Healing What Is Inside Our House Of Memories

So many of my memories of being six are
associated with our family-filled older
frame farm house in rural Virginia.

In some family seminars I led years ago, I invited everyone to close their eyes and imagine themselves being six years old again, and to go with me on a “memory trip.” 

We were to each go back into the house we lived in as first graders, starting by coming home from school, reaching up to open the front door, and then exploring the various rooms of our house as we remembered them. We were invited to spend some time in our special favorite place in the house, gather with our family at dinner for conversation around an evening meal, and to relive a bedtime ritual with one or both of our parents or a sibling. 

Afterwards we were all to share our most vivid images and memories. 

Some participants reported having difficulty even recalling what it was like to be six again. Some were moved to tears, either of bittersweet joy or of melancholy. 

I especially remember one young adult reporting feelings of such deep distress that when he pictured himself at the front door of his house he felt sick with dread. He experienced an overwhelming urge to run as far as he could from his family of memory. When it comes to dealing with past griefs and distresses, we may be tempted to relieve them by creating as much psychological or physical distance from our families as possible.

But try as we might, our ghosts of childhood past tend to stay in our heads wherever we go. People in our current relationships become surrogates and scapegoats with whom we may work out some of our unfinished business from childhood. Which means that one of our tasks as adults is to come to terms with the early chapters of our lives, to embrace what is there as a part of our story and to make peace with it, and to see how we can make the next chapters of our continued story as whole and healthy as possible.

I'm convinced that in God's economy nothing has to go to waste. Even our saddest experiences can be transformed into something we can learn and gain from. And that even the most dysfunctional families most often have underlying elements of strength we can experience some good from. 

Life is too short not to experience the healing and liberation we need to pass on everything that is blessed and to be able to let go of the rest.