The Choice
Ratings16
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings16
Average rating4.3
"A powerful, moving memoir--and a practical guide to healing--written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients and allow them to escape the prisons of their own minds. Edith Eger was sixteen years old when the Nazis came to her hometown in Hungary and took her Jewish family to an internment center and then to Auschwitz. Her parents were sent to the gas chamber by Joseph Mengele soon after they arrived at the camp. Hours later Mengele demanded that Edie dance a waltz to 'The Blue Danube' and rewarded her with a loaf of bread that she shared with her fellow prisoners. These women later helped save Edie's life. Edie and her sister survived Auschwitz, were transferred to the Mauthausen and Gunskirchen camps in Austria, and managed to live until the American troops liberated the camps in 1945 and found Edie in a pile of dying bodies. One of the few living Holocaust survivors to remember the horrors of the camps, Edie has chosen to forgive her captors and find joy in her life every day. Years after she was liberated from the concentration camps Edie went back to college to study psychology. She combines her clinical knowledge and her own experiences with trauma to help others who have experienced painful events large and small. Dr. Eger has counselled veterans suffering from PTSD, women who were abused, and many others who learned that they too, can choose to forgive, find resilience, and move forward. She lectures frequently on the power of love and healing. The Choice weaves Eger's personal story with case studies from her work as a psychologist. Her patients and their stories illustrate different phases of healing and show how people can choose to escape the prisons they construct in their minds and find freedom, regardless of circumstance. Eger's story is an inspiration for everyone. And her message is powerful and important: 'Your pain matters and is worth healing: you can choose to be joyful and free.' She is eighty-nine years old and still dancing."--
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The “therapy memoir” seems to be a new or at least an increasingly popular genre – a therapist tells the stories of her patients (in forms disguised for privacy) while threading in her own life journey and what she's learned through her work with others. Dr. Eger's is a remarkable and moving example, drawing on her experiences as a Holocaust survivor and pioneering psychotherapist for a riveting, page-turning, beautifully written and heart-wrenching chronicle of human suffering turned into wisdom and love. What she discovers is that we need each other in order to survive, a theme of the primacy and sanctity of human connection that I'm finding confirmed over and over again in various ways. Recommended to anyone who wants to find meaning in the darkness.
Th first half of this book is about the authors experience leading up to her & her family's imprisonment in Auschwitz & up to liberation. It is the most emotionally rich story-telling of a death camp experience I have ever read. It's amazingly dramatic. I don't think I've ever cried as much from a book as this one.
The second half is about her experience after the war including meeting & befriending Viktor Frankl & her experience as a therapist. I enjoyed this but not nearly as much as the first half. I think Viktor Frankl does a better job as sharing his wisdom whereas Edith Eger does a much better job at sharing the texture of her experience.
‘“My mama told me something I will never forget,” I began. “She said, ‘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.'”‘
“And here you are. Here you are! In the sacred present. I can't heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. 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.”
“This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you're most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.”
‘Today I have been assigned two new patients, both Vietnam veterans, both paraplegics. They have the same diagnosis,...the same prognosis...I meet Tom first. He's lying on his bed, curled up in a fetal position, cursing God and country. He seems imprisoned—by his injured body, by his misery, by his rage. When I go to the other vet's room, I find Chuck out of bed and sitting in his wheelchair. “It's interesting,” he says. “I've been given a second chance at life. Isn't it amazing?”‘
