Kindle Highlights

Highlights

victimization. — location: 252 ^ref-42941

“thriver” — location: 261 ^ref-50696

action that could move them from victim to survivor even if the circumstances they were dealing with didn’t change. Survivors — location: 278 ^ref-32450

“Why — location: 279 ^ref-63065

me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?” — location: 279 ^ref-54761

innocent. Somehow, something good will come of this. — location: 831 ^ref-6203

Innocent

hope — location: 837 ^ref-13997

hope she wasn’t able to keep living. — location: 837 ^ref-36533

Hope

trauma. — location: 2224 ^ref-54202

light. In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life. — location: 2516 ^ref-20979

Given set of circumstances…

He had also found a sanctuary in an inner world that both shielded him from his present fear and pain, and inspired his hope and sense of purpose—that gave him the means and a reason to survive. Frankl’s book and his letter helped me find words for our shared experience. So began a correspondence and a friendship that would last for many years, in which — location: 2596 ^ref-42361

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 to endure the hardest parts of life and to experience more passion and joy? After exchanging letters for several years, we met for the first time at a lecture he gave in San Diego in the 1970s. — location: 2599 ^ref-45741

the search to make meaning in my life by helping others to make meaning, to heal so that I could heal others, to heal others so that I could heal myself. It also reinforced my understanding, however misapplied when I divorced Béla, that I had the power and opportunity—as well as the responsibility—to choose my own meaning, my own life. — location: 2603 ^ref-62252

Meaning…

good listener and synthesizer, and helped me to derive my eclectic and intuitive insight- and cognitive-oriented therapeutic approach. If I had to name my therapy — location: 2797 ^ref-5644

probably call it Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE—about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression. — location: 2798 ^ref-16718

growth, which says: Very often it is the crisis situation … that actually improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result of such calamities the person often makes a major reassessment of his life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding of his own capabilities, values, and goals. I planned to interview my fellow concentration camp survivors to discover how a person survives and even thrives in the wake of trauma. How do people create lives of joy, purpose, and passion, no matter what wounds they have suffered, no matter what sorrows they have experienced? And in what ways does the trauma itself give people an opportunity for positive growth and change? I wasn’t yet doing what my friend Arpad had advised me to do—grapple deeply with my own past—but I was getting one step closer in interviewing people with whom I shared a traumatic past, laying a foundation for my own healing to come. How did the experience of calamitous events contribute to my subjects’ everyday functioning? I met survivors who had gone back to school, who had opened businesses (as Béla and I had planned to do), who had built tremendous close friendships, who faced daily life with a sense of discovery. Israel wasn’t an easy place for survivors; it’s not easy to live amid prejudice and not become an aggressor yourself. I met people who faced the political and cultural conflicts with courage and peacefulness, who took turns standing guard at a school all night so bombs wouldn’t greet their children in the morning. I admired them for whatever it was that allowed them not to give up or give in, I admired their strength for living through another war and for not allowing horrific experiences in the past to destroy what came after. Having endured imprisonment, dehumanization, torture, starvation, and devastating — location: 2816 ^ref-10443

Experience of calamitous events..

no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. — location: 2841 ^ref-25452

articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be our own jailors, or we can choose to be free. — location: 2843 ^ref-38097

Expression is the opposite of depression. — location: 2905 ^ref-34766

Work has set me free. I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant—the hard labor of sacrifice and hunger, of exhaustion and enslavement. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. — location: 3763 ^ref-12697

sense of meaning that helped me not only to come to peace with the past but also to emerge from my trials with something precious worth sharing: a path to freedom. The last — location: 3775 ^ref-20212

freedom. My first step in the dance was to take responsibility for my feelings. To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on Béla or other — location: 3782 ^ref-28747

Viktor Frankl writes, Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life. … This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life. CHAPTER 21 The Girl Without Hands The second step in the dance of freedom is learning how to take risks that are necessary to true self-realization. — location: 3981 ^ref-48433

Franke

It was a beautiful question. Where does our power reside? Is it enough to find our inner strength, our inner truth, or does empowerment also require that we take action on the outside? I do believe it’s what’s happening inside that matters most. I also believe in the necessity of living in congruence with our values and ideals—with our moral selves. — location: 4026 ^ref-64348

And he had taken a moral stand. He had acted in alignment with a higher purpose: to combat racism, to protect human dignity. In defending his own humanity, he protected everyone’s. He paved a way for all of us to live in keeping with our moral truth and ideals. Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what — location: 4055 ^ref-17842

Beatrice was ready to take me mentally into her father’s study, where the molestations had occurred. This is an extremely vulnerable stage in the therapeutic process, and there is an ongoing debate in the psychology and neuroscience communities about how useful or harmful it is for a patient to mentally relive a traumatic situation, or physically return to a site of trauma. When I received my training, I learned to use hypnosis in order to help survivors reexperience the traumatic event in order to stop being hostage to it. — location: 4095 ^ref-50677

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief. — location: 4184 ^ref-59207

found meaning and purpose in different ways in the more than seventy years since liberation. — location: 4267 ^ref-39553

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