January’s Recommended Reading: The Gift

If you’ve been here for a while, you know I love Dr. Edith Eger and her book The Choice. I recently read her second book The Gift, and it’s absolutely fantastic as well, and that made it an easy choice for January’s recommended reading.

Dr. Eger, who is a wise and wonderful 94-year old Holocaust survivor and currently practicing psychologist, gives 12 life lessons in this book on different topics giving examples from her own life and her clients through the years.

The lessons are on victimhood, avoidance, self-neglect, secrets, guilt and shame, unresolved grief, rigidity, resentment, paralyzing fear, judgment, hopelessness and not forgiving. She’s no-nonsense, yet encouraging and inspiring. This book is a treasure trove of lessons on the things she has seen over time that hang us up the most. If you are kind of turned off by the negative lesson subjects, don't worry -- Dr. Eger presents these as solvable challenges we commonly deal with, not as permanent character flaws.  

I read this pretty quickly, but you could even take one subject month by month and kind of do a deep dive on it, if that's something that interested you. Any way you choose to read it, this book holds up to it's title -- it's a true gift!