The Choice: Embrace the Possible, Dr Edith Eger

In this poignant memoir, Dr Eger, an Auschwitz survivor and eminent pyschologist, shares powerful lessons on the how we can recover and empower ourselves/others through CHOICE therapy.

Eger’s CHOICE therapy is about choosing Compassion, Humour, Optimism, Intuition, Curiosity and self-Expression.

• 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.?

• Only I can do what I can do the way I can do it.
• For Eger, this meant overthrowing the compulsive achiever in her, who was always chasing more and more pieces of paper in the hopes of affirming her worth. And it meant reframing her trauma of having endured Auschwitz, to see in her painful past, evidence of her strength and gifts and opportunities for growth, rather than confirmation of weakness or damage. ?

Richard Farson’s calamity theory of growth says:

Very often it is the crisis situation …that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can someone likes ruin people, they are actually 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.?

Martin Seligman, who founded a new branch of Positive Psychology in the field off clinical psychology, did experiments that shed light on this question: Psychologically, what was at work to make a liberated prisoner reject freedom (i.e. why do people freed from trauma keep returning to it)?

• 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 figured out how to escape the pain in subsequent experiments by leaping over a small barrier.
• But dogs who hadn’t been given means to stop the pain had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it. When administered shocks in a kennel cage, they ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and whimpered.

Seligman concluded that when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering and improve our lives, we stop taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is no point.

Suffering is inevitable and universal. Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, showed this:?

• underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviours is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a believe, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this believe to ourselves in our daily lives.?
• the belief determines our feelings and our feelings in turn influence our behaviour.

To change our behaviour, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.?

Powerful ways to help someone who needs help:

• Why now??
• How can I help you?
• I hear you saying…
• Tell me more…
• What are you doing now? Is it working? Is it bringing your closer to your goals or farther away?

Eger’s 4 questions for beginning a session with someone seeking to liberate themselves from victimhood:

• What do you want? Answer this question for yourself - should not be about what you want for someone else.?
• Who wants it? Should be your expectation for yourself and not because you are trying to live up to others’ expectation of you.
• What are you going to do about it?
• When?

When an emotion overwhelms you, use this mantra to manage it:

• Notice - acknowledge that you are having the feeling
• Accept - accept that those feelings are your own, not resolvable by lashing out at someone?
• Check - check your body response: hot/cold/heart racing? How’s your breathing? Are you okay?
• Stay - could bear those feelings and stay with them because they are temporary feelings, or practice how to respond to them in a healing manner instead of just reacting.?

What Eger’s mom taught her: 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.

• Mirrors the 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.

Being angry does not mean you are a bad person. Anger is a feeling, just like sadness, happiness, and fear. You’re allowed to express how you feel. Depression is the opposite of expression. Don’t repress / anesthetize your feelings - this only prolongs suffering. Be your authentic self. All our emotions are just shades of 4 main feelings - sad, mad, glad and scared.

When you lose your temper, you might feel strong in the moment, but really you are handing your power over.

Watch Dr Eger speak here , and access her official page here . Remember, you choose what you put in your mind.