“You can say, ‘That used to be me.’ And regain power over your thinking. One word is all you need: permission. I give myself permission for pleasure.’ ”
She began to cry.
“Honey, take back your power.”
But she was using minimization instead, telling herself things could be so much worse. Even though she got hit with a paddle, at least her parents didn’t put cigarettes out on her arm, she’d tell herself.
I told her to get rid of the “shoulds.” To make her language kinder. “Tune in to the way you speak to yourself,” I said. “Acknowledge you were wounded. And then choose what you let go and what you replenish. You got in the habit of minimizing your pain, and wanting to make yourself smaller. Now build a new habit. Release shame by replacing it with kindness, by making sure your dialogue is full of ‘yes I am, yes I can, yes I will!’ ”
While visiting the Midwest once on a speaking tour, I was invited to eat dinner with a lovely family. The food was earthy and delicious, the conversation pleasant, but when I complimented the daughter, the mother kicked me under the table. Later, over coffee and dessert, she whispered, “Please don’t lavish praise on her. I don’t want her to grow up conceited.” In trying to keep our children or ourselves modest, we risk making ourselves less than we really are—less than whole. It’s time to give yourself a kiss on the hand and say, “Attaboy! Attagirl!”
Loving yourself is the only foundation for wholeness, health, and joy. So fall in love with yourself! It’s not narcissistic. Once you begin to heal, what you discover will not be the new you, but the real you. The you that was there all along, beautiful, born with love and joy.
KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM GUILT AND SHAME
You made it. If there’s some part of yourself you routinely resent or criticize, imagine yourself being very little, so tiny you can crawl inside your body and say hello to each of your organs, to each part of yourself. If you believe that everything is your fault, then gently hold your heart, hug that wounded part of you, and exchange it for a loving self. Tell yourself, “Yes, I made a mistake. It doesn’t make me a bad person. My doing is not the entirety of my being. I am good.” If your trauma is still living in your body, embrace it, because you survived it. You’re still here. You made it. My breathing has been very limited since my back broke during the war, so I like to go inside myself and say hello to my breathing, to my lungs. Find your vulnerable part and love it all over.
What you pay attention to grows stronger. Spend a day listening to your self-talk. Is it full of “I should,” “I shouldn’t,” and “yes, but”? Do you tell yourself, “It’s my fault,” or “I don’t deserve it,” or “It could have been worse”? Replace these messages of guilt or shame with a daily practice of kind and loving self-talk. As soon as you wake up in the morning, go to the mirror and look at yourself with loving eyes. Say, “I’m powerful. I’m kind. I’m a person of strength.” Then kiss yourself on the back of each hand. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Say, “I love you.”
Chapter 6
WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
The Prison of Unresolved Grief
One day two women came to see me back-to-back. The first had a daughter who was a hemophiliac. She’d just come from the hospital, and she wept the whole hour, feeling the intense pain of watching her child suffer. My next patient had come from the country club. She also spent the hour weeping. She was upset because her new Cadillac had been delivered, and it had come in the wrong shade of yellow.
On the surface, her reaction seemed out of proportion, her tears unearned. But often a minor disappointment represents a larger grief. Her sense of loss wasn’t about the Cadillac—it was about her relationships with her husband and son, the sorrow and resentment she felt that her desires for her family went unmet.
These two beautiful women reminded me of one of the most fundamental principles of my work: how 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.
This is the epitome of what most soldiers face in combat. I’ve worked with many combat veterans throughout my career, and they often tell me the same thing: that they were sent to a place they were unprepared for, and that they were told one thing and found another.
Grief is often not about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen. When Marianne went to her first high school prom in a gorgeous orange silk dress, Béla told her, “Have fun, honey. When your mother was your age she was in Auschwitz and her parents were dead.” I was speechless with fury. My children knew by then that I was a survivor, but how dare he burden our precious daughter with my past? How dare he ruin her night with something that had nothing to do with her? It was completely unfair. Totally inappropriate.
But I was also so upset because he was right. I never got to put on an orange silk dress and go to a dance. Hitler interrupted my life, and the lives of millions of others.
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
