The Pillars of Life Technique

The Pillars of Life is a technique that highlights the good memories we have stored away on our life journey. The technique helps us to focus on what we have, rather than on what we lack. Good memories provide a firm foundation from which to move forward. They also sustain us in difficult moments of life.

Sometimes in life, we feel like the ground has been taken out from under us. We lose confidence in our own abilities to handle the big issues of life. In life, the good memories slip like Teflon and the hard memories stick like velcro. In this technique, I encourage you to remember moments of richness, happiness, and life-giving support.

There is a wonderful piece of advice in a Book in which the author writes: “Fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable”

We all look at life through lenses. If the lens we use to view our past is negative, full of resentment and bitterness, we must understand that the same lens will taint the reality of our present and our future. The Pillars of Life technique helps people to create healthy lenses.

Some counselling methods encourage people to repeatedly return to and re-live their past to purge themselves of the hurts and injustices they have experienced. Our approach, while never dismissing the impact or injustices of past hurts, focuses on those things that sustained people through their most difficult times. These are the “Pillars” of life.

This is one of the principles of Logotherapy developed by V. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) which enabled him to flourish in the midst of the most traumatic circumstances in concentration camps during WWII.

Once you have completed the technique, contact Melanie if you’d like to go through the process as a free consult with Melanie.