Resilience: How your inner strength can set you free from the past

Many of us experience pain in our childhoods, and young people face trauma all over the world. How is it possible to recover? Do those abused always go on to hurt others? This book shows how the extraordinary power of resilience can heal damaged lives.

Boris Cyrulnik is an internationally-renowned psychologist and leading proponent of the theory of resilience: that we are much more capable of overcoming traumatic events in our lives than we imagine. Working with genocide victims in Rwanda and child soldiers in Colombia, he travels around the world helping individuals and countries come to terms with their pasts to create positive new outlooks. Author of numerous books on resilience and its possibilities in childhood and throughout life, this is the first time Resilience has been published in Britain. An international bestseller, his work has been credited with helping France heal the wounds left by the Second World War. Born in 1937, Cyrulnik's parents were deported to a concentration camp and never returned. Maltreated by his foster parents, he was eventually chosen as a runner in the liberation, perilously crossing enemy lines to deliver messages to French fighters. He was seven. This personal trauma helped him develop his belief that trauma is not destiny.