When he turned nineteen, Ruth’s youngest son asked her to take him and his brother to Hungary. He wanted to learn more about his grandparents, who were no longer alive. And with the rise of right-wing extremism around the globe, and an understanding that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, he felt especially committed to knowing more about the past. But Ruth balked. She’d been to Hungary as a young woman, during the height of Communism, and it had not been a pleasant experience. She had no desire to return.
Then a friend recommended a book to her—The Choice!—and reading it gave her new courage and a strong imperative to face her parents’ past. She agreed to the trip.
It turned out that retracing her parents’ past with her sons was an intensely transformative and healing experience. They visited a synagogue that houses an exhibition on the Budapest ghetto. For the first time, she saw pictures that detailed what her mother had lived through. It was painful and difficult to take in the truth. But it was also helpful and empowering. She gained insight and a new sense of connection to her parents—she understood why they’d been so reluctant to talk about the past, appreciating that they were trying to protect her, and themselves. But hiding or minimizing our truth doesn’t protect our loved ones. Protecting them means working to heal the past so we don’t inadvertently pass the trauma on to them. As Ruth confronted her family’s legacy, she was able to feel congruence within herself. To come to terms with the root of her anxiety and begin to release it.
My healing didn’t start until a fellow student at the University of Texas gave me a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and I finally worked up the courage to read it. I had so many excuses, so many reasons to resist: I don’t need to read someone else’s account of Auschwitz, I told myself. I was there! Why feel the pain all over again? Why open myself up to nightmares? Why revisit hell? But when I finally cracked the book open in the middle of the night while my family slept and the house was quiet, something unexpected happened: I felt seen. Frankl had been where I’d been. It felt like he was speaking directly to me. Our experiences weren’t identical. He was in his thirties when he was imprisoned, already an acclaimed psychiatrist; I was a sixteen-year-old gymnast and ballet student dreaming of my boyfriend. But the way he wrote about our shared past changed my life. I saw a new possibility for myself—a way to give up secrets and hiding, to stop fighting and running away from the past. His words—and later, his mentorship—gave me the courage and inspiration to face and express my truth, and in speaking my secret, reclaim my genuine self.
Reckoning and release are impossible when we keep secrets—when we operate under a code of denial, delusion, or minimization.
Sometimes the demand to keep a secret is unspoken or unconscious. Sometimes others buy our silence with threats or force. Either way, secrets are harmful because they create and sustain a climate for shame, and shame is the bottom line of any addiction. Freedom comes from facing and telling the truth—and, as I’ll explore in the next chapter, this is only possible when we create a climate of love and acceptance within ourselves.
KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM SECRETS
If you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half-assed. Place two chairs side by side. Begin by sitting on one chair, legs uncrossed. Feel the way your feet rest against the floor. Feel your sit bones heavy on the chair. Feel your spine lengthen out of your pelvis, your head extend from your neck. Soften your shoulders away from your ears. Take a few deep, nourishing breaths, lengthening with the inhale, grounding with the exhale. Now move so you are sitting with one butt cheek on one chair, the other cheek on the other chair. Check in with your feet, your sit bones, your spine, neck, head, and shoulders. How do your body and breath feel when you straddle two chairs? Finally, return to one chair. Ground your feet and sit bones. Lengthen your spine and neck. You’re back home. Follow your breath as you realign and become congruent.
Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself. Try the Vital Signs exercise that Robin used to heal her marriage. Several times a day, make a conscious effort to check in with your body and take your own emotional temperature. Ask yourself, “Do I feel soft and warm, or cold and stiff?”
Tell the truth in the safe presence of others. Support groups and twelve-step programs can be a wonderful place to share your truth—and learn from others who are doing the same. Find a local or online meeting where you will be in the company of people who can relate to and empathize with your experience. Attend at least three meetings before you decide whether or not it’s for you.
Chapter 5
NO ONE REJECTS YOU BUT YOU
The Prison of Guilt and Shame
It took me decades to forgive myself for surviving.
I graduated from college in 1969. I was forty-two years old, a mother of three, an immigrant. It had required significant courage and resources to learn English and return to school. And I
