Edith Eger #5: You can’t heal what you don’t feel
Sometimes we must face what we fear most in order to heal.
Reminder: This is article #5 on my special series about Edith Eger. Check previous posts if you want to know the whole story.
You are not your emotions
Edith Eger
Three decades had passed since the war ended, and Edith had built a new life for herself as a trauma specialist working alongside the US Army. When she received an invitation to serve on a committee for war prisoners, offering her expertise and counsel, she accepted. Yet during each journey to Washington for these meetings, the same question would inevitably arise from colleagues and acquaintances: "Have you visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum?"
The suggestion always struck Edith as unnecessary, almost absurd. She had already come back to Auschwitz itself, walking through the very grounds where her childhood had been shattered, where she had last seen her parents alive.
What could a museum possibly show her that she hadn't already witnessed firsthand? The reasoning seemed logical enough—why examine the horror when you had lived through the reality?
But as months turned into years of service on the committee, Edith began to recognize something troubling in her avoidance. Each time she dismissed the museum visits, each time she told herself she had already "dealt with" her past, she was actually running from something deeper. The truth was uncomfortable: while she had survived Auschwitz physically, emotionally she remained partially imprisoned there. Her refusal to engage with her trauma was keeping a piece of her soul locked away.
Then she had a realization. She could not help others heal until she healed herself. It was a contradiction that she could not process and overcome some of the challenges her own patients were facing.
“And as long as I kept avoiding the museum, as long as I kept convincing myself that I had already overcome the past and didn't need to face it again, a part of me would remain trapped there. A part of me was not free.” Edith once said.
So she made a decision that required every ounce of courage she possessed. She would visit the museum.
The experience proved every bit as terrifying as she had anticipated. The photographs from the Auschwitz arrival platform in May 1944 struck her like physical blows. But nothing prepared her for the cattle car exhibit—a copy of the German livestock wagons that had carried thousands to their deaths.
The museum encouraged visitors to step inside, to experience the claustrophobic darkness, and when Edith approached the entrance to that reconstructed car, her body betrayed her. She froze completely, transformed into a statue of fear and memory.
Inside the replica car, fear overwhelmed her. She felt sick and remembered the train ride with her parents. She could hear the wheels on the tracks—the same sound from when she was sixteen, not knowing they were going to die. Surviving back then had been easier than remembering now.
At Auschwitz, she couldn't cry as she was so absorbed in surviving. But here, the tears came freely. She sat in the darkness for hours while other visitors came and went. She finally let herself feel the pain she had carried for so long. When she left the car, she felt different. Lighter. The pain was still there, but something had changed. She had stopped running from her feelings.
You can’t heal what you don’t feel
There are many good reasons why we avoid our feelings: they're uncomfortable, or they're not the feelings we think we should have, or we're afraid of how they might hurt others, or we're scared of what they might mean, what they might reveal about the choices we've made, or those we'll make going forward.
But as long as you keep evading your feelings, you'll be denying reality. And if you try to close the door on something and say: "I don't feel like thinking about that," I promise you're going to think about it. So open the door to that feeling.
A feeling is just a feeling, not your identity. ~Edith Eger
When Eger teaches that "a feeling is just a feeling, not your identity," she's not dismissing the validity of emotions but rather their authority over our identity and choices. Emotions provide crucial information about our inner state and our relationship to circumstances, but they don't have to dictate our actions.
This understanding—that we are the awareness within which emotions arise and pass away—became the foundation not only for her survival but for her later work helping others find freedom from their own emotional prisons. It reveals that even in our most overwhelming moments, there remains an untouchable core of awareness that can choose how to respond to whatever we're feeling.
You are not your emotions. Emotions are just energy that come and go. As buddhist monk Pema Chödron beautifully expresses: “You are the sky. Everything else – it's just the weather.”
Treating our emotions with care
How should we treat our emotions? With softness, care and delicacy.
Just as a skilled gardener approaches their garden with patient observation rather than forceful control, we can learn to tend our emotions with the same gentle awareness. The gardener never yanks a flower to make it grow faster or shouts at weeds to disappear—instead, they create optimal conditions and trust the natural process.
The way we treat our emotions profoundly shapes who we become. Whatever we practice, we master. When we cling to fears, we cultivate fearfulness. When we reject reality, truth becomes increasingly harder. When we approach ourselves with harshness, tenderness slips away.
Our emotional habits are like daily training sessions for the soul. Choose your practice wisely: Will you train in the art of gentle courage, compassionate truth-telling, and tender self-regard? Or will you strengthen the muscles of fear, denial, and self-aggression?
Don’t try to cheer you up when you’re sad. It’s not going to help. You will just feel culprit and think that you should be feeling better. Instead, try to feel the emotion. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s guilt. Or sadness. Whatever it is, just observe it. And then reject the urge the necessity to change it. ~Edith Eger
How to get better with your emotions
Don't try to cheer yourself up when you're experiencing a emotion—it won't help. You'll only feel guilty and believe you should be feeling better. Instead, try to feel the emotion fully. Maybe it's fear. Maybe it's guilt. Or sadness. Whatever it is, simply observe it. Then resist the urge to change it.
This practice of presence, rather than resistance, opens the door to genuine healing and growth.
Picture yourself as the mountain that experiences all seasons. The mountain doesn't become winter when snow falls, nor does it become spring when flowers bloom. Similarly, we are the unchanging awareness that experiences the changing seasons of our emotional landscape. We are not the storm; we are the vast sky that holds it.
The emotions are temporary visitors. The awareness that observes them is greatest power. Try to deal with our emotions by observing thoughts and feelings without attachment, as Edith Eger's recommends. Here’s a more in detail explanation:
Witnessing without judgment: Recognizing emotions as they arise without immediately labeling them as good or bad, right or wrong.
Creating space: Understanding that there's always a gap—however small—between the arising of an emotion and our response to it. Here lays our power of choice.
Non-identification: Realizing that we are the sky, not the weather; the ocean, not the waves; the awareness that experiences emotions, not the emotions themselves.
Instead of: "I am angry" (identification with the emotion).
Try: "I am experiencing anger" (observation of the emotion).Instead of: "I am depressed" (becoming the emotion).
Try: "Depression is visiting me right now" (temporary visitor perspective).
To learn more about Dr. Edith Eger's extraordinary journey, you can check my previous posts, read her powerful memoir "The Choice" and "The Gift," or listen to her interviews on various podcasts where she continues to share her wisdom about healing, hope, and human resilience.
Outstanding man. You’ve done her proud in this series. So many profound lessons from a truly exceptional woman. Thank you for highlighting her and her story. Wild I was unaware of it until now.