The myth of normal, p.36
The Myth of Normal, page 36
Among the profound connections Sue made was with the last people you would have expected her to bond with. Ever the adventurous sort, some years after the explosion she found herself in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal wilderness on a peacemaking mission with, among others, several participants from Northern Ireland, veterans of the very organization whose bomb had mangled her body and altered her life forever. “The idea,” she said, “was to hear the other side of the story, to see each other’s struggles, and to put us in a different environment where we would need to protect one another.”
At some point the expedition had to ford a river. Sue’s dilemma was that she could not expose her metallic prosthesis to water, and the anticipation made her quite agitated. She needn’t have worried: plans had already been made for her safe and dry passage. Two men carried her across on their shoulders, one of them a former IRA militant. “The fact that it was an IRA guy, it made me absolutely overcome with emotion. I was crying and so was Don, the IRA man. The experience of working with these fellows made me realize just how damaged they had been by what had gone on in their lives before. Don himself was the youngest of seventeen. He had his first gun when he was eight, and he grew up in a children’s home. He’d been in jail, he’d been bullied, and he’d been having a really tough time himself. He was carrying the burden of having killed people and not having a clear conscience. It was good for me to be with these people whose lives I had had no insight into before. I realized I could have easily been Don, had I grown up in those circumstances.”
Hanisch’s ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro came a few years later. There, too, she was accompanied by a man from Northern Ireland, someone who had heard her story and wanted to reach the mountaintop with her. Reach it they did, and then the two improbable co-climbers did something even more unlikely: they danced, giving new meaning to the term “peak experience.” “I have had to be invited back into life,” she reflected. “And it was love that invited me back.”
Another illuminating conversation with a woman who had come through a personal hell ended up supporting my own unlikely reconciliation with the past. My interlocutor was Bettina Göring, grandniece of Hermann Göring, the Nazi Reichsmarschall whose Luftwaffe had killed Sue’s grandfather, and one of the pillars of the criminal regime that murdered my grandparents. We had been brought together by the director of a documentary series that featured us both; the filmmaker intuited, correctly, that we might have something to offer each other. We spoke by Skype: I from Vancouver, Bettina from Thailand, where she now lives and does healing work with others part-time. That such an exchange actually happened, and that it was so heart-to-heart, requires a word that I don’t often use: “miracle.” She had initiated it, writing to express appreciation of my work. The magical quality of this meeting, for me, was the fact that two people who had begun life at such different poles—one the descendant of martyrs, the other the relative of a notorious perpetrator—would each be sent on a healing journey on which they would serendipitously encounter each other and find mutual understanding.
Born eleven years after the war, Bettina had carried a dark legacy her entire life. A hypersensitive child, she bore all the family burden of multigenerational trauma and absorbed guilt for her uncle’s monstrous depravity. Having been abandoned by his mother at six weeks of age, Hermann Göring was brought up under the rigid and cruel child-rearing regimens Alice Miller identified in studying the lives of all the top Nazi leaders—what she had called the “poisonous pedagogy.” Morphine addiction and compulsive eating were among his attempted escapes from his dreadful inner world, the monstrosities of which he did so much to inflict on others.
Bettina recounted how she had sought healing for herself. It was at an encounter group in Australia that she realized, she said, “how guilty I felt, even though it made no sense—I mean, from my brain, my mind, I knew it didn’t make sense—but I felt it.” She shuddered as she told me this. “It was very painful to face that shame and to face the horror and all that had been a part of it.” A woman with acute empathic ability, she decided to use that inner resource and courageously opened herself to experience her great-uncle’s psyche—that is, to its resonance and vibrations within herself. She did so not to forgive Göring, but to forgive herself, to let go of the darkness she had always identified with. “I faced it,” she told me. “It was horrible. It was like going through the darkest night of the soul. I faced the worst of the worst, the monster. Very scary. Yet coming out of it again, I felt much freer.”
That’s exactly how I felt after we said our goodbyes. My own past had not changed one iota; my sense of the possible, though, had. I was reminded of something my colleague, the trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, had said to me one balmy autumn day about ten years ago, over lunch at a conference we were both speaking at in upstate New York. I no longer recall what in the conversation or my demeanor prompted his comment, but suddenly from across the table Bessel peered over the rims of his glasses and said, “Gabor, you don’t need to drag Auschwitz around with you everywhere you go.” In that instant Bessel saw me. Despite all my positive engagements with life, despite the love and joy and immense good fortune that have also been my portion, that self-directed hopelessness was an ever-lurking shadow, ready to obliterate the light whenever I experienced a setback or a discouragement, and even in innocent, unguarded moments.
