Understand your emotional baggage to improve the quality of your life
Coming to understand your emotional baggage is the first step in healing it.
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.
What is emotional baggage?
Emotional baggage can best be described as the hang-up’s and insecurities that we carry over from our previous experiences. 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.
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.
The types of emotional baggage.
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. The problem, however, is that — when you grow up in a stressful family environment — you can often learn the wrong lessons, which can carry on to become self-destructive forces in their own right.
There’s a reason for this. Adverse childhood experiences have been shown to hamper neurodevelopment, which can in turn lean to mental, social and even emotional impairment. The problems of our parents become our own problems, unless we learn how to take a long, honest look at ourselves and put in the work that’s needed to change. 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.
Those who struggle with mental health issues often need more reassurance than others, and they can frequently put themselves down or deprecate themselves in ways that make it hard to maintain an equal and fulfilling partnership. 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.
Abusive or traumatic relationship baggage
It’s never easy to end a relationship. No matter how long you’ve been together, or how many experiences you’ve shared- the memories of our partners linger with us for a long time. This is especially true for those who have survived 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 clinging to those hurt feelings while looking for those some toxic traits in the next partner that comes along. Just because one relationship was bad does not mean all your relationships will fail. That takes knowing your baggage, however, and understanding just how it’s destroying your life and relationships.
How emotional baggage limits us.
The emotional baggage that we carry around with us is an incredibly destructive force, both inside and out. When we cling to the fears and hang-up’s of our past, we allow that negative energy eat us alive from the inside out, zapping our energy and driving a wedge between ourselves and the people that matter most. If you want to overcome your emotional baggage you have to understand it, and you have to understand just how (exactly) it’s undermining your happiness each and every day.
Energy zapper
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 you’re self-esteem is gone, so are any hopes of a happy and healthy relationship.
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
Being burned by people in your past and instill a very powerful fear of the future into you. 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?
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.
How to let go 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. Learn how to live 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 and be present by focusing on this moment and this moment alone. 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. 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. Spend 10 minutes detaching each day
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 the cast-off negative emotions of those who used you. One way to combat this is to spend a little time each day detaching yourself from those words and those wounds. Whatever han-up’s someone else has — they don’t have to be yours too. It takes time and detachment to come to understand that, however.
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.
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. Learning how to master our thoughts is how we learn how to master our emotions.
Whenever you feel your mind slipping back into that negative, fearful place, stop it in its tracks and turn that thinking around. 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. If you want to heal, acceptance is everything, 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.
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. 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.
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.
