How to Dump Your Emotional Baggage

We all have emotional baggage of some sort or another. The things that happen to us in our pasts determine who will become in our futures. However, there are times when those past experiences haunt us and pull us down. Emotional baggage can prevent you from being able to move on with your life and find happiness and success in relationships, business and family. You need to learn to dump this excess weight and move on with a healthy and happy future.

What is Emotional Baggage?

Emotional baggage happens when we go through life experiences. For example, if we were hurt by someone close to us in the past (a lover, a parent, a close friend) we may carry that pain on with us throughout our lives. These experiences shape who and what we become in the future. This affects our future relationships because we have pre-conceived notions of what will happen:

"She'll just cheat on me like my last girlfriend."

"Women can't be trusted."

"If I reveal my feelings and emotions, I will be made fun of."

"Everyone who loves me leaves me."Being locked into these ideas and expectations set us up for failure in future endeavors. However, you do not have to suffer with your emotional baggage.

Helping Yourself

There are some ways that you can help yourself dump your emotional baggage. The first step towards overcoming it is to recognize it. Once you recognize that you are carrying these things along with you, they can be overcome. Here are some tips for helping yourself with your emotional baggage:

Acknowledge the emotion

Don't blame yourself for feeling how you feel

Understand that it is normal

Allow yourself to feel emotions you may have been pushing deep inside

Find closure

Learn from your past but recognize that every situation and every relationship is different and unique

Accept that sometimes you may need outside helpSeeking Outside Help

In some situations, you may not be able to deal with your emotional trauma on your own. You shouldn't feel bad or weak for this. If you've been trying to deal with your emotional baggage on your own and it's not working, you shouldn't be afraid to seek outside help. There are different methods of help you can seek such as from:

Friends

Family

Relationship Counseling

Professional therapist or psychiatrist

Religious leader (priest, pastor, etc.)

OtherIt's important that you recognize that emotional baggage is a result of trauma. This emotional trauma is just as real as physical trauma an accident victim may experience but emotional trauma is much harder to treat because it is not as easy to recognize. When you combine this with the "tough-guy mentality" that many people have which tells them to just get over it and not to talk about it, this trauma often gets buried and never treated.

However, no matter how deep you think you've buried it, emotional trauma never truly goes away and sometimes it rears its ugly head right when we think things are going good. Perhaps you have trauma from a past relationship which you think you've finally gotten over until things get serious in your new relationship and suddenly those old fears and worries return.

The only way to rid yourself of this emotional baggage is to recognize it, accept it and then seek to get to the root of it. Finding out why you feel the way you do will help you move on from the pain and betrayal caused by past occurrences. Remember that when you allow the emotional baggage to affect your future, you are just allowing the person who hurt you to harm you over and over again.

If your emotional trauma is related to something you did yourself, you still have to learn to forgive. You can't live your whole life being afraid you will mess up again. Also, negative feelings and expectations will lead to negative consequences. You have to think positive and happy thoughts to have an enriched future.

Remember that until you learn to rid yourself of your emotional baggage, you can never truly move on with your life. It's important to learn from your experiences but to move on with your life with insight. Don't let the troubles from the past hold you back and prevent you from future success.