Do you have the feeling like you’re weighed down emotionally? It’s a fair question that each of us must consider at some point in our lives. We all have had an emotional event or episode in our lives that influences us in such a way that we have difficulty with other people. Unfortunately, we are rarely able to drop that emotional baggage we carry at our emotional doorstep and leave it behind. The result is our failure to move forward in life or when beginning a new relationship. Instead, we often drag that baggage right into our next relationship or life experience.
​Instead, we often drag that baggage right into our next relationship or life experience.
Emotional baggage can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing if we fail to confront it head-on. Sadly, our negative emotional baggage shows up at the most unexpected times. It can pull us down into an ocean-filled abyss of misery and despair. It can act like two cinder blocks shackled to our ankles. How we manage that emotional baggage is key to our sanity and health of future relationships.
What is Emotional Baggage?
You’ve probably heard this age-old metaphor but may not know what it means to be carrying around emotional baggage. In simple terms, emotional baggage is a representation of all the negative experiences you have encountered within your personal (romantic and non-romantic) and professional relationships. Just like the weight of carrying multiple suitcases on a trip out of town, so emotional baggage weighs us down and makes our travel through life much more difficult.
Robin Hoffman writes in the Huffington Post that we all have emotional baggage. How we allow those experiences to influence our lives is what makes us different. We experience and respond to the highs and lows of a relationship in different ways.