The Choice

The Choice -- summary

A loaded gun, a frozen captain, and a 53 year old therapist who refused to be afraid

In 1980, an Army captain named Jason Fuller walked into Edith Eger's office in El Paso. He sat down, said almost nothing, and stared past her. He had a loaded service weapon hidden under his shirt. Eger could feel something was wrong, the way you feel a storm coming on the back of your neck. She did not ask the standard intake questions. She did not reach for the panic button. She stood up and said, "We're going for a walk." She put a leash on her white poodle, took the captain by the elbow, and led him into a public park, where a man with a gun is less likely to shoot a woman because too many strangers are watching.

By the end of the afternoon Jason Fuller had begun to talk. Years later Eger learned that if she had failed to reach him that day, he would have driven home and killed his wife, and almost certainly ended up on death row. What gave a small Hungarian woman the nerve to walk a stranger and his hidden gun into a public park? She had survived Auschwitz. She had danced for Josef Mengele on her first night there, the same night her mother was gassed, and discovered that even in hell a person could choose where to put her mind. By the time Jason Fuller sat down in her office, she had been turning that one discovery into a life's work for decades.

This summary walks you through the book Eger wrote about that work. It tries to answer three questions she has been asking patients and audiences for fifty years. What is the difference between being a victim and choosing victimhood? Where exactly is the door out of the prison of your own past? And what does a person actually do, on a Tuesday morning, when they decide to stop being run by something that already happened?