11 phrases from Boris Cyrulnik to reflect on

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Boris Cyrulnik is one of the world’s leading resilience experts. His phrases are an invitation for anyone who wants to reflect.

Boris Cyrulnik’s phrases tell us about love, relationships and life, but above all about resilience. They are a gift for anyone who wants to reflect, investigate themselves and their ability to move forward.

Boris Cyrulnik is a French psychiatrist, neurologist and ethologist. known as one of the fathers of resilience. It is no coincidence that Cyrulnik has investigated and studied childhood trauma so much: his childhood was not easy. At just seven years old, his family was sent to the concentration camps and never returned.

From there, he visited different centers and foster families, his name was changed and he was transferred to a farm at just eight years old by French Public Assistance until an aunt of his found him and took him with her to Paris. Everything he experienced led him to study medicine, psychoanalysis and later neuropsychiatry until he specialized in the treatment of traumatized children and became one of the world’s leading experts on resilience.

As we see, His biography has been and is the fundamental axis on which his production is based. scientific and literary. Below we are going to learn just a little bit of his wonderful work through the selection of some of his best phrases.

Understand to move forward

“Neither forget nor use: the only way to get ahead is by understanding.”

For Cyrulnik, The act of understanding is one of the fundamental strategies that allow us to move forward and put aside stagnation, that blockage in which we sometimes find ourselves immersed when we do not understand what is happening. Of course, understanding does not imply healing, but it does open certain doors to the healing process.

Furthermore, understanding what happened is not usually easy, not when what we experienced has hit us hard and hurt us. A qualitative leap at a cognitive level is necessary to achieve this, that is, another way of processing what happened. However, when it comes, the suffering begins to progressively ease and we can move forward.

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Expressing yourself as a coping strategy

“To count is to expose oneself to danger. To remain silent is to isolate oneself.”

Giving voice to our discomfort, to what worries us and wraps us in a spider web, to what we dislike or even to what does not convince us about the other It is releasing part of our suffering. It is also to cleanse the mind and heart and prevent it from poisoning us inside.

However, it is important to vent to the right people, not everyone is worth it, as well as knowing how to do it and of course Keep in mind that telling carries a risk: facing what hurts and bothers us. However, not doing so is also dangerous, since it means closing ourselves in on ourselves and building almost insurmountable walls around us.

The art of knitting ourselves

“With biological, emotional, psychological and social threads of wool, we spend our lives knitting ourselves.”

That’s right, we are a set of experiences, affects, psychological, social and biological aspects. A conglomerate woven by ourselves that writes one story or another. Therefore, the same situation can be experienced differently by different people because even though it is something general, it is filtered through our uniqueness.

“The chimera called “fiction” is the twin sister of the story of oneself.”

What do we tell each other about what happened? What are we left with? Often everything has a fictional component, since memories are still reconstructions of what was experienced and there it is impossible for everything to be reproduced as it was, no matter how much we want. Think about it.

“Haunted by our memories, we dedicate ourselves to polishing our memory.”

“In healthy memory, the representation of oneself tells the way of living that allows us to be happy. In traumatic memory, an incredible tear fixes the past image and clouds thought.”

These last two sentences from Boris Cyrulnik stand out the ability of our memory to transform itself on occasions to cushion damageto make the weight of the past lighter and even to pretend certain experiences had never happened – at least consciously -.

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However, any experience leaves its mark and colors our gaze, even if we do not believe it. You just have to be willing to discover it.

The importance of love

“Love in all its manifestations is the cure to heal the wounds of childhood.”

“There is a point perhaps even more important than being loved, which is not emphasized enough. Human beings need to be loved. But not only to be loved, but to love and let oneself be loved.”

The first of Boris Cyrulnik’s sentences is hopeful because he states that It is possible to heal the emotional wounds of childhood through love. The author affirms that, despite the fact that insecure, ambivalent or disorganized emotional bonds have been built in childhood, it is possible to acquire a secure attachment later on from a healthy loving experience.

This is really amazing. Love frees us from the belief of always being marked by our past in a negative way, as it opens the possibility of reinventing ourselves, rebuilding ourselves and healing what hurt us so much.

Furthermore, the second of Boris Cyrulnik’s phrases emphasizes the importance of not only being loved, but of loving and letting oneself be loved. We need to love, but also to be loved and we have to allow the latter, which In many cases it means freeing yourself from armor and defensive postures to show yourself vulnerable, That is, to be authentic, because only in this way is the construction of a true bond possible.

Relationships: worlds that meet

“A true relationship causes a reciprocal influence. They are two intimate worlds that interact and one modifies the other.”

When two people meet, so do two worlds full of experiences and stories. These are two worlds that dialogue and that, if they are really committed, little by little, they are transformed based on their exchanges, their visions and ways of conceiving the world.

Resilience

“Resilience is the art of navigating torrents, the art of metamorphosing pain to give it meaning; “the ability to be happy even when you have wounds in your soul.”

“Resilience is more than resisting, it is also learning to live.”

These phrases from Boris Cyrulnik tell us about his specialty: resilience. That ability that allows us to re-emerge after sufferingwhich pushes us to move forward despite what we have experienced and teaches us to live differently.

Read Also: Generalization, a strategy that helps us and betrays us

According to the author, resilience enables us to understand what happened to us, what role culture and trauma had in us and favors our development in another direction. It is an awakening after a time of agony.

As we see, Boris Cyrulnik’s phrases are an invitation to reflect on deep issues in life: suffering, love and the processes of personal reconstruction. Without a doubt, words to turn to when we want to delve inside ourselves to know something more…