Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

“They found him a week or two after he died,” she said. “He was completely alone.”

  We all go into relationships carrying messages we learned in childhood. Sometimes it’s a literal phrase someone repeated—like when my mother told me, “A bad husband is better than no husband.” Sometimes it’s something we gleaned from others’ actions or the home environment.

  “Honey,” I told Marina, “I’m hearing that you carry a message inside—that if you love someone, they’ll leave you.”

  Tears sprang into her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself as though the room had suddenly gone cold.

  When we’re imprisoned, it’s the damaging messages that stick.

  “But there’s another message I hear in your story,” I told her. “That you’re a woman of strength. Once you were that scared, lonely girl standing on the street with your suitcases. Many times you could have died, and you didn’t. Now look at you. Out of something you didn’t want, you made something good. You’re good.”

  Believing at a fundamental level that she wasn’t worthy of love, Marina had chosen a partner and patterns of behavior that reinforced this belief. I often see this dynamic in military marriages. When it’s only a matter of time before you’ll have to deploy or move and start your life anew, it’s hard to trust that someone will really stick with you through the distance and disruption. One way to cope with the fear of how much it will hurt to be apart—or the fear that someone will leave us or be unfaithful—is to avoid being close. Marina had married a man who charmed her into feeling safe and adored, only to use their relationship as a punching bag. He was carrying his own pain into the relationship—and his method of coping with his unresolved emotional business, to rage and blame, just reinforced Marina’s internalized message that to love is to be hurt and abandoned.

  “Perhaps you’re both using the fighting to fight intimacy,” I said. “So let’s look at your pattern.”

  Many couples have a three-step dance, a cycle of conflict they keep repeating. Step one is frustration. It’s left to fester, and pretty soon they move on to step two: fighting. They yell or rage until they’re tired, and fall into step three: making up. (Never have sex after a fight. It just reinforces the fighting!) Making up seems like the end of the conflict, but it’s really a continuation of the cycle. The initial frustration hasn’t been resolved. You’ve just set yourselves up for another go-round.

  I wanted to give Marina some tools to help her stop the dance at step one. What were the frustration triggers that kept launching them into the same imprisoning dance?

  “You’re either contributing to the relationship or you’re contaminating it,” I said. “How do each of you contaminate the marriage?”

  “When I want to have a discussion with him—express a feeling or bring something up—he’s afraid of being guilty, that something’s his fault.” His preferred defense was offense—to turn the tables and attack Marina with blame and criticism.

  “And what’s your part in it?” I asked.

  “I try to explain myself. Or I say, ‘Stop,’ and he explodes and starts kicking or throwing or smashing something.”

  I gave her an assignment, a detour to get them off the path they kept choosing. “The next time he tells you you’re wrong, your answer is ‘You’re right.’ He can’t fight with that. And you’re not lying, because everybody makes mistakes; anybody could improve. Just say, ‘Yes, you’re right.’ ”

  If we deny an accusation, we’re still accepting blame. We’re taking responsibility for something that isn’t ours.

  “The next time he’s angry, ask yourself, ‘Whose problem is it?’ Unless you caused the problem, you’re not responsible when he tries to put the monkey on your back. Give the monkey back. Say, ‘Sounds like you’re in a tough position. Sounds like you’re mad about that.’ When he tries to make his feelings about you, give the feeling back to him. It’s his feeling to face and you hope he’ll let go. When you step into the ring, he’s looking at you, not at his feeling. Stop rescuing him.”

  When Marina and I spoke a few weeks later, she said the de-escalation tools were working. Their fights had radically diminished.

  “But I have so much resentment against him,” she said. This time, it wasn’t his anger she wanted to talk about. It was her own. “In my mind, I make him responsible for everything.”

  “So do the opposite,” I said. “Thank him.”

  She stared at me, eyebrows raised in surprise.

  “You choose your attitude. So thank him. And thank your parents, too. They’re helping you become a very good survivor.”

  “And just ignore what happened? Leave out what they did?”

  “Make peace with it.”

  Many of us didn’t 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 weren’t always responsive to our needs for attention and affection. Maybe they didn’t pick us up and say, “We always wanted a child just like you.”

  “You’re grieving over the parents you never had,” I told Marina. “And you can grieve over the husband you don’t have.”

  Grief helps us face and ultimately release what happened or didn’t happen. And it opens up space to see what is and choose where we go from here.

  “Would you like to be married to you?” I asked.

  She gave me a confused look.

  “What do you like about you?”

  She was silent, her brow creased as though taken aback, or maybe she was just searching for the words.

  She began hesitantly, but her voice became fuller as she spoke. Her eyes brightened and a flush rose in her cheeks.

  “I like that I care about other people,” she said. “I like that I have passion—that I love climbing high. I like that I don’t give up.”

  “Write it down, honey,” I said. “Carry those words in your purse.”

  Taking an honest inventory is so important. It’s easy to reach for critiques of others and ourselves, to focus on wrongs and complaints. But all of us are good. We choose what we focus on.

