You are the creator of the podcast “You told me … “which highlights the words of patients. How did this idea come to you?
Amélie Boukhobza. :: I have not noted some sentences heard in consultation for years. On post-notes, in notebooks, sometimes even on a piece of paper lying around … I have hundreds, thousands scattered everywhere. I choose those who strike me, touch me, those which, in a few simple words, say something strong. Better than I can do it: experience, emotion, inner conflict.
“I say to myself:” Here, what is it said “or” it could speak to so many people “.
These sentences, I keep them preciously. They summarize, with their words to them, what we sometimes try to say for hours. They become supporting points. Ways of explaining otherwise, to see otherwise.
Then one day, on an airplane with my companion, while I settled in to work, I opened a cover in which were some of these sentences. I reread them, without remembering the context, or even of the person to whom they belonged. And this is where the idea was born: to make it a podcast. Offer these sentences another scope than the only framework of therapy. Not only share them, but also to transmit everything they had triggered in me: the why I noted them, what they had awake: an emotion, a thought, a reflection, sometimes a memory.
“So I do a brief analysis, accessible, sensitive. Hoping that they open a question, a resonance … and perhaps the desire to transmit in turn”
For this, I chose a short format, almost like a chronicle. Episodes that go to the basics, with simple but precise words. My goal was to broadcast psychic content, different content, that I saw anywhere else else. Without ever giving up the requirement of concepts.
Why do these sentences have this little taste of universality?
If these sentences have this little taste of universality, it is because they summarize complex experiences in very few words. They touch deeply shared human experiences: loneliness, life, death, love, grip, lack, shame, doubt, the desire to be loved … These are sentences that are born in the intimate, but which often speak to many. They make people think, they move. We don’t always know why, but they stay in mind.
Maybe because you recognize something about yourself. Even if history is not ours, the heart of what it tells – it – is universal.
Why do the testimonies of others help us to see our own situations in a different light?
Because they deny us of ourselves. When we hear a testimony, we are not taken in our own injuries. You don’t need to protect yourself, justify yourself or feel shameful. We listen with more distance, more freedom. And this is often where something can move.
On the psychic level, there is a double movement. On the one hand, we identify ourselves: we recognize in the story on the other an emotion, a doubt, a fragment of oneself. And on the other, we project: we hear a word which, without we know why, comes to touch us very directly.
“The testimony then becomes a lever. It makes it arise what you could not say, or to think, for yourself.”
There are things that we understand better when they do not talk directly about us. And it’s this little side step, which sometimes allows new lighting.