There's a lot of wisdom here. Consider it a companion to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search of Meaning. It's part memoir, as the story of Dr. Eger's own journey of self-acceptance and self-discovery, but the author also describes a collection of her clinical therapy situations that offer helpful life advice--and not just to the reader: we get to see how Dr. Eger herself gains self-awareness and wisdom as she helps (and sometimes is not able to help) her clients.
The reader gets insights on how to handle rage, guilt, feelings of inadequacy, how to reframe problems and suffering as potential opportunities to learn and grow, and so on. We see Dr. Eger's own sincere struggle to live with her own rage, her own feelings inadequacy and insecurity, and we see her grapple with guilt--especially her guilt over one specific, devastating choice she made at Auschwitz.
One last thought: I'd be deeply remiss if I didn't also mention that the publishers of this book made a terrible decision choosing disgraced professor Phil Zimbardo--creator of the now thoroughly debunked (and likely fraudulent) Stanford prison experiment--to write the forward. This is an unfortunate decision for an otherwise good book. Admittedly, the publishers could not have known this, because the debunking and fraud came to light more than a year after this edition came out, but it will be interesting to see whether this forward is included in future editions. For the benefit of this author's wonderful insights, I certainly hope not.
Notes:
1) "Why now?" as a useful, focusing therapeutic question to ask a client ("Why are you seeking help now?")
2) "...over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. "
3) "We develop a victim's mind--a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailers when we choose the confines of the victim's mind." Nowadays, you can only write something like this if you're literally a concentration camp survivor: anyone else would be told to "check your privilege."
4) I don't want you to hear my story and say, "my own suffering is less significant. "I want you to hear my story and say, "if she can do it, then so can I!"
5) Perhaps the most macabre scene in the book is when the author describes her experience dancing for Josef Mengele shortly after arriving at Auschwitz: "As I dance, I discover a piece of wisdom that I have never forgotten. I will never know what miracle of grace allows me this insight. It will save my life many times, even after the horror is over. I can see that Doctor Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind, which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he's done. He is more a prisoner than I am. As I close my routine with a final, graceful split, I pray, but it isn't myself I pray for. I pray for him. I pray, for his sake, that he won't have the need to kill me."
6) "If this moment, this very one, is my last on Earth, do I have to waste it in resignation and defeat? Must I spend it as if I'm already dead?"
7) "There are different ways to keep yourself going." (revenge, forgiveness, etc)
8) "He has come out of the death camps with dreams. It seems an unnecessary risk." One of the author's friends wants to go to the United States and become a medical doctor.
9) "Always use your beautiful things, you never know when they'll be gone."
10) Dr. Eger divorces her husband in a supreme act of spousal reactance, but then realized her error, corrects it, and remarries him.
11) Viktor Frankl writes to her after anonymously receiving a copy of her personal essay "Viktor Frankl and Me." They begin a correspondence and a friendship, "in which we would try together to answer the questions that ran throughout our lives: Why did I survive? What is the purpose in my life? What meaning can I make from my suffering? How can I help myself and others endure the hardest parts of life and to experience more passion and joy?"
12) "By the time I finish [my PhD program] I'll be fifty." "You're going to be fifty anyhow."
13) "Before you say or do something ask, is it kind? Is it important? Does it help?"
14) "How easily the life we didn't live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control..."
15) Her therapy career as rendered in this memoir is a very helpful review to groove the ideas of Carl Rogers, Martin Seligman, Albert Ellis.
16) "Our painful experiences aren't a liability--they're a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength."
17) Notice, accept, check, stay (method for responding rather than reacting to feelings):
* Notice the feeling, acknowledge it
* Accept that it is you having this feeling
* Check your body's response: are you hot? Cold? Rapid heart rate? Am I breathing?
* Stay with the feeling until it passes or changes
18) Also useful therapeutic advice on couples' therapy in this memoir:
Where there's a dynamic between one partner relying on the other's inadequacies. The bad partner gets a free pass to test all limits while the good partner gets to say "look how selfless and patient I am to put up with all this!" The question, then, is to what extent do you give your agency to the other person by making your happiness a function of that person changing? You become your partner's puppet.
19) "So often when we are unhappy it is because we are taking too much responsibility or we are taking too little. Instead of being assertive and choosing clearly for ourselves, we might become aggressive (choosing for others), or passive (letting others choose for us), or passive aggressive (choosing for others by preventing them from achieving what they are choosing for themselves)."
20) Dr. Eger changes from saying "How can I help you?" to saying "How can I be useful to you? (read: "How can I support you as you take responsibility for yourself?") as the latter question implies that the patient has more agency, more volition, and is less passively dependent on the therapist.
21) On taking personal risks, and how they are necessary to self-realization.
22) A striking and very sad anecdote at the very end of the book when Dr Eger's older sister lashes out at her in grief over how the family lost their mother at Auschwitz. It's astounding how effortlessly cruel siblings can be to each other.