  “What’s good about your husband?” I asked.

  She paused, squinting slightly, as though trying to see into the distance. “He cares,” she said. “Even though he is like he is, I know he cares about me. And he’s working hard. I injured my shoulder, and he helped me. There are times when he supports me.”

  “Are you stronger with him, or without him?”

  Only you can decide if a relationship depletes or empowers you. But it’s not a question to answer quickly. You can’t know the truth about your relationships until you deal with your own wounds, until you bury and leave behind all the things from the past you’re still dragging around.

  My decision to divorce Béla was unkind and unnecessary, 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 didn’t liberate me from my emotions and trauma, from flashbacks, from feeling numb, anxious, isolated, and afraid. Only I could do that.

  “Be careful what you do when you’re restless,” my sister Magda had warned me. “You can start to think the wrong things. He’s too this, he’s too that, I’ve suffered enough. You end up missing the same things that drove you crazy.”

  And I did miss Béla. The way he danced and wore joy on his sleeve. His relentless humor, how he made me laugh in spite of myself. His steadfast appetite for risk.

  Two years after our divorce, we remarried. But we didn’t return to the same marriage we’d had before. We weren’t resigned to each other; we’d chosen each other anew, and this time without the distorted lens of resentment and unmet expectations.

  “Your husband is getting your anger,” I told Marina. “But maybe he’s not the one you’re really angry with.”

  We cast others in the roles that help us enact the story we’ve decided to tell. When we
tell a new story—when we come home to our wholeness—our relationships might improve. Or we might find that we don’t need them anymore, that they don’t have a place in the story of freedom.

  You don’t have to figure it out in a hurry. In fact, it’s best to stop figuring and figuring and trying to understand. It’s an answer that will come only by playing more, by living your life as fully as possible, and being who you already are: a person of strength.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM RESENTMENT

  Change the dance steps. Many couples have a three-step dance, a cycle of conflict they keep repeating. It starts with frustration, escalates to fighting, and appears to restore harmony when they make up. Until the initial frustration is resolved, the peace won’t last for long. What frustration triggers keep going unresolved in your relationship? How can you change the dance at step one, before you fall into the old cycle? Decide on one thing to do differently the next time frustration brews. Then do it. Take note of how it went and celebrate any change.

  Take care of your own emotional business. Reflect on a message about love that you may have learned as a child and may be carrying into your relationships. For example, Marina was carrying the message that if you love someone, they leave. What did your childhood teach you about love? Fill in this sentence: If you love someone, __________.

  Would you like to be married to you? What qualities do you think create a comfortable and thriving relationship? Would you like to be married to someone such as you? What strengths do you bring to the table? Make a list. What behaviors might be challenging to live with? Make a list. Are you living in a way that brings out your best self?

  Chapter 9 ARE YOU EVOLVING OR REVOLVING?

  The Prison of Paralyzing Fear

  I’d been teaching psychology at a high school in El Paso for a few years—and had even been awarded teacher of the year—when I decided to return to school for a master’s in educational psychology. One day my clinical supervisor came to me and said, “Edie, you’ve got to get a doctorate.”

  I laughed. “By the time I get a doctorate I’ll be fifty,” I said.

  “You’ll be fifty anyway.”

  Those are the smartest four words anyone ever said to me.

  Honey, you’re going to be fifty anyway—or thirty or sixty or ninety. So you might as well take a risk. Do something you’ve never done before. Change is synonymous with growth. To grow, you’ve got to evolve instead of revolve.

  In America, the slang term for a psychologist is shrink. But I like to call myself a stretch! To meet survivor to survivor, and guide you to release your self-limiting beliefs and embrace your potential.

  I studied Latin as a girl, and I love the phrase Tempura mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. Times are changing, and we are changing with the times. We aren’t stuck in the past, or stuck in our old patterns and behaviors. We’re here now, in the present, and it’s up to us what we hold on to, what we let go, and what we reach for.

  Gloria is still carrying a heavy burden. She fled the civil war in El Salvador when she was four, grew up in an extremely violent household where her mother was repeatedly beaten by her father, and then, when she was thirteen and visiting family in El Salvador, was raped by her pastor uncle, the man who had christened her. He assaulted her on Christmas Eve, destroying her faith along with her sense of safety. No one believed her when she came forward about the assault, and the uncle who raped her is still a practicing pastor.

  “I’m holding on to so much anguish and hurt,” she said. “Everything is covered in fear. I don’t want to lose my husband or children to the past. I need things to change, but I just don’t know how to change, or where to start.”

  She thought that pursuing a degree in social work might help her find purpose in the present and unlock the hold of the past, but hearing her clients’ experiences of victimization only deepened her sense of despair and helplessness, and she abandoned the degree. She hated feeling defeated, hated that her children saw her struggling. Now, along with the frequent intrusions and feeling of panic from the past, she lives every day terrified that her children will be harmed the way she was.

