To be honest, I don’t like the term “emotional baggage.” I feel it lumps all of us with pain, trauma, or even just feelings into a term that makes us feel too much to handle. So this post is to unpackage this generalisation and help myself and others to see that we aren’t too much to handle because of our “emotional baggage.” We have experienced things that have hurt us and that we deserve compassion and understanding as we heal.
“Emotional baggage” is often used to describe things from the past that are still unprocessed or trapped in us. I don’t think there is a single person alive that hasn’t experienced something that caused them pain, grief, anger, fear, or some other uncomfortable emotion. Each experience can leave a mark, and the deeper the cut, the longer it can take to heal.
What can cause “emotional baggage”?
Everyone’s experience is unique. What may seem insignificant to one may be deeply damaging to another. But finding out what your “emotional baggage” is can help you start to resolve them.
For me, a traumatic and unstable childhood is where my emotional baggage stemmed from. Yes, I’ve had painful experiences as an adult, but I believe they only felt that painful because of the deeper wounds they reactivated.
Unpacking the impact of this had brought such sense as to why I’ve struggled so much in myself and in relationships (both platonic and romantic). During our more influential years, we are effectively sponges. How we’re treated lays the groundwork for how we see and treat ourselves. At first, this “baggage” helped us. Children quickly learn behaviours that help them feel safe and give them the best possible chance of surviving. For example, I’d be hypervigilant of tones, facial expressions, body language, and words because I felt that by doing so, I could preemptively protect myself.
However, when we become adults, these habitual patterns are no longer helpful because they are no longer needed. Those traumas are over. But until we process and start to heal, the past will continue to influence our present and self-sabotage our future.
Signs of emotional baggage
Being able to identify our unprocessed trauma can help us see the areas we need to focus on. These are some of the patterns in me, caused by unprocessed trauma, that I now work hard on; maybe you can relate:
Hypervigilance
Unprocessed trauma can cause our bodies to remain in a hyperactivated state. Despite how safe I know I am, in the background there lays a lingering anxiety. Never truly trusting that I am no longer in danger.
Difficulty communicating our own needs
Depending on the trauma, we can get into the habit of not speaking up or being truly vulnerable because we don’t want to get hurt again. It can become a survival strategy; for example, “if I don’t rock the boat, people will stay happy with me. I’ll stay safe.” From a young age, I quickly learnt to keep my feelings and needs to myself, giving off the impression that I was always “happy.”
“Emotional baggage” can cause overthinking
Unprocessed trauma can also cause us to habitually ruminate in an attempt to protect ourselves from future pain. My subconscious believes that if I continue to keep “threats” in the forefront or think through every possible scenario and outcome, the rug can’t be pulled out from under me. But all this does is keep my mind and body stuck in a fearful state.
Low self-worth and toxic shame
Trauma can really affect how we see ourselves. For me, so much trauma lay unattended for so long that a negative image of myself grew in my subconscious, and this showed up in how I let others treat me and how I treated myself.
Disorganised attachment
Ah, the most challenging of attachment styles. The push-pull dynamic of both fearful and avoidant behaviours. (You can learn about attachment in my attachment posts.) Before we learnt to regulate our own nervous systems, we relied on our caregivers to meet our needs. However, if we experience a lot of trauma with said caregivers, then our ability to do this for ourselves gets warped. For me, this resulted in a disorganised attachment.
Difficulty trusting
Finding it hard to truly trust can also be a sign of unprocessed trauma. At least it is for me. If we’ve had our trust repeatedly destroyed, then it stands to reason that trusting will get harder and harder to do.
Why Do We Need To Heal Our “baggage”?
Having spent most of my life being a slave to these patterns, it was until I started working on myself that my eyes truly opened up to how much they were hurting me. Now I’m not going to sugar-coat the process. It takes hard work, commitment, patience, and a willingness to unpack and face the deep-rooted traumas that are driving these patterns. However, for me, this has been the only way to set the wheels in motion. I’m still in this process and am fully aware there’s still a long road ahead.
But we are very capable of healing our “emotional baggage.”. We just have to put the effort in.
Do you think you have unprocessed trauma too? How are you healing it? Let me know in the comments or just fill out a contact form!
Advice on how to start releasing unprocessed trauma can be found throughout this blog, and here: How to release emotional baggage: 13 tips to feel lighter | HealthShots
