Let go of emotional baggage to improve your relationships

The sooner you let go of your emotional baggage, the happier you and your partner will be.

by: E.B. Johnson

When it comes to our overall happiness, few other forces are more destructive than emotional baggage. Emotional baggage are all the little insecurities that manifest over our lifetime, as a result of our experiences or upbringing. Our emotional baggage can undermine both our relationships and our happiness, but it mainly undermines our hopes for a happy future.

Overcoming the toxic effects of emotional baggage is a process that takes time, commitment and a lot of personal willpower. This healing is possible within each and every one of us, but we must learn how to accept things for what they are, live in the present moment, and forgive ourselves for the things (and people) we cannot change.

The truth about emotional baggage.

In the simplest of terms, emotional baggage comprises all the insecurities and hang-ups that follow us from our childhood experiences and past relationships. You can inherit your emotional baggage from family, or you can develop it after having a tragic or stressful experience that involves friends or romantic partners. Our emotional baggage is what makes us unsure and what makes it hard for us to trust others — let alone ourselves.

We use our emotional baggage as the bricks with which we form the walls we build around ourselves. All those little pains and all those little heartbreaks add up to create a number of beliefs that make it hard for us to get close to others and even ourselves.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, or if you’ve had a number of tragic or abusive relationships, you might be dealing with emotional baggage that is holding you back. Overcoming this baggage takes time, but it also takes understanding. Until you can come to accept the origins of your baggage, it’s hard to take the steps you need to let it go. Start taking those steps by getting to the root of your emotional baggage. Connect the dots and discover how you’re hurting yourself (and others) and why.

What emotional baggage looks like.

Not all emotional baggage is created equal. The hang-up’s we carry throughout our lives stems from everything from our childhood experiences to our most recent romantic entanglements. Emotional baggage is all about learning, specifically learning about trust and how to extend that trust to yourself and the people around you.

The dysfunctional family baggage

One of the most common sources of emotional baggage is being brought up in a chaotic or dysfunctional family. Family dynamics are at the core of who we are, and it is through these early experiences that we learn the emotional behaviors and patterns that make us who we are. Adverse childhood experiences have been shown to hamper neurodevelopment, which can in turn lean to mental, social and even emotional impairment. Through bad family experiences, we can learn to be abusive, manipulative and mistrustful — but those can all be changed when we make the conscious choice to do so.

Mental health baggage

Just receiving a mental health diagnosis can be a form and baggage in-and-of itself. Struggling with depression or anxiety is a difficulty that can entirely consume a person. Those who struggle with these conditions often come into relationships with feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, and this can lead into some self-destructive behaviors that challenge their partners, family and friends. Dealing with darkness can drag the whole ship down, making it extremely important to pinpoint such issues and enlist the help of a trusted and certified mental health professional if you believe this is the case.

Traumatic past relationships

Relationships are dynamic and complex, and even when they come to an end they can retain that same nuance and complexity. This is especially true when it comes to abusive or traumatic relationships; one of the biggest causes of the emotional baggage that drags us down and destroys our happiness. Coming out on the other side of an abusive relationship, or one in which your trust was violated, can leave you feeling raw, lost and hopeless. Without taking the time to heal (and perform a posmortem) correctly, it’s common to find yourself repeating the same toxic habits and attracting the same toxic people.

How emotional baggage undermines our relationships.

There are a number of ways in which our emotional baggage — whatever form it takes — can eat away at our happiness and our relationships. If you’re truly looking to build a partnership that lasts, then you have to let go of the pain that’s holding you back. That takes knowing how it destroys your connections, however, and how it holds you back from sharing yourself in a real and authentic way.

Low energy

Carrying around all that negative energy and emotion zaps your energy and can make you feel more lethargic than you actually are. When you’re feeling tired, low or defeated, it makes it hard to connect on any type of meaningful way. This is because connection is all about an exchange of energy. If you have nothing to give, you have nothing to connect with.

Damaged self-esteem

When we cling to the past, we allow it’s reverberations to echo again and again across our futures — shadowing the horizon in a way that makes it hard to see yourself in a realistic light. Emotional baggage can weigh you down, and make it seem as though you aren’t good enough or aren’t worth love. The longer you cling to these ideas, the more you start to believe them; and once your self-esteem is gone, so are any hopes of a happy and healthy relationship.

