“The Welcome Home From Family” by Joseph Cabrera

“The Welcome Home From Family" by Joseph Cabrera

It is the last visit before you are going to be released.  Your family is there, and the occasion is truly a joyous one.  After the visit, you go back to your unit and resume counting the days until you are set free.  Anticipation is a very powerful emotion.  But what realities might anticipation block?  What does the incarcerated leave behind when they become confined?

What everyone who comes to prison leaves behind is the person they were before they were incarcerated.  Those memories and experiences, no matter what character evolution that you experienced inside, are what your loved ones remember and subconsciously expect to be reunited with.  What do you do as a formerly incarcerated person to make the transition from prison to family faith?  How can you realign yourself into an atmosphere with life partners and children who have been waiting for you to return while also living and evolving and building lives that you were previously excluded from?  Visit rooms can and usually are places where surface associations play out.  This is because when people come to visit the incarcerated they temporarily leave behind the majority of themselves in efforts to create a pleasant atmosphere.  But once released, you are not only coming home to the full lives of your loved ones, but you are also bringing all of your life with you.

Once incarcerated, we develop and learn how to survive the conditions which we live among.  Conventional methods of life-style fade as we adapt to the prison subculture.  We find our comforts, our ways to cope, our process of evolution.  We develop our habits and our values.  We also separately anticipate returning to the memories of how things were.  A lot of times the formerly incarcerated return to situations at home that are a stark contrast to what they remember.  The scenery is different, the smiles are those sidewalk smiles when one receives when greeted by a neighbor.  People look and behave differently while they are attempting to give you the expression, which they remember when you were in their lives before prison.  But it is not the same because neither you or your loved ones are the same, and it will be but a matter of time before you experience those changes in those who you remember to be a certain way.

This article will offer some methods of receiving your loved ones with open arms while coming to terms of the potential changes in this two-way street called “coming home from prison”.

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