The mental prison camp Bessel identified was built and fenced in by the meaning my infant mind had forged from events that were painful and frightening and far beyond my control—not just by the events themselves. That meaning, the never-ending story whose moral is “I am a damaged being, beyond all hope of healing,” has frequently colored my subjective experience of life, regardless of external factors and regardless of all I’ve witnessed and learned to the contrary, even in defiance of my core values and convictions about humanity. I have always believed—and “believed” is not a strong enough word here, because I’m speaking of a conviction more powerful than belief—that within everyone there is the potential for development and growth, no matter what they have experienced, believed, or done. And then there was me, the lone exception! Such is the power of the mind: it can rigidly maintain its convictions for a long time even when such views are self-defeating, contrary to experience, and even dissonant with other, neighboring beliefs.
The most inspiring journeys toward wholeness are the most improbable because they belie the notion that some traumas are beyond the pale. When writing this chapter, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Edith Eger, a fellow Hungarian Jew, internationally beloved psychotherapist, and author, now in her nineties. The same filmmakers who had connected me with Bettina also introduced me to Edith.
Edith was sixteen years old in June 1944 when, five months after I was born, she and her family were transported to Auschwitz from Košice, the same Slovakian town where my mother grew up and from where my grandparents were deported. Very likely they traveled on the same train as the Egers. Her parents, along with my grandmother and grandfather, were sent to the gas chambers immediately on arrival. Edith’s survival and, far beyond that, her transcendence of the horrors she endured are depicted in her book The Choice. What choice could she mean? Certainly not the choice of when and where she was born, or what befell those closest to her. Rather, she found a way to exercise the only agency she had, which lay in her own point of view and emotional attitude toward the unchangeable past. Here she explains how, decades later, she forgave Hitler himself. This happened at Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, the location of the Führer’s residence from 1933 onward. “It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of our past,” she writes. “So I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing that part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting mental and emotional energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is.”[2] We could say that she came to “choose” her past, not in the sense of liking or condoning it, but by simply letting it be. “I do not of course mean,” Edith adds, “that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I had clung to and fought for against all odds.”
When Bessel advised I could let go of Auschwitz, he meant precisely that I didn’t need to keep clutching the pain and resentment of the past, nor the beliefs I developed at a time when I could not have known any better. It is a freedom worth seeking.
When I spoke with Edith Eger again in 2019, she was just completing The Gift, her second book of healing wisdom. I was moved, knowing I was unlikely ever again to encounter someone so intimately close to the story of my own beginnings. “Edie,” I said, “I haven’t got over it yet, and here I am, seventy-six years later.” She laughed gently. “Gabor, perhaps you never will. You don’t need to. You just need to allow yourself to be with it.” Nothing needed to change, Edith was reminding me: only how I held my history in my mind.
None of us need be perfect, nor exercise saintly compassion, nor reach any emotional or spiritual benchmark before we can say we’re on the healing path. All we need is readiness to participate in whatever process wants to unfold within us so that healing can happen naturally.
Anyone, no matter their history, can begin to hear wholeness beckoning, whether in a shout or whisper, and resolve to move in its direction. With the heart as a guide and the mind as a willing and curious partner, we follow whatever path most resonates with that call.
Chapter 26
Four A’s and Five Compassions: Some Healing Principles
Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all costs, against all resistance.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
No one can plot somebody else’s course of healing, because that’s not how healing works. There are no road maps for something that must find its own individual arc. We can, however, sketch out the territory, describe it, familiarize ourselves with it, prepare to meet its challenges. We can learn what natural laws seem to govern healing, specifically what attitudes and attributes it both awakens and responds to in us. Like natural childbirth, healing cannot be mandated or hastened, but it can certainly be helped along. As the poet and musician Jewel eloquently puts it, “You cannot force nature / only nurture it.” That had been her personal experience of healing, she told me in an interview.
The following four A’s are not how-to steps or rigid injunctions. They represent healing principles that have proved useful guideposts for many people. I originally devised them while writing When the Body Says No and have since amended them, condensing them from seven to four. (In a later chapter I will propose two new A’s that harmonize individual and social healing, of which justice is a core tenet.) Each of these represents a healthy quality corresponding to a human need, often stunted or forced underground early in life by emotionally or physically inimical conditions or, in this confused and repressed culture of ours, just by environments that could not support its development. An essential aspect of healing is welcoming each of these qualities back into our life and letting it teach us its ways.
