When I lead any student in guided meditation, one of the first things I have them do is go back in time to their childhood to locate a happy memory. Many of those I’ve guided though have often reported that this was one of the hardest things to visualize during it. The common culprit amongst all of them has always been that they each grew up in a dysfunctional home. I can totally identify, but I realized over the years how important it was to find at least one happy memory and then focus on it instead of all the painful ones.
In a dysfunctional home where some type of addiction, mental illness, or abuse is regularly present, there is often a lot of tragic drama present. For a kid growing up in that type of environment, any happiness they ever have is often snuffed out and quickly overshadowed by that tragic drama. As those children grow up having gone through that process again and again of watching their happiness flicker away, the only memories retained are usually negative ones. I can safely say this because I spent years in therapy trying desperately to remember the positive things that happened during my younger years. There was one though that I consistently remembered and it became the anchor I needed to locate the rest of them. It was my family’s annual two-week summer vacation.
From my elementary school years till the beginning of my high school ones, my family always travelled on the first Saturday after the school year ended to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The two weeks that would follow still hold many of my happiest moments from childhood, even to this day.
Our vacation always began in our driveway at 4 Frederick Drive, Poughkeepsie, NY where the car was fully loaded up from top to bottom, several hours prior to dawn. Over the course of the next two days, I entertained myself in the car with some “Yes & Know” games, “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, and various other things that kept my short attention span occupied for the 14 hours I’d be in the car. During the drive, I also treasured those morning donuts, the afternoon lunches of cheese and crackers, Slim Jims, and vegetables and dip we’d have at the rest areas, and the evening swim at the motel we’d stay at the halfway point. When we finally arrived in Myrtle Beach, the next two weeks were always filled with building sandcastles, body surfing in the ocean, digging for treasure, collecting shells, playing miniature golf, riding amusement park rides, making huge gooey ice cream sundaes, and stuffing my face with hush puppies at every single restaurant I went to.
For whatever the reason, the drama in my dysfunctional family completely disappeared on most of those annual summer vacations. I’m not actually sure why that was, but I’m grateful for it because the happy memories of those trips truly helped me to get through the many years I held onto all that anger and resentment from my childhood. Once I did the work in Alcoholics Anonymous utilizing the 12 Steps, I became free of all of that. That’s when many other happy memories began to surface such as taking hikes and eating homemade Italian Ice with my father, and playing cards and cooking Chicken Marsala with my mother. The key to remembering each of these new memories though started with me focusing on just one happy one. That was my annual vacation to Myrtle Beach and today it’s still the first one I think when it comes to my childhood.
Now I choose to focus on all of the positive memories I have from my childhood rather than any of the negative ones I used to dwell upon regularly. I’ve definitely become a much happier person because of it. The fact is it’s not healthy to focus on anything negative, especially painful childhood memories. Doing so day after day will only turn someone into a very miserable person like it did to me. When I ultimately chose to begin healing from those dysfunctional years, I shifted my focus to the only positive memory I could think of, which was my Myrtle Beach annual summer vacation. Eventually that helped me to find many others and be thankful for so much more of my childhood.
So if you are someone who grew up in dysfunctional family and can only seem to remember painful memories from your childhood, try to meditate a few minutes each day solely to locate at least one happy memory from back then. As soon as you find one, start focusing on it every time you think of your younger years and I can promise you that it will eventually help you heal your past and even better, find all the others that may have been buried long ago…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson