How Much Emotional Baggage Are You Carrying Around?

There's a word we all know well. A word we tend to toss between us in discussions with each other, particularly in reference to our relationships with partners, those both past and present, as if it were an overly-inflated conversational basketball.

A word that speaks of roadblocks that never fail to appear and impede our own progress toward achieving personal happiness, even when we try our darnedest to avoid them. A word recipients frequently receive from me in readings to describe difficulties they are encountering at that particular point in their lives.

That word is baggage. Specifically, emotional baggage - the kind we (or our partners) spend years trying to get rid of and yet, inevitably drag like overstuffed Samsonite behind us everywhere we go.

Like ghosts, this baggage relentlessly rises from the past to haunt us, no matter how hard we try to outrun it. It stays hot on our tails as we speed down the highways of our lives in frantic attempts to evade it. It holds the power to insideously influence, hamper and outright derail our lives as we strain and struggle to achieve new futures for ourselves.

Doomed to Carry It

Face it, every human being on this planet possesses emotional baggage of one kind or another. Whether it's from past relationships, marriages, our own backgrounds and upbringing, we've all got our own fair share of baggage.

And we'll carry it with us until we either consciously confront it and successfully resolve it - or we die.

Those who claim to "travel light" in life are probably carrying the most baggage of all. The trouble is, these individuals don't consciously recognize their own baggage as they busy themselves with tedious details while travelling their own life paths, emotionally dabbling "here" and "there" with relationships, convincing themselves that they don't need anyone.

However, beneath the transient emotional natures of such individuals, as I've discovered in readings, lies a heart so riddled with pain and fear of rejection that the mere thought of planting roots anywhere emotionally is more than these "light travelers" can realistically bear.

The Sexes and Emotional Baggage

Intuitively, I find a large percentage of women with emotional baggage in readings are running toward something - new relationships or extra-marital affairs, new jobs or exotic, distant locations - whatever they feel will immediately rescue them and prevent them from having to deal with their own unresolved issues attached to the past.

It never seems to cross their minds that the baggage they are trying to be rescued from will inevitably follow them wherever they go.

Conversely, a large percentage of men, in the intuitive sense, tend to be running from something - dissatisfying relationships or marriages, unsuccessful careers or financial problems, sexual inadequacy, their own low self esteem.

While they may hold back from physically taking steps to abandon and change for themselves such unhappy circumstances, they tend instead to pour their energy into trying to escape their own emotional baggage - if only in for a little while.

By comforting themselves through such avoidance mechanisms as affairs, workaholism, drinking and drugging, in some instances, outright denial of the baggage they carry, they ultimately only run right back into their own deep unhappiness in the long run.

The focus between the sexes may be different, but the end result is still the same: We can run but never hide from our own emotional baggage.

New Partners and Baggage

It's important to remember that whenever we engage in new relationships, these partners come to us with a certain amount of emotional baggage from the relationships they've left behind.

My perception is always that while a new partner may grow to care intensely for us, he or she still carries emotional baggage from that previous relationship which has yet to be resolved - for him/herself, within himself. It's our job to give these new partners the time they need to fully resolve and decisively leave that baggage where it realistically belongs - behind them.

As I've learned over the years as a result of conducting Personal Prophesy readings for hundreds of others, whenever a long-term relationship disintegrates, we must allow ourselves enough time to heal and emotionally process the past. By overlapping relationships too quickly, all we really manage to do is push aside that baggage as we enthusiastically try to embrace a new situation.

But that baggage will come back to haunt us intensely, only because we are not able to fully commit ourselves to a new future, unencumbered emotionally, as a result of it.

Achieving Personal Growth

The bottom line is, you can't help someone get rid of his or her emotional baggage. You can sit down and talk with them until you are blue in the face and they will still have it, carry it, even cling to it.

Why?

Because our own baggage and our ability to cope with it plays a critical role in the process toward deep, personal growth. In other words, that loathsome baggage we carry with us is an integral part of our own individual journeys into Becoming who we will be for the future.

As much as I would love to say that the best relationships in life are the "easy" ones, unfortunately that isn't the case. The more difficult they are, the more worthwhile they ultimately turn out to be in the long run. The more we are able to learn from these relationships as we bring meaningful resolve to our own baggage, the more we are able to become emotionally stronger and healthier for the right partners for us.