Carrying the Burden of Your Past Into Your Future
Carrying the Burden of Your Past Into Your Future
When you focus on the past, this is known as having emotional baggage. Everyone has stuff come up about their past, but it’s when you focus on it and let it fester that it can cause problems in your present life.
It can also hold you back from enjoying your future life. Emotional baggage can stem from events that happened to you - such as from being in an abusive relationship, from physical or emotional traumas such as a car wreck, or from carrying a burden you shouldn’t be carrying – like guilt.
When you hold onto the burdens of your past, it affects how you live your life now as well as how you’ll live in the future. It can become your identity because you get stuck in a certain pattern that was created by a past event.
Whatever it is that you experienced then colors how you behave with others, how you handle your day-to-day life, how you process thoughts and what your beliefs are today.
People carry the burden of the past because they’ve never healed the emotional blow that stemmed from the situation.
The hurt they felt back then is still there just under the surface. It might be something that’s steeped in anger or anxiety. Or it could be that you’re stuck in feelings of grief or sadness.
When you carrying a burden like this, it can make you feel like you never left that time in your life. Your emotions will feel as raw now when you think about it as they did back then.
Not only can it weigh on your emotions today when you focus on the past, but it can also hurt you physically. You can develop things like insomnia, chronic stress, stomachaches, elevated blood pressure and more.
In order to leave the past where it belongs, you have to heal. That means you must unload that baggage so you can move on. You should keep in mind that you can’t heal from what you don’t name.
So when it comes to the past, you have to look at it and uncover the pain that’s keeping you tethered to that event, person or whatever it is. Write out the things that bother you now about the past and why they bother you.
It can be helpful to take this list and speak out loud or write a letter that you eventually destroy to the past situation or to the person who wounded you. As you read out the words, picture them releasing into the air, taking the connected emotion with it until it dissipates.
Accept whatever you went through without assigning blame to yourself or someone else. This is a step toward letting it go. It doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t to blame. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t bother you emotionally.
It means that you’re recognizing that the past has had enough of your life already and you’re through with that. Once you identify what happened and what kind of emotional reaction it caused you, you find peace by loving yourself through it.
Be compassionate toward yourself. Forgive the pain of the past. Forgive your mistakes. Unpack the burden of your past by practicing self-help techniques if needed to help heal from past triggers.
