Happy Families

By Jane Louise Johnson

Our memories mark our lives…

Some of us have had the good fortune to have had a ‘happy childhood’. Others have spent years exorcising the hungry ghosts of yesterday’s deprived longings. Some of us have filled in the gaps, sanded down the bumps, reinvented ourselves and are none the worse off for it.

The point is, the filter of our perceived experience is what marks us, not the memories themselves.

So if we should choose to see our past as too banal, too ordinary, when compared with that of the sometimes extraordinary people we meet, who is there to sanction or pity us, if we try to jazz it up a little, to become more interesting than we appear, for fear of being overlooked?

So the sense of abandonment, when being sent away for summer camp , is more an evidence of a lack of personal boundaries, of a too great investment of parental or significant other presence. It is far less likely that the inner child was damaged from being sent away. However for the child adrift in a sudden sea of isolation, the feeling is real, and remembered.

So our memories can betray us, we can feel victimised, rejected, lost or lonely, when in fact our lack of independence shows that we were in fact too closely kept in a cocoon of protection, to be able to self-reliantly embrace what the world has to offer.

Conversely, those who were able to take to a life in community may have never known parents that gave the impression of being ‘on the case’; they may have had their baby bottles propped on a cushion from earliest infancy and, devoid of all maternal reward, become so independently -minded that trying to get them to cooperate later led to a ‘don’t care’ attitude that made discipline impossible.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the very subjectivity of the process of memory, and the manner in which it’s archived, can have a profound effec on our perception of our past, in the present, particularly of our childhood, when our perception of our own experiences is so partial.

Irrelevant whether this long held resentment is well documented or no. The results of the feelings are what count, as they last and govern our behaviour in all future relationships.

So it is healing the memories that we need, as much as therapy for any imagined, or factual suffering. More to the point, this approach makes healing possible.