I have been reading a book… this one:

I have been impacted by ‘The Choice’ and there are so many connections with compassionate communication, that I’m compelled to share some of it with you. It is the memoir of Edith Eger, a holocaust survivor who learned to live again with strength and resilience.

One of the things that struck me, is when Edith describes how she escaped prison camps, yet, once ‘free’, she built her own prison by forcing her truths and stories into hiding. Freedom, she discovered, lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle that prison, brick by brick.

Edith also introduces the awareness that there is a difference between victimisation and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimised in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life and this, she writes, is victimisation. It comes from the outside. In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimisation. We develop a victim’s mind in which we become our own jailers when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.

Her search for freedom and her years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist, taught her that suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional.

She also describes the time where she doesn’t yet understand that the flashbacks she experiences are a physiological manifestation of the grief that she hasn’t dealt with yet. A clue her body sends as a reminder of the feelings that she has blocked from her conscious life. A storm that assaults her, when she denies herself permission to feel.

She describes how deeply painful it is to confront her fear and the loss all over again, each time she remembers or recounts it. Yet she is starting to understand that feelings, no matter how powerful and uncomfortable, aren’t fatal. They are temporary. Suppressing them makes it only harder to let them go.

Expression is the opposite of depression.

All the above, and much more, inspired me to share with you.