Do you ever notice things feeling a bit off after seeing your family? Do the voices in your head second-guessing you get a little louder? Do you notice words coming out of your mouth that don’t even sound like you? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you, like so many others, have experienced the downside of the family visit. Whether inviting your parents along for your summer vacation, spending a long weekend at your relatives’ or celebrating 4th of July with a family-reunion-style BBQ, you may be unaware that when you see your family you are risking exposure to much more than UVB rays.
This is not to say that the effects on one’s mental health of seeing one’s family are all negative or that there aren’t real joys that come with reconnecting with loved ones. But being around your parents or going back to the town in which you grew up can stir up implicit memories that automatically trigger feelings we felt in our past. Dr. Daniel Siegel, author of The Mindful Brain and Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA wrote that “[A]crucial feature of implicit memory is that when we do retrieve an element of implicit memory into awareness we do not have the internal sensation that something is being accessed from a memory of the past. We just have the perceptual, emotional, somatosensory, or behavioral response without knowing that these are activations related to something we’ve experienced before.”
“The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.”
Dr. Lisa Firestone, PhD, is the Director of Research and Education for The Glendon Association. Since 1987, she has been involved in clinical training and applied research in suicide and violence. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Firestone, her studies resulted in the development of the 
