Hello friends,
Hope you are well amid so much going on around Corona Virus. I still don’t care, if a dove comes into the house and I have to save it… a bit scared of bats though :D.
Seriously, how is it all going for you? How are you really feeling now that it has reached a pandemic?
I hope today was a good day, and tomorrow will be an even better day.
We’ve been having a lot of power cuts lately here in South Africa this week. It’s going on for four hours sometimes five every single day so far and is going to go on for the rest of the week. It is pretty frustrating when you have to be on online meetings and do your work, but I’m here, see I made it.
Let’s get straight in.
Are you carrying emotional baggage, and how much of it are you carrying? Did you do a scan on that?
What is emotional baggage?
It is unresolved emotional turmoil caused by negative experiences. It is normal to have this as we all got through pain, rejection and neglect that comes and go in our lives. Now everyone has emotional baggage, but some people let it rule their lives.
Examples of emotional baggage are:
- Guilt
- Anger
- Shame
- Resentment
- Fear
- Stress and Worry
- Past relationships
- Your inner critic
According to this article 8 common pieces of emotional baggage and how to ditch them.
Here are three more examples of emotional baggage
- Negativity
- Dysfunctional family (Check out this article Is your family codependent? What is your role? Who does it affect?)
- Blame
Unresolved issues show up as:
- Spending too much money
- Drinking too much
- Road rage
- Outbursts of tears or anger at home, in public or the workplace
I have to admit this is one of the best articles I’ve read so far on emotional baggage and how to unpack it.
Is your emotional baggage holding you back?
Note: When it comes to the romantic front these three can threaten your relationship
- Depression
- Major problems with the family of origin
- The ex factor
Here are six signs that emotional baggage is affecting or sabotaging your relationships.
- Emotional distance
- Commitment issues
- Serial dating
- Paranoia
- Projection
- Comparison
Check out this article Emotional baggage – signs you have to let it go
Now can you imagine why some people do not want to do Christmas dinners and how come arguments take place over dinner when you were teenagers? Sometimes it takes being away from certain people or certain circumstances for a long long time to naturally rewire your thoughts and patterns and hope that others will be doing the same. People grow up differently, manage things differently, react differently, and get triggered differently. There are a lot of complicated things out there like for one, we live in a world with so many different cultures and ways of raising kids. Knowing what triggers you and being mature about it comes with time. Trust me, the assessment will be worthwhile. This can improve your communication massively. Self-improvement can change your life. Mostly, facing this without running away from it in a healthy fashion is recommended; no drugs, no alcohol or whatever else there is out there that helps people escape it.
“Sometimes the past should be abandoned, yes. Life is a journey and you can’t carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.” ~Ha Jin
Do not let your emotional baggage define you.
Self-improvement is the greatest gift you can give yourself and it pays off over time, removing what caused the baggage to be there in the first place, finding out how the baggage got there and why? The baggage you are carrying might not even be yours to carry but you have taken it on from your own beliefs, basically, your own bulls**t that you made up somewhere and somehow along the years.
With doing a bit of research this is what I found.
Where does anger come from?
Many things can trigger anger even stress, family problems and financial issues. For some people, anger can come from depression or alcoholism. Anger itself can be considered as a disorder and is also a symptom for several health conditions. Anger can be a symptom of depression. Anger can be suppressed or overtly expressed. I really recommend reading the article below.
According to this article Health – Anger issues and causes
Where does resentment come from?
Resentment comes from bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly
Where does fear come from?
Fears can be formed by traumatic experiences of the past involving the source of terror. Fear also comes from witnessing another person’s anxiety of phobia according to another article.
Where does guilt come from?
According to one article guilt usually comes from family, friends, society, and/or religion who, consciously or unconsciously taught you to feel guilty for thinking or acting in a certain way. It stems from external approval. It’s got to do with how we interpret moral codes.
According to another article guilt often comes as a result of a conflict between enjoyment and a perceived negative outcome of your actions. The result of this conflict results in feelings of guilt because you did something which you thought would cause other people to disapprove of you (i.e. to not find you attractive).
Where does shame come from?
According to one article, the feeling of shame comes from the belief that “I am basically flawed, inadequate, wrong, bad, unimportant, undeserving or not good enough.” At some early point in our lives, most of us absorbed this false belief that causes the feeling of shame.
Where does negativity come from?
According to one article negative thoughts come from the fear generated by doubt and ignorance about a subject. They come from your mind and in some cases because of low self-esteem about yourself and your abilities. Let go of this baggage if you’re carrying it in order to fulfil your destiny.
Where does blame come from?
According to one article people blame others because of the following reasons: Loss of control: Some people panic when they lose control of a situation and so they try to restore the sense of being in control by blaming others!! So, behind the act of blaming others fear might exist!!
Another article states we blame because we like to have narratives that explain why things happened so that we can add these to our mental story of life, shifting the blame onto someone else is a subtle way to attack them, shifting the blame directly onto someone or something else is the perfect way to avoid having to reflect on your behaviour or delve deeply into your own psyche, sometimes we convince ourselves that it really is someone else’s fault, but sometimes we know we’re lying, and blaming other people can provide us with an excuse to act in a hurtful manner.
I found this article very handy in terms of self-improvement and walking away from your emotional baggage.
5 steps to deal with emotional baggage so that it does not define you
- Write an honest list of the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours that weigh you down.
- Reflect on each item and identify the source of the thought/belief.
- Find at least one positive in each hurtful experience/situation.
- Create affirmations to foster change and counteract negative thoughts
- Practice patience and mindfulness.
Emotional baggage, triggers, chemical dependency and why you should not escape it. Face it.
Using drugs and alcohol to escape is a form of self-harm which then explodes the emotional baggage spreading it in various areas of your life (emotionally, mentally and physically) causing more emotional baggage. T. Dench Patel, 11 March 2020, 19:15 (British time) It might allow you to escape, feel less pain, in the moment it lasts giving you more damage to deal with. It prolongs and worsens the pain, baggage, anger, blame, regret, shame, worry, guilt, stress, negativity, your inner critic almost procrastinating your life in all areas whether you have it under control or not. The sooner you face it, find the root of it, get the support you will have at least started on the work that many people are still running from, you would be closer to the life you dreamt of before beginning to use alcohol and drugs to soothe your emotional baggage and even prolonging it. If you’ve found this article now, it’s no coincidence. It is the sign that you have to face it otherwise a harmless person is going to say something that they didn’t even say intentionally to trigger your anger, blame, guilt, stress, worry, negativity, anger, shame, fear, the inner critic, or your past relationships and in turn, you will create another circle adding more to you current anger, guilt, stress, worry, negativity, blame, shame, fear, the inner critic or your past relationships. You would have created a pattern that just goes in circles. T. Dench Patel, 11 March 2020, 19:23 (British time)
Self-improvement is the best investment you can make in yourself – T. Dench Patel, 11 March 2020, 19:43 (British time).
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
