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47 quotes from Edith Eva Eger: 'To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.', '...By the time I would finish school I'll be fifty? He smiled.
- Who Is Edith Eger?
- On Victimhood
- On Avoiding Suffering
- On Self-Neglect
- On Hiding and Keeping Secrets
- On Guilt and Shame
- On Unresolved Grief
- On Rigidity
- On Resentment
- On Paralyzing Fear
Edith Egeris a concentration camp survivor. She survived unspeakable horrors; but instead of letting her painful past destroy her, she chose to turn it into a powerful gift – to help others heal. In her first book The Choice, she tells the story of her survival in the concentration camps, her escape, healing, and journey to freedom. Her book The Gi...
#1. The Worst Prison Is the One You Built For Yourself.
“The worst prison is the one I built for myself. Although our lives have probably been very different, perhaps you know what I mean. Many of us experience feeling trapped in our minds. Our thoughts and beliefs determine, and often limit, how we feel, what we do, and what we think is possible.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: 10 Powerful Techniques To Control Your Negative Thoughts
#2. Suffering Is Universal. But Victimhood Is Optional.
Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is no way to escape being hurt or oppressed by other people or circumstances. The only guarantee is that no matter how kind we are or how hard we work, we’re going to have pain. We’re going to be affected by environmental and genetic factors over which we have little or no control. But we each get to choose whether or not we stay a victim. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do get to choose how we respond to our experien...
#3. “Victims ask, “Why me?” Survivors ask, “What now?”
“When I ask “What now?” instead of “Why me?” I stop focusing on why this bad thing happened—or is happening—and start paying attention to what I can do with my experience. I’m not looking for a savior or a scapegoat. Instead, I begin to look at choices and at possibilities.” – Edith Eva Eger “Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It’s stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits: what I can’t do and what I don’t have. This is the first tool for moving out of vi...
#7. A Feeling Is Only a Feeling.
“We disable our children when we take away their suffering. We teach them that feelings are wrong or scary. But a feeling is only a feeling. There’s no right or wrong. There’s just my feeling and yours. We are wiser not to try to reason others out of their feelings, or try to cheer them up. It’s better to allow their feelings and keep them company, to say, “Tell me more.” To resist saying what I used to tell my children when they were upset because someone had teased or excluded them: “I know...
#8. The Opposite of Depression Is Expression.
“The opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does.” – Edith Eva Eger
#9. Don’t Inhale Your Anger to Your Breast.
“Of course, many factors account for each person’s potential for health and disease, and we do great damage to ourselves when we believe we’re to blame for our illnesses or injuries. But I can say with certainty that the emotions we don’t allow ourselves to express or release stay bottled inside, and whatever we’re holding on to affects our body chemistry and finds expression in our cells and neural circuitry. In Hungary we say, “Don’t inhale your anger to your breast.” It can be harmful to h...
#13.You Are the Only One You’re Going to Have For a Lifetime.
“One of our first fears is of abandonment. Thus we learn early how to get the A’s: attention, affection, approval. We figure out what to do and whom to become to get our needs met. The problem is not that we do these things—it’s that we keep doing them. We think we must in order to be loved. It’s very dangerous to put your whole life into someone else’s hands. Youare the only one you’re going to have for a lifetime. All other relationships will end.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: Self-Loathing: H...
#14. If a Good Report Card or Good Manners Earn Love, That’s Not Love At All. It’s Manipulation.
“Unfortunately, many families, in trying to motivate children to do well for themselves, create a culture of achievement in which the child’s “being” gets entwined with her “doing”; she’s taught she matters not for who she is, but for how she performs and behaves. Children are under such intense pressure to get good grades, be high-performing athletes or musicians, ace college entrance tests, earn a degree at a select college or university that will lead to a high-paying job in a competitive...
#15. We Honor Our Children When We Can Create A Culture Of The Joy Of Achievement.
“It’s not good to live with success looming over you, feeling burdened by the need to reach a certain height to be worthy of love. And yet the strengths and skills of our ancestors are also a part of us. It’s our legacy. It’s our prize, too. We honor our children when we can create a culture not of self-aggrandizement or self-effacement, of overachievement or underachievement—but a culture of the joy of achievement. The joy of working hard. Of nurturing our gifts. Not because we have to. Beca...
#20. If You’re Living a Double Life, It’s Going to Catch Up With You.
“If you’re living a double life, it’s going to catch up with you. When you’re free, you’re able to live with authenticity, to stop straddling the gap between two chairs—your ideal self and your real self—and become congruent. You learn to sit fully in the chair of your own fulfillment.” – Edith Eva Eger
#21. A strained relationship is both people’s fault.
“Even a marriage begun with passion and connection can grow to feel like a prison cell. It happens slowly over time, and it’s often difficult to see when and how the bars are built. There are the usual intrusions—stress over money or work or children or extended family or illness —and because the couple lacks the time or the tools to resolve these irritations, the worry and hurt and anger build up. After a while it’s even harder to express these feelings, because they lead to tension or argum...
#22. Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.
“Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.” – Edith Eva Eger “Healing can’t happen as long as we’re hiding or disowning parts of ourselves. The things we silence or cover up become like hostages in the basement, trying more and more desperately to get our attention.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: Higher Self-Awareness and Consciousness: 4 Ways to Connect With Your Inner Self
#23. Guilt Is Rooted In Shame
“Guilt is when you blame yourself, when you believe something is your fault. It’s important to separate guilt from remorse. Remorse is an appropriate response to a harmful mistake we’ve made or a wrong we’ve committed. It’s more akin to grief. It means accepting that the past is the past, that it can’t be undone, and allowing yourself to feel sad about it. I can feel remorse andrecognize that all I’ve lived through, all the choices I’ve made, have brought me to today. Remorse is in the presen...
#24. Guilt and Shame Don’t Come From The Outside. They Come From the Inside.
“Ultimately, guilt and shame don’t come from the outside. They come from the inside. Many of my patients seek out therapy when they’re going through a painful divorce or breakup. They’re grieving the death of a relationship, and the disappearance of all the hopes, dreams, and expectations it represented. But usually they don’t talk about the grief—they talk about the feeling of rejection. “He rejected me.” “She rejected me.” But rejection is just a word we make up to express the feeling we ha...
#25. We Choose How We Talk To Ourselves.
“If we’re to live free of shame, we don’t let others’ evaluations define us. And most of all, we choose how we talk to ourselves.” – Edith Eva Eger “These thoughts will influence how you feel. And how you feel is going to dictate how you act. But you don’t have to live by these standards and messages. You weren’t born with shame. Your genuine self is already beautiful. You were born with love and joy and passion, and you can rewrite your internal script and reclaim your innocence. You can bec...
#27. Grief is often not about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen.
“It is a universal experience for life not to turn out as we want or expect. Most of us suffer because we have something we don’t want, or we want something we don’t have. All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.” – Edith Eva Eger “Grief is often not about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: Dealing With Grief and Loss 10 Lessons You Learn...
#28. You’re a prisoner and a victim when You minimize or deny your pain—and hold on to regret.
“I’m a prisoner and a victim when I minimize or deny my pain—and I’m a prisoner and a victim when I hold on to regret. Regret is the wish to change the past. It’s what we experience when we can’t acknowledge that we’re powerless, that something already happened, that we can’t change a single thing.” – Edith Eva Eger
#29. To Resolve Your Grief Is to Release Yourself From Responsibility For All the Things That Weren’t Up to You
“When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.” – Edith Eva Eger “Resolving grief means both to release ourselves from responsibility for all the things that weren’t up to us, and to come to terms with the choices we’ve made that can’t be undone.” – Edith Eva Eger “This is the work we get to do in the present: to grieve what happened or didn’t happen, to own up to what we did or didn’t do, and to choose our response now.” – Edith Eva Eger “It’s so hard to be where we ar...
#37. A Couple That Doesn’t Have Fights, Don’t Have Intimacy Either.
