Talking of Love by Boris Cyrulnik

Author:Boris Cyrulnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Embers of Affection in a Cold Family

For years, Georges was astonished by the intense but gentle emotion he had felt when, as a young boy, he saw a father fussing over his little boy. He often replayed the scene in his mind because it gave him so much pleasure. He had been out skiing one day. It was very foggy and he stopped at the top of a steep path to catch his breath for a moment. Below him he saw a man who was obviously a father, even though he could not see him very well against the greyish white of the mist and the white snow. The man was tying his little boy’s muffler. He then set off on his skis again and slowly disappeared, followed by the child. He was a big man, and ‘big’ was the important word, as it was that which gave Georges the pleasure he experienced. The father had devoted a little of his brute strength to a tender relationship with his little boy. Subsequently, Georges often went to look for this image in his memory, and he was always surprised at how much pleasure it afforded him.

He had spent his childhood in a cold family in which no one ever said anything. His father took every opportunity to disappear. His silent and over-worked mother would rebuff Georges with a gesture of annoyance whenever he tried to go near her. His little sister broke everything she could lay her hands on and kept running away from home from morning to night. The family’s days were spent in a sullen silence. The little girl was an expert on avoidant attachment. She put up with her mother’s physical roughness, and never protested when she gave her a shove to indicate what she wanted her to do without ever saying a word to her. In self-defence, she prevented herself from loving her and, being convinced that she could not depend on others, taught herself not to cry. She walled herself up in a closed world, and came out of it only to run away.

Living in this leaden atmosphere, Georges relished the few moments of emotional warmth he could find outside the house. When he was out shopping, he used to have long chats with the greengrocer and used to take an old lady her bread and milk because she had trouble climbing four flights of stairs at her age. He dreamed that, when he was grown up, he would start a family where they would talk a lot and laugh together. As an adolescent, he had a fantasy about crawling into a sleeping bag where a woman was waiting for him. Simply being there side by side with her in the warmth of the bag was enough to make him happy. For the first two years of his life, his parents had placed him with a very cheerful child-minder. In her company he blossomed, and the secure attachment-style that he had been taught by that pleasurable encounter was probably imprinted on his memory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.