I_am_reading_a_new_book.
Three actually.
Two by Parker Palmer, he
being a formal educator,
being read by me - an
informal educator to the end.
The book I am clicking about, however, is about is by Boris Cyrulnik who lost his mother and father in the Holocaust.
Only this week I asked a group of teenager about the holocaust. Not one put their hand up to knowing anything about it.
It is interesting working with young humans and asking them to consider the trauma of other young humans.
If they have not got too much toothache themselves,
(toothache blocks all other considerations and compassion) -
and we all have toothache of some kind.
Considering these issues, I can sometimes have a breakthrough with those who are locked in poverty of the spirit.
Boris touches issues close to my soul
close to my heart
and I know many of you are residing there too.
He looks at childhood trauma
and says that it needn't be a burden but
it can be the making of us.
Boris Cyrulnik's parents were murdered by the Nazis when he was seven.
He grew up in France without siblings or other relatives.
He was himself arrested,
but escaped by hiding in a synagogue,
then worked as a farm labourer until the war was over.
He was put into care.
He considers his survival,
as a miracle.
The issue of Children in Care is a big one in the UK.
I linked to one experiment in Essex
to my Facebook page this a few weeks ago.
It was about new methods called Caring in Care.
The first job Joan and I did,
after I stopped being an engineer in a factory -
and we left hometown comfort zones -
was working with Children in Care.
In an interview Boris talks about his work and his book.
He says that suffering can be the making of somebody
rather than their destruction.
Even children who appear to be beyond help
can be saved.
I am in that place of struggle.
I believe that everyone is a beautiful human.
Everyone has the potential to grow
change, become,
journey into wholeness.
In 1944, Cyrulnik's parents were taken to Auschwitz, where they perished.
The night before his mother was taken, she had him fostered.
The new "family" betrayed him to the authorities almost immediately.
As a child, Cyrulnik could not understand what was happening.
There was no adult around to explain what was really going on,
so it did not affect him deeply until long afterwards.
This gives a hint of the "resilience" his book describes
- the capacity to turn a terrible situation into something useful.
After the war, when he tried to tell people what had happened to him,
they wouldn't believe or want to hear it.
"Nine out of 10 Jewish children were killed.
You didn't talk about it.
It was difficult to say these things
- it made me feel like a monster.
People didn't believe me.
It cut me in half.
One part of my personality had friends and played football.
The other half was silently suffering.
"It was very English in a way," he jokes.
"Never complain, never explain.
No one wanted to know anyway.
In the postwar period in France,
what I was saying was unthinkable and impossible
- that all these children had been killed.
At that time in France, no one wanted to own up to the past.
In any case, it was too early to talk. Survivors' accounts of the Holocaust were not heard in France because, he says, they ran counter to the resistance narrative that De Gaulle was trying to impose.
Cyrulnik soon realised he wanted to be a psychoanalyst.
It was only at this point that he was able to re-evaluate his own life,
experiencing what he calls "la rage de comprendre"
- the passion to understand the past that he considers a healthy,
positive reaction.
Instead of feeling,
as before, isolated and "monstrous",
he suddenly felt closer to others
and fascinated to understand what it means to be human.
He realised he could apply his own experience to that of other people.
"When I became a doctor, I was very personally hurt when I would hear people say of a child:
'No point in bothering with him.
He is lost.'
Knowing what I did of my family and what I had gone through,"
he taps his chest passionately,
"it felt like a personal condemnation."
Many of his ideas are informed by Anna Freud,
daughter of Sigmund and one of the first to research the deprivation of parental care.
Cyrulnik also describes himself as a disciple of John Bowlby,
the British psychiatrist who pioneered attachment theory.
This emphasises the importance of an attachment figure for babies.
"This figure can be a man or a woman.
Men make very good mothers - seriously," he says, with a laugh.
Bob Holman writes about John Bolby and his experiences::
In 1960, I entered a Children's Departments office located in the back of a cinema in Romford. I was a student child care officer and over 49 years since then I've always had a concern for children in the care of local authorities, The Children's Departments replaced care of children under the poor law. They were charged to exercise their power with respect to him (the child in care) so as to further his best interests.
Children's Departments looked upon their children positively. Today the political and media view of such children is often negative
My era of social workers was taught about John Bowlby, the child psychiatrist, who insisted that all children needed a warm and intimate relationship with a mother figure.
..... it is argued that their stressful experiences in early years could be overcome and that they could become more resilient.
For this to happen, children must be placed in circumstances where they receive skilled help from carers and social work staff and, where possible, from parents.
‘You can’t have relationships without emotions’
In my work in schools and hostels, I return again and again to the issue of Emotional Literacy. The ability to feel emotions deeply, contact them and then manage them into an energizing force for good.
The most important thing to note about his work, Boris says, is that resilience is not a character trait:
people are not born more, or less, resilient than others.
"Resilience is a mesh, not a substance.
We are forced to knit ourselves,
using the people and things we meet in our emotional and social environments.
When it is all over and we can look back at our lives from heaven,
we say to ourselves:
'The things I've been through.
I've come one hell of a long way.
It wasn't always an easy journey.' "
Resilience is a process that requires the right conditions.
If children are securely "attached"
(ie, they had an attachment figure in the early months of their life),
the process is easier.
This, he says, applies to 70% of children,
but it is also possible for the 30% of children who are insecurely attached,
if they can find a new secure base.
"We had very good results working with severely disturbed, institutionalised children in Romania.
They couldn't speak, would rock themselves constantly, returned a smile with a grimace
- they thought you were baring your teeth at them - and would bite you if approached.
Within a year of living with a foster family who had basic psychological training,
they were making progress.
These were children who had been dubbed 'incurable'.
But they were fine:
they had just lived in sensorial isolation for a long time.
They were not "bad".
They just didn't know any different."
Attachment - Bowlby's prescription - and affection help develop the resilience factor.
"We know that affection gives children confidence and then,
when something bad happens to them, they can get better."
Even if a child has suffered a lot
the human brain is malleable and can recover.
"Brain scans show that traumatised children can heal.
In the right conditions, the brain returns to normal within a year."
It is imperative not to label children who have suffered a trauma.
No child is doomed by their past.
"A person should never be reduced to his or her trauma."
In so-called "normal" family life, if such a thing really exists,
he has one area of concern.
Whereas he is appalled that,
within living memory,
people still thought it was acceptable to inflict physical punishment on children, he is equally worried about doing damage by allowing the child to be the centre of the universe.
"We have done a lot of work on children who are 'over-invested'," he says.
Some parents who have been hurt in childhood let their children do what they want.
These children develop badly.
"Over-investment is a form of impoverishment in itself,
because it ends up that the child is only supposed to love one person
- this self-sacrificing, all-permitting parent.
This is a prison for the child."
"What is best for children is when they are brought up by a community,
like in the African saying:
'It takes a village.' "
He is fascinated by the paradox of wealth, especially in the consumerist west: the richer a society becomes, the more unhappy its people. "It is not easy to have a family life in a rich country. Wealth fragments family life because people can travel in a way they can't in poor countries. Poverty is a barrier to many things, but it gives solidarity to family life. In modern life, the personality can flower, but we hold our families less dear."
This is why Cyrulnik is not especially pessimistic about the current global crisis:
"Young people will rediscover the importance of family life and it will renew the family."
We all know beautiful humans who have experienced severe trauma. I want this to be a positive contribution to you and them. Not yet another layer of oppression.
The journey is not easy. It can be done. The journey can be done and, like all human development, we are on a journey through life into wholeness.
Becoming ......................