  “I do my best to make sure they’re safe,” she said. “But I won’t always be there to protect them. I don’t want them to live in fear. I don’t want to pass on the fear.”

  But everyday events, like dropping her daughter off at camp, provoke enormous fear. “I’m up all night, thinking, ‘What’s going to happen to her? Is something happening to her right now?’ ”

  We should never stop 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.

  Fear uses the most insistent, relentless, provocative words: what if, what if, what if? When fear comes like a panic storm, and your body shakes and your heart races and the trauma you already survived threatens to swallow you, take your own precious hand and say, “Thank you, fear, for wanting to protect me.” Then say, “That was then, this is now.” Say it over and over again. You already made it. Here you are. Wrap your arms around yourself and rub your own shoulders. “Attagirl,” you say. “Love you.”

  You never know what’s coming from the outside. You can’t predict who might show up to cause harm—yell an insult, throw a punch, break a promise, betray your trust, drop a bomb, start a war. I wish I could tell you that tomorrow the world will be safe from cruelty and violence and prejudice, from rape and depravity and genocide. But that world may not ever come. We live in a world with danger, and so we live in a world with fear. Your safety isn’t guaranteed.

  But fear and love don’t coexist. And fear doesn’t have to rule your life.

  Releasing the fear starts with you.

  When we’ve been hurt or betrayed, it isn’t easy to let go of the fear that we’ll be hurt again.

  Fear’s favorite words are “I told you so.” I told you you’d regret it. I told you it was too risky. I told you it wouldn’t turn out well.

  And we hate to disappoint our hunches.

  We hold on to fear, thinking vigilance will protect us, but fear becomes a relentless cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy. A better protection against suffering is to know how to love and forgive yourself, to be safe for yourself, to not punish yourself for the mistakes and hurt and pain that are inevitable parts of life.

  This was Kathleen’s struggle when I spoke with her in the aftermath of her husband’s affair.

  She’d been happily enjoying her twelfth year of marriage to a handsome, accomplished doctor, taking a pause in her career to focus on their young sons, when she got the phone call. A man she’d never heard of claimed to run an escort service and threatened to expose her husband’s affair with one of the escorts and ruin his career if she didn’t pay up. It was sordid and outlandish, the stuff of soap operas and nightmares. But when she confronted her husband, he said it was true. He’d engaged the services of an escort. The man who’d called Kathleen was her pimp.

  Kathleen went into a state of shock. She shook uncontrollably, she couldn’t eat or sleep. Her world was upside down and inside out. How had she been so oblivious to the truth? She entered a state of perpetual vigilance, prodding her life for clues that would help her understand why her husband had cheated, and for evidence that he might be straying again.

  But over time—and with lots of help from a marriage counselor—the infidelity became an opportunity for her and her husband to rediscover their marriage, to rekindle intimacy. As they regained stability, he surprised her by becoming more attentive and romantic. Their marriage felt more joyful. They hosted a giant Christmas party, their house full of light. On Valentine’s Day, her husband woke her before dawn and led her down the dark hall to the staircase bedecked in rose petals and twinkling tea lights. They sat in their robes together and cried. Sweetness and trust had returned to their relationship.

  Little did she know he was weeks away from another destructive decision—the
start of another affair with a young colleague—or that in a few months she would stumble on a passionate letter that he’d written to his lover.

  Kathleen and I spoke two years after the devastating discovery that he’d betrayed her again. She chose to stay in the marriage, and once more they engaged in intensive couples therapy and rebuilt their relationship, from the ground up. She told me that in many ways their bond feels stronger than ever. Her husband is less walled off, less prone to edginess, more affectionate—he hugs and kisses and comforts her, checks in frequently, video calls her from work or dials out from his work phone so she knows he’s really where he says he is. He’s open about why he cheated again—“I was a powerful narcissist, trying to have it all,” he says—and speaks his heartfelt regret.

  But Kathleen is still imprisoned by fear.

  “I have the loving, attentive husband I’ve always wanted,” she said. “But I can’t accept it. I can’t believe it. I play the mind movies all day, reliving the past, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to cheat again. I know that I’m robbing myself of my own life. I know I need to learn to trust him again. I’m trying to stay in the present. But I can’t escape the fear. I can’t stop policing and monitoring him.”

  When we’re living with a lot of doubt, we’re on the lookout for signs that will calm—or confirm!—our fears. But whatever we’re looking for on the outside, we need to address within.

  “Maybe it’s not your husband that you’re doubting,” I said. “Maybe it’s you. I heard you say four times, ‘I can’t.’ ”

  Her bright eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re not giving yourself enough credit. So let’s work on dissolving that self-doubt.”

  The prison of fear can become a catalyst for growth and empowerment. To enact this transformation, language is one of our most powerful tools.

  “Let’s start with that ‘I can’t,’ ” I told her. “First of all, it’s a lie. I can’t means I’m helpless. And unless you’re an infant, that simply isn’t true.”