Emotional Baggage — Millstone Around Your Neck
If you’re someone carrying stresses, guilt, anxieties, criticisms and various such negative emotions — welcome to the club! We’re all carrying unprocessed emotions from past experiences which, if not taken care of, can cause negative impact on your current experiences. Life tends to become gloomy and uncertain. Now, let’s talk about these unprocessed emotions or commonly called Emotional Baggage, that each one of us carries.
There are different kinds of emotional baggage you might be carrying from past experiences. First and foremost, how do we ascertain that we are carrying baggage from the past? It’s simple! Just observe yourself every time you get depressed, anxious, angry, lonely, unfocused, guilty, scared or feel any such negative emotion and try to analyse why exactly you are feeling what you’re feeling. Ask yourself if it is because of the current situation or if it’s because you’ve experienced something similar to the situation you are in today and you’re not quite sure about the result. If it is because of the latter, you can conclude that you carry a certain amount of baggage from the past and it is affecting how you are currently feeling about the situation you are in. It is our baggage that makes us view life from the same narrow lens.
Unresolved issues due to failed/neglected relationships, career failures, huge financial losses, abuse, trauma or any such unpleasant experience can cause this psychological baggage. Dealing with this sort of emotional pain is extremely difficult. Learning how to cope and heal from the pain can be even harder. Developing coping skills is really essential to the process of healing. Healing from emotional pain is so powerful and important versus getting stuck and letting negative feelings hinder your daily life and these negative feelings can only stop you from living to your full potential and you just go through life not happy, facing interpersonal struggles and wondering why everything seems so hard.
Emotional baggage is the combination of problems that collect and occur when you haven’t learned how to trust yourself, set relationship boundaries, think in patterns that are constructive rather than destructive or manage your emotions such that your needs are met. Low self-esteem and lack of confidence are conditions that are baggage-based and that limit your overall ability to make life decisions and end up causing more stress. You may be letting others make decisions for you but then resent those decisions as they aren’t really reflective of you. The baggage, unfortunately, tends to rear its ugly head when you are faced with stressors or triggers.
Mastering the art of coping or healing is indispensable in the current day’s scenario, especially after we’ve been exposed to unanticipated challenges since the past year or so and we’ve observed how life can change drastically in a very short time leading to critical decisions that have to be made concerning our jobs, education, finances and health. There are various challenges you might be facing right now such as — financial stressors, lifestyle changes, relationship problems, chronic anger, boundaries, educational related issues or a whole laundry list of challenges.
How do we face them? How do we accept the challenges and overcome them? How do we succeed in healing from the past?
In my opinion, there are numerous ways to cope up or heal from the past. In this post, I want to share with you, what I think works best for healing from or alleviating the emotional pain we carry. Here’s how we do it. Firstly, finding a healthy support system or rather a social/emotional outlet is very important. Having a friend or a relative to whom you can speak out everything you’re actually feeling, out loud, is a blessing. However, do not get too bogged down with just repeatedly venting where it can turn into unhealthy rumination and you get stuck. The second thing I’d suggest is — doing your homework. This suggests that you should create a mental inventory by examining your subconscious mind. This is where you can store thoughts, emotions and memories. Sift through all the negative experiences you’ve encountered and determine how they’re affecting you today and why you’re not able to let them go and work towards how you can let them go. Thirdly, forgive yourself and others. Forgive others for not living up to your expectations. Forgive everyone, totally and utterly. No strings attached. Another way to deal with coping up is to look forward. It is important that we do not get stuck in a negative cycle for too long. It’s crucial to keep moving forward. Of course, you should always give yourself time to heal. However, it is also important that you are working towards progress and looking for a future when these emotions do not weigh heavily on you.
A few other ways I’d suggest for letting go of emotional baggage are: Face the fear of letting go — realize that the past is the past. It taught you what you needed to learn. Use your experiences as a learning tool. Be patient — Be patient with yourself. It is not easy to empty that emotional suitcase. Change takes time. Don’t quit and you will see that hard work and persistence will pay off. Celebrate you — find acceptance in your talents and embrace your differences that make you unique. Labels are for items in the grocery stores, not for people.
Get to know the emotional baggage that’s weighing you down, and accept it for what it is and where it comes from. Learn how to live in the present and take control of your thoughts so that you can take control of your own happiness! Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction! To sum it up, I’d like to tell you, dear reader, that you can’t flow freely in life without letting go of a past moment. I hope you can let go of yesterday and live today with happiness and smiles!
~ QB