It wasn’t until I was 46 years old that I was sure I wanted to be alive.
Before that I lived on a fence, with life on one side and death on the other. I couldn’t climb down off the fence to fully embrace my life because I didn’t know how. But I also couldn’t justify leaving my kids without their mom. So I waited in limbo.
Over my 27-year career as a therapist I have worked with people living on a similar fence, also in limbo. Maybe they have a deadly disease and ask, How much more suffering can I take? Maybe they’ve lost their child or their beloved and ask, What’s the point of being alive without them? Maybe they are disabled and wonder, Why should I even be here when I can’t do the most basic things for myself?
Others can’t point to a specific tragedy but feel a chronic deadness inside. While merely going through the motions of life, they say, Nothing inspires me anymore. I don’t feel a sense of purpose.
If you know this fence, if you know that limbo, this book is for you.
These 10 Foundations are the very essence of what helped me to finally get off the fence and choose life. I hope they help you choose life, too.
In this book I want to single out what helps and what doesn’t. I want to save you time, money that you might spend on years of therapy, and unnecessary pain on your path to a wholehearted life.
In practical and efficient ways, I have distilled the most powerful lessons I’ve learned to help you create a gorgeous life on your terms—no matter what’s happened.
Coming fully alive is your birthright.
Dedication
My muse is Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor. I talk about him a lot. I needed to learn from someone who knew hate and humiliation and the end of a world. I needed a real-life person who’d come back from all that, who believed in life more than death, and who fell in love with his future, despite his tragic past.
In fact, Viktor Frankl decided that some of the most horrific cruelty and pain he experienced in the death camps of the Holocaust would be his biggest teachers. I needed that kind of perspective and courage to help me get off the damn fence. He was big and bold enough to reach me, not only in the horrors he suffered but in how he raised the bar for all of us to say Yes to life despite any circumstances we’ve suffered. Any circumstances, with no exceptions.
I dedicate this book to you, Viktor. Your valiant efforts in the midst of unimaginable suffering translated through religions, cultures, languages, and eras, providing a bridge to life that I could walk across. You helped me choose to leave an internal frozenness and risk moving toward a full expression of my human spirit. You offered a map from despair to joy. You showed me why I should understand that life itself is asking something of me, and the only thing that makes any sense, despite it all, is to uncurl my hand and reach out, finally, to take hold of life’s hand and say a wholehearted Yes.
I admire people who fight for the betterment of all people, not just some. It’s an important distinction that being for all people does not mean being for all situations. I wanted to learn how to not be against others, too. I admired Viktor’s position in theory, but I only felt open to everyone on days when the sun was shining and people were kind to me.
With the turn of a mood, I could catapult into all kinds of “against-ness”: against my parents, against my biological family, against various people I’d had conflicts with, against the lady with the angry face at the grocery store who was clearly against me—or at least not for me.
I had an extra bad beginning in my life, and a very lonely middle. How much could one person actually change in a lifetime, and what would it take? As Jim had said, I had an abandonment and betrayal story. I didn’t want to have that story; it was just there, like a cement block that wouldn’t budge. I had thoughts such as, Maybe this just isn’t my lifetime to figure out how to be for all people. My life had too much pain arising from the outside and not enough capacity for coping on the inside.
In the oldest, wisest part of me knew the truth; I couldn’t actually find a single person on this planet whom I could justify being against. I also knew that as soon as I started being against anyone, I was lost. But my nervous system and the patterns of my survival brain were so entrenched that when under “threat,” I put up my shield and fired shots, at least in my mind.
I began to seriously study how to stop being against anyone. Especially helpful was Forgive For Good by Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects. “Against” was killing me—I lived with a feeling of twisting tension in my chest night and day, so I read his book like my life depended on it. I learned that to form a grievance we have to do specific things: we take a normal life event and make it very personal (rather than seeing it as something that just happened), and then we exaggerate how important it is. Next, we ruminate about it and stop looking at it from new perspectives. As a result, we get stuck, and our perspective becomes fossilized as “The Truth.”
This recipe for a grievance called me out in a way that made me laugh out loud when I read it. I laughed first because the thought of me exaggerating the centrality of my role in a grievance was embarrassing. And second, I laughed out of pure relief that if my grievance wasn’t, in fact, so personal, that meant I wasn’t so bad.