The Healing Power of Memories
Last week at the Children’s Behavioral Health Conference in Tulsa, I taught a seminar entitled “Caring for Your Own Emotional Health While Raising an Emotionally Disturbed Child.” The theme of my presentation was that in order for parents to help their children deal with out-of-control emotions, they must first learn to manage their own emotions well.
I spent the 90 minutes talking about specific strategies caregivers can use to bring their emotions under control. One of those techniques is a relaxing visualization exercise to help parents lower their stress level. I had them sit comfortably in their chair and take several slow deep breaths. Then I asked them to allow their subconscious to take them to a peaceful place. Try it sometime when you are feeling stressed. Once your mind arrives at that place, focus on all the things you see there, listen to the sounds, smell the odors, examine what you are doing in that setting. Living in that peaceful place for a few minutes refocuses your emotions and helps you see that there is more to the world than the anger, guilt, or worry that you were feeling.
The last time I did this exercise my subconcious took me immediately to my grandparent’s home in Missouri. I was a child again sitting on the front porch of my grandfather’s workshop. The old barn was located toward the back and side of their concrete block home. Directly across from the workshop was a row of leaning chicken coops and an old outhouse, still used for emergencies. Beyond the chicken coops the grass turned to tall weeds overtaking rusted farm machinery. Farther still was a tangled forest of briars, trees, snakes, and ticks.
My subconcious helped me remember the song of crickets and locusts in the weeds, the slamming of the back door to the house, the distant hum of the well’s electric pump, and the pinging of acorns as they fell from the large oaks onto the tin roofs. The faint odor of chicken houses and outhouses mixed with the smell of grease and freshly cut wood from my grandfather’s shop.
In my imagination, I sat on the bare planks of the small porch alone. Knife in hand, I whittled a stick into a spear, which of course, could be used for all kinds of manly endeavors. At that moment, I was a boy again–nothing in the world to worry about, convinced of a family that loved me, and a recognition of my own power and creativity.
As we grow older we forget such moments existed in our lives. The return to such events in memory is a wonderful God-given gift to humanity. Such visualizations remind us in the middle of adult pressures and struggles that the immediate problem is temporary. They inform us or re-inform us of hope, love, and possibility that resides deep within us.
I asked a group of parents once to share a good memory from their childhood. These were parents who, for the most part, had difficult childhoods full of abuse and abandonment. Everyone of them, however, could remember moments of peace, hope, and joy. With all our struggles it’s often easy to forget the gifts that life gives us. The wonderful thing about memory is that we can relive those gifts many times and they never lose their healing power.
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