I wonder if you are familiar with those kind of lanyard badges that staff are often given at concerts and gigs and things?

Perhaps you have had one for work or something?  I am sure that you know the kind of thing I am talking about, the kind of badge that affords access to different areas of a building or event ground.

Perhaps you have had one for work or for a gig or concert or show you have been involved with.

But what if instead of being the one wearing it you were the one giving them out? And what if instead of being in order to afford someone access to different areas of a gig or concert or show it was affording them different areas of your life?

Think, if you will, of your life as being one big house with many different  rooms.

Each room contains an experience or set of related  experiences or memories.

Some of those rooms you are more than happy to leave open and for folk to wander in and out of as they pleased.

Some, of course, you keep private just to be enjoyed by you personally or with those you hold most dear or trust the most.

It’s an interesting concept isn’t it?

Of course some of those rooms are very private aren’t they?

Rooms which contain memories or experiences that we are not willing to share or make publicly known or even share with very many of our closest friends or family.

Perhaps they contain experiences or memories of experiences that we have personally done to others or that others have done to us and which hold, for us and possibly for others, some form of hurt or shame, perhaps guilt or confusion.

So we lock them up and try to forget them or at least not revisit them very often.

And of course there are, for some of us, those rooms which we have locked as tightly and securely as possible and which we have pushed to the very recesses of our hearts and minds and which we have vowed never to return to again.

Rooms which contain perhaps the most painful or even the most shameful of memories or experiences.  Things that we desire do deeply to be free of.

And yet are we? Are we really free all the time those rooms and their contents remain and remain unaddressed, unprocessed, unhealed?

Isn’t it true that related circumstances, similar events or situations portrayed; in films, written about in (or on) the news, expressed through songs etc, often instantly remind us of the existence of those rooms and the experiences and memories contained therein?

Isn’t this what happens when, for those of us who do so, we “trigger”?

And isn’t it true that for some of us, our depression – that which is not chemically induced – often comes from the existence of such rooms?

Indeed isn’t the very purpose of therapy to bring us to a point where we are able to safely unlock, open and enter those rooms.  Processing and addressing and finding healing for that which was previously locked within them?

It is something that I have been giving a lot of thought to lately.  And indeed something that I have been reflecting on in respect of who, if anyone,  I would share the existence of, let alone access to, those rooms with.

So what about those lanyard badges and what about if you were the one giving them out and thus affording people different levels of access to those rooms – those parts of your life?

Who would you give them to?  Who would you trust with them?

And here is a very interesting question in my opinion…

“Are there rooms in your life which you have not let anyone in or even know about and which, by doing so you might just be able to unlock and find healing for?”