients to understand both what causes and what maintains their self-defeating behaviors. The self-defeating behaviors first emerged as useful behaviors, things they did to satisfy a need, usually a need for one of the As: approval, affection, attention. Once patients can see why they developed a certain behavior (belittling others, attaching oneself to angry people, eating too little, eating too much, etc.), they can take responsibility for whether or not they maintain the behavior. They can choose what to give up (the need for approval, the need to go shopping, the need to be perfect, etc.)—because even freedom doesn’t come for free! And they can learn to take better care of themselves and to discover self-acceptance: Only I can do what I can do the way I can do it.

  * * *

  For me, learning that only I can do what I can do the way I can do it meant overthrowing the compulsive achiever in me, who was always chasing more and more pieces of paper in the hopes of affirming my worth. And it meant learning to reframe my trauma, to see in my painful past evidence of my strength and gifts and opportunities for growth, rather than confirmation of my weakness or damage.

  In 1975, I traveled to Israel to conduct interviews with Holocaust survivors for my dissertation. (Béla accompanied me; I thought that his facility with languages, including Yiddish, which he had picked up from his El Paso clients, would make him an invaluable translator.) I wanted to explore my professor Richard Farson’s calamity theory of growth, which says: Very often it is the crisis situation … that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result of such calamities the person often makes a major reassessment of his life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of his own capabilities, values, and goals. I planned to interview my fellow concentration camp survivors to discover how a person survives and even thrives in the wake of trauma. How do people create lives of joy, purpose, and passion, no matter what wounds they have suffered, no matter what sorrows they have experienced? And in what ways does the trauma itself give people an opportunity for positive growth and change? I wasn’t yet doing what my friend Arpad had advised me to do—grapple deeply with my own past—but I was getting one step closer in interviewing people with whom I shared a traumatic past, laying a foundation for my own healing to come.