1. Authenticity
To put it bluntly, authenticity is a quality more often marketed than manifested in our culture. Even Coca-Cola is sold as “the real thing.” We find ourselves surrounded by the rampant phenomenon of ersatz authenticity: someone is performing “realness” for the crowd or the camera, but it doesn’t convince; maybe the words don’t match the cadences, or there’s too much defiance and bluster in the delivery.
Authenticity is hard to pin down. While synonyms like “genuineness,” “truthfulness,” “originality,” and so on come to mind, authenticity itself eludes any precise definition that could fully capture its essence. Like its fellow natural state, love, authenticity is not a concept but something lived, experienced, basked in. Most of the time you know it when it’s there. Have you ever tried explaining to anyone what love is in purely intellectual terms? As with love, so with authenticity.
The pursuit of authenticity is rife with pitfalls. For starters, we have the paradox that authenticity can’t be pursued, only embodied. By definition, striving for some idealized self-image is incompatible with being authentically who one is. We have to begin with accepting ourselves fully, as Anita Moorjani discovered in her encounter with fatal illness.[*] “Even the slightest little resistance from the opposite person . . . like if I had displeased someone even slightly—this was me before—I would be the one to back down,” she told me. “Today, I’m not afraid of being disliked, of disappointing someone. I’m not afraid of what I used to think of as my negative qualities. I realized that they are just the other side of being who I am.”
One of the most direct approaches to authenticity is noticing when it isn’t there, then applying some curiosity and gentle skepticism to the limiting self-beliefs that stand in for it, or just stand in its way.
The lack of authenticity makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability or regret, depression or fatigue. When any of these disturbances surface, we can inquire of ourselves: Is there an inner guidance I am defying, resisting, ignoring, or avoiding? Are there truths I’m withholding from expression or even contemplation, out of fear of losing security or belonging? In a recent encounter with others, is there some way I abandoned myself, my needs, my values? What fears, rationalizations, or familiar narratives kept me from being myself? Do I even know what my own values are?
The growing capacity to admit to oneself, “Ouch, that hurts,” or “You know, I didn’t really mean what I just said,” or “I’m really scared to be myself in this situation” is the impulse toward authenticity becoming stronger. After enough noticing, actual opportunities for choice begin to appear before we betray our true wants and needs. Whereas earlier, such awareness would have been clocked only after the fact, we might now find ourselves able to pause in the moment and say, “Hmm, I can tell I’m about to stuff down this feeling or thought—is that what I want to do? Is there another option?” The emergence of new choices in place of old, preprogrammed dynamics is a sure sign of our authentic selves coming back online.
2. Agency
Agency is the capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence, exercising “response ability” in all essential decisions that affect our lives, to every extent possible. Being deprived of agency is a source of stress. Such deprivation could arise from social or political conditions: poverty, injustice, marginalization, or the seeming collapse of the world around us. In the case of illness, it’s often due to internal constraints.
The exercise of agency is powerfully healing. The psychologist Kelly Turner has studied many cases of so-called spontaneous remission of what had been diagnosed as terminal malignancy. “Having worked as a counselor at various hospitals and oncologists’ offices,” she reports, “I know firsthand that the patients who listen and follow instructions are considered ‘good’ patients, while the ‘annoying’ patients are those who ask a lot of questions, bring in their own research, or—worst of all—challenge their doctors’ orders.”[1] Yet these latter ones, she found, those who find ways to take control of their own healing, are the ones likely to do better in the long term. In hindsight, Dr. Turner notes, all her radical remission survivors wished they’d started much earlier to be active agents of their destinies rather than compliant patients in the hands of physicians.
As with authenticity, capitalism sells a bogus version of agency through personal-power mantras like “Be all you can be” and “Have it your way.” Personal choice becomes a brand, with no attention paid to the contexts in which those choices are made. Often the freedom being advertised is the dubious freedom to choose between this or that identity-burnishing product or service that will not, cannot, satisfy us. Nor does agency mean some sort of false omnipotence or ultimate dominion over all happenings and circumstances. Life is so much bigger than us, and we do not forward our own healing by pretending to be in control where we’re not.
Agency does mean having some choice around who and how we “be” in life, what parts of ourselves we identify with and act from. This often starts with renegotiating our relationship with the personality traits we have so long taken to be identical with who we really are, the ones that first arose in us to keep us safe but now keep us boxed in. There is no freedom in having to be “good” or the most talented or accomplished, or in the need to please or entertain or be “interesting.” Nor can we wield agency when we react with automatic opposition to other people’s demands: knee-jerk reactivity leaves no room for “response ability”—or what in our first chapter we called response flexibility, a capacity trauma greatly impairs.
Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning.
