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PART 2:WHY,WHY WHY? #3 EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE
How Emotional Baggage is formed (2)
Our unconscious mind locks away emotionally charged memories that are just TOO painful
When our painful emotions are so intense that we simply can’t deal with them, our unconscious mind once again steps in to protect us… this time by locking away those overwhelming, emotionally charged memories, outside our conscious awareness. It’s very important to understand how this happens because it can really help with the process of clearing out your Emotional Baggage in PART 3.
What happens when intense emotions cross our pain threshold?
Do you know what I mean by a circuit breaker? It’s that big trip switch that shuts off the power to prevent an electrical circuit in your home from burning out when it’s overloaded, for example when there’s a surge of power or a short circuit. Every time I think of circuit breakers, it reminds me of an embarrassing dinner long ago…
I’d started dating a guy who was very cute but didn’t have much money (one of many I dated over the years!) and, to save his pennies, I invited him to my place for dinner. I almost never cooked, preferring to eat out or make salads, and I’m not a confident cook, so this was a big deal for me. I spent all afternoon chopping and preparing the food, (with a lot of help from a friend who happened to be round that day), so when my date arrived everything was under control. It was a very warm evening so I had the air-conditioning on, the music was playing, the candles were lit and I was feeling very pleased with myself. But then I poured him a glass of wine and switched on the oven… and all the lights went out!
I felt my way to the fuse box by candle light and discovered the circuit breaker had tripped. Assuming the overload was due to the air conditioning, I switched it off, reset the trip switch and tried to turn on the oven once more… and again all the lights went out. When I’d switched off every light and appliance in the whole apartment and still the oven tripped the circuit breaker, we gave it up as a bad job and HE fried the fish and vegetables instead… of course it turned out he was a much better cook than me.
I’d been living in my apartment for more than five years but this was the first time I’d tried to use the oven! An electrician later told me it had been wrongly wired, so thank goodness that circuit breaker was there or I might have burned out all the electrics! That was the last time I tried to fake being a domestic goddess.
So what does this have to do with Emotional Baggage?
Well, just as a domestic circuit breaker can protect our electrical power supply, so our unconscious mind can protect us when we’re at risk of an overload of intense painful emotions that might overwhelm us… by tripping our ‘emotional circuit breaker’.
This kind of emotional overload typically happens in one of two circumstances:
- When we accumulate so many memories with the same painful emotional charge that adding just one more, (even a minor one), feels like it could tip us over the edge. For example, if a parent kept hurting or rejecting us, over and over again, our accumulated hurt and rejection might have reached a level where we felt our heart would break and we just couldn’t take it any more.
- When we live through a one-time experience so big and intense that it’s just too much for us to deal with at the time. For example, we might have felt a peak of intense fear as a child if we spent time alone in hospital, were involved in an accident, lost a parent or witnessed domestic violence. (But please remember… a lot of the things that felt ‘big and intense’ in early childhood don’t seem so big when we look back at them through our adult eyes).
Whatever the circumstances, when the intensity of emotion crosses our pain threshold in this way, our unconscious mind decides, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” and jumps into action.
Usually it doesn’t shut down our emotions completely. Instead it simply isolates the intense, emotionally charged memories that would otherwise cross our pain threshold in a kind of ‘secure storage’, so we’re cut off from them and not able to feel those intense emotions… at least for a while.
It’s as though our unconscious mind isolates the fragment of our self that has reached the end of its tether after living through these painful experiences and locks it away in its own little ‘safe deposit box’, complete with the emotionally charged memories that are too intense to deal with and any unhelpful expectations and beliefs that may have arisen from these experiences. And once they’re safely locked away, we can recover our equilibrium and get on with our normal life.
This starts happening from a very, very young age, so some of these small parts of us have been locked away in secure storage for pretty much our whole lives. Most of the time we’re not in touch with these repressed, emotionally charged memories and the parts of ourselves that lived through them… and we’re not even aware of them. But they can show up at any minute, like an unwelcome guest, and cause some serious damage… as we’ll discover now.