I wonder if this is my destiny. To expound the virtues of investigation & my last name happens to be Sherlock? Ha! 
My youngest brother & I have been spending some quality time lately with our older brother in counselling. Unusual?  Well… yes. The councillor from Relationships Australia said it was & none of their paper work was designed to cope with such a threesome. Well that just makes it all the better to me. I always did like to do things that are a bit out of the ordinary.

After 2 sessions establishing a rapport between the councillor & my younger brother Steve & I, we finally took a session with our older brother Tom. All went well & here is what transpired.

During our first session without Tom the councillor heard me say I apologised to my mum but in a way that he did not feel comfortable with. So, to this he replied that my apology was “invalid” & then later warned me to be “careful” how I deal with my mum. After the session he noted that I was “intense”. I think I did well considering a trained psychologist used, what I considered to be a very dominating language on me.

So we had to return the following week without the older bro until we sorted out this discrepancy in the first session. What I learned was that we, as humans, seem to drop “Emotional Breadcrumbs” when we feel threatened so that we can investigate the situation later on & also to allow others to examine the breadcrumbs also. What a fantastic way to preserve a moment in time for ever it seems in this “emoltion” that forms a block of time & space in our minds possibly for ever or at least long enough to evaluate it.

Obviously what I had said to the councillor set him back enough to drop such an emotional breadcrumb as to say my apology was invalid. I guess his experience with his mum came in at that point as he agreed & so he dropped that crumb for him & me to look at. Well I did & I cam up with that I would prefer him to only tell me what he would do in that situation or ask me why I did & said what I did. The councillor agreed to this in our second session. Great. With this agreement it allowed us to move on & establish a language that all three of us were willing to accept.

We then brought Tom, the older brother, in to our third session to see if we could establish some agreement similar to what we achieved with the councillor. Tom complied throughout the session but on nearing the end lashed out saying that I was “too intense”. Another bread crumb for me to investigate, I realised later & did not react to his comment only allowing it. After the session I realised that I felt quite down & not really knowing why. But with this bread crumb evident I was able to establish just what it was & what Tom wanted to achieve by dropping it, investigation. And four hours later while flying up to Brisbane a veil of depression was removed when I could see that that was what had occurred & the “emotional breadcrumb” , term was born.

Unbeknownst to me, I had been dropping these breadcrumbs for most of my life using drama to let others know that they need to be followed up & saving them for me to follow up when I was more knowledgeable. Well I now am & can now investigate the past breadcrumbs of my life. Starting with the original one that started off all of this therapy stuff.

Twenty two years ago I arranged with my mum to have family therapy sessions with my mum, dad , 3 bothers & a sister. Well it was there that I dropped my biggest bread crumb of my life, calling my mum a “compulsive liar” & my dad a “piece of chicken shit for allowing her to lie”. Wow! What a bread crumb. Unfortunately no one else or myself cold see the statement for what it was & it was never investigated by anyone at the time. However I have spent that last 22 years, 40 journals & most of my waking life working on this & have come up with some interesting concepts that I believe will someday rock the world or at least my world.

One is that failure to investigate emotional breadcrumbs results in us taking sides & by taking sides means by virtue that we fail to investigate.

What emotional breadcrumbs have you failed to adequately investigate?