Your Trauma Backpack is Full — And Most of It Was Never Yours

Let’s get one thing straight: if you feel like you're carrying too much, it’s probably because you are.

But here’s the kicker — most of what you’re carrying? It’s not even yours.

I’m talking about inherited trauma. Emotional baggage passed down through guilt, shame, silence, and survival. Generational patterns that shaped how you love, how you parent, and how you see yourself… long before you ever had a say.

It’s what I call the backpack of trauma. And for decades, mine was overstuffed with other people’s pain.

I inherited it from a long line of women who didn’t feel safe — and had no idea what to do with their pain except pass it down. Women like my grandmother, who gave my mother coal for Christmas as punishment. My mother, who gave me the silent treatment instead of love. And me? I gave my daughter the yelling and rigidity I swore I wouldn’t repeat.

That’s what generational trauma does. You don’t wake up and choose it. But one day, you wake up and realize you’ve done it. And it’s affecting everything.

The Patterns We Don’t See

I didn’t know my perfectionism came from trauma. I thought it was just part of being a high achiever.

I didn’t know that marrying emotionally unavailable men was me chasing the dad I never had — trying to finally earn the love I was denied.

I didn’t know that my hypervigilance — always walking on eggshells, scanning the room, waiting for the other shoe to drop — was my nervous system still stuck at age six, bracing for my father’s mood to crash through the door.

But once I started to look? I couldn’t unsee it.

We inherit behaviors. We inherit beliefs. We inherit emotional survival strategies. Be quiet. Be good. Be small. And when those don’t work, we overcorrect — trying to control everything, prove our worth, and fix what should never have been ours to fix.

If that’s you — the fixer, the over-functioner, the “strong one” — I see you. I was you.

When Dating Patterns Aren’t About Dating

If you’ve ever asked, “Why do I keep choosing the wrong person?” This is your answer.

Dating struggles don’t come out of nowhere. They come from relationship blueprints you were handed in childhood.

If your father was emotionally absent or abusive, your nervous system learned that love equals inconsistency and fear. If your mother taught you that love is conditional — based on how well you obey, accommodate, or self-abandon — guess what you’ll do in every relationship?

You’ll shrink. You’ll fix. You’ll perform. You’ll fall for the person who makes you earn your worth all over again.

It’s not because you’re broken. It’s because you were trained that this was normal.

You’re Not Broken — You’re Programmed

This realization hit me hard: you can’t heal what you’re still defending.

It took me years to stop minimizing the abuse I grew up with — to say it out loud, without shame. It took even longer to see how much of my identity was shaped by someone else’s wounds.

My trauma backpack was filled with emotional manipulation, generational guilt, and old family roles — like being the scapegoat while my brother played the golden child. I resented him, but the truth was, we were both just playing parts in someone else’s dysfunctional playbook.

The freedom came when I stopped playing.

So What Do You Do With the Backpack?

You name it. You unpack it. You stop adding more to it just because your mother, or father, or partner expects you to.

Healing generational trauma isn’t about blaming — it’s about breaking the cycle. It’s about saying, “This ends with me.”

That means you forgive your past self for not knowing what you didn’t know. You hold your parents accountable, even if they can’t hold themselves. And you get support — because trauma this deep doesn’t unravel on its own.

For me, that looked like somatic healing. Brainspotting. EMDR. Coaching. It looked like facing myself in the mirror and asking, “What am I still carrying that isn’t mine?”

You Have the Power

This work isn’t easy. But it’s worth every uncomfortable moment. Because when you drop the backpack — even just a few rocks at a time — you begin to feel something you may not have felt in years:

Light.

And that lightness makes space for peace. For safety. For love that doesn’t require you to bleed to earn it.

You’re not here to carry someone else’s pain. You’re here to heal yours. And in doing so, you give future generations a chance to live free.

That is power.