Spoiler alert: If you still want to read the books of Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger (highly recommended!) you should not read on now.
Edith Eger wrote two books, “The Choice” and “The Gift. She tells how as a 16-year-old girl she was deported with her parents to Auschwitz, they traveled for days under miserable conditions in a train car normally used for cattle transport. She never saw her parents again after their arrival; she herself narrowly survived the Holocaust.
Years after the war, Edith visited Washington regularly as a psychologist. She was frequently alerted to the Holocaust Museum, but never went. One day she realizes she doesn’t want to go to the museum because she is afraid of what she will find there. She decides to go. It is a terrible experience to be reminded of the time she didn’t want to have experienced. Halfway through the museum is a train car, so visitors can get a picture of how transportation took place back then. Edith sits down in the wagon; a wave of sadness overwhelms her. Crying, she sits in a corner of the train car for hours. Days later she experiences how good it was to go here, and to give that old pain space. On the last day she saw her parents, there was no grief, only a lot of tension and fear. But the grief got in the way for years and hindered her from getting free from her traumatic experience.
My moral: You don’t experience what emotions lie beneath our traumas until later. You only find that out when you allow them. You have hidden them away for so long that you reluctantly face them. That is the Choice. But you feel relieved and unburdened when you can round up your old pains.