Do you ever relive any of your good childhood memories?
I do and I’ve found it to be very therapeutic, especially given that I had such a dysfunctional family growing up. Coming from a dysfunctional family always made it very easy to talk negatively about the experiences I had growing up. And for awhile that’s all I did. But I found that was holding me back from healing and growing spiritually. When I started realizing that, I began doing work to reshape my thoughts of my childhood to a more positive level. It wasn’t an easy process given the fact that I had so much suppressed anger inside about what I went through back then. But the more I worked through and released those things, the more I began to remember moments from my childhood that I truly cherished. I wrote specifically about one of those yesterday when I spoke about my family’s annual day trip to New York City during the Christmas holiday season. Remembering good memories like this was only part of the healing process I went through to reshape the thoughts of my childhood. The other part was in taking an action to relive them in the present. And since 2007, I’ve been doing just that by going to New York City during the Christmas holiday season on or around the second Saturday of each December.
I’m quite sure I wasn’t fully conscious of the healing that was taking place inside of me that first year I went back down to New York City in December. But I was definitely conscious of a constant urging coming from somewhere within me to get me to actually do it again. It started with me asking my closest friend if he was interested in going and it turned into us asking a few other friends to join us as well. When the second Saturday arrived in December of 2007, I had a car full of people heading with me to the train station in New Haven, CT at five in the morning. Over the next 14 hours or so, my friends allowed me to guide them along the same exact path I had taken with my family almost twenty years earlier. By the time we were back in my car heading home late in the evening, all of our faces hurt from laughing so hard because of the amazing experience we had with each other. But what I felt inside was even more special than that and it was the same sense of joy I had in reliving a happy childhood memory.
For seven years now, I have visited New York City around the second Saturday of each December solely to relive one of the fondest memories I have from my childhood. While some of those outings have been more fun than others, I have always been able to remember my family with positive thoughts during each. Things have changed over the years in each of those outings including the people who went with me, the activities we did there, and the destinations we had during the day. But one thing has never changed with these trips and that’s the fact that I’m still doing them, like I did last Friday.
My honest truth is that I don’t feel anger anymore about my family and I know reliving my happy childhood memories, like our Christmas trip to New York City, is a big reason for that. It’s helped me to shift my focus completely away from the negative thoughts and experiences I had back then. Now, I’m able to reflect so much easier on the good things that actually did happen with us during my childhood, as there were actually many of them.
I know how difficult this task may seem if I was to ask you to recollect your happy memories from childhood, especially if you grew up in a dysfunctional family like I did. But I want you to know that it’s not only possible to recollect them, it’s also possible to completely heal from all the bad ones too.
My healing began with God guiding me to forgive my family and let go of all that anger. And the more that I forgave my family and let go of all that anger, the more those happy memories of them started trickling in. And the more those happy memories of them starting trickling in, the more I had urgings to relive those memories in the present. And the more that I have relived those memories in the present, like my annual outing to New York City during the holiday season, the more I’ve realized how God has guided me to reshape my thoughts of my family to that of the positive.
So please know if you are finding it difficult to recollect any happy memories from your own childhood, all it may take for them to surface is a little bit of forgiveness and the letting go of some anger. In doing so, I’m sure that some of them will begin trickling in and when they do, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and start reliving them as best as you can in the present. As the more you do just that, the more I’m sure you’ll find your own thoughts being reshaped of your family to that of the positive too.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson