But I didn’t go to my graduation ceremony. I was too ashamed.
Like many survivors, in the years after the war I’d grappled with crippling guilt. It had been twenty-four years since my sister Magda and I were liberated. But I still couldn’t understand why I had lived when my parents and grandparents and six million others had perished. Even an occasion of celebration and accomplishment was tainted by my certainty that I was damaged goods, unworthy of joy, that every bad thing was somehow my fault, that it was only a matter of time before everyone discovered how broken I was.
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 and recognize that all I’ve lived through, all the choices I’ve made, have brought me to today. Remorse is in the present. And it can coexist with forgiveness and freedom.
But guilt keeps you stuck. It’s rooted in shame—when you believe “I’m not worthy”; when you think that you’re not enough, that nothing is enough, no matter what you do. Guilt and shame can be extremely debilitating. But they’re not real assessments of who we are. They’re a pattern of thought that we choose and get stuck in.
You always have a choice about what to do with the information life hands you. I once gave a lecture at a conference, and midway through my presentation, a dignified-looking man walked out. I almost froze on the stage, caught up in a barrage of negative self-talk: “I’m no good. I don’t deserve to have been invited to present at this conference. I’m out of my league.” A few minutes later, the auditorium door opened, and the same man came back in and sat down. He’d probably just gotten up to have some water or use the restroom, but by that time I’d already put myself under the guillotine.
No one is born with shame. But for many of us, the shame message starts early. When Lindsey, my oldest grandchild, was in elementary school, she was placed in a class for “talented and gifted” children (the very notion of this label frustrates me—all children are talented and gifted, one-of-a-kind diamonds!). She sometimes had trouble keeping up, and her teacher began to call her “my little caboose.” Precious Lindsey took her teacher’s words to heart. She became convinced that she wasn’t capable enough to be in the class, that she didn’t belong, that she wasn’t worthy. She was ready to drop out. But I talked to her about the importance of not letting her teacher define her. So she stayed in the class. And years later, when she wrote her college admittance essay, she titled it, “When the Caboose Became the Engine.” She graduated with honors from Princeton.
My shame messages began early, too, at age three, when I became cross-eyed. Before I had surgery to correct my eye, my sisters would sing cruel songs: you’re so ugly and puny you’ll never find a husband. Even my mother would say, “It’s a good thing you’re smart, because you have no looks.” These were difficult messages, and hard to unlearn. But ultimately the trouble wasn’t what my family told me. The trouble was that I believed it.
And kept believing it.
When Marianne and Rob and their kids lived in La Jolla, I used to go to their house every Monday to cook dinner. Sometimes I made American food, sometimes Hungarian. It was the highlight of my week, nourishing my grandchildren, feeling a part of their daily lives. One evening I was in the kitchen with pots bubbling and pans sizzling on the stove. Marianne came home from work in her beautiful silk suit and immediately began pulling lids out of the cupboard, matching each one to the correct pot. My heart sank. I was trying to be helpful, to make my family happy, and there she was, showing me that I wasn’t doing it right. That I wasn’t good enough. It took me a while to realize that the message of my failure wasn’t coming from Marianne—it was coming from me. To counteract my belief that I was damaged, I strove for perfection, believing I could achieve and perform my way out of shame. But we’re human, no more, no less, and human means fallible. Freedom lies in accepting our whole, imperfect selves and giving up the need for perfection.
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 have when we don’t get what we want. Who said everyone should love us? Which god said that we should get what we want, when we want it, how we want it, the way we want it? And who said that having it all is any guarantee? No one rejects you but you.
So choose the meaning you make. When I give a speech and receive a standing ovation and embrace a hundred people afterward who greet me with tears and say, “You changed my life,” and then one person shakes my hand and says, “Your talk was very good, but…,” I can choose how I respond. I can fall into a pit of insecurity, thinking, “Oh my god, what did I do wrong?” Or I can recognize that the critique might have more to do with