An inability to open up

If you’re someone that’s been hurt or damaged by people you love and trust, it can make it hard for you to open up. The problem here, however, is that you have to open up, in order to truly connect with the people that you love — be they romantic partners or just family. By opening up to others, we allow them to see us as we are, but we also allow them to trust us enough to open up themselves. Being open is a prerequisite to any happy relationship, but that can be a hard mountain to conquer when you’ve got a pain-riddled past.

Constant comparisons

When we give power to the negativity of our pasts, we put it at odds with our future. Emotional baggage does the same to our partners, putting them at odds with the specters of our pasts, and pitting them in a constant (and unhealthy) competition in which they need to prove that they won’t do to us what that person did before. It’s an unhealthy standard to set, and one creates automatic inequity.

Failure to fully commit

Unaddressed pain in our pasts eats away at who we are and makes us scared of the future. Failing to fully commit, however, is a sure-fire way to lose someone you care about, as any happy relationship is about committing to one another and engaging in an emotional give-and-take. If you’re afraid of tying yourself down, ask yourself why. Has something in your past taught you that you’re not worthy of love? Or has it told you that you’re not worthy of trust?

The best ways to get rid of your emotional baggage.

The good news about emotional baggage is that it can be healed; it just takes time and a lot of internal work and radical self-acceptance. By instituting a few basic practices and techniques into your life, you can make some major changes and start healing the pain of your past. You have to do it one day at a time, though, and you have to have patience. Breaking bad habits takes time.

1. Be more in the present

Our baggage can root our brains to the past, but as the old adage goes “we’re not going that way” so it’s important to learn how to live in the present moment while you detach yourself from your past. Bring your thoughts to the forefront conciously and be present by focusing on this moment and this moment alone. Be in your body and feel the moment. You can’t change anything in the past, but you can change things here in the right now — so, why don’t you?

Find a quiet space and focus on who you are right now, in this exact moment. Appreciate where you’ve come from, and focus-in on the strengths that you’ve got to hand right this second. Remember that you are not your past, and though someone may have held power over you then, you’re the only person with power of you now. Take that power by the throat and start making choices for yourself from this moment forward. No one else can direct your future unless you allow them to.

Only by learning how to be present in this moment can we truly focus on what we want from the future. If you’re too focused on the past, it makes it impossible to see the way ahead. If you live entirely in the future, you miss the opportunities in the now that can lead you there. Be mindful of who you are, how you’re feeling and what you need. Communicate those needs and be honest with yourself (and your partner) right here, right now, in this current moment. After all, it’s the only one we have.

2. Start detaching yourself

If you’re someone with a laundry-list of traumas or heartbreaks under your belt, it can often feel like you’re drowning in all those cast-off negative emotions. One way to combat this is to spend a little time each day detaching yourself from those words and those wounds, so you can be more fully and consciously in the present. Whatever hang-up’s someone else has — they don’t have to be yours too. You can reach understanding with time and detachment.

Spend 10 minutes each day consciously detaching yourself from that hurt and that pain of your former experiences. Tell yourself that you are not responsible for carrying the pain of others anymore, and give yourself the freedom and the power to break free of the poisonous and toxic emotional chains of those who raised you or those who took you for granted. We are little more than a summation of our experiences; we are not our experiences. There’s a difference, and it takes space to see and understand that.

You can use affirmations or even a mindful journaling practice to get started. Takes notes about how you feel now, versus how you feel then, and try to look at each situation through the eyes of an impartial third party. If someone from the outside — someone with compassion and love for you — saw the situation, what would they think? Probably the truth: that it wasn’t your fault and that it doesn’t have to define you for all time. Shift your perspective by starting to cut those ties to the past.

3. Resume control of your thoughts

When you’re not living in the present moment, it’s easy for your thoughts to become bogged down with negativity. In order to overcome the challenges and traumas of your past, you have to learn how to take control of your thinking again and reframe the way you see yourself and your thoughts. Learning how to master our thoughts is how we learn how to master our emotions. From there, the future becomes ours to create.

Whenever you feel your mind slipping back into that negative, fearful place, stop it in its tracks and flip that thinking on its head. Remind your brain that your present is not your past, and your current partner or loved one is not the abusive monster lurking on the edge of your nightmares. Try to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones, and focus on the present moment and what you can do to generate happiness and joy in your here and now.

Recognize thought-loops when they start and ask yourself probing questions about why you feel the way you do.Release your judgements about yourself or your current situation and practice a little gratitude for the distance you’ve come today. If you can’t replace your negative thoughts for positive ones, then at least replace them with something rational. Focusing on the bad will never bring you the good, so center in on actions you can take to correct whatever is going wrong and move forward confidently.

4. Write a letter

Sometimes, the experiences of our past require resolution, but we don’t always get that resolution from the people that hurt us. Writing a letter can be a great way to get the resolution you need, while avoiding the stress and chaos of conflict. While you can send the letter, you can also burn it, bury it or just throw it away. Writing a letter to the pain of our past is a great way to get your thoughts out loud and clear, while also providing yourself with the clarity you need to move foward.

Get everything out of your head. Scribble down every single piece of hurt and every single little thing you need to say to your past. Give your pain permission to come forward, and give yourself permission to let it out. Don’t hold back. Say what you need to say and stop worrying about protecting anyone but the fragile, broken soul you’ve buried deep down inside.

Writing and journaling can be an exceptitonal way to get in touch with our pain, safely. It can also reveal some monumental truths to us. When we write, we allow ourselves to open up in a way that isn’t always possible with other living, breathing people. Say what you need to say and get the closure that you need so that you can find your joy and happiness again. You don’t owe anything to your past, but you owe everything to your future.

5. Acceptance is everything

If you truly want to be happy, you have to start practicing radical self-acceptance every single day. This starts with accepting yourself for who and what you are, but it ends with accepting the people around you as they are, and your past for what it was. For true healing to take root, acceptance must be present, but it’s often one of the hardest skills for us to master.

Stop complaining or dwelling on the things that happened in your past, and start finding solutions for the future. If you attracted serial cheaters and abusers, look inside and find what it is that’s attracted to those qualities and heal it. When you complain, you waste your energy. If you’re going to direct your energy anywhere, direct it toward things you can change — like the future — instead of wasting it on the past.

Learn how to let the beauty of life back in, and understand that every single one of us is imperfect. Allow for mistakes, and allow yourself the time and space you need to accept the things that hurt you and caused you distress. A little distance will help you let go, but only acceptance can set you free. Give yourself that power by learning how to accept what was, what is and what comes next. Acceptance is not forgiveness. It’s simply giving yourself permission to move on.

6. Learn how to forgive yourself

Holding on to bitterness or resentment — no matter who it’s directed at — will leave you stuck in a cycle of negativity. Revenge never brings us the relief that we think it will, and it never provides us the redemption we seek. You have to forgive yourself in order to escape the shame-loop that keeps you gridlocked in your self-destructive patterns, but you have to do it thoroughly and you have to do it from the ground up.

It’s okay to feel guilty, and it’s okay to admit that you’ve messed up. We’re all human and we all make mistakes or give in to our lesser-natures from time-to-time. What separates the good people from the bad people is recognizing those missteps and coming back from them in a way that allows others to forgive us, while giving us the understanding we need to forgive ourselves. There’s a difference between guilt and shame, but neither serve us long-term. Learn how to forgive yourself and through that, your past.

Practicing forgiveness will allow you to connect with your innately loving nature, and help you accept the one thing that we all struggle to accept more than anything: our humanity. The one thing that makes us the flawed, fragile and beautiful beings that we are. Whether knowing or unknowing, give yourself the forgiveness you need to bloom. No one else can give it to you, so stop denying yourself. Allow yourself to be human, and allow yourself to make mistakes when you don’t have all the information (and even when you do). Life is hard. Don’t make it harder by holding on to anger that’s eating you up.

Putting it all together…

Letting go of our emotional baggage is imperative in order for us to find happy, healthy and productive futures. It’s easy to get bogged down in the traumatic events of the past, but that can do serious damage to our futures and the relationships that rest in our here-and-now. If you want to unlock true happiness, you have to learn to let go of your emotional baggage, but that’s a process that takes time, commitment and some radical self-acceptance.

Get to know the emotional baggage that’s weighing you down, and accept it for what it is and where it comes from. Spend time getting to know that hurt and that grief, and then spend time each day detaching yourself from the pain that it continues to cause you. Learn how to live in the present and take control of your thoughts so that you can take control of your own happiness. Emotional baggage will wreck our lives and our relationships if it’s not resolved, so start forgiving yourself and let that joy back in.The only person that can hold you back is you. Are you going to let go, or are you going to give in? No one can make that choice for you.