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Ep6 Its not Heavy…its just my Emotional Baggage

Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes.

Today I want to look at: Emotional Stacking

It is absolutely necessary to understand what it means to stack and how that sets up our entire outlook on life. Specifically how we make decisions, deal with our finances, experience our relationships and fundamentally, how we look at and deal with our selves.

So what is emotional stacking. Let’s start with the brain. First you have what I will call a primary experience, lets call it experience balloon 1.0. This is the first time and event takes place for a person. Let’s say your first experience of a loud bang is a balloon popping at your 1st birthday party. Nothing that sudden and loud has ever happened to you before. It scares you…a lot. Why? Because the brain’s fight or flight mechanism is designed to keep you safe. This is an unknown threat and you are hard wired to go for safety. You scream until you are safe in the arms of your mom or dad.

Next, the brain takes the event and frames it, like a frame for a picture, by adding the notions of fear, lack of safety, must flee to the balloon. So, now balloons are stored in the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, as balloon 2.0. In other words, for you, balloon equals loud noise which is met by your survival instinct with flight because it is rooted in fear.

From now on, balloon 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 will contain the base experience of fear. So, when someone throws you a great surprise party and they all shout surprise you are okay but when the balloons come out, even though they don’t necessarily pop, you freak out.

What is rather disconcerting about who we are is that we don’t even realize that this is happening. This is what is meant by stacking.

Watch how this plays out. Balloon 1.0 is ok. 2.0 has the bang and now every balloon gets associated or triggered with fear. Then we compound it because our brain generalizes…meaning that parties are dangerous, that’s 3.0. Then it becomes groups of people that can become frightening which is 4.0 and so on. Down the road you won’t remember the earlier versions only the newer ones. That is stacking. Other real life examples are stacking on our parents divorce, the deat of a loved one, loss of a job, fear of getting sick, serious injury, food. The goal is to unstack your stories and create new ones rooted in positive and higher vibrational emotions. This will lead to a more fulfilled life.

Emotional stacking is a fascinating subject. We associate all sorts of things. However, the most impacting associations revolve around our need for survival and safety. To keep us safe, the brain takes each version of the experience and creates rules or algorithms that our mind uses to keep us safe. In other words, our brain stacks experiences to keep us safe. Ex: “Must avoid balloon aisle in grocery store…could be dangerous” every relationship is doomed to fail just like your parents when you were 7. You don’t know why you do this, it just feels safe to do so.

In a study published in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, in 2012 Squire and Wixted found that different medial temporal lobes affect how our memory is organized. They show that nondeclarative memory has a tremendous influence, albeit unconscious, on our behavior and mental life. It is here that dispositions, habits, and preferences arise. They may be inaccessible to conscious recollection but nevertheless are shaped by past events. I believe that our stacking takes place here.

The last two Episodes of the Way of the Emotional Warrior dealt with shame and guilt. Please go back and listen to them after you understand stacking. You will be amazed at how much those 2 emotions have embedded themselves into how you live your life.

Let’s apply this to emotional stacking. In itself, stacking is a natural process. The difficulty comes in that the foundation emotions that everything else is...