“Resilience across writing is a good way to get out of the fog and light up your life” says Boris Cyrulnik, neuropsychiatrist and writer, having lost both his parents at the age of five, is a living model of how one develops resilience and can overcome the major dramas of life.

When the word “resilience” was first used in physics it referred to a body’s ability to absorb an impact. Transformed to the human psyche, it is the capacity to transcend from traumatic experiences.  Brené Brown defines resilience as a character quality “ it is how we fold our experiences into our being ” and in doing so, resilience enables us to emerge from the trauma more whole. For Boris Cyrulnik resilience is a natural process, what we have to face obliges us to “knit” ourselves. “We might feel that, if a single stitch holds, we can start all over again.” Looking back at our childhood, as we remember, we reconstruct our story turning it into a narrative, give a meaning and rework it in emotional terms.

Faced with the catastrophe of losing both his parents, totally left in void and longing for the loved ones lost, he recounts his efforts to save his parents’ memories vivid by hiding their photographs and intimate objects in a wooden box carved by his father.

In this longing, I have developed a “split personality” as the psychoanalysts would describe it. I was very talkative all day long like a magpie but when the night fell I became silent and switched to writing at a very early age. I wrote both awful and wonderful stories. Writing has become an instrument of resilience for me, it allowed me to choose from the images of the past to act upon my mental world. At the traumatic moment, of course, we only perceive the wound. It is not until much later that we can speak of resilience; not until the restored adult can at last come to terms with the chaos of her childhood.

[…]

There is no such thing as pure unhappiness or happiness. But as soon as we put sadness into a story, we give a meaning to our sufferings and understand, long after the event, how we succeeded in turning our unhappiness into something wonderful. Anyone who has been hurt has to undergo metamorphosis. Our sufferings are not in vain, and victory is possible.

Boris Cyrulnik refers to the neuroimagery records made during psychanalysis which show that when the subject recalls a problem hurting him, the amygdala, the base of unpleasant emotions flames up and consumes energy. When the analyst refines and elaborates on this problem, the amygdala is calmed down and the firings are switched off due to the effect of the elaborated words which would have called other parts of the brain –prefrontal lobe –the lobe of anticipations in particular to join in and consolidate the emotional work. In the same way, writing is also elaborating words, refining expressions in meaningful chunks while the memories get lined up and organized, the healing works through the story. Hope, the major human anticipation in this struggle finds its way through the cracks.

Duygu Bruce
May 25, 2019

Reference:
Psychologies, No. 397, May 2019