Emotional Baggage and a Choice to Take Responsibility

Emotional baggage is easy to blame on others. For me, though, this seems shortsighted, as it always puts the power outside yourself. It is disempowering. Then you can’t really grow. You are always subject to people and things around you.

Personally, I decided to look for ways to take responsibility for my own personal emotional baggage. For instance, growing up, I have been able to see how I wanted others to like me. Sometimes, this was a very very strong feeling. It was almost always silent. I did not know that I wanted others to like me. It was like a fish swimming in the water. In a sense the fish is not aware of the water. I was not aware of my desire to be liked but I desired it anyway.

This created a LOT of personal emotional baggage for me. For instance, my desire to be liked made me obsequious, and then I was liked even less, and I felt resentment. Now by becoming aware of this, I have taken responsibility for my emotional baggage.

I could have blamed my older brother when he ignored me. I could have blamed my father who did not talk to me when we took a two hour drive once a month to another city for my braces. But blaming them does nothing at all to improve me or my situation. They could not have done any better had they tried. That was the place they were in and the people that they were at that time.

One of the results of wanting people to like me was that I could not be firm with others. At the time I was extremely firm with myself, and I simply could not understand why I could not be firm with others. Being firm was necessary as I was a school teacher. This created all sorts of stress and problems in my life on multiple levels.

For years, I had an overwhelming desire to blame circumstance and other people. The problem with this approach was that it didn’t make anything better. In fact, it usually made things worse. Finally, by starting to address the problem of emotional baggage, I was able to start clearing a path to taking responsibility. I want to re-emphasize, the point is not WHO is responsible. The point is to assertively TAKE responsibility, regardless. By doing so, you take command of your life.

Even in a lousy situation with another person who is clearly in the wrong, blaming them will almost never solve the problem. If it could, they probably wouldn’t have done the wrong thing in the first place. Since they did the wrong thing, they are probably not mature enough to own up to it. On the other hand, if you take responsibility for the situation despite their being in the wrong, you have a chance to improve it, probably by quite a bit. You come out the winner on several fronts. The short time problem is you have to give up your righteousness. The long term gains will offset this by 1000%.

If you find it hard, keep this in mind. You cannot take responsibility to the extent that you have emotional baggage. The less baggage you have the more responsibility you can take. Start small and always start with getting rid of the baggage first. This will usually take at least a couple of years. Get started now.