In my last article, I explored the powerful influence of your emotional baggage on your life; it’s harmful effects on your happiness, relationships, and the pursuit of your life goals. Your response might be: “Okay, I now understand where my emotional baggage came from and how it affects me. But how do I unpack my emotional baggage so it doesn’t continue to drive my life in an unhealthy direction?”
Unpacking your emotional baggage is no small task, to be sure. You have likely been driven by your emotional baggage since you were a child and, as a result, your ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving have been hard wired into your brain creating strong and immediate reactions. There are two approaches you can take to alleviating the emotional burden you carry with you every day.
First, you can embrace a “depth” approach that involves unpacking your emotional baggage through deep exploration, the courage to confront painful memories and emotions that you’ve been trying to suppress—unsuccessfully—for years, understanding how these experiences have impacted your life, and, ultimately, acceptance and letting go. This “lightening your load” involves showing yourself that the defenses you erected as a child to protect you from some real or perceived threat are no longer necessary. Moreover, recognizing that what was threatening when you were young is most likely far less so now as an adult because you have many more psychological and emotional resources with which to face your emotional baggage.
Opening up and unpacking your emotional baggage can be facilitated with guidance and support from a qualified mental health professional. They can provide a safe environment to be vulnerable and experience the emotions associated with your emotional baggage, offer insights and connections between your emotional baggage and your current way of thinking, feeling, and behaving in your life, help you let go of your emotional baggage, and assist you in identifying healthier ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving based on who you are and who you want to be.
Second, you can look at your emotional baggage as bad psychological, emotional, and behavioral habits that have been deeply ingrained in your psyche. The way you respond to yourself, others, and your world in unhealthy ways driven by your emotional baggage occurs because you’ve engaged in those thoughts, emotions, and behaviors 1000s upon 1000s of times in your life to date. Emotional habits can be understood as automatic reactions that were instilled through repetition of exposure to situations that share common qualities. For example, you may have felt unworthy of love when you were growing up each time your father devalued your achievements. When this happened, you felt great anger toward him; however, it was unacceptable to express your feelings to him so you turned your anger toward yourself. Over the years, any experience that caused you to feel that others were not appreciating your efforts triggered anger that you internalized as self-criticism and self-castigation, which created an emotional habit that emerges whenever your emotional baggage is triggered.
From this perspective, letting go of your emotional baggage is about identifying those unhealthy habits and retraining new habits that are based on who you are now and that are productive in your present adult life. In essence, you break the habits that have been instilled in you by your emotional baggage by engaging in healthier thoughts, emotions, and behaviors so many times that your brain literally gets re-wired and the old habits no longer have the neural circuitry to impact your life.
Changing your emotional habits is a progressive process of awareness, self-control, and repetition that culminates in a shift in your emotional life. You can think of this journey as containing “forks in the road.” You have for years taken the “bad road” that your emotional baggage has propelled you down because its power over your life has been significant and because you didn’t see another road—the good road—to take.
Step #1: Your Emotional Baggage Under a Microscope
The first step in changing the road you are traveling involves taking a clear-eyed look at the bad road you are on; how it impacts your happiness, mental and physical health, relationships, and aspirations. You likely already know that this road doesn’t feel good, but an “under the microscope” look will hopefully open your eyes wide to how bad a road it is and, perhaps more importantly, fuel your determination to get off the bad road as soon as possible. Questions such as the following can shine a light on a road that may have been shrouded darkness for most of your life:
What thoughts dominate my life and are they life affirming or life sucking?
What emotions dominate my life and do they make me feel good or bad?
Are my actions in my world healthy and constructive or harmful and unproductive?
Is my life fulfilling and joyful or empty and sad?
Am I living the life that I want and deserve?
Step #2: Identify Your Triggers
The second step involves identifying the situations that trigger your emotional baggage. This step is important because it enables you to recognize when a fork in the road can present itself. Typically, there are characteristic situations that have similarities to situations in your past that were painful and in which your emotional baggage is rooted. What happens is that your unconscious connects a current situation with painful memories. In doing so, your limbic system, always on high alert for a threat to your well being, instigates a protective reaction grounded in either a fight-or-flight reaction. The result is a negative reaction (e.g., anger, sadness) that is out of proportion to the situation you are in.
By identifying these common situations, you can understand how they are related to your emotional baggage, that is, what it is about the present situation that provokes such a strong and unpleasant reaction? In doing so, you begin to separate what is from what was, setting the stage to respond based on who you are now rather than who you once were. This exercise also enables you engage your pre-frontal cortex which helps you to disengage your limbic system, thus reducing or removing the threat that is triggered by your emotional baggage. Importantly, it allows you to place a sign by the side of the bad road that reads: Fork in the Road Ahead, which alerts you to the fact that you don’t have to stay on the bad road much longer.
Step #3: Prepare Alternative Responses
When your emotional baggage gets triggered, it is exceedingly difficult to just flip your limbic system’s switch off and your prefrontal cortex’s switch on. At that point, your inner animal is in full protection mode with all of the attending psychological (e.g., sharpening of senses, narrowing of focus), emotional (e.g., intense feelings of fear or anger), and physiological changes (e.g., racing heart, shortened breath, muscle tension, shot of adrenaline). Your primitive brain believes that any interference by your evolved brain will lead to certain death, so it simply doesn’t give it time to respond; rather, you just react to your emotional baggage in a way that worked on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago (i.e., fight or flight), but isn’t usually effective in the 21st century.
Because of this eons-old defense mechanism, your only chance of short circuiting your limbic system and allowing your prefrontal cortex to gain control of your response when you get “lit up” emotionally is to use your knowledge of the situations that commonly provoke your emotional baggage and create a more positive alternative response. Ask yourself: What would be healthy ways of thinking, feeling, and responding in this situation? With this “good road” identified and your plan to take that road planted firmly in your psyche (and even rehearsed using corrective imagery), when you get lit up next time by your emotional baggage, you can more readily conjure up that substitute response by your prefrontal cortex, allowing you to override your initial emotional-baggage-driven reaction. In other words, by creating for yourself a healthier psychological, emotional, and behavioral response that is specific and detailed, you are revealing a fork in the road that you can clearly see when your emotional baggage gets activated and also know that it is a much better road to proceed on in this sensitive situation.
Step #4: Put Your New Responses into Action
Of course, given the weight of your emotional baggage, just because you have a plan to take the good road doesn’t mean that your primitive brain will give up without a fight. Remember that your emotional baggage is well entrenched in both your psyche and your neural pathways. You may find that the next time your emotional baggage gets triggered and your prefrontal cortex presents a healthier option, you will still react in an emotionally unhealthy way. But, as you bring your new response to the fore more and more, at some point, you will take the good road. And, when you do it once, and you see how much better this new response is (it is self-reinforcing because it feels better and the outcome is better), it gets easier to implement in future situations in which your emotional baggage tries to assert itself over your thinking, emotions, and behavior.
During this process, you are likely to feel frustrated and get discouraged by your inability to quickly and easily replace your old emotional habits with new ones. These feelings are normal. You must resist these feelings because they will only slow the retraining of your emotional habits and reinvigorate your emotional baggage. Most importantly, you must continue to persist in the retraining process and persevere in the face of the slowness and difficulty of the change process. Stay confident in the knowledge that your old emotional habits will die in time and you will develop new, healthier emotional habits. You will be able to choose the new course in your life in the near future and it will get easier.
As time passes, the internal battle will continue, but the tide will slowly turn. With each experience in recognizing how truly destructive your emotional baggage is and how attempting to put your new response into action, your old emotional habits will lose their power and your new emotional habits will gain strength. Then one day it will happen. You will see the opportunity to respond to your emotional baggage in a healthy way, your prefrontal cortex will override your limbic system, and you will think, feel, and act in ways that are life-affirming rather than life destroying. Finally, your persistence and perseverance will have paid off. You will have let go of the old emotional habits and replaced them with new, healthier emotional habits that will further fuel positive changes in your life.
Step #5: Reinforce Positive Emotions
While the primary focus of unpacking your emotional baggage is on relieving you of negative emotions, it is equally important to learn to experience and express positive emotions. An unfortunate byproduct of an upbringing which emphasized strong negative emotions or no emotions at all is that positive emotions were rarely experienced, so positive emotions are largely unfamiliar, and perhaps even alien, to you. Negative emotions have their place in our lives because they act as warning signals of people and situations that can harm us, so negative emotions can indicate to us what to avoid. At the same time, positive emotions are as important because they communicate what we want to seek out and look forward to. Love, excitement, joy, enthusiasm, contentment, and happiness are the emotional goals toward which we should strive and are the emotional rewards for our efforts in all aspects of our lives. By experiencing and expressing positive emotions, you are, in fact, ingraining new, positive emotional habits that can replace the old negative emotional habits.
Just as experiencing and being guided through negative emotions can help you let go of your emotional baggage, so to does feeling about positive emotions. You have opportunities on a daily basis to create, express, share, and talk about the positive emotions that you can replace your emotional baggage. There are no rules on expressing positive emotions. There are no techniques for learning positive emotions. You learn about positive emotions by allowing yourself to experience and express them in your daily activities, work, and relationships. When you are happy, show it. When you are excited about something, share it with someone. When you thoroughly enjoy something you are doing, tell someone why. When you feel content, sit quietly and immerse yourself in it. Most importantly, when you are with others whom you care about, express your love in any way you can because love is the ultimate defense against emotional baggage (because a lack of love in your life is the most likely cause of your emotional baggage in the first place). By experiencing and expressing positive emotions regularly, you gradually replace the negative emotional fuel that powered your emotional baggage with positive emotional fuel that can propel your life in a new and healthier direction.
The journey of unpacking your emotional baggage, however you choose to do it, is ultimately about letting go of the past and embracing the present and future. This evocative poem by Nelson Mandela, which I have modified and added to, highlights the stark contrast between a life driven by emotional baggage and what life has to offer when you unpack your emotional baggage.
Letting Go
To let go does not mean to stop caring, but to not care too much.
To let go is not to close yourself off, but to open yourself up.
To let go is not to dwell on what might be, but to appreciate what is.
To let go is not to blame, but to take responsibility.
To let go is not to fix, but to heal.
To let go is not to deny, but to acknowledge.
To let go is not to judge, but to accept.
To let go is not to punish, but to cherish.
To let go is not to dwell the past, but to embrace the present.
To let go is to fear less and to live more.
To let go is to feel exhilaration rather than relief.
To let go is to feel love, happiness, peace, and connection.
