My own search for freedom and my years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist have taught me that suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood.
No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization.
Survivors don’t have time to ask, “Why me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?”
asked her how she was managing to go on. “I heard we’re going to be liberated by Christmas,” she said. She kept a meticulous calendar in her head, counting down the days and then the hours until our liberation, determined to live to be free. Then Christmas came, but our liberators did not. And she died the next day.
Soon we will understand that out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war.
The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose.
“When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window,”
In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.
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.
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.
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.
I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.
At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.
He walked from Czechoslovakia to Vienna, only to be denied a seat at the exams because he was Jewish. He begged. He had come so far, he had walked the whole way, could he at least take the test, could he be allowed that much? They let him sit for the exam, and he passed. He was so talented that he was offered a spot at the school despite his ancestry. Sitting beside him at the exam was a boy named Adolf Hitler, who was not accepted at the school. But the Jewish boy was. And all his life, this man, who had left Europe and lived in Los Angeles, had felt guilty, because if Hitler hadn’t suffered this loss, if he hadn’t lost to a Jew, he might not have felt the need to scapegoat Jews.
Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.
Taking risks doesn’t mean throwing ourselves blindly into danger. But it means embracing our fears so that we aren’t imprisoned by them.
Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.
‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ”
You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.