11 Phrases By Boris Cyrulnik To Reflect On

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, inquire into himself and his ability to get ahead.

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, they sent their family to concentration camps and never returned.

From there, he toured different centers and host families, they changed his name and he was transferred to a farm with only eight years by the French Public Assistance until an aunt of his found him and took him with her to Paris.

Everything he experienced somehow led him to study medicine, psychoanalysis and later neuropsychiatry until he specialized in the treatment of traumatized children and became one of the leading experts on resilience in the world.

As we can see, his biography has been and is the fundamental axis on which his scientific and literary production is based. Next we are going to know just one iota of his wonderful work through the selection of some of his best phrases.

Understand to move forward

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

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

Express yourself as a coping strategy

To give voice to our discomfort, to what worries us and wraps us in a spider’s web, what we dislike or even what does not convince us of the other is to release part of our suffering, it is to sanitize the mind and the 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 keeping in mind that telling carries a risk: facing what hurts and bothers us, although not doing it too: locking ourselves away in ourselves and build almost insurmountable walls around us.

The art of weaving ourselves

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

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 has been lived and there it is impossible for everything to be reproduced as it was, no matter how much we want to. Think about it.

These last two sentences by Boris Cyrulnik highlight the capacity of our memory to transform itself on occasions to cushion the damage, to lighten the weight of the past and even to pretend that certain experiences had never happened -at least consciously-.

However, any experience leaves its mark and colors our gaze, even if we don’t believe it. You just have to be willing to find out.

The importance of love

The first of Boris Cyrulnik’s phrases is hopeful because he affirms 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 affective bonds have been built in childhood, it is possible to acquire a secure attachment later from a healthy love experience. This is really amazing because it frees us from the belief of always being marked by our past in a negative way because it opens the possibility of reinventing ourselves, rebuilding and healing what did us so much damage.

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

Relationships: worlds that meet

When two people meet, so do two worlds full of experiences and stories … It is about two worlds that dialogue and that if they are really committed, little by little, they transform from their exchanges, their visions and ways of conceiving the world.

Resilience

These phrases by Boris Cyrulnik tell us about his specialty: resilience. That capacity that allows us to resurface after suffering, that pushes us to move on despite what we have experienced and that teaches us to live differently.

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

As we can see, Boris Cyrulnik’s phrases are an invitation to reflect on profound questions in life: suffering, love and the processes of personal reconstruction. Undoubtedly, words to turn to when we want to investigate inside ourselves to know something more …