Reminiscence and reminiscence therapy

“I remember that time when…”

So begins many a session of reminiscence therapy.

What’s reminiscence therapy? It’s using guided communication (and, often, objects from the past) to stimulate memories and help someone reconnect with her personal history. But that makes reminiscence sound more complicated than it is.

Picture this: searching for a pencil, you reach deep into a desk and your hand brushes across a seashell that’s somehow found its way into the drawer.

You pull it out, feel the ridges and the smooth inside.

As you hold the shell and touch the surface, memories of a long-ago trip to the beach flood your mind. You can hear the ocean and the wind and the birds. You feel the sun and salt on your skin, taste the sea in your mouth. The smell of waves fills your nose and you are almost transported to the scene, the feeling is so visceral. Walking in ankle-deep water looking for a perfect shell; your foot sinks into the sucking sand, a slight sunburn flushes your shoulders as another wave rolls in and tumbles the shells. You bend to pick up a nearly perfect one and the flash of the sun on the water momentarily blinds you…

Just touching that shell brings it all back.

Life story

Recording your life story can be a powerful experience. So can helping someone else record theirs.

For people facing progressive dementia, discussing and sharing life lessons can mean even more. As they record their hard-earned knowledge, people living with dementia also lay a kind of roadmap of the most significant and defining moments in their lives.

This is important because dementia often eats away at memories in a predictable pattern.

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Recording your life story can be a powerful experience. So can helping someone else record theirs.

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We talk about a “narrowing window” on childhood. That’s when someone with memory loss retains older memories but not more recent ones. A lot of times the most resilient memories that all of us make are in the times we define ourselves as individuals, usually as teens and younger adults. New experiences make the strongest memories, and you have more new experiences at younger ages age, too.