Emotional Debris

During one of my many conversations, I used the phrase “emotional debris.” I’m not sure if I came up with that, or if I heard it somewhere else before, but I like it. It’s not the same as emotional baggage, though it refers to the same junk that has the ability to weigh us down. Baggage somehow implies that you made a choice along the way to get some bags, and then slowly (or quickly) fill them up with every difficult, awful or traumatic thing you’ve experienced so that you could throw these bags on your back and carry them through life. Who would do that? And by choice?

While we do make choices in our life that contribute to the emotional debris we have gathered, the only time we can really use the word “baggage” is once we start on the path of health and wellness, and choose to hold on to things in the bags we carry. Before our conscious awareness of what’s going on around and within us, there’s no way we made a conscious and deliberate choice to carry all that junk around. And yet, it’s still there. So, it’s emotional debris.