Emotional Baggage – is It Weighing Your New Relationship Down?

Time and again I hear my girlfriends complain of their mates’ baggage- their experiences from the past that shape how they think and feel today. The expression “too much baggage” is a cliché describing a very real and common problem. We are all products of our past, and we’ve all had bad experiences with former lovers, parents, siblings, friends, and co-workers. When we don’t bother to face these issues, process them emotionally, and put them behind us, they cannot help but affect our current relationships.

OLD DEFENSES CAN CAUSE US TO MAKE MISTAKES

As children, we were all hurt at times. Because we lacked the power to defend ourselves – to speak up, to influence the people and situations that hurt us – we learned other ways to protect ourselves. We may have withdrawn or cried to plot revenge. These behaviors are normal in children, even necessary to their development. By the time we enter late adolescence, however, we should have expanded our emotional repertoire beyond whining and pouting. We should be learning a new set of skills, including standing up for ourselves, addressing our problems, and confronting the people who cause them.

Unfortunately, most of us do not learn to set personal boundaries because no one bothered telling us that we should and we so rarely see others doing it. We simply internalized more of the false beliefs. For example, we expect others to treat us fairly of their own accord, out of the goodness of their heart, because they know it’s the right thing to do. When they don’t, we play the martyr. We get upset and find ourselves facing the only two options we ever learned to consider: Stay and take it, or leave. No one ever told us that we can renegotiate the terms of a relationship or that there are healthy ways to persuade others to treat us well.

Sometimes you may get it half-right: You try to stand up for yourself or assume you are right and over-control your mate to avoid being over-controlled yourself. Other times, incidents from your past may cause you to experience emotional flashbacks whenever someone says or does something that makes you feel the same hurt you felt as a child. Flashbacks can cause you to try to force intimacy to get the love you wanted from your parents. Or you may try to rescue your mate, since for example , you were unable to rescue your alcoholic father.

Subconsciously, we all seek balance. At the same time and without even realizing it however we set up relationships that are perennially out of balance and unhealthy. We might think of ourselves as bookkeepers and our relationships as separate accounts. Ideally, each should balance at the end, with our investment and the other person’s coming up pretty much equal.

But in real life, that rarely happens, and what we end up doing – even though we seldom realize it – is using a new relationship to correct the imbalance of a previous one. We are like the bookkeeper who finds that an old account is ten dollars short and decides to make it up by taking the money from a new one. It never really works since, for one thing, that old account is closed. In the end, extracting some payback from the current mate to compensate for an earlier wrong only depletes the new relationship.

Another way we try to balance our new books is by withholding the trust, the love-the emotional capital-we should be investing. We think that if we save it in this way, we won’t put it at risk, and to some extent we are correct. But again, all we have done is shortchange our mate and ourselves. In love as in business, an undercapitalized venture is doomed to fail.