Conducting a life reviewĪ “ life review” is a method of examining our pasts by searching memories, interviewing friends and relatives, and retrieving archival documents, such as school and ancestry records. I felt drawn into a reconsideration of where I came from and how I got to where I am now-a life review. The revelations about my father shook my sense of my own life’s trajectory to its foundations. I tell the full story of my discoveries and how I dealt with them psychologically in my new book, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. My discoveries cleared up a host of mysteries, confusions, regrets, and resentments that I had lived with, not always consciously, for most of my life. I discovered that my father had a substantial career abroad after he abandoned my mother and me. Now, after all those years, I was offered a glimpse of the actual man.īy the time of my daughter’s call, I was secure and settled enough to open myself to the reality of what my father was like and what happened to him when he did not return home after the war.
Nor, as a developing young man, did I need a negative role model to identify with. I was not eager to get distracted by information about a man who clearly abandoned my mother and me as soon as I was born. I was absorbed in my studies, then in my career, and then in my own growing family. But I had no interest in following up on anything I heard about my missing father. In the midst of my college years, I heard otherwise, in cryptic information that my mother revealed to me in a side remark. Until college, all I knew about my father was that he was “missing in World War II.” I assumed he had died in action on some nameless European battlefield. I had lived for over six decades without seeing a picture of him. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.
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