When Marianne came home from kindergarten in tears, her sadness made me sad and uncomfortable. So I led her by the hand into the kitchen and made her a chocolate milkshake. I served her a big piece of Hungarian seven-layer chocolate cake. That was my remedy—eat something sweet. Cure your discomfort with food. Food was my answer to everything. (Especially chocolate. And especially Hungarian chocolate, with unsalted butter. Don’t ever put salt in the butter and make a Hungarian anything!)
I didn’t know it then, but 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 how you feel.” It’s a lie. You can’t ever know how someone else feels. It’s not happening to you. To be empathetic and supportive, don’t take on other people’s inner life as if it is your own. That’s just another way of robbing others of their experience—and of keeping them stuck.
I like to remind my patients: the opposite of depression is expression.
What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does.
I recently talked with a beautiful man who counsels children in the Canadian foster care system. He helps young people grieve the loss of family, security, and safety that many never had in the first place. I asked what motivates his work, and he told me about a conversation he had with his father, who was dying of cancer. “Why do you think you got cancer?” he asked. His father replied, “Because I never learned to cry.”
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 hold on to feelings and keep them locked inside.
Trying to shield others or ourselves from our feelings doesn’t work in the long run. But many of us are trained from a young age to disown our inner responses—in other words, to give up our genuine selves. A child says, “I hate school!” and a parent replies, “Hate is a strong word,” or “Don’t say hate,” or “It can’t be that bad.” A child falls down and skins her knee, and a grown-up says, “You’re okay!” In trying to help children regroup or bounce back from hurt or difficulty, caring adults can minimize what the child is going through, or inadvertently teach that some things are permissible to feel and others aren’t. Sometimes the cues to change or deny a feeling are less subtle: Calm down! Get over it. Don’t be such a crybaby.
More than by what we say, children learn by watching what we do. If adults create a home environment where anger isn’t allowed to be expressed, or where anger is vented in harmful ways, children learn that strong feelings aren’t permissible or safe.
Many of us are in the habit of reacting instead of responding to what’s going on. We’ve often learned to hide from our emotions—suppress them, medicate them, run away.
One of my patients, a physician addicted to prescription drugs, called me early one morning. “Dr. Eger,” he said, “I realized last night there was no Prozac at Auschwitz.” It took me a moment to digest what he’d said. There’s a huge difference between selfmedicating, as he was doing, and taking necessary medications that have the potential to save lives. But he made a good point. He’d begun reaching outside himself for an escape from his feelings, and he’d become hooked on drugs he didn’t need.
At Auschwitz, nothing came from without. There was no way to numb ourselves, to take the edge off, to check out for a while, to forget the reality of torture and hunger and imminent death. We had to learn to be good observers of ourselves and our circumstances. We had to learn to just be.
Yet I don’t remember ever crying in the camps. I was too occupied with survival. The feelings came later. And when they came, for many, many years I managed to avoid them, to keep running away.
But you can’t heal what you don’t feel.
More than thirty years after the war, as part of my ongoing work as a trauma specialist with the US military, I was asked to serve on a prisoner-of-war advisory committee. Every time I visited Washington, DC, to meet with the committee, someone would ask if I’d been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I’d already returned to Auschwitz, I’d stood on the ground where I was separated from my parents, under the sky that had received their bodies as they became smoke. Why would I go to a museum about Auschwitz and other concentration camps? Been there, done that, I thought. For six years I served on the committee, and for six years I avoided setting foot in the museum. And then one morning I was sitting at the mahogany table in our meeting room, my name etched on a little plaque in front of me. And I realized that was then, this is now. I’m Dr. Eger. I made it out.
And as long as I avoided the museum, as long as I convinced myself I’d