“When a couple tells me they never fight, I say, “Then you don’t have intimacy, either.” Conflict is human. When we avoid conflict, we’re actually moving closer to tyranny than to peace. Conflict itself isn’t imprisoning. What keeps us trapped is the rigid thinking we often use to manage conflict.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: Resolving Marital Conflict: How to Repair Your Marriage
#38. You Can’t Want Something For Another Person. You Can Only Discover What’s Right For You.
“If you come in with an agenda, if you’re keeping score or trying to change someone else, then you’re not free. Freedom is when you embrace your power to choose your own response. My patients say it all the time: “I want him to…” or, “I want her to…” But you can’t want something for another person. You can only discover what’s right for you.” – Edith Eva Eger “You can’t change the situation, you can’t change someone else’s mind, but you can look at reality differently. You can accept and inte...
#39. No One Grows With Criticism. So Eliminate It.
“We don’t empower others—or ourselves —when we launch into complaints, when we say here’s-what-you-did this, here’s-what-you-did that. No one grows with criticism. So eliminate it. No criticism. None, ever. We do this for others, but most of all for ourselves, so we can live free of unrealistic expectations, and free of the anger that comes when our expectations are not met.” – Edith Eva Eger
#42. Love Isn’t What You Feel. It’s What You Do.
“When we’re angry, it’s often because there’s a gap between our expectations and reality. We think it’s the other person who’s trapping and aggravating us— but the real prison is our unrealistic expectations. Often, we marry like Romeo and Juliet, without really knowing each other. We fall in love with love, or with an image of a person to whom we’ve assigned all the traits and characteristics we crave, or with someone with whom we can repeat the familiar patterns we learned in our families o...
#43. Divorce Doesn’t Make You Free.
“Every choice has a price, something you gain, and something you lose. One choice we can always make is to do nothing. To decide not to decide. To keep on going the way we are.” – Edith Eva Eger “A divorce can be an extreme way of continuing to do nothing. “What do you gain from a divorce? It gives you a piece of paper that says you’re now free to marry someone else.” Divorce doesn’t resolve the emotional business of the relationship. It just gives you legal permission to repeat the same patt...
#44. If The Initial Frustration Hasn’t Been Resolved, You Set Yourselves Up For Another Go-Round.
“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...
#46. You’re Going To Be Fifty Anyway.
“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.” – Edith Eva Eger Related: Facing Your Fears: 5 Truths About Fear And 5 Ways To Conquer Fear And Get Unstuck
#47. We Have A Choice How Much Of Our Lives We Give Over To Fear.
“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, whatif? 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...
#48. Whatever We’re Looking For On The Outside, We Need To Address Within.
“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.” – Edith Eva Eger
We always have a choice. They determine our survival. As an Auschwitz survivor, Edith Eva Eger, author of The Choice: Embrace the Possible, tells us that everyone still has a choice even when imprisoned in that horrendous death factory.
Aug 18, 2021 · Inspiring Quotes from The Choice author, Edith Eger. This entry was posted on 18 August 2021. With The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save your Life, celebrated therapist and Holocaust survivor, Dr Edith Eger, provides a hands-on guide that gently encourages us to change the imprisoning thoughts and destructive behaviours that may be holding us back.
The Choice became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Relatives. Robert F. Engle ( son-in-law) Edith Eva Eger (born September 29, 1927) is a Hungarian-born American psychologist, a Holocaust survivor and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. [1] Her memoir entitled The Choice: Embrace the Possible, published ...
- Edith Éger
- Hungarian Jewish
- Edith Eva Elefánt, September 29, 1927 (age 96), Košice, Czechoslovakia
- Clinical psychologist
5. Believe in yourself - Ultimately, The Choice encourages readers to believe in themselves and to trust their own judgment. It is only by believing in ourselves and our abilities that we can truly make meaningful choices in life. The Choice Related Book Summaries. The Choice by Edith Eger. Edith Eger. We always have a choice.
3 ways to speak English. Jamila Lyiscott. 11:13. 2.72M views | Jan 2013. What fear can teach us. Karen Thompson Walker. Courage is not just for heroes. It is a choice we make every day. It is present in each breath we take. We learn courage from parents, mentors, and our darkest moments.
