Emotional Backpack

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about the way that our emotions effect us. The metaphor that I am going to use is that of a backpack.

Everyone is born with an emotional backpack that they are required to carry around with them. The first thing to understand about this backpack is that it is a part of you. There is no option to leave it behind or to not carry it. Instead, think of it like a leg or an arm. There are things that can happen to change the nature of this part of you, but it isn’t something that you can just choose not to have in your life.

When you are born, this backpack is empty. You haven’t experienced anything yet, so there hasn’t been any emotional baggage added in yet. But as we live our lives and things happen to us, we begin to add things into our backpack. These are the things that we will always carry with us and that will always have an impact on our lives. It is more likely that we will put things into this backpack as a child then as an adult. There are a few theories as to way this is, but we really don’t know why that is. The prevailing thought is that these are our “formative years” or the time in our lives that we are defining who we are and how the world works. Research into ACE scores has demonstrated that there is a strong connection to what happens to us in our childhood and what our life long risk factors are.

Everyone is born with a different backpack. They come in different sizes, are made of different materials and support the load they carry in different ways. Just like the different models of real backpacks out there. This means that at the start of our lives everyone is born with a different carrying capacity because the backpacks we are born with are built differently.

Our backpacks can be damaged or upgraded as we live our lives. Things can happen that make it so that our backpacks don’t carry things as well as they used to. But things can also happen that will make our backpacks better able to carry their loads without shifting that burden onto us.

Our life events will determine what and when we put things into our backpack. But everyone puts things inside these backpacks at some point. As humans, we all experience suffering and trauma. The emotional impact of these events creates bricks that we put into our backpack. Sometimes, those bricks can add other bricks. Being abused as a child puts a brick in your backpack. If that trauma isn’t properly supported and the emotional work is never done to process that event a person could start adding other bricks into their backpack like: inappropriate guilt, shame, fear, social anxiety and others. Doing the proper emotional work to process these traumatic experiences can remove some or all of these addon bricks. But trauma bricks remain. We never leave our trauma behind. Instead, we learn how to better carry it.

Over time, our backpacks can become rather full. If enough things happen to a person, their backpack might become so full that their bricks start spilling out and they can no longer properly contain all those emotions any more. These are the people that have reached an emotional crisis and are no longer able to regulate their emotions.

Carrying these bricks requires energy and effort on a daily basis. We often don’t think about the manner in which our past experiences effect our current life, but their impact can be rather remarkable. How much energy one must invest in carrying these bricks will be determined by the number of bricks they have and the backpack they are using. Depending on the course of a person’s life and the backpack they are carrying, a person might struggle to carrying their emotional bricks.

Consider this from the perspective of encumbrance rules that we see in RPG games like D&D. Encumbrance, measured in bricks carried, determines the load a person is currently carrying. A person’s encumbrance can be normal, encumbered, or heavily encumbered. A person has a carrying capacity equal to their Resilience (which is the maximum weight they can carry), they are heavily encumbered if they are carrying more than two-thirds of this number, and encumbered if they are carrying more than one-third this number. (Clearly, this isn’t how this actually works, but puts it in a format that can be readily understood.)

Normal encumbrance means that the person is carrying a number of bricks that does not impact their ability to move and function in life. Being encumbered means that they have enough bricks that they are now required to make modifications in their life in order to continue to perform their daily tasks while carrying their load of bricks. Being heavily encumbered means that they are carrying enough bricks that it has become impossible to function normally. Everything in their life is impacted by the weight of these bricks they are hauling around.

Just like in these games, we can do things to change our encumbrance. The most obvious is to remove bricks from our backpack. However, there are many that we are not able to remove. We can increase our emotional resilience. This means that we will be modifying our backpack to better support the weight that we are carrying so it isn’t as heavy. Carry this to an game example extreme and those with really high resilience gain a bad of holding.

Those who live their lives heavily encumbered are those that are at risk for suicide. These are the people that have not been able to modify their backpack enough or remove enough bricks to reduce the weight of their backpack to something more manageable. They get up every morning and stagger beneath their pack while they are struggling to pretend that everything in their life is fine.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Hopefully, this random, nerdy tangent is helpful to you in getting a better understanding of the way that life experiences impact us everyday. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!