The Gift: 12 Lessons To Save Your Life

This 92-year-old author survived Auschwitz and went on to get a PhD in psychology and conduct a successful clinical practice for decades. She maintains that real freedom is within one’s mind, and that it consists of one’s power to choose. Here, with cowriter Weigand, Eger identifies common mental prisons that contribute to suffering, helps readers identify these, and offers tools to become free. The author’s approach, named “choice therapy,” is centered on the idea that healing, fulfillment, and freedom come from one’s ability to choose one’s responses to life’s circumstances, and to make meaning and purpose from it all. Her three guideposts are: “We do not change until we’re ready” and “change is about interrupting the habits and patterns that no longer serve us and discovering the real you.” The chapter “Would You Like To Be Married to You?” deals with resentment, and “No One Rejects You But You” focuses on guilt and shame.