What Trauma Survivors Teach Us About Processing Pain

Dr. Edith Eger, a Holocaust survivor and psychologist, has spent decades writing and speaking about her experience as a prisoner at a concentration camp, where she witnessed unimaginable brutality, including the deaths of people she loved. Her account, detailed in her book The Choice, offers insight that's worth taking seriously, applied at an appropriate scale to the very different kinds of hardship most people encounter in their own lives.

An Insight Worth Sitting With

One detail from Dr. Eger's account stands out: she describes learning, over time, to feel pity rather than hatred toward the soldiers who worked under Hitler's regime, coming to see them, too, as prisoners of a sort, shaped and controlled by an ideology of hatred they'd been indoctrinated into. That's an extraordinary act of reframing, offered by someone with every reason not to extend it.

A few of her broader reflections carry weight well beyond her specific circumstances:

• The internal narrative is something you have some influence over, even in genuinely difficult circumstances. Not as a denial of the difficulty, but as a recognition that meaning-making is a real, if limited, form of agency, even when external circumstances are entirely outside your control.
• Chasing external validation to prove your worth creates its own kind of confinement. If self-worth is contingent on constantly proving something to someone else, that need itself becomes a trap that only you can ultimately release yourself from.
• Positive thinking without action doesn't accomplish much on its own. Reframing a situation mentally is a starting point, not a complete solution, it has to be followed by some form of genuine movement forward.
• What doesn't get expressed tends to stay lodged in the body. Suppressing grief or pain rather than feeling and processing it doesn't make it disappear, it tends to surface later, often physically, rather than resolving on its own.
• Hatred and judgment aren't innate, they're learned. Which means the opposite is also possible to cultivate deliberately.

Applying This at the Right Scale

Almost no one reading this has experienced anything close to what Dr. Eger survived, and it would be a disservice to her story to treat everyday hardship as equivalent to genocide and imprisonment. What does translate, at an appropriately scaled-down level, is the underlying principle: everyone encounters difficulty and pain of some kind, and while the external circumstances often aren't within your control, there's real, if partial, agency in how that experience gets processed, interpreted, and carried forward.

For physicians specifically, that might mean a difficult loss, a professional setback, a period of genuine burnout, or an accumulation of hard shifts that's taken a toll over time. The scale is different. The underlying mechanism, feeling something fully rather than suppressing it, and finding whatever meaning is genuinely available in a hard experience rather than either denying it or being consumed by it, still applies.

Why Feeling It Matters More Than Bypassing It

One of the more clinically grounded points in Dr. Eger's account is the idea that what doesn't get expressed tends to be what causes lasting harm, not the difficult experience itself, but the parts of it that never got processed or released. This tracks with a broader pattern seen across trauma research: suppression tends to extend suffering, while genuine processing, grieving, naming, expressing, tends to be what actually allows it to move through and, eventually, lessen.

This is a meaningfully different message than "just choose to feel better." It's closer to: the path through difficulty runs through feeling it honestly, not around it.

The Bottom Line

Nobody gets to choose most of what happens to them. What's available, in varying degrees depending on the situation, is some influence over the meaning attached to what happened and what gets built from it afterward. That's not a small thing, it's often the difference between an experience that stays lodged and unprocessed indefinitely, and one that, eventually, becomes something a person has genuinely moved through.

FAQ

Who is Dr. Edith Eger, and why is her perspective relevant here? Dr. Edith Eger is a Holocaust survivor and psychologist whose book, The Choice, details her experience and the insights on human agency and processing trauma that emerged from it. Her perspective is relevant not because everyday hardship compares to what she endured, but because the underlying principles about meaning-making and emotional processing apply broadly, at an appropriate scale.

Does this mean I can just choose to feel differently about a hard experience? Not exactly, it's less about instantly choosing a different feeling and more about having some influence over the meaning and narrative attached to an experience over time, particularly once the initial emotional processing has actually happened. Suppressing or skipping past a difficult feeling tends to backfire rather than resolve it.

Why does expressing difficult emotions matter, rather than just moving past them? Emotions that go unexpressed and unprocessed don't tend to disappear, they often surface later, sometimes physically, rather than resolving. Genuine processing, feeling, naming, and expressing a difficult experience, tends to be what allows it to actually move through rather than remain unresolved.

How can physicians apply this without minimizing genuinely severe trauma survivors have experienced? By keeping scale in mind. The specific magnitude of Dr. Eger's experience isn't comparable to most physicians' hardships, and it shouldn't be treated as such. What's transferable is the underlying mechanism, that meaning-making and honest emotional processing matter regardless of the scale of the difficulty involved.