Kayla ignored her surging emotions and began to carry her burdens around like emotional baggage. One day she was late for work because she overslept and couldn’t find her keys. Next, she got stuck in traffic and realized she’d forgotten her lunch. By the time Kayla got to work, she’d crossed into an emotional danger zone without realizing it. She snapped at the office manager and treated her boss disrespectfully—all because she hadn’t dealt with her emotional overload.
Do You Have Emotional Baggage?
Kayla is not alone. In fact, most of us have seasons when our emotions get the best of us. We carry negative, unprocessed emotions that arise from past circumstances and experiences. They accumulate and become heavy emotional baggage.
Each of us has an emotional danger zone, although we have different limits and meltdown moments. Reactions will be different from person to person. Some of us tend to be forceful verbally or even physically. Others become sarcastic, making cutting comments that hurt others deeply. Some withdraw, become numb, or cry.
Your feelings have the potential to become especially harmful when you stuff them, deny them, or allow them to accumulate. When that happens, you may become controlled by them. Warning signs are hard to discern and easy to ignore. Subtle attitudes like feeling grumpy or “out of sorts” quickly escalate to behaviors that cross a line and we find ourselves reacting badly.
Perhaps you’ve recently lost your cool and made a snide remark to someone—like that tech person who spoke limited English. Maybe you snapped at that clerk you thought incompetent. Or perhaps you found yourself saying things you vowed you’d never say as a parent, such as, “Won’t you ever get it right? How stupid can you get?”
How to Lay It Down
There are two attitudes that can help you lay down our emotional baggage: The awareness of your emotional state, and the commitment to change. Practicing both simultaneously enables us to reverse our tendency to react and then appropriately respond to our emotions.
Do you know you’ll be more likely to keep a commitment to handle your feelings differently if you are emotionally invested in the process? A decision to change must be made with your heart as well as your head. A good starting place is to explore where you are by asking:
- What will motivate me to pay attention to how my behavior affects others?
- What will inspire me to get serious about dealing with my emotional stuff?
The best way to succeed in altering behavior is to find some meaningful, lasting reasons for implementing the changes.
Even when we are inspired to change it is still hard. In the short term, it seems easier and more comfortable to just stay the same. But avoiding change creates more pain in the long term. So whether your motivation is to have better health, richer relationships, or to stop hurting the ones you love, take a moment to clarify, write down, and tell at least one person why you are going to change the way you’ve been handling your emotions.
Warmly,
Georgia
P.S. Today’s content was adapted from Taking Out Your Emotional Trash: Face Your Feelings and Build Healthy Relationships. If you’d like to read more, you can purchase your copy of the book here. https://georgiashaffer.com/shop/books/taking-out-your-emotional-trash/
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 4:6-7 (ESV)
