You know the story: I didn't know my father, despite his frequent visits to the neighborhood. Because I kept asking about him, my mother pointed him out to me when I was seven years old.
One day, excited that the ice cream truck and my father happened to be in the neighborhood at the exact same time, I asked him for a dollar. Like a giant, dreadful ogre, he roared at me. I don't remember what he said. I do remember crying myself to sleep that afternoon. And that's when I started to hate him.
When I was 28, those feelings of hate turned 21 years old, drinking age. Good thing I wasn't a drinker. Nevertheless, it dawned on me that those feelings were too big a part of my emotional life and were coloring my view of life in a terrible way.
I needed to work things out with him.
But I was 7 years too late. He died by suicide. In all honesty, that was fuel on the fire of my hatred.
Across those two-plus-decades, I had spent a lot of money on seven-year-old me, but money couldn't heal that wound. And I didn't have money for therapy, so I turned to journaling.
I poured all that anger onto the page. You can only do so much of that until you realize that it only gets you so far. At that point, I decided to write him a letter--and then burn it as a symbolic gesture of letting go. Again, the results were limited.
At some point, I realized I needed a response for him. There were things I needed to hear him say. So, I wrote a letter to myself from him. It was fantastic. I made him say everything I needed to hear. And it felt great. It was so touching, it even made me cry. The fact is, if he'd been alive, you and I both know it would have been a disaster.
At some point, I'll go hunting for that letter in the pages of my journals. I haven't thought about that letter much. It did its job well, but not perfectly. Some years later, I could sense those feelings growing like a weed.
At this point in life, I'd attended a local Tony Robbins franchise program that introduced me to using the imagination and visualization techniques. In my mind, I went back to that "dollar moment," turned the memory black-and-white, messed with the volume and image of that ogre, turning it into something stupid and silly, completely disempowering the memory. I went through the process a few times. It helped a lot.
But there was still more work needed. I imagined a conversation with my father. I poured out my anger at him, and again, he said everything I wanted and needed him to say. He asked for my forgiveness. I hugged him.
I'm no psychologist, not a therapist, not a neurolinguistics programming practitioner, so sometimes, thinking about this, the techniques I used seemed highly unusual to me. Maybe there were. I don't much care. They worked. That's all that matters to me.
So, somewhere between 28 and 30, I released the anger I had once felt toward my father, and I've been at peace since. Now, when I see movies with father and son moments, I no longer tear up. I've had my moments. Now, when my sister talks about our father, I no longer berate him.
I'm not certain these techniques will work for every person or every situation. Some may benefit from other techniques or from guided assistance, whether one-on-one or in the middle of a group at a seminar. For anyone facing this kind of hard work, to you, I offer my best regards.
And it all started with journaling... and realizing its limitations.
Like Peter Pan explained, “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts, and they lift you up in the air.”
It wasn't that easy, but there's truth in those words. And mostly, the lovely, wonderful thoughts I came up with were completely fabricated.
But they did the trick.
R. Maurice Ledesma
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