How to Get Rid of Emotional Baggage

Can you remember a time when someone hurt you, and many years later you still feel resentment towards that person? What about an embarrassing incident in the past that you still cringe at today?

Emotions come and go, but sometimes they linger around for a long time…

If the pain of an old wound is still present, this tells you that the wound was never actually healed. As a result, you carry the emotional baggage, and all it does is weigh you down.

Sometimes, people carry this emotional baggage their entire lives. It lives in the form of repressed trauma, and it will always be there until you get rid of it.

But turns out that getting rid of emotional baggage is not that easy to do…

Here we’re going to look at what emotional baggage is in this article and how you can let go of those heavy emotions that have been hanging around for way too long.

What Is Emotional Baggage?

Emotional baggage is trauma that you consciously, or unconsciously hold onto. Imagine it as the residue of an unresolved emotional wound.

For example, if someone backstabs you causing you to feel resentful towards that person months or even years later, that resentment is emotional baggage. Because the wound was never healed, you continue holding onto this dense energy that takes a toll on your emotional, mental, and physical health.

Emotional baggage is created when you fail to process a wound when it happens, and instead push it out of awareness. You hold onto this baggage because you have never let it go.

The way I see emotional baggage is like stagnant energy that gets trapped in the body. We’re all going to get hurt from time to time, and generally, we allow ourselves to feel and express these painful emotions which give them a passage.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling emotions like resentment or jealousy, it’s human. However, when we don’t give these painful emotions a passage, they get stuck.

Why You Need to Get Rid of Emotional Baggage

Emotional baggage is heavy. You’re forced to feel reoccurring pain until the root cause has been healed, and you may struggle to heal your emotional pain while you’re still holding onto baggage.

Think of being emotionally hurt like being cut. If you get cut and decide not to treat it, it may become infected. When left untreated, that infection can spread, evolving into a more serious problem.

Your emotional body works the same way.

Emotional baggage is like an infected wound that prevents you from moving on. If left untreated, this infection spreads to other parts of you and can lead to all sorts of problems.

For example, your general distrust for people may have been caused by an unresolved incident when someone took advantage of you when you were younger. At the time, you felt betrayed, perhaps resentful and angry, but look at how it has grown into a much bigger problem – a limiting belief.

This study suggests that there is a link between emotional baggage, and the inability to change. People believe that they get stuck in old patterns because they’re still holding onto the trauma from the past.

This means that holding onto past situations prevents you from moving forward with your life to better things. So it’s necessary to drop the baggage and allow yourself to heal the past.

Emotional baggage can take a toll on your physical health or mental health too because they’re thoroughly connected to your emotional health. We each have four bodies, and these distinct but inseparable bodies create an ecosystem.

According to HealthLine, emotional baggage can lead to physical issues such as:

• Stress
• Fear
• Self-worth issues
• Burnout
• Contempt and dissatisfaction with life
• Self-sabotage

With that said, it can also lead to detrimental mindsets, beliefs, and self-perceptions. So you shouldn’t treat emotional baggage just as a sticky emotion, but as a seed that can sprout if let to incubate under the right conditions for long enough.

Emotional Baggage Examples

Here are some examples of how a wound turns into emotional baggage if not healed. See if you can identify the connection between the emotional baggage and the manifestation.

• Lucy was bullied during her adolescence and now has severe self-worth issues. She struggles to accept her appearance and gets embarrassed very easily.
  
• Jake who was walked over and treated poorly most of his life can’t see the good in humanity anymore. He thinks humanity is a lost cause, and there’s not much hope for us.
  
• Nancy felt betrayed by her ex-partner and has wished that bad things would happen to him for years now. She regularly checks his social media to see if something happened and feels disappointed when it doesn’t.
  
• Michael was publicly made fun of while giving a presentation in school. In adulthood, he is still ashamed of that day and avoids putting himself in front of people out of fear that something similar might happen
  
• Megan felt like she was never good enough for her parents. She now doesn’t think anyone can love her and refuses to look for love.
  
• Jenny has general trust issues after being harassed many years ago and now hates meeting new people. Because of this, she doesn’t have many friends, and often battles with loneliness.

How to Let Go of Emotional Baggage

When you allow painful emotions to run their course, they will leave when their service is up. Pain is a messenger, and if you’re avoiding the lesson, the associated emotion is going to stay around.

Back in the day, I worked at a restaurant where I was owed a lot of money in tips before leaving. After finishing up and moving to Vietnam to teach English, the owner decided to withhold my money which he promised to send before I left. Every time I contacted him, he would be polite, and agree to send it, but the cash would never arrive.

Over six months passed after contacting him many times, and he eventually stopped responding. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I felt cheated.

For a long time, I resented this man. The money was one thing, but the resentment I felt consumed me. I drank poison, hoping he would drop dead from it. But he didn’t… He got on with his happy life while I was left to deal with these hostile emotions I was feeling.

By holding onto this resentment, he still had power over me, and I didn’t want that. It took me a long time to finally forgive him and let it go. One of the lessons I learned from this situation is that sometimes the emotional baggage causes us much more suffering than the actual event. But listening to the pain often reveals a deeper layer.

In my case, it was more than missing out on the money I was owed. What got to me was the feeling that I was taken advantage of and helpless to do anything about it.

It hit a trigger and I ended up holding onto that dense energy for much longer than I should have. It took me a long time to sit with those emotions and slowly work through the pain until it finally went away and didn’t affect me anymore.

Part of this process was to look at why I was feeling so hurt from this experience, and learning from that pain. In my view, emotional pain is a wise messenger. If we listen to it by observing rather than allowing it to control us, it points us to deeper unresolved issues – the root cause.

Be aware of the painful emotions that you’re holding onto, and how they affect your life. Identify where those emotions came from, and what the underlying wound is that is causing you to feel that way.

Probe Your Memories

First, you need to bring your emotional baggage to awareness by triggering the emotions and flushing them out of your subconscious mind.

You can do this by recalling the specific memories of the event that caused the pain, mentally putting yourself back into that situation, and feeling all the sensations by replaying the event in your mind.

If you manage to resurrect some of the painful emotions, this is a positive sign as you’re bringing these painful emotions to the surface where they’re easier to work with. If there is no emotional pain associated with the memory, then this is a good sign that you have healed the wound, and the baggage is gone.

You can tell whether something is unresolved depending on the frequency and magnitude of reemergence.

If you have emotional baggage, the painful emotions will be triggered at times, and you will feel them. But these moments are probably short-lived because you push them back under every time they show up.

If a painful sensation keeps resurfacing, then it has not been resolved. It’s goading you to fix it by bringing your awareness to it.

Self-awareness is key here.

You will not be able to get rid of these painful emotions that you carry around with you until you look into them. Once you’re aware of the emotions that no longer serve you, you can take productive steps toward letting them go.

Pinpoint the Wound

Sometimes you will get seemingly random bursts of guilt, shame, regret, or whatever emotion is associated with the wound.

This used to happen to me quite a lot, over incidences that seemed insignificant. Sometimes I would think back to something I did in a previous relationship, or perhaps a mistake I made in a job, or something I did that hurt someone else, and suddenly I would feel a sharp sting.

Usually, I pushed that painful memory away. After a few seconds, I would be feeling normal again, and that was that. But then on a later date, that same emotion would pop up again.

After realizing that this was an unhealed wound, I identified the memory that was associated with the wound.

I would look into:

• The memory: What is the specific memory that causes the pain?
• The pain: What sort of pain is it, where do I feel it?
• The situation: What specifically happened that made me feel this way?

By looking into the memory, the pain, and the pain point, I can usually identify the wound and know what needs healing.

Work through the pain

Finally, you need to feel those painful emotions deeply to learn what they’re trying to teach you. Given that you do this every time they show up, you are squeezing out a little bit of that stagnant energy every time you do.

Certain emotional release techniques can be helpful to get all the dense energy out of your emotional body so that the recurring pain doesn’t come back, at least not in full force.

If something triggers an insecurity, the emotion is trying to draw your attention towards the core issue of your insecurity. If you feel resentment towards someone that you can’t seem to let go of, the emotional pain is turning your attention to the wound, not to discover what caused the wound, but why you feel so deeply hurt.

This is the premise of shadow work, and it’s a good practice to get into.

Consciously Release Emotional Pain

When you have brought up the underlying pain point, don’t judge, analyze, or label it. Hold space for yourself to experience the emotional pain fully and let it go in its own time. Make a habit of removing all distractions such as the TV, music, noise, people, or anything that could distract you from the experience.

our ability to be present and feel the emotions fully is paramount in processing those painful emotions and letting them go.

This is likely to take many attempts until you get to the bottom of it, so make a habit of processing these emotions every time they come up. The more you build the habit of sitting with your emotions, the more effective you will become at this practice.

When you feel the discomfort, allow yourself to go through the motions… Cry, tremble, shout, pray. Do whatever you need to expel that uncomfortable energy that’s blocked inside your body.

This is commonly known as a purge. You’re purging out all that bad energy every time you go through the motions and ‘get it all out’.

Depending on the severity of the wound, getting rid of emotional baggage can take some time. Just be consistent and use every time it shows its face as an opportunity to purge a little more until there’s nothing left to carry.