Dear Jessica Brennan,
It is a recent realization for me that emotional heaviness is generational. All people have secrets, and all families and ancestors have secrets. We drag those secrets around with us, even when we aren’t sure what they are.
Emotional scars carried by a grandparent affect how they raise a parent, who, in turn, projects that weight onto a child who then becomes a parent wearing the knapsack of burden passed down by generations.
If you add a bit of evil and an impaired emotional IQ or two to the line of secret keepers, these buried traumas may appear neatly packed away. Normal, or our normal anyway. They are not.
This heaviness may surface on a deathbed with a string of confessions, in a therapy session, or it might come racing at you from the closet; crazed skeletons in the middle of a supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon when someone nudges you accidentally with a cart. But they will come out.
Examining what is in the sack on your back is the only way through this heaviness. So what are you dragging around in your backpack?
- dissatisfaction with life
- betrayals
- rage
- sadness
- loss
- worthlessness
- over achievement
- anxiety
- unhappiness
- worry
- shame
- fear
How many generations has it taken us to normalize the heaviness? What unquestioned weight have you inherited? Just something to consider as you set fire to the knapsack.
Love,
Mum xo