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Souvenirs hold a whole complex of meanings.

Don’t reduce a souvenir to a one-dimensional motto. There are probably many lessons in each souvenir. Someone once asked Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, what her dance meant. She said, “If I could say it in words, I wouldn’t have made it into a dance.”  

Souvenirs are pictures and they can't be reduced to mere sentences.  There is always more to be said about them.  

Souvenirs are moments of self-discovery.  

Memories are not causes, they are markers, like bookmarks. A  person holds onto a souvenir of that moment when he or she learned something important about himself.

Don’t be put off by blandness.  

Often enough the memories seem bland and unimportant. Souvenirs are like that, except for the curious fact that people have kept them for so many years.  A young man remembers walking with his parents on the beach and coming across broken stones. His dad tells him that they are the stones of an old lighthouse and when he hears that he briefly imagines what it was like in the past when that lighthouse stood. Not a traumatic or even dramatic moment. Why does he remember this? It is so his soul can tell him, among other things, that he has the imaginative talent that historians have for making vivid reconstructions of the past.

Memories reveal a person's goals.

One woman holds the memory of a moment when there was a lot of unpleasant chaos in the house and how angry she was that no one was in charge.  She is now a person with a high value on control. 

Is that good or bad?  I think the answer is, “It depends on how she goes about it.” 

At the end of this article is a list of Goals.  You can read down the list and you can imagine how any one of those goals could be realized in a way that you would hate to see, or that you would applaud.  Like the song says, “It ain't watcha do, it’s the way ‘atcha do it.” 

Regret and Warning memories point to what a person wants to be conscientious about.

One woman didn’t want to share her memory in a seminar.  She was afraid it would show that she was a bad person. She remembered playing with her younger brother and doing something careless and hurting him. Then she remembered holding him, comforting him and giving him a Band-aid.  The woman is in mid-career as a nurse and trainer of nurses. The central themes of her life as shown in the memory are Care and Compassion. 

How could someone who so highly valued Care and Compassion hold a memory of having hurt someone she cared about? Quite simply it was a Regret and Warning Memory. She holds it as a warning to herself to be extra careful.  Her memory of hurting someone amplified her values of care and compassion to conscious levels; they made her conscientious.

Her conscientiousness made it difficult for her to discipline people who worked for her.  Some coaches would argue with her to be less worried about making mistakes. I think that kind of coaching would go against her grain. A better coaching point would be to encourage her to be more caring by taking more into consideration during her supervision tasks.  People are really helped when I am able to help them articulate the positive side of those Regret Memories.

Find other ways to work with memories. 

You might want to ask someone to give you only their happiest memories and build some coaching out of that information.  

Also, you can work backward from people’s successes. Ask them what they did recently that pleased them enormously and then ask for earlier and earlier memories which gave them that same particular kind of satisfaction. The farther back you go in time, the more refined the memory and the more souvenir-like it becomes. 

Summary.

The goal of this work is to see people walk away from a conversation about memories and goals being really pleased with their self discoveries, delightfully surprised to discover something deep and wonderful about themselves.

Souvenir memories reveal the spontaneously formed dreams of the heart.  Many people I’ve worked with have been helped especially by having a small conversation which teases out these dreams and puts them into words.   

Name your fears and learn from them.

Know your blind spots and be on the alert for them

Know your strengths and build on them.

Contact Dr. Philip Belove directly at drbelove@datingatmidlife.com

For a Full Two Hour Consultation using

Souvenir Memories, Temperament Tests and Questions

to develop a penetrating and articulated look at

your most cherished values and most deeply rooted talents. 

Acknowledgments.

The technique of using early recollections to reveal deep personal goals was developed by Alfred Adler and his followers.  I learned to do this by watching a contemporary master, Robert L. Powers.  I wrote another paper on a variation of this technique that developed working with couples. That paper is soon to be on this website.

  Appendix A: List of Common Values Grouped by Priorities

Comments: This is only one set of categories and you could arrange these values by several other sets, or not at all, and just have a random list.  I’ve included the set of categories as one more tool for becoming sensitive to the values expressed in souvenir memories.   As a coach, I want to develop my sensitivities to possible ways to help people put their inner pictures into words. You might find this helpful as well.   Learn how to work with your own souvenir memories.