It’s a rare gift to read a book that changes your life. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you carry it with you. The Choice was written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a therapist, and Holocaust survivor. It’s a book that traces her path from trauma to healing while helping others through their darkest days. It’s filled with wisdom and insight. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from her book.
“I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.”
“To forgive is to grieve – for what happened, for what didn’t happen – and to give up the need for a different past.”
“To save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”
“When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves.”
“Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.”
“We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible.”
“It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.”
“The problem – and the foundation of our persistent suffering – is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment sign something about our worth.”
“Very often it is the crisis situation that actually improves us as human beings.”
“When we come to believe that there is no way to be loved and to be genuine, we are at the risk of denying our true nature.”
“Choice Therapy – 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 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 exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.”
“We can choose to be our own jailors or we can choose to be free.”
“But despite – and, really, because of – the struggles and the tragedies in our lives, each of us has the capacity to gain the perspective that transforms us from victim to thriver.”