Overall, I am a person who experiences a lot of emotion and I experience it hard. I truly can sense and start to empathize immediately with how you are feeling. (It doesn’t work very well when my husband and I get in an argument because then I’m mad for the both of us!) I believe there are two sides to why I am this way and it all stems back to the nurture versus nature discussion.
It’s definitely the way I am hard wired, and I’d also say as an agriculture community we tend to have a lot of passion – a lot of emotion. Whether that appears with short tempers moving cattle or the care and drive to save a newborn calf’s life in a winter storm. Emotions drive our actions. It’s something that goes way back in our roots.
But how far back does that emotional baggage go? Are we carrying around an excessive weight of emotions compared to the life we have lived?
A friend of mine recently shared with me a study they did on mice where they sent in the smell of cherry blossoms and proceeded to essentially didn’t treat them very nice. (Terrible, I know, but I promise it makes a great point!) The next time all they did was release the smell of cherry blossoms and the mice immediately began to react negatively to the smell. The situation was imprinted on them.
The next part of the study was done on their offspring who were never treated badly, but the scientist introduced the smell of cherry blossoms and all of sudden they began to act negatively. They began to feel the trauma that their parents had felt.
THEN they even did another study on the offpsring’s offspring and guess what? The same thing happened to them! Two generations removed and they were still carrying around the emotional baggage from their grandparents. Woah!
Okay did your mind just get blown, because after I heard it, mine definitely was.
They have also done a similar study with those of Holocaust survivors who weren’t even born during that time. And this really got my wheels turning. If we are already a bit of a feelings bunch AND we are carrying emotions from generations past – I mean, woah, that’s a lot.
Just think about it. If we only go back to my grandparents, they endured the great depression and my parents, well, they went through the 80’s farm crisis. And while these are only two big events, just imagine how many traumatic emotions are tied to them living through this and thus have been “passed down” to us unknowingly?
Great, I’ve now just discovered I have a ton of subconscious emotional baggage I’m carrying around on top of mind so what do I do?
Well I’m not a licensed therapist, but here are a few quick tips that help me:
- When you feel a wave of emotion, stop and take a deep breath. (Not always possible, but I promise it helps.)
- Figure out where you are carrying that emotion. Is it in your chest, your stomach? What does it feel like? Are you worried, anxious, scared, angry?
- Ask if that baggage is all yours? You may not totally know, but giving ourselves grace that it might not be all yours could help relieve some of that angst.
- Talk about it! I realize this is usually not a farmer’s first thought, but working through it with someone really does help.
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