Check Your (Emotional) Baggage At The Door…

Does anyone else remember the song by The Offspring, She’s Got Issues? When that song first came out, I was an adult still healing from my childhood trauma. Hearing the song lyrics felt like pouring salt onto a flesh wound–raw and painful. Having mental illness or PTSD is difficult to heal from, but it can be even more difficult to support someone else going through it.

When we aren’t healed from our traumatic childhood experiences, everyone around us suffers. We can’t turn back time and erase what happened, but we still feel the pain no matter how we much we have suppressed it or repackaged it.

We are an open wound oozing emotions and radiating chaos around us. We inflict our pain onto others, while we spiral further into victimhood and jadedness. We may denounce our partners for not saying or doing the right thing, and for not being able to help us more. We view life through our early childhood filters, and then prosecute the people around us when we “see” ourselves being victimized again and again. The hard truth is that we need to take a deep introspective look at ourselves and begin to take responsibility for our current state of affairs.

We need to heal the emotional baggage that we have accumulated. How can this be done? It’s like a storm front has decimated our beach front property and we don’t even know where to start the cleanup process.

We may not even be able to tell which house is ours, it’s all a blurry mess. We have become entangled in our own web of self-deluding machinations and chicanery.

The first step is to begin to get your current emotions under control. As a Scorpio, I can tell you this is one of the hardest parts of the journey. Water signs process life through emotions, and when you add mental illness and depression, it is a time bomb waiting to explode. Take a deep breath and step back from your environment. Really step back. Pretend like you are watching a movie about yourself, in slow motion. See the situations that occur in your life and strive to be the neutral observer. From this advantageous position, we can begin to extract ourselves from the play we are trapped in and move into being the playwright. Examine each scene and identify the accompanying emotion. Ask yourself, who does this emotion belong to?

If you are an empath, the emotion you are analyzing may or may not belong to you. You may have absorbed it from someone else while at home, work, or out to play. If that is the case, you can easily neutralize it and release it out of your awareness by simply asking the question, and waiting for the answer.

If it is your emotion, then examine it without judging it. Is it appropriate? For example, sometimes anger IS an appropriate response, sometimes it is not. Do you want to ride the emotion out or do you want to release it? Riding the emotion out means allowing yourself to feel into it, bring it into your core, nurture it (express it safely, privately, if needed) until it begins to dissipate on its own. Alternately, releasing it simply means that you are in enough awareness to know that this feeling is temporary and by the process of simple acknowledgment, you decide that it is not worth spending your energy on. You can allow it float up out of your reality, without creating a new story around it.

YOU are the one in control. YOU decide what you are going to feel and when. So choose wisely. Decide that you will no longer react to things outside of yourself. Stop allowing yourself to be used up by life’s experiences and start using life’s experiences for you. What does that mean?

That means you begin to heal yourself by examining past experiences you are holding onto. Look at each experience that was painful, and if you need to, allow yourself to relive those feelings until you are ready to release them. Find the lesson that you learned from that experience or emotion, and release it, allowing the experience and resulting baggage to float out of your awareness and up to your higher Self.

Thank the lesson for all you learned. What might you have learned? Did you learn courage? Did you learn to speak up? Did you learn “no fear”? Did you learn how to be independent? Did you learn how to rely on others? When you begin to process old unhealed experiences, you begin to clear out the past emotions that are hanging around you, like a ghost haunting an old house. You give yourself permission to release yourself from the prison that your emotions have kept you trapped in.

After doing this for a while, you may find that you emotionally react less and less to the behavior of other people. Why? When we react to a situation or someone else’s behavior, chances are we are reacting because it reminds us of an earlier painful event in our life. When we heal the original event, we can see the current event as it is.

For example, your husband comes home two hours later than expected. You have a strong emotional reaction, starting a fight and attacking him verbally. If you were abandoned often as a child, you may have abandonment issues that surface whenever someone’s behavior deviates from your expectations of them. When you start asking questions like, “why am I having this reaction and where else have I felt this way?”, you allow yourself the opportunity to heal from those earlier experiences. Now you can begin to be the one in control of your present, and not live from the past.

When we begin to heal ourselves emotionally, we begin to take back our power. We process old wounds and old emotions that may have been keeping us in a depressed state. We don’t need those experiences anymore, they don’t define us. We have to be willing to release those experiences and resulting emotions, to make room for new, more positive experiences. They are in the past, and we are creating a better present so that we can have a better future.

Don’t give up, processing and releasing emotions and memories is the hardest step. If we want to heal, we have to be courageous and strong. And we must remember to love ourselves unconditionally throughout this process. You CAN do it, be gentle and patient with yourself. Give yourself permission to cry, then give yourself permission to